“Miss Claire,” Patricia said softly. “You do not want to be here, do you?”
“No, ma’am,” Claire said, and it pierced Migisi’s heart. Even in her pain, her daughter clung to her manners. Migisi watched Claire, drinking her in, determined that, even on her maddest days, she would not forget the one beautiful thin she’d managed to create.
“I understand. But your mother is trying to do what is best for you. All she wants is for you to be safe and happy. We promised her we would keep you that way. And that we would love you like a member of our own family.”
“But you are not my mother,” Claire said softly.
Patricia shook her head, still watching Claire. “No, my dear. None of us are. You only have one mother, and she is losing a piece of her heart by leaving you. We will not be your mother, any of us. But we can be your family.”
Claire gave Migisi one last angry, teary look, and turned away. She sat on the top step of the wooden front porch, arms crossed, staring at the ground.
Migisi handed over the two packs of Claire’s belongings. “There are no words I can use that can express my thanks for this,” she said to Patricia. Her two sisters, the Shadow witches, looked on.
“We will be leaving within the hour. We don’t want to give him a chance to find her. And, we don’t want to give you a chance to come back for her either,” she added quietly.
Migisi’s first instinct was to be insulted, but she tamped it down. They were right. “Thank you,” she said. She studied the other witch, who was roughly her own age. She had spent so much time, once she’d found these witches, demanding their help, trying to force them to break a curse they could not break, terrorizing them in her rages. They knew, perhaps better than anyone other than Claire, how little she was still able to cling to her senses. She’d gone so far as to destroy their original home in a fit of rage and suspicion, sure they were actually on Marshall’s side somehow. Their refusal to help her had simply been due to the fact that they were not powerful enough to do much more than create protective wards. They were no match for either Migisi or Marshall. Or Luc, for that matter.
“We will keep her safe,” Patricia said.
Migisi nodded and took a deep breath.
“Claire. It is time for me to leave.”
Her daughter didn’t respond, keeping her same posture, looking at the ground.
“Can I have a hug before I go?” Migisi asked. She saw her daughter's shoulder start shaking, her little chest heaving, and when she looked up at Migisi, tears flowed from her eyes. There was such anger, such betrayal, such raw hurt in her eyes that Migisi hated herself even more than she already did. She had not known that was possible.
“I love you, my Claire,” Migisi said, tears falling from her own eyes. Claire continued to glare at her, tears falling. “I love you,” she repeated, her voice cracking. She felt like she was about to fall, her knees weak. How could she do this? How could she walk away from her child?
“Claire?” Migisi begged, and Claire turned away, refusing to look at her.
“You should go. Come on, now,” Patricia said gently. “Do not make this harder for her. We will make her understand. We will make sure she knows how you love her. Prove how much you love her now, and walk away while you still have some control left.”
Migisi nodded. Patricia had seen her in madness too often. She knew what it looked like when Migisi began to become unhinged. “Thank you,’ she whispered hoarsely. She looked at her daughter one last time, her heart shattered, and took a large step, disappearing from Claire’s life forever.
Chapter Fourteen
“Calm down, Sophie,” Bryce said, holding his hands out as he shifted back to his human form. The rest of his pack stayed in their wolf forms, and Sophie did not let her shield down. “It’s okay.”
“Is it? This is one of mine. Murdered on your land. What do you think killed him?” she demanded, gesturing toward the body.
Bryce walked over to Rob’s body while the rest of the pack looked on. He inspected it, sniffed at it, then turned to Sophie.
“Sophie, I know it looks bad—”
“You think?”
“You know we’d never do anything like this.”
“You wouldn’t. You can’t really speak for them, though.”
“What was he doing in our territory?” Bryce asked quietly, meeting Sophie’s eyes. “Between two friends, Sophie. Because we are friends and you know that.”
Sophie nodded and took a deep breath. “We are. He was here keeping an eye on the pack, along with several others.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t trust that at least a few members of your pack have given up the idea of revenge against Calder for what happened. Or that they are fully loyal to you, either.”
A few of the wolves growled at her words, and Bryce looked back at them.
“I can handle that myself,” Bryce said.
“Fine. But I am not leaving the safety of the only family I have up to the hope that they’ll all fall into line,” Sophie said. “Especially since we all know one of your people burned his house down.”
This was met with more growls, and Bryce glared at her. “Unless you have proof, I expect you to take that back, Sophie.”
“Oh, come on. You know it as well as I do,” Sophie muttered.
“My people are hardly the only ones pissed at Calder.”
“They’re the only ones who wanted him dead for Jack’s death. Which he didn't cause,” Sophie added.
“I know that.”
“Yeah? They don’t. Look at how they’re looking at him, like they want to tear him apart.” She gestured to the wolves, who were no longer paying her much attention at all, but were staring at Calder, fur bristling, low snarls emitting from their throats. For his part, Calder stood there in bear form, watching them without making a move or a sound.
“Calm down. Now,” Bryce barked, and the wolves stopped snarling, instead sitting back on their haunches, yellow and brown eyes all still fixed on Calder.
“You know it’s a big goddamn breach of etiquette to trespass here.”
“So that was worth killing him over?” Sophie asked, meeting Bryce’s gray gaze.
“Obviously not.” Bryce looked away, and back down at the body. “I know what it looks like. I’ll look into it.”
“And Calder’s house?”
“We both know that could just as likely have been that warlock asshole,” Bryce said. Then he looked at Calder. “Are you staying with Jon?”
The bear gave a shake of his head.
“He’s staying with me,” Sophie said.
Bryce’s expression brightened a bit. “Oh. Well, that’s good. I’m glad to hear it.”
“Yeah.”
Bryce met her gaze again and nodded to the side. “Let’s talk,” he said. He started moving away from the group of shifters and witches, and she joined him. Within moments, they’d each had to call back to their respective groups to stay where they were.
“If any of my pack did this, or burned Calder’s house down, I’ll find them and I’ll punish them. I need you to trust me in this, Sophie.”
“Bryce—”
“I’m barely hanging on to the alpha position by a thread,” he whispered. “They don’t want me here. If they find a reason to remove me, even the smallest one, they’ll go for it. Do you know how you remove an alpha?”
Sophie shook her head, supposing she wasn’t going to like the answer.
“They make damn sure any alpha they remove can’t come back to try to reclaim his role,” Bryce said. “It’s a fight to the death, and I wouldn’t be allowed help. I think I’m strong enough to take them. What do we have left? Old men? Teenage boys? And several widows. If it came to that, they would force me to fight, and I’d end up killing even more of them. I don’t want to do that, Sophie,” he murmured.
She thought, for a moment, how weird anyone else looking in on this scene would think it was. Bryce was still stark naked, an
d they walked along as if it was nothing, discussing issues of life and death.
“They need to know I’m in charge. They need to know I have the best interests of the pack at heart, and that as much as I love you and Calder, that my loyalty is to my pack, not anyone else.”
Sophie nodded. “Okay.”
“I will find out what happened. I can’t imagine that any of my people would kill someone just for being in our territory, even if it is a Shadow witch. As for Calder’s house…”
“It’s a possibility,” Sophie said.
Bryce nodded. “He doesn’t have many friends left among the pack. They either still think he killed Jack, or they blame him for the deaths of their friends and family. They all know the rules. They knew what they were getting into. None of them expected Calder to win, which was stupid.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m sorry for your friend. Did you know him well?”
Sophie shook her head and explained about the Shadow coven and how they came to be hers. She’d told Layla about them, and she’d passed a bit on to Bryce, but he hadn’t had the whole story.
“So rather than having them sit in my meadow, I wanted them doing things. Making use of themselves and their magic,” Sophie finished. “And they’ve been good. They’re not evil,” she added quietly. “I’m still confused about a hell of a lot of this mess, but I know that much. They’ve been used to do evil things, by people more powerful than they are. But they aren’t evil.”
Bryce nodded. “I believe you.”
“Why?”
He grinned. “Because you’re one of the least evil people I’ve ever known, and you’re so Shadow it makes me want to crawl out of my skin.”
“Uh. Thanks.”
“I mean… you’re very Shadow. But I’d trust you with my life. So I get what you’re saying.”
“I know. I’ll keep them out of your territory—”
“Sophie,” Calder called. Sophie looked back at him, as well as the assembled witches and shifters. He had shifted back and pulled his clothing back on, and he was standing over Rob’s body. “You should come check this out.”
She and Bryce exchanged a look and made their way back to Calder and the others.
“What is it?” she asked, standing beside Calder.
“I decided to sniff around a little. Any shifter, anyone, period, would have left a trace of scent behind when they did that to him.”
Sophie nodded. Bryce quickly shifted back into his wolf form and bent close to the body, sniffing near the neck, which Sophie still couldn’t look at too closely.
Bryce released a low snarl, then backed away, glancing up at Sophie.
“What?” Sophie asked, stomach twisting.
“A wild wolf attacked him,” Calder said. “Not one of the pack.”
Sophie kept her eyes on his. “But there’s more.”
He nodded. “There’s another scent on him.”
Bryce shifted back. “That fucking warlock,” he growled, his voice somewhere between animal and man. The only one who wanted to see Marshall dead as much as Sophie and Calder was Bryce, after what the warlock had done not just to Layla in particular, but to her family in general. He'd killed Layla and Cara’s father, and Layla was in a wheelchair now because of him.
“I don’t…” she trailed off, tilting her head as she studied the body. She closed her eyes, reaching out, sensing for the magic. Within moments, she could see the Light magic imbuing the trees, the earth, even the shifters around her. Beings very much in tune with nature, they were all touched by the Light as well. She could see the dark, oily clouds of Shadow that surrounded her coven.
She focused on the body, and there was nothing.
She focused harder, concentrating.
“What’s she doing?” she heard Bryce ask Calder.
“Looking at the magic,” Calder whispered.
“Huh?”
“It’s complicated,” Calder asked, and they fell into silence again as Sophie continued studying Rob’s body.
“There’s nothing there,” she said finally, opening her eyes.
“I have no idea what that means,” Bryce said. Sophie met Calder’s eyes.
“There should be some lingering sense of who he was. What he was,” Sophie said. “There should be a bit of Shadow magic still clinging to him. But there’s nothing there. It’s like a giant void. No Light, no Shadow. Just… nothing.”
“Well. I mean. He’s dead, right?” Bryce said.
“He’s dead,” she affirmed. “I should still be able to sense some of his Shadow magic. The magic is never created or destroyed. It just is. It doesn’t just go away.”
“It kind of does, though. I mean, you took the Shadow magic from that asshole.”
“I took it, meaning it transferred to me. It didn’t just disappear.”
She watched as it dawned on both Calder and Bryce what she was saying.
“So someone took his power,” Calder said. “They took it all.”
“Which would have killed him all by itself, from what I understand,” Sophie said, forcing herself to look back at Rob’s body.
“So why the claw slice to the throat?” Bryce asked.
“To sow mistrust between us,” Sophie said quietly. “Divide and conquer. Isolate whoever it is he’s targeting.”
“So he’s back, really.”
“Esme and I were almost positive he was the one who killed Jack, probably knowing that you all would suspect Calder and he’d have to face pack justice.”
“And it was hugely unlikely that anyone would have survived that,” Bryce said quietly, rubbing his hand over his mouth. “Fuck.”
“And then you would have been left alone, completely,” Calder said, studying Sophie. Sophie nodded, then glanced around. The shifters had all shifted back to their human forms. Her Shadow coven was doing their level best not to look at the naked shifters, though some were managing better than others. Jayda still looked lost. Sophie would have to spend some time with her later and help her through this.
“I would bet, if we’d even considered checking Jack’s body out, we would have smelled the warlock on him, too,” Bryce said. “Another apology we owe you,” he added to Calder, and Calder waved it off.
“You can’t seriously believe this mumbo jumbo,” one of the shifters said. He was older, grizzled, his eyes flashing in anger. “She’s a witch. A Shadow witch. You can’t believe a word that comes out of her mouth. And whether he killed Jack or not, he sure the hell killed over half of our pack—”
“Because we gave him no choice,” Bryce said. “Was he supposed to just lie down and die?”
The older man shut up, and Bryce kept his eyes on him until he looked down.
Sophie patted Calder’s arm, and then she addressed the assembled shifters. “Before all of this, many of you saw me as some kind of hero, when I shielded you and your families from Marshall,” she said gently.
“Now our families are dead,” the older man said angrily.
She nodded. “They are. They died as warriors. Their deaths are not on Calder’s head, or Bryce’s or anyone else’s. There is one man to blame for this, one man who made it look like Jack was murdered by a bear, one man who attacked our entire town when we were in mourning. Look at us,” she said, glancing around at the shifters, then at her witches and warlocks. “Suspicious. Angry. This is exactly what he wants.”
“No,” the older shifter said. “What he wants, from my understanding, is you. To destroy you or mate you, I don’t know and I don’t care. But it seems to me that he gets what he wants, and he’ll be out of our lives for good.”
One or two of the older shifters murmured their agreement, even as she felt Calder bristle behind her.
“Don’t be an asshole,” Bryce said. His calm tone belied the obvious stress he was feeling, but Sophie guessed that all of the martial arts and yoga and stuff he did kept him a little calmer than everyone else.
Note to self: try to take up yoga again, once this
is all over.
“He has a point,” one of the other older shifters insisted. “He gets her, he gets the hell out of our lives and our town.”
“You really think it would stop at that?” Sophie asked. “You don’t know him. Everything is a power trip to him. Everything, every situation, is a game he’s determined to win. Let’s say we just turned me over to him. You think he’s going to spirit me off somewhere and live his sick, twisted version of happily ever after while leaving you in peace? No. He knows I care about too many here. He doesn’t rule by love and benevolence. He rules by fear. He would keep me in line by constantly threatening what I care about. Which means he wouldn’t leave. He would keep me here, so I could watch what happens when I displease him.” She paused. “I mean… he cursed my ancestor via the man she was in love with, because she didn’t want the warlock of her own free will. So his brilliant plan? Was to drive her insane, turn her to Shadow, and then claim her when she was broken and couldn't fight back. That was the plan, as far as we can tell. Does that sound like a sane, benevolent person to you? Maybe it’s just me, but that doesn’t seem like someone who will just say, ‘That’s all I need. I’ll be going now.’”
“You should have never come back to Copper Falls,” the first man muttered.
“Enough,” Bryce said. Sophie looked around. Other than the three older shifter males who seemed like they wanted to hog-tie her and turn her over to Marshall, everyone looked like they were ready to fight. Determination, mixed with plenty of anger. It felt like maybe something had changed. Sophie looked at Bryce to see him watching the three older shifters.
“I want to see you three when we’re done here,” Bryce said, gesturing to the three of them. “You can go back to your homes until I send for you. Everyone else, stay a while.”
The three older men stalked off, sending glares Sophie and Calder’s way. Bryce shook his head and turned to Sophie. “It was a good idea to have your Shadow coven watching things. But now that we know it was him, it’s more dangerous. He could be anywhere.”
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