The Alpha's Oracle

by Merry Ravenell

  “Yes.”

  The vet bent over and untied the makeshift bandages. She peered at the three puncture wounds on Gabel’s leg. In the bright light of the room, it was much worse than I had expected. “Gunshots?”

  “Pitchfork,” Flint said.

  “It helps if you tell me exactly what did it.”

  “A dirty pitchfork,” Flint amended.

  The vet shrugged and rolled her eyes. She retrieved a pair of scissors and clacked them at Gabel. “Hope it’s not a rental. And that you’re not shy.”

  “He’s not,” I said without thinking.

  Donovan pulled up one of the chairs and made himself comfortable.

  The vet had Hix help Gabel shrug off his jacket, then snapped off his suspenders, and proceeded to cut his pants and boxers off him. For good measure they pulled off Gabel’s shirt as well. The doctor noted the scar on his hip, and the one burned into his haunch, then patted the metal table. Hix had to help him up, Gabel’s leg had turned a hideous shade of purple around the three holes.

  “Swelling,” Flint told my worried expression. “Muscles are so engorged they can’t move. Probably not actual damage since he walked out.”

  “Progressive loss of function is either dying nerves or swelling,“ the vet agreed as she pulled Gabel onto his side. “Swelling, from the looks of this. You going to faint, Purple Dress?”

  “No.”

  “You look pretty pale.”

  “I am always this pale,” I replied.

  “He belong to you?”

  Donovan chortled, and I half-laughed. “Something like that.”

  “Something like that? Buttercup, I am offended.” Gabel propped himself up on his elbow like he was posing for a demented life drawing class. He pointed at the three holes in his leg. “I believe this was all over you.”

  It was a good thing he had regained his human speech and sense of humor, even if the situation wasn’t funny.

  The vet pulled on a pair of gloves and asked me, “Is he good with pain?”

  “Yes,” Gabel told her.

  “I did not ask you. All men say they are studs. They can please any woman, and they can take any pain. I’m asking your woman about your pain tolerance. She’d need another kind of doctor if you leave her thirsty.”

  Donovan snickered again. Flint sighed in his general direction.

  “Thirsty?” Hix asked the room in general.

  Donovan supplied the more common meaning. Hix winced and rubbed his head.

  She began to examine the three holes in Gabel’s leg, taking care as she examined them. Then she pulled off her gloves and told us, “This is a mess. Thousand, cash. Up front.”

  “Cunning one, this one,“ Gabel told me, “she cut me out of my clothing, gets me on the table, and then names her price.”

  Hix, still refusing to see anything the least bit entertaining about the situation, took his billfold from his breast pocket and counted out the bills. The vet re-counted all the bills, tucked them in her coat pocket, pulled a little metal tray up to her counter, and began to place implements on it.

  She didn’t offer him anything to numb the pain. Gabel stared off into the distance, unflinching, as she flushed the holes, then pulled the margins apart and peered into them with a little thin light, and generally fished around. Blood kept bubbling up from his thigh and forming a little puddle on the metal tray. She explained it wasn’t much blood (relative to Gabel’s weight), and it was better to let it bleed to get the toxins out anyway. “Not really any major blood vessels on the outside of the thigh,” she explained as she worked. “Well, there are, but they’re by the bone. He’s got so much muscle it’s just meat bleeding.”

  Hix glowered as the minutes ticked by. Flint excused himself and returned with a change of clothes for Gabel. Nobody went anywhere without a change of clothes.

  “Pants too much for you, old man?” Donovan asked as Flint shed his attire.

  The doctor turned around, whipped back to the front, then looked at me. “Is there a naked, tattooed man behind me?”

  “There is,” I confirmed with a sigh.

  “Excuse me a moment,” she told Gabel. She turned around and drank in an eyeful of Flint.

  Flint gave her a look of polite inquiry, as if he had no understanding how a woman might be distracted by his nudity. And he was now absolutely naked, holding a kilt in one hand, and making exactly zero attempt at modesty.

  She indulged herself for a solid thirty seconds. “I’d have given a ten percent discount for the peep show.”

  Flint’s polite inquiry turned to something less amused. “How fortunate payment was not an issue.”

  “Burn.” The vet turned back around. “Well, just saying, if you don’t want looksies don’t randomly undress. A whole lot of man is worth appreciating. Normally it’s just the unwashed weirdos nobody wants to see naked stripping down.”

  Flint sashed his kilt around his hips in record time. “Do you normally grope clients?”

  “If I’d groped you you’d have known. Trust me.”

  “With your eyes.”

  “Do you normally get naked in front of strange women?” She threaded a needle.

  “Nudity is not sexual.”

  “Never said it was. It’s the ink that turns me on.”

  “My tattoos are religious,” Flint informed her, affronted.

  “Oh, yes, they are. Praise the Lord.” The vet licked her lips and bent over Gabel’s thigh.

  “Have some decorum,” he scolded her. Her response was just to snicker under her breath.

  Decorum was probably not a service sketchy vets wearing flipflops sewing up holes at three a.m. for cash provided.

  The vet seemed harmless anyway. Just a woman trying to make some money. No different from any other kind of hunter on barren land.

  The vet finished stitching, bandaged Gabel’s leg, and once Gabel had wormed his way into a spare set of pants (which required cutting the leg seam for the wound wrap), she hurried us out the door. Not because she was scared—there was another client stumbling in clutching a bloody arm.

  The whole thing had taken two hours, and I slumped against my seat and tried not to turn into an exhausted puddle.

  “Buttercup.”

  I lifted my head. Gabel seemed a little paler, and tired, and I knew his leg hurt like hell, but his blue eyes were human again.

  “You recognized Aaron.”

  Cold Paws

  Guilt and anxiety slammed into me. I admitted, “Yes.”

  “Does he have some claim on you?”

  “Of course not. I’ve never met him.”

  “I know you recognized him, and you weren’t happy to see him. Don’t give me the run-around, buttercup. You’re not good at it, and I’m not in the mood.”

  At least he hadn’t picked up on Marcus, and Flint hadn’t betrayed me. “Can we talk about this later?”

  “And give you time to get your story straight? No.”

  Every moment I balked at answering him I dug myself deeper. “I saw him in a vision. It wasn’t your question. I can’t tell you more than that.”

  “Before or after you came to IronMoon?” Gabel asked.

  I squirmed. “After.”

  “The petitioner wolf,” Gabel muttered to himself. “It was his vision.”

  “I can’t say more.” I’d already said too much.

  Gabel sat up a little straighter, pinned me with an ocean-colored stare. “You knew.”

  My voice trembled, “Knew what?”

  He glared at me, jaw working.

  “So what if I saw Aaron?” I asked, voice still trembling. “You don’t know what the question was.”

  “I have three damned holes in my leg on account this question.”

  “You don’t know that, but we both know you’d have gotten those anyway.”

  Gabel glared at me.

  I withered into my seat at the impossibility before me. Even the most loyal underling might have a compromising question, and use my vo
ws against me. I had deliberately not thought about it, but now it was front and center, and it seemed like I couldn’t be both. This is where it broke.

  “You knew what I am,” I whispered.

  He turned away from me and didn’t say anything the rest of the trip.

  * * *

  I offered to sleep in my bedroom on the other side of the house.

  “No.” Gabel pulled off his shirt. We were alone now, in our room, and I did not fancy the idea of being caged in with a wounded Gabel who was trying to decide if I was a traitor. I knew what IronMoon did to traitors.

  “I don’t mind. If you want the bed all to yourself.”

  He cricked his neck. His back had bruises on it. “I know you won’t tell me what you saw, Gianna.”

  “Then why are you angry?”

  He flexed his bruised knuckles. Something popped into place. “Tell me this, then, how much should I not discount Aaron?”

  “I don’t need to be an Oracle to tell you you already know the answer. He’s very dangerous.”

  “Does he tempt you?” Gabel gave me the side eye.

  “Are you jealous?”

  “No. You’re a female. If you responded to his prestige and authority even through the Mark, I want to know.”

  Clever. I rubbed my Mark. Interesting way to ask two questions at once.

  “Buttercup,” he warned me, “tell me the truth. I saw you with him. I felt you with him.”

  “Felt me? What did it feel like?” I asked.

  “Like there was a door between us. I could hear you, and smell you, but you were apart.”

  A jealous Gabel was better than the one trying to ferret out secrets I couldn’t tell him. “I felt my Mark squirm like oil on water.”

  His spine tightened as he drew back a bit. His eyes clouded, his whole body hardened over. “The vows must do more than we realized.”

  “Perhaps,” I murmured, rubbing my Mark thoughtfully. “He told me I still have my lure-scent.”

  “Impossible. That’s a lie,” Gabel snapped.

  “That’s what he told me.”

  “So what do you smell like to him, buttercup? Did he tell you? Cinnamon, perhaps? I’ve heard that’s a popular one,” Gabel said sarcastically.

  “Cereus. The night-blooming flower.”

  His lips stretched back over his teeth, revealing gleaming white that shifted dangerously. Fury erupted between us. I scrambled backward and bumped into the wall.

  Under the fury was something that resembled fear. No. Anxiety. A crush of anxiety.

  “What?” I asked blankly. “So what? He didn’t say the Moon, at least. You said the Moon.”

  Gabel snarled, “Yes. You smell like the Moon. But your lure-scent is the cereus.”

  That couldn’t be true. Females lost their scent with the Mark. “You must have told someone.”

  “No. I never mentioned that to anyone,” he hissed.

  “I—”

  “The Moon had best not cross me on this. She will regret it,” Gabel growled.

  Paralyzed with shock I watched as he slid into bed, careful around his heavily bandaged leg. The Moon—had left my scent? And Aaron could smell me? I scrambled to understand it and failed. It didn’t make any sense. Had the Moon chosen to punish Her Comet—if that was what Gabel truly was—for going too far? Was She trying to teach him even the strongest could be undone? Was it a clever lie by Aaron? Who was Aaron he could smell my scent?

  Was Aaron the Comet?

  Gabel hadn’t said a word to me since the previous night, and he had retreated into a pensive silence that was unlike him. It seemed prudent to make myself scarce before he dragged more deductions out of my non-answers, so I retreated to my workroom.

  I turned one of the smaller pieces of tourmaline over in my hand, marveling at how it seemed to catch and hold the sunlight like ocean water. Even if Gabel no longer wanted to finalize our mating, I would still be the IronMoon Oracle, unless he threw me out.

  Gabel would almost surely go through with he mating, because if he didn’t, Aaron would use it against him, and say he was too weak to handle me. The IceMaw would probably make off with me, and I’d be a war-prize once more.

  Gabel would go through with the vows. He couldn’t afford not to.

  What a fitting end to the entire thing. Caught in his own trap.

  “How it was always destined to end. Except I’m locked in here with him,” I told the blue stone.

  The stone had no answers, but it was beautiful to look at. Maybe this was why I had never heard of it. Beautiful but useless. A pretty trinket for my shelves.

  Gabel didn’t come to dinner, leaving me in the unenviable position of making excuses for him.

  Hix didn’t approve of Gabel being in his office needlessly, and he said as much to me after dinner.

  “He is licking his paws,” Hix grumbled to me.

  “I don’t know what he’s doing. I haven’t seen him all day,” I retorted. I didn’t know what he was doing, but I did know that prodding a brooding Gabel was as smart as poking an angry badger with a stick.

  “You’re going to let this continue?”

  “You think me going in there and trying to get him out of his burrow is a good idea? No thanks.”

  Hix frowned. “You fear he would strike you?”

  He’d rage at me, and the punishment I’d feel from his fury was something I would have rather not imagined. I knew how much pain even his anger would cause. He didn’t have to hit me to hurt me.

  “Has he hit you?” Hix lowered his voice.

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Am I sure? Of course I’m sure. I know what it feels like to get hit. You’ve hit me, remember?”

  “In training!”

  “Don’t get so offended, Hix. You know what I meant.”

  Now I had an angry, rankled Hix glaring at me conjuring all kinds of stories to himself. Suddenly being locked in with Gabel didn’t sound bad. Trying to reason with Hix once he got his mind stuck on something was like shouting at a rock. I sighed. “I will go deal with him. Go to bed, Hix.”

  I did knock, however, before entering Gabel’s office.

  As always he was staring at his map, but I don’t think he actually saw it.

  His dinner was untouched on his desk and had gone cold long before.

  “Holed up in your burrow, Gabel?” I decided to go right for the throat.

  “You don’t have to be here.”

  “Hix sent me. You skipping dinner to lick your paws is not allowed. I made your excuses. You are very busy working.”

  “I am very busy. I have had a great deal to think about and do not need distractions.”

  “You should not be standing on that leg.”

  “I am not going to lie on my back like some goddamn corpse.”

  “No, but you giving a damn about healing quickly might be nice!”

  “I will heal fine.”

  “Then I’ll report to Hix you are not lying dead in your office. Be at breakfast in the morning. I don’t care if you come to bed or not.” I was in no mood to deal with him. I was not the enemy. I wasn’t the one who made my Mark move in the presence of another male he despised. “Go howl at the Moon if you’re angry. If you’re going to punish me for all your bad choices over the past six months, you can go fuck yourself.”

  I slapped away the Bond’s whimper. It could keep on whimpering. It couldn’t force me to love Gabel. It could do a lot of things, but Bonds were possible to kill off, and if Gabel was going to start blaming me for his mistakes, that would wither our connection very quickly. A petty, weak, selfish Gabel wasn’t one I could love or even respect. Not even a little.

  “Buttercup,” his voice pulled at me, “was Aaron the cloaked man?”

  “I don’t know. I never saw his face or caught his scent. I’m leaving now.”

  “Do you think it’s strange, buttercup, that the Elder Oracle tried to warn you off me, and Aaron wants you?”

&
nbsp; “Anita told me you would destroy everything you touched. Aaron seemed miffed he hadn’t got a chance with me. Those aren’t the same reason.”

  “Unless there was some reason for Anita to want to help Aaron.”

  “I don’t know what that could be.” I needed to get away from this conversation before he went back to the petitioner wolf, because it didn’t exactly take a monumental mental effort to see the connection.

  “What did he say to you in private before he started spouting off in public?”

  I glanced at the door, then sighed. “I’m not going to talk to you if you’re standing up. You have to get off your leg.”

  Gabel muttered under his breath but limped over to the couch. “Happy?”

  Not really, but it was a start.

  “What did Aaron tell you?” Gabel asked.

  “Aside from making a pass at me and telling me I smelled like the a flower?”

  “Besides that.”

  “He told me you have no idea what you have, and even less idea how to hold onto it.”

  Gabel’s chuckle surprised me. He rubbed his chin, staring out the large window, and nodded to himself.

  “So now you’re not jealous?” I asked.

  “I was never really jealous,” he corrected. “Unsettled by this thing that should not be, from a wolf I had not expected to see, nor in a mood to deal with.”

  “Don’t take Aaron lightly.” I bristled with annoyance at his arrogance.

  Alpha Magnes hides behind his Oracle, but Aaron comes right for me, and Anders tries to play both of us.” Gabel smirked. “And Aaron comes for my mate. How desperate must he be?”

  It wasn’t just Anders trying to play both sides. “Aaron’s offer to me was serious, Gabel. Serious enough to make my Mark shift against my soul.”

  “How flattering, but it changes nothing. You are mine. I simply can’t take my eye off you, even for an instant. You bite, claw, scratch, kick, howl, and then disappear for days on end to places I cannot track you. The risk of defeat makes every victory worthwhile. Every day with you will prove a battle to be won.”

  Damn, this Gabel I could come to love. I shifted onto my knees, shimmied across the middle of the couch, and kissed him warmly.