Page 45 of Wolfsbane

“Or they might try to hide their incursion instead of driving up the road,” Daire said, almost in a whisper.

“That,” Tristan agreed. “The Sawtooth and Payette packs hate her even more than Wildwood. They never agreed to work with her before, so it’s not likely they’ll do it now, even if she asks. Ermengarde does not like to be turned down, so it’s more likely she’ll try to sneak in the back way and try to steal them. Or even finish the spell right here on pack lands, since that might be easier. Once she’s a witchwolf, she can do almost anything, and stopping a pack will be child’s play.”

Unrest in the coven.

No deals with Sawtooth and Payette.

It seemed to me that just maybe, the coven was on its last legs, and they desperately needed this win. Or Ermengarde needed to steal Daire’s and my power in order to force them back in line.

It didn’t even matter if it would work; the woman was desperate, and desperate people did insane things to try to preserve their illusions.

Maybe I’d done even worse than bringing the pack into danger by asking them to come with me to retrieve my wolf. Maybe I’d brought the danger right to their door, in the form of a witch so frantic to keep power in her own coven that she’d do any reckless thing to force the issue. Like murder her own son for the power inside him.

Not that I suspected she’d ever cared much about him, from what little I’d learned about Daire’s childhood. No, I thought she’d always considered him a tool, not a loved one.

I wondered if she was even capable of love.

I’d wondered the same about myself at times, but seeing her planning to murder Daire had helped a bit with that. After all, I might be a disaster of a person, with broken and missing pieces in my soul, but I would never, ever have considered sacrificing the lives of my own family for power.

“We could . . . there are wards,” Daire said, and when Cash whipped his head up to glare at him, he leaned hard into me, and his voice went even quieter than before. “We could at least set up perimeter wards around your homes, so we’ll know if witches cross them.”

“You mean other witches,” Cash near-snarled at him.

“Yes,” I agreed. I met his eye and tried to be as sympathetic to his anger as possible, but well . . . emotions weren’t exactly my forte. “Witches other than me.”

The face he made was somewhere between horrified and disgusted, and I couldn’t blame him. I had no great desire to be a witch. I’d rather have my wolf back by far. But if I was the pack witch for the moment, then this was my responsibility.

“We will try to lay these wards in the morning,” I told Daire. “You need rest before that. However good you are at teaching, it has been a long day and night, and we both need sleep.”

He didn’t deny it this time, just nodded without looking up.

Thank goodness. I loved everyone in the room with me—well, except for Tristan whom I barely knew—but the last thing I needed was to deal with any more of Cash’s anger at that moment. He was like another brother to me, but Daire was . . .

Had I just failed to exclude Daire from the people I loved?

Strange.

Well, we’d been forced together rather violently, and so far I did actually like what I knew of him. Beyond that, well . . . there was something about him being in possession of my wolf that had led not to snarling anger, but softer feelings. Like his feeding Drew for years, he was now taking care of my wolf, and the fact that it hadn’t ripped him apart said good things about the brightness of his soul.

Like how light and beautiful his magic was. Just like his smile, not that I’d seen that in a few hours. His magic was inside me, a part of me, and the intimacy of it, the way it felt, was teaching me more than I could have learned about him in a year of conversation.

Daire was the perfect witch to be going through this with us. He was entirely on our side, and now, as far as I was concerned, he was one of us. More than Tristan, who hadn’t found a place inside the pack yet. Daire had a place, and it was right where he was, at my side.

CHAPTER 24

Daire

We had time. Mother would need it to keep the coven in hand. Hell, I doubted Destiny was in any great rush to get back to the coven house and explain how we’d gotten past them.

Because Leo and Altair were staying with Katya, and Drew needed a place to sleep, I’d be sleeping in Viktor’s room. It worked, given that we could hardly take half a dozen steps away from each other without pulling on the tether between us.

I had an animal sense that if it snapped, it would destroy me. I didn’t want to test how far we could go or try and stretch it farther.

But as I trudged up the stairs with Viktor behind me, I couldn’t help wondering what might happen if Mother did get her hands on me again.

What she wanted, more than my magic in Viktor, was Viktor’s wolf in me. If I could turn myself over, maybe that’d be enough for her. And Viktor was convinced that his wolf would never tolerate my mother. She’d finish the spell, his wolf would tear her apart, and then⁠—

Well, it took a special kind of magic for a witch’s spell to outlast them. It wasn’t entirely unheard of, but when a witch wove magic, it was tied to them.