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“What?” he asked, realizing that his comment was unpopular.
“There’s no such thing as an ‘expert’ in this. Packs don’t get together and write books about our own kind,” I reminded him. “We don’t compare differences, we don’t try to figure it out.” That was always my problem with being part of a standard pack—they weren’t exactly knowledge-seekers.
“Yeah, but there are magic experts!” he reminded us like a kid who was told he had to shovel snow off the front porch by hand when there were snow blowers all around him. “And obviously it’s gotta be magic, right? On its face—it doesn’t make any sense that she wasn’t triggering a mate bond on Friday, but she was on Saturday. When things don’t make sense, that could be because they’re not following the natural order. If it’s not following natural order, it’s gotta be magic.”
“He might have something,” Hunter admitted, gesturing to the group behind him. “We were talking about it—it’s too strong of a shift to happen all the sudden. If it was this girl’s first day on campus, and she’d come from fuck-knows-where, and then the bond happened… Well, that’d be one thing. Inconvenient, yes. But it would have had the possibility to be natural. This has to be magic.”
“If there’s magic,” another pack-brother, Clint, said as he put his boots up on the coffee table, “then we’re already out of our league. I know you don’t like the idea of presenting the Cajun Quatro to your new girl here, but there’s really nothing else for it.”
“We could ask Little Mama. It was their book she bought,” Beau suggested nonchalantly, crossing his skinny jeans, one leg over the other, showing off a lot of ankle above his boat shoes.
There wasn’t a crisp silence now like there should have been. A couple of our brothers were trying to hatch out a several step plan, but this was the first time I had heard of any book.
“Whatbook?” There might have already been a growl to my tone. I was quickly smelling out a problem.
Beau blinked at me, then put his feet on the ground and leaned forward. He was suddenly uncomfortable, as he should have been, because this was definitely information that shouldn’t be hitting me for the first time. “Well, therehadto be a magic book. She bought it at Little Mama’s on Saturday afternoon, because she kept the receipt. I found it when I was packing her stuff into bags this morning.”
“Can’t be anything, boss—Little Mama doesn’t sellrealmagic,” Clint assured, waving his hands around dismissively. When I looked over at him, he then seemed to feel the need to list all the exceptions. “Except, you know… the potions and shit she sells…” He looked up at the ceiling. “And the tarot readings,” he added thoughtfully. “And the seances on Tuesday night…” He looked left and right. “Maybe… maybe we should call her…?” He stretched out this question, no longer seeming to harbor any of the certainty he’d had when he’d begun to speak. He was one of Little Mama’s fans, since he liked the fact that she seemed to tongue-fuck anyone with a pulse.
I scrubbed my hands down my face, exhausted and already feeling more pissed off than I remember being. Ever. “Oh, no. Ry and I are going to drop in and pay her a visitourselves.”
“Should I call Samael so he doesn’t feel like you’re stepping on his toes?” Clint asked, wincing.
Samael was the witch’s handler of sorts and was a powerful being that normally gave everyone the creeps, if not the innate knowledge that he was no one to fuck with. But Samael and I knew each other pretty well at this point, and I knew that if Little Mama was selling magic books to whomever the fuck she wanted to, then he wasn’t going to be happy about it, either.
“I don’t give a fuck if Samael thinks I’m stepping on his goddamned toes. If she’s at fault, then she’s been dancing on my dick! I don’t appreciate it.” My tone had risen, and the atmosphere was feeling decidedly tense.
I stood up, and it fucking hurt. Everything hurt, but I had to play alpha now, especially with a rogue pack of wolves on our ass, on top of everything else. These guys, if released to their own devices, would do their own thing. None of it would be helpful, and before we knew it, we would all end up dead somewhere. If there was an enemy trying to take the territory, then a leader needed to step in, and not the fucking president of the university who was beat up and really just wanted a scotch and a blowjob. Oh, no. It was alpha time.
Patrols needed to go out, research needed to be done, calls needed to be made. We needed to research the threat. I gave out assignments quickly and succinctly, wasting no time.
“What do you needmeto do?” Beau asked, because he was the only one of us I hadn’t given a job to.
I was actually still annoyed that he hadn’t told me about the book receipt until just now. I felt that he could have at least texted that info as a head’s up. I didn’t worry that he was incompetent or stupid; I’d already checked that out, and if he was, he wouldn’t have so much as noticed the receipt, wouldn’thave known there was a book any better than I had. But I felt like he still needed to be punished.
“You’re on babysitting duty,” I assured him, smiling wide even as his face fell.
“Babysitting duty?” he groaned.
“Oh, yes. And get used to it—it might be a while.”
“I have a date tomorrow…” he began to say apologetically.
“Oh, I’d cancel. I’d clear my schedule if I were you. All the way out. Indefinitely.” I didn’t know why, and it probably had a psychological reasoning behind it, but I did feel better when I made the new pup completely miserable. His frowning was somehow healing my wounds.
“What’d I miss?” Ry said, coming down the stairs and pulling up his fly, because it was down for some reason I already didn’t approve of.
“And the worst beta ever reappears!” I announced. I was hoping I could get to bed within the next half-hour, but apparently that wasn’t in the cards. I could smell our mate all over him, I could smell his seed, and it was beginning to ramp me up.
“No, there’re worse,” he argued. He looked way too relaxed, much more relaxed than he’d been when he brought Kaci up the stairs.
I liked to think he would be more apologetic if he had fucked her outright, so I calmed, but only slightly. He smelled like her pussy, and that was enough for me. “Are you done doing whatever the fuck you wanted?”
“Oh, I didn’t,” he said, straightening like he was tired ofmybullshit. “But you gotta stop letting them lick the cone once the cream is gone.”
There was a red flash of fury when I attacked him. It was stupid; one way to make the alpha look like he’s not in charge would be for the beta to clean the floor with him, and it would have been easy for Ry to do. Ry wasn’t in the last fight, for starters, and for seconds, he was bigger and stronger than me anyway. I was not alpha because I was the better fighter; I was alpha because I had the better brain.
The better brain wasn’t working, either.
