by Annie Bellet
“Charming,” Rachel muttered. “Where’s the third brother?”
“I killed him, many years ago.”
“Why not kill them all?” she asked.
That would have made things simpler later, Alek thought. “They surrendered and claimed they did not know the extent of their Alpha’s madness. They told the truth about that, so they and the rest of the pack were allowed to go free. Enough had died to make the point, or so we felt at the time. There was no more danger that the Nine could foresee.”
The man across the street looked like he was waiting for something, or someone. Alek was fairly sure that man was the older of the two remaining brothers. If so, his name was Arlo. Frederick was the name of the other.
“He watching for something?” Rachel asked.
Another car, this one a small sedan, drove into view. It pulled into the driveway and four men, none of whom looked familiar to Alek, got out. The driver pulled the vehicle into the garage. Then, with another quick glance all around, the men went into the garage and the door came down.
“Seven of them, two of us,” Rachel said. “Want to take odds those other five are shifters?” She rose and eased away from the window.
Alek did the same, staying back in case anyone in the opposite house was looking out.
“Likely more wolves,” he said. Wolves almost always ran in packs.
“Freyda wouldn’t like this one bit,” Rachel said. She holstered her gun as they retreated to the kitchen where they couldn’t be observed. “I’ll call her.”
“No,” Alek said. “This is my fight. I will not have anyone else get hurt.”
“What are you going to do, cowboy? Go over there and start ripping wolves apart in the middle of the damn afternoon? What if they start shooting? What if a stray bullet hits another house or some kid walking down the street?” Rachel glared up at him, her cell phone in her hand now.
“They will shoot at Freyda, they will shoot at anyone who comes near. It makes no difference. But if I am there, they will not shoot. I will make them shift and fight properly.” Alek took a step toward Rachel, straightening up to his full height. Even though it hurt like hell, he rolled his shoulders, pushing his chest out.
“For fuck’s sake, Alek,” she said. She licked her lips and stepped back, dropping her gaze from his eyes to his chest. “Can you even make them shift? Isn’t that a Justice power?”
“It is my power,” Alek said. He had not lost the abilities the Council had given to him. He was not sure why, but they were useful still.
“I cannot believe I am even contemplating this.” The Sheriff sighed and put her phone away. “How do we get close? This isn’t an action movie, I can’t just smash my car through their front window while we go in, guns blazing. That’s somebody’s house. A human somebody, who will expect it to be sans corpses and bullet holes.”
“You have cleaned up messes before,” Alek pointed out.
“Yeah. I call Freyda. Well, Ulfr before her, but the Alpha is good at this stuff,” Rachel said. She paced across the kitchen. “Some days I feel like I’m in the mafia,” she added. “Fuck.”
“Can they replace a glass door?”
Rachel turned back to him. “What do you have in mind?”
Alek told her his plan, knowing she wouldn’t like it.
She did not like it. But, as Alek had also known, she agreed.
Alek slipped out of Coleman’s house and shifted to tiger in the back yard. The immediate cessation of pain surprised him with its intensity. He had not realized how much he was hurting until he was not any longer. Alek also realized he was starving, but he shoved that discomfort aside, promising his grumbling, twisting stomach a cow’s worth of steaks when he was done.
He hoped—though he was not going to hold his breath—that the wolves with the brothers would stop fighting once he had put down their leaders. If they were true pack, however, they would likely keep fighting. He had no authority from the Council behind him to curtail unnecessary bloodshed. Part of him had known deep down that someday Arlo and Frederick might come for him. Even now, many years later, he recalled the naked hatred in their eyes.
Mercer, the Justice who had helped Alek with the mad Alpha, was one of the Justices who had fallen out of contact with the others. Alek hoped it was for non-lethal reasons. Seeing the brothers here, however, he feared they had gone for Mercer first.
They could not know if he was dead or not, but reinforcements implied they suspected he was not and were preparing for that. The lack of news about someone gunned down might have tipped them off, but perhaps not given how quiet shifter communities tried to keep deaths. They had not come at him like a pack, but like the killers they were.
Alek mused as he crouched in the back yard and waited for the distraction Rachel would soon be providing. If anything surprised him, it was that no Justice had been sent after the brothers before now. They had been cruel bastards before they followed a mad Alpha, and he imagined they would still be that way.
In the end, it did not matter. Their objective was clear. There would be no asking them questions. They had committed the crime of trying to kill him, of hurting someone he loved.
Alek was judge and jury. Soon he would be the executioner.
Rachel’s vehicle pulled onto the street and drove right up to the house across the way. Alek heard more than saw this, but he started moving immediately. Her vehicle would block some of the view and he had to get across the road very quickly and around the back of the opposite house.
Rachel got out of the car. She didn’t have her gun drawn. The plan was that she would approach the front door as though everything was normal and she was just checking up on things. Alek hadn’t liked that part, but Rachel had insisted. She did not believe they would start shooting a sheriff without provocation in broad daylight. The brothers had been cautious and careful, she argued.
She was betting her life on that. Alek was not thrilled, but he could recognize when he had pushed someone enough. Rachel wanted to do her part her way. It was not easy, but he decided to trust her instincts.
She knocked on the door and Alek streaked across the road, flattening himself alongside the garage. There was no window in the garage and only a frosted window on this side of the house toward the back yard.
“Can I help you?” a male voice said as Alek heard a door open.
“Hi, sorry to bother you,” Rachel said.
What else she might have said was lost to Alek as he started moving again. He cleared the side of the house and rounded the back. The grass was dry under his paws and he could not quite manage perfect silence, so he opted for speed instead.
His plan was to slam his way through the sliding glass door and then start roaring to make sure all the wolves shifted. Rachel would be forced to shift also, but she could fight just as well as a wolf.
The sliding glass door opened as Alek leapt up onto the deck. The man, not one of the brothers, froze in the doorway, staring at the huge tiger. Alek wasted no time. He charged the man and slammed into him. His teeth closed around the shifter’s weak, human neck and crushed it in a rush of warm blood.
He dropped the body and roared, shoving his way into the house. Two men shifted to wolves, guns dropping to the floor as they did so. Alek attacked the larger wolf, a red-furred beast. His huge paw slammed into the wolf’s shoulder and he crushed its head in his jaws.
Movement caught his eye and he twisted to meet the attack of the other wolf. This one was smaller, with brown fur and white tipped-ears. This wolf was Frederick, Alek thought. He remembered those ears. The hatred in the wolf’s eyes was familiar as well, shining through even in animal form. Frederick snapped his jaws closed where Alek’s foreleg had been a moment before. Alek used the weight of his body to slam the wolf to the side, deflecting him. He tried to rear up so he could use both paws to slam the wolf down, but his head hit the ceiling fan and threw him off-balance.
Two more wolves charged into the living room. One shifted to huma
n, revealing he was the older brother Arlo, and went for a fallen gun as Alek batted Frederick aside again. Alek roared, forcing Arlo back to wolf form. He would allow no guns. It would not be that kind of fight.
The confined space made getting to the dodging wolves difficult. The wolf that wasn’t the brothers tried to circle around behind, going for a hamstring. Alek caught the wolf’s hindquarters in his jaws. Bone crunched beneath his teeth as the dragged the hapless shifter back around and threw him toward the brothers.
The motion of tossing the heavy wolf away brought fresh pain to Alek’s neck. He had mostly forgotten his injured human form, but the phantom of the wound still lurked in his tiger self. He was not at full strength and he knew he should be more cautious.
A cry of pain from elsewhere in the house was followed with a crashing noise, like a vase falling. Rachel was fighting in the front. There was no room and no time to get to her. Alek had taken out three, with two more in front of him. He hoped that Rachel could handle two on her own.
The brothers were more cautious than their companions had been, now that the initial rush of battle and surprise was passing. They snarled at Alek, crouching as far from him as they could get. Frederick eyed the open sliding glass door. In his head, Alek dared the brother to go for it. He was far larger than the wolves, his reach greater. Their pack mate was a twitching lump against the far wall, unconscious but not dead. Alek had severed his spine, however. He was out of this fight.
His tail lashing back and forth, smacking into the shoved-aside couch behind him, Alek snarled at the wolves. They were at angles to him. He couldn’t charge one without leaving his side open to the other. If they had been normal wolves, he would not have thought twice, daring their jaws to get any good purchase on his thick fur and hide. These were shifters, and experienced fighters. Their jaws were larger, stronger. They would know where to strike to hurt and disable, just as he did.
The older brother shifted to human, holding up his hands in a surrendering gesture, palms out.
“Let’s talk,” Arlo started to say. His eyes flicked toward his brother, who began to slide sideways and more into Alek’s peripheral vision than his immediate line of sight.
Alek had hoped they would make a mistake. It would make it simpler if he did not get hurt more. He did not want to explain that to Jade as well. She would be mad enough he had gone after the brothers without her.
Arlo’s mistake was that he thought he was still dealing with Alek the Justice. A Justice would likely have shifted to speak. Once upon a time, Alek would have. Part of him wanted to. He wanted answers to questions like was Mercer alive.
But the Council of Nine was broken. Alek was a Justice no longer.
And these Nazi bastards had shot his mate.
Alek twisted as he pushed off with his powerful back legs. He sprang at Frederick with a speed that even Arlo could not have predicted, using all his extra power from being an Alpha shifter as well as a tiger. His paws smashed into the smaller wolf. Frederick might have been the size of a small pony, but he felt like a chew toy in Alek’s grip as the tiger crushed his spine with massive jaws.
Dropping the wolf the moment he tasted brain and spinal fluid and felt the body go limp and heavy in his jaws, Alek spun back.
Arlo screamed something unintelligible in German and shifted. He had no time to do more than throw himself at death in the form of Alek’s rearing body. Alek’s heavy paws battered the wolf, the shifter’s jaws finding purchase on a tiger foreleg for only a moment before ripping away. Alek barely felt the sting of the wound as he dropped his weight down, pinning the wolf. He racked with his back paws, blood and fur flying in the air around him.
The wolf stopped moving and Alek swiped at the corpse, shoving it aside. A black furred wolf bounded into the living room from the front of the house and shifted. Rachel.
“Had to kill the two back there.” She looked around and shook her head. “They weren’t going to go down easy, I suppose. I think that one is still alive?”
Alek turned his head. He had not heard the injured wolf’s breathing over his own and Rachel’s panting breaths. The wolf he had crippled lay in a heap, its chest still rising and falling in sharp, uneven breaths. If the wolf woke up and shifted to human, he might have a chance to survive.
A Justice might have let him live. Alek had let these brothers live once, however. That decision had nearly killed him.
He went to the wolf and rolled him over with his paw. The killing blow was easy and quick, his jaws crushing the back of the neck. When it was done, he shifted to human.
The pain in his throat was almost gone, but Alek knew that was likely from adrenaline and battle high. He would pay for this later.
“It is done then,” he said.
“Remind me never to piss you off,” Rachel said with a nervous laugh.
“Never piss me off,” Alek said. His gaze must have been colder than intended because she licked her lips and took a step back.
“No shots fired, at least. Try to walk out of here without tracking blood around. I’ll get clean-up out here.” Rachel pulled out her phone and looked around the living room again.
Furniture was shoved aside. The ceiling fan was cracked and half-hanging from its mooring. Blood, offal, fur, and dead wolves decorated the ground. Half in and half out of the sliding glass door, the single human corpse lay twisted, his head almost severed.
“Freyda is going to kill me,” Rachel said with a sigh as she hit Send.
Jade is going to kill me, Alek thought. She would forgive him. And now there was no more problem here. No more snipers.
As he had sown, so he had reaped.
The first two hours in the car on the way home, I crashed hard in the back seat, drooling on Harper’s lap. I woke up when Levi stopped for gas and sodas. A cold Mountain Dew later, I felt sort of alive again. I checked my phone, remembering they had promised to call if Alek woke up. There was a message from Junebug saying he had and was doing fine. My companions, eavesdropping on the message with their shifter hearing, cheered. With a feeling of profound relief, I had Harper hand the jar over to me.
It was locked via a dial on the top that looked like a combination lock, except it pointed at glyphs that were similar to the ones in the ritual room circle. The silver bands would, I guessed, unlatch if the dial were turned the right way. I had no idea what the right way was and I wasn’t about to experiment in a moving vehicle, so I left it alone.
“Looks like a human heart,” Harper said. She leaned so far across the seat that her head was nearly on my shoulder.
“Maybe,” I said, peering into the phosphorescent liquid. I was tempted to shake the thing like a snow globe but managed to resist the urge.
“Sorcerer?” Ezee asked from the front seat where he had also twisted around to get a look at what I was holding.
I knew what he meant. Was the heart a sorcerer’s heart. Trouble was, I had no idea. Seemed possible. The one heart I’d taken from a sorcerer in actual human heart form—present blood droplet gem in necklace notwithstanding—had stayed beating.
“Maybe,” I repeated. Question was, whose heart was it if so and did I let them regenerate or whatever would happen so I could ask? Or did I hand it over to Noah Grey like I had promised?
“Necromancer?” Ezee said. It was half question, half statement.
“Could explain why the Archivist wanted me to go get it, being undead himself.” I’d been trying not to think about that word, either. But who else raises people from the dead and protects their home with a zombie horde?
If this was the necromancer though, who had put his heart in a jar?
Levi said aloud exactly what I had just thought and all of us were silent as the landscape outside the car grew more forested. Trees blurred by. We were almost home.
“So, if you ate that, we’d know who it was, right?” Harper said as we turned off the highway and toward town.
“I am not going to eat a heart in a glowing green jar that I picke
d up in a zombie-infested dungeon.” I made a face at her.
“It seemed less crazy in my head,” she said, unrepentant.
“Also it would kill him or her,” Ezee pointed out.
“If it even is a sorcerer’s heart,” I added.
Without knowing, I wasn’t about to chomp down. I likely had until nightfall to figure it out. I tapped the jar like a kid would a goldfish tank, silently wishing we’d left it where it sat. I had to hand it over. Noah had promised to find the men who shot Alek. I couldn’t welch on my side of the bargain even if I wanted to.
I would hand over the jar, get the information I needed to protect Alek, and try to go on with my life pretending that the mystery of this heart and all that necromantic magic back at the weird house with its subterranean levels did not bug me one bit. ’Cause I’m a pro at ignoring unsolved mysteries.
Well, I thought, I guess everyone has to do some growing up sooner or later. Maybe this was me, growing up.
It was still sunny and warm when we arrived back at my shop. I practically ran up the stairs, jar in hands. I dropped it onto the kitchen table and went straight to where Alek sat on the floor in tiger form. He shifted as I reached him and caught me in his arms.
His skin was even paler than normal and he was still in some pain, evidenced by the tight line of his jaw and the slight wrinkle in his forehead. His neck was a mess of ridged skin where the bullet had torn through the side, but it was healing. The wound was mostly closed and the skin was pink instead of angry red. He’d cleaned himself up and was wearing a different shirt, though his pants were still covered in dried blood.
“Hey you,” I said as I jammed my face against his chest. I hadn’t realized how scared I’d been for him until I felt his arms around me. I had secretly feared that I would never feel his warmth, his strength holding me ever again.
“I am here,” he murmured into my hair. “What did you burn? You smell like fire and rotting meat.”
I looked up at his expression and grinned. “Sorry,” I said. “I had to fry some zombies.”
