The Alpha's Oracle

by Merry Ravenell

  She looked around, eyes sort of crazy and bright. Her cheeks burned with color. Fury and hatred overwhelmed her perfume. Her fingers snapped into fists, and she screeched, then whirled and bolted to the door. She yanked it open and spun around.

  Jealous rage is a hell of a thing. Her blue eyes sparkled, pupils tiny little pinpoints. She looked around again and spotted the bowls on the shelf.

  “No!” I barked and lunged.

  She snatched the large, velvet pouch that held my obsidian scrying bowl from the nearby shelf, then threw it on the ground.

  I gasped at the muffled shattering sound, then stared, struck dumb with horror.

  Gardenia laughed and swept her arm across the shelf, shattering the smaller bowls, spilling salt everywhere, and scattering my runes over the floor. A few broke on impact. “Aren’t so special now, are you, Oracle?”

  My tools... destroyed, desecrated, shattered, ruined.

  She cackled.

  I jerked my head up to face her. “Start running, bitch.”

  Gardenia hesitated, but as I melted into wolf form, lips curled over fangs and ears slicked, she got the idea. Her eyes widened, and under her choking perfume, she stank of something that can only be described as:

  oh shit.

  This was IronMoon, and I was going to kill her. Nobody was going to stop me.

  She shrieked and bolted down the stairs, melting into her own pale tawny-gold wolf form, struggling out of her clothing and barking for help. Help? Who was going to help her? I barked, lunged over the steps, and tackled her. She flattened on the stairs with a yelp. My teeth found some soft, large part of her (it turned out to be a shoulder), and we somersaulted end over end down the remainder of the stairs to the hallway floor below. We smashed into the opposite wall. I bit down on another part of her. She shrieked, squirmed out from under me, and bolted. I shook myself off and sprang after her.

  She screamed like a terrified puppy.

  She was also pretty fast. Faster than I was. Downright fleet.

  She led me through the marble foyer, splashing through the pond, down the main hallway, through the mudroom. She plowed through the screen on the screen door. It tore and dangled in the breeze. I leapt through the hole. Hah! She was making a run for the training fields! Did she hope Flint would pull me off her?

  She accelerated away from me, opening her lead stride by stride. I barked after her: I’d catch her eventually, she could just keep on running. She yipped, yipped, yipped, speeding toward the training ring barking for help.

  She plowed right into the center of the sand ring, scattering the warriors in the center, and yowled for them to help her, that I was going to kill her, stop me before it was too late.

  Stupid, she should have kept running. Five seconds later I caught up to her, lunged, and tumbled her into the sand.

  She screamed. I bit down on her foreleg, and she shrieked and flailed. Blood bloomed on my tongue and splattered the sand.

  The males all scattered back. Flint, on his box, simply held up his arms to keep all the males steady and silent. “Stay well clear when females fight, wolves!”

  Gardenia wailed for help.

  “No one is going to save you!” I snapped my teeth near her snout and peeled off a layer of skin.

  She whimpered and flung her snout away from my teeth, exposing her throat, and she stayed that way, bloody, shaking, reeking of cheap human perfume and real fear. Her foreleg dangled unnaturally.

  I backed off her and curled into human-form, which was considerably colder in the snow, as I was completely naked. My blood was still hot with fury. Gardenia whimpered and rolled around on the sand, blood pouring from her mangled foreleg, and tufts of fur bloodied and ripped.

  I spat out a mouthful of her fur and blood.

  One of the males tried to advance again.

  “Stay out of it,” Flint ordered him. “It is disturbing to watch females fight, I know, but when they decide they must, you must not interfere, or there will never be harmony within the pack.”

  “You shattered my bowls,” I snarled at her.

  I should kill you.

  The dark thought whispered from my mind. I’d never been so angry I wanted to kill someone. I’d never even considered killing Gabel.

  She slid back into human-form and whimpered over her broken arm. Her face needed some stitches, and she was battered and marked up.

  I snorted at the hatred burning in her eyes. She could hate me all she wanted. She could sit and glare at me during meals, plot my demise, and whisper to her little cadre about what a rancid, stuck-up cow I was. That was the best she could do.

  Violent rage seeped into my blood, something dark and cruel and malevolent.

  Kill her.

  No. Not over this. Not over her.

  Instead, I told Flint, “I apologize for the interruption, Master of Arms. Excuse me, Alpha Gabel is expecting me.”

  Flint half-bowed to me. “Lady Gianna.”

  Gardenia could find her own way to the doctor.

  Shards of Obsidian

  I fished a piece of grass out of my hair and flicked it onto the mudroom floor.

  Flint directed two of the warriors to take pity on Gardenia and drag her off to the doctor’s small house a quarter mile down into the woods. Pathetic. She could have dragged herself down there, but no, she had cried and whimpered until two males carted her off.

  And Gabel wanted me to be the Luna of that? No thank you.

  I rubbed a bruise coming up on my hip.

  Gabel and Hix almost collided with me in the narrow hallway from the mudroom to the main hall. They’d seen (and heard) the chaos, and now (being students of Flint) had come to see how the fight had ended. Gabel took one look at me, then glared at Hix. Hix coughed and looked somewhere other than my naked body.

  “Oh stop,” I told Gabel’s surge of jealousy. “We’re all naked under our clothes. They’re just breasts and hips.”

  Gabel scowled at me.

  “Are you going to ask me why I just walked naked around half the warriors of IronMoon, or are you going to assume I’m up to no good?” After Gardenia smashed my precious tools, I was in no mood for Gabel’s rage. Bond-fueled, possessive jealousy. He didn’t even realize it was the Bond gnawing at him. Nobody out there had been ogling me, and if they had, fine. They couldn’t have me any more than Gardenia could have him. “ Jealousy doesn’t suit you.”

  Hix coughed again, this time on laughter. Gabel growled at him again, with actual menace, before whirling back to me. He scowled, jaw churning as he looked me up and down, torn between jealousy and lust and the overpowering urge to remind me just who I belonged to.

  Hix’s presence was the only thing keeping Gabel in his own clothes.

  “What...” Gabel’s voice was rough, more like a growl, human speech having suddenly become difficult, “happened?”

  “Gardenia smashed my tools.” When I said it, my throat closed over in sadness, and despair washed over me. Each bowl, each rune, each item was special. Part of me. They were attuned specifically to me, extensions of my own powers.

  Shattered. Broken.

  “All of them?” Gabel asked. Hix tore his eyes from the ceiling and swung his dark attention onto me.

  “Just cleared off my shelf.” I swept my arm along an invisible plane and choked down another sob. “So I had to... deal with her.”

  “Did you kill her? You don’t look bloody enough for that.” Gabel took inventory of my dirty body.

  “No, of course not,” I snapped, guilty at the little voice from within the abyss that whispered but I wanted to. I could have. I might have. I still might.

  “I see. Come on, you need to get some clothes on and—”

  “I thought we didn’t deal in silly human modesty.” I shook off his hand. Hix slid past me, careful to keep his eyes somewhere else, even though I caught the scent of his interest.

  Gabel did too, and his eyes flickered at Hix’s back as the Beta moved to the mudroom. Gabel grabbed my
bicep in his hand, his fingers clenched down like stone. “Naughty, naughty, buttercup.”

  I growled back. “So what if he knows I’m alive? You’re the one who has me.”

  “So true, so true.” He grinned crazy-like. So the Bond had defeated him, now he wrestled with the possibility my eye might wander? This wolf was strange.

  “I’m not in the mood.” I yanked my arm away, still aching from the loss of my tools. There was nothing sexy about dried blood and dirt crusted onto my skin. “I had to tell that little whore she was just a pawn in your game. That she was part of a strategy. Being the scab she is, she didn’t even ask. But it sure infuriated her to hear she might have helped me. This is your fault!”

  I stomped upstairs to our room. He followed.

  I stood under the hot shower water, scrubbing and peeling at the dried blood, and wincing as soapy water found little scratches and scrapes and bruises.

  Gabel offered me a towel with one hand, and in the other, held a fresh dress and dainties, as if he were some glorified valet. Then he silently followed me up to my workroom to take stock of the damage.

  All my tools were stored in velvet or silk bags between uses. The bags now held the smashed remains of the fragile bowls. My upended two bags of runes and spilled their contents all over the floor. Some of the runes had cracked and broken upon impact. There was salt everywhere. Smashed vials of oil created a mangled stench in the air. The only thing that had been spared had been the small bowls on the window ledges where I had been purifying other tools in salt or water.

  I cradled the velvet bag that housed my favorite bowl. The large pieces made it lumpy and limp in my hands, like lifting a broken body. This piece of obsidian had spoken to me, chosen me. I had felt safe within it, even if it had taken me to scary places within the Tides. I sobbed once and scrubbed my eyes with the back of my arm. The bowl was broken and could never be repaired.

  I reached inside the bag and removed a large, sharp-edged piece. Destroyed. Even the power imbued within it was broken.

  “Can it be fixed?” Gabel inquired.

  “No. It’s dead.”

  “Dead?”

  “They die. The power in them is broken. They can’t be made whole again.” I set the bag down gently and gathered up the scattered runestones.

  Four runes had been broken, the ones for safety, flight, waterfall and storm.

  “What of the runes?” he asked.

  “The sets have to be complete and carved from the same stone or bones of the same prey. I can use an incomplete set, but it’s less safe. Especially since safety has been broken. I’ll have to be that much more careful now that I don’t have access to these runes or their powers.”

  Gabel watched in pensive silence while I sniffled and picked up what I could.

  Only when I was done placing the shattered bowl-bags into a pile to carry to the trash did he ask, “Can the bowls be replaced? Surely bowls and mirrors and tools break.”

  “It’s a blemish on the Oracle.” I tried to explain to him the shame of having to replace even one bowl, or having lost even one rune. Then I gave up trying. Only another Oracle would understand.

  The oils were easy enough to replace, as were herbs and incense. I could keep using the runes, but my bowls? They were what was important.

  “But they can be replaced. How?”

  “I have to find chunks of obsidian that speak to me. Maybe clear quartz, or malachite, or jasper, but I’ve always worked best with obsidian. And it has to be large enough to be carved into a bowl.”

  “Not a mirror?”

  I shuddered. “Most Oracles can’t use mirrors. Even fewer want to use one.”

  “But can you?”

  “If I have to, but it’s dangerous. Mirrors are a flat raft on the Tides. Bowls are boats.” I shuddered a second time. My one time with a mirror had been terrifying. I’d slid over the smooth surface as the Tides had bucked and tossed me about, spray in my face, the sensation of clinging to the sharp edges. I’d screamed myself hoarse and suffered a sharp headache for a week.

  “What about a metal bowl? Don’t some Oracles use iron or white gold?”

  “Some do, but I’ve never been able to use metal.”

  “So it’s specific to the Oracle. The tools you can use.”

  “Yes. And the chunk of rock, it has to speak to you. It has to be the right rock. And it has to be large enough and flawless enough to be carved. My favorite bowl was my initiation gift. Others I’ve collected, but you saw how many I had.” I gestured to the four bags. “One large, the others were small. I used them mostly for purification or anchor bowls. The obsidian one was... the one.”

  “And when you find the chunk, can any craftsman do the carving?”

  “Most any. Then the Oracle has to do all the rest of the work.”

  “So where exactly did you get these?”

  “Elder Oracle Anita of SableFur. She was my last teacher. She collects possible stones, and all the Oracles in this part of the world go to her to...browse.” My favorite bowl had been my gift, but the others I had had to pay for (or Shadowless had). The Elder Oracle had standing orders for stones that met certain requirements. SableFur paid a bounty on them and had craftsmen who could carve out the bowls as the Oracle wanted, then the Oracles (or their packs) paid a princely sum.

  I explained all this to Gabel. I also explained how we couldn’t ask Anita of SableFur for help. It was my fault (doubly my fault as the first-rank female) my tools were broken. If there was a pack who was going to destroy an Oracle’s tools, everyone would say it would be IronMoon. It wouldn’t do anything to improve our reputation as mindless barbarians. We might have plenty of mindless predators that were just teeth with legs attached, but IronMoon wasn’t run by the rabble.

  “Considering you ripped up Gardenia in public, probably won’t stay a secret,” Gabel said.

  I scowled, hot, angry tears coming up anew. “Embarrassed by her. Again.”

  I let that barb sink right into Gabel. He felt it but didn’t flinch.

  “Then we’ll need to figure out how to get you in front of chunks of obsidian,” Gabel stated. “The SableFur can’t have a monopoly on it. We’ll find some, even if we have to wander around on volcanoes with a sledgehammer.”

  “I’d take a sledgehammer to Gardenia first.”

  “Buttercup, you’ve become so violent. I wouldn’t stop you, in fact, I’m sure we have a sledgehammer around somewhere.”

  Platinum needed to learn she couldn’t even wag that pretty little ass of hers without my permission. She didn’t get to come after what was mine.

  As if he could read my thoughts, Gabel said, “Her punishment doesn’t fit her crimes, Gianna.”

  “You want me to decide her punishment?”

  “Yes.”

  “Didn’t I already do that?”

  “No.”

  “You’re the Alpha. Discipline is your job.”

  “She’s a female.”

  “Oh no, Gabel. I’m not your Luna.” I backed up a step.

  “I’ll tell the pack this is what you want, and I agreed to give you the justice you wanted. But between you and I, you name her punishment.”

  “It makes you uncomfortable,” I gasped, realizing he didn’t want to. He practically squirmed away from it.

  “Females usually don’t require rough handling. I don’t like it when they do,” Gabel said, annoyed. “I’ll do it if I have to, though. This isn’t behavior that can be tolerated, and if you think it can be—”

  I cut him off with a sharp gesture. He waited, expecting something suitable to the IronMoon.

  I couldn’t believe I was about to so blithely mete out such a cruel punishment.

  Maybe I should have killed her.

  “Put her in the basement for a few days. Let’s see how she feels when she gets thrown out like trash.”

  Victory and Defeat

  Gabel bent down and lifted a bag of shards. “May I have these?”

  “I guess.
Why would you want them?”

  “I don’t know. They might be useful. Why did you keep the canines of the RedWater wolves?”

  “Why do you think I kept them? Maybe I threw them out.”

  “Of course you kept them. There’s no way to properly bury them, so you kept them, and I don’t believe you would have thrown them out after the fact. You fought too hard to make me give them to you.”

  I shrugged. “So what?”

  “Exactly. So may I keep these?”

  Gabel seemed to be able to find a use for things nobody else wanted, so he could do whatever he wanted with the dead shards.

  Gabel slung the bags over his shoulder, the little silk cords hooked around the first joint of his right index finger. I winced at the scraping noises from the shards shifting and jostling. “So, buttercup. There’s one more thing for this morning.”

  “One more thing? Isn’t this enough?” I gestured helplessly to my destroyed room.

  “Hix asked what our intentions are. Rather forcefully.”

  The words hit me hard enough to knock the wind out of me.

  “He and I didn’t get to have much of a conversation before two pretty she-wolves running across the yard distracted us, but he’ll be back for more once Gardenia gets mopped up and put into a bucket. You and I won’t evade him for long.”

  “You’re the Alpha. Growl at him.”

  Gabel laughed. “One of the reasons I like Hix as First Beta is he growls back.”

  “Let’s wait and see what he says,” I said.

  “You know what he’ll say. In fact, I imagine if we put him off, he’ll say that if you’re not sure about me, he’ll be pleased to make his case to you. It’s far too late for that, of course, but I doubt that would stop him.”

  Twinges of hot jealousy laced with a peculiar, exquisite pleasure emanated from Gabel.

  “Gabel, not right now! I can’t right now.” I gestured helplessly to the ruins.

  “Yes, I suppose I am being a bit inappropriate.”

  “I’m going to go get a broom,” I muttered.