AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I squinted. I hadn’t expected that question, and I expected all sorts of questions, like, ‘Are you stupid?’ ‘Why did you leave me without sufficient protection?’ ‘How are you so incompetent?’
Questions about ancient Lycan history? That was harder to predict. Honestly, I wasn’t a history buff, and so when the elders tried to teach us the lessons about our own history when I was a kid, I was probably thinking too much about boobs to let much of it settle. So far, my brain only remembered that it was the name of a dead, ancient, royal family of Lycans.
Caelum started speaking because he was a nerd. He’d probably listened to his elders and taken fucking notes like a good little student.
“Silvermane doesn’t mean anything to anyone,” Caelum was quick to say from the driver’s seat. “The Silvermanes were oneof the proto-Lycans, but they were sort of assholes; got power hungry and started a war with other modern-Lycan families until the Silvermane pack were all hunted down and killed back during medieval times. The name is sort of a footnote.” He said this in a way I used to think was annoying when I had first met him as a teenager. It tended to carry this pedantic air to it, but he had two PhDs, and one of those was in history. So, he never missed an opportunity to be a complete know-it-all.
“Well, they think I’m one of them,” she said frankly, turning her head towards the front seat for a moment. I stared at her. “At least that’s what they said when they were outside my jail-cell, drunken monologuing their evil plans.” She squinted and added peevishly, “Seriously, I didn’t think that was a real thing, but apparently when people do evil shit, they want to celebrate it with their accomplices a lot…”
I kept staring at her, checking out her every freckle. What I expected to see, I couldn’t say. But a Silvermane? Fucking impossible. Caelum was right—that family was dead. Dead-dead. Like, rotted, ten feet underground, eaten by worms and made dirt dead. There weren’t any living survivors. We didn’t learn about them to give them credit for being powerful, or being the first, but to learn how much all the other Lycans can kick ass when we put our mind and hearts into it, because Proto-Lycans were hard masters to beat…
But then again, we were mated toher, and that wasn’t normal. Sure, Lycans would sometimes blend with humans—I know my grandmother was human; lots of Lycans had some human in them. But it was rare that the mate bond would happen. Even weirder that the mate bond would be strong. …Okay, and it had been first-rate strange that this was a fucking strong mate bond like it was a relic from theold days.
But if shedidhave proto-Lycan blood in her veins… Maybe that made sense. If she was bonded, and they were able to mystically bring that blood to the surface… that might actually explain the strong mate-bond.
“Say it’s true. And I’m not totally convinced,” Caelum began, always the skeptical one, “but say it’s true. How the fuck would they discover you? And how would they even know you had something to bring to the surface?”
She shrugged, and of course she did. She had only known about all this shit for a week; I couldn’t imagine she knew anything. “They had a witch with them. Wendy recognized her.Madame Juana.”
Ohhh…Fuck.
The hair on the back of my neck raised up on end at the mention of the name. She wasn’t quite ghost-story level, but she was notorious. And not like Wendy, who was known as a loveable, mischievous weirdo. No, no. Madame Juana was a mystic priestess that was powered by black magic. She’d been around for centuries, causing drama wherever she went.
“Okay, so can you fill me in?” she asked. “I feel like the car just got super fucking tense.”
I didn’t know what Caelum was thinking—he was probably already trying to assess how much shit we were in and how we could get out of it. My brain wasn’t doing that. It was hard to keep it out of full-on freak-out mode.
“Is she like… a witch like Wendy?” Kaci asked, snapping me back to the moment.
“No.” It was almost adorable how dumb that question was. The real answer was terrifying, but it was hard to relate, so I thought about it for a second before coming up with a decent analogy. “Well, you know how like… Scooby Doo is a dog and Kujo is a dog?” I replied back like I was talking to a child.
She raised an eyebrow. “Yeah?”
“Which one is better to have on your side when you’re fighting against a whole pack of Lycans?”
“Oh, fuck,” she said, her eyes falling down to her lap in defeat.
“Yeah,” I agreed. I didn’t want to let her know how much I was freaking out. It was freaking me out enough that I didn’t even want to go to the mansion.
“Wendy has rules and Madame Juana doesn’t. Not to mention their experience doesn’t measure up at all. Jauna has been around for centuries. Supposedly she’s one of the reasons the bubonic plague got out of hand,” Caelum noted, rubbing the back of his hand agitatedly over the back of his neck. “But she’s been quiet my whole life. Wendy mentioned that Samael saw her around, and I didn’t even think of it. Bad folks pass through here sometimes; they come and they go. It’s normally not a huge deal. But… shit.”
“That being said, let’s go to Wendy’s,” I mentioned, pointing at Caelum. “Not the mansion. I don’t want to be any place they can just walk in.”
“We have a pack of fourteen! How many do they have?” Caelum asked.
“We don’t have fourteen!” I snapped. “They took out Rog, remember? He might not be fight-ready. We have thirteen.”That wasn’t a big number if you added Juana to the opposing side. And my gang wasn’t a gang. I was the muscle, the rest of the guys were nerds that probably barely survived training when they were growing up. “And that’s saying that Beau picks up his phone! He’s been an asshole lately.”
“And they have seven,” Kaci added weakly. “I think. I tried to give three of them brain injuries…” She pressed her hand over her eyes. “Sorry, I’m just tired,” she told me and my worried expression. “They knocked me out with something that’s making me feel like I ate steel, and now it’s trying to escape through my eyeball.”
“Look, I’d rather hunker down in a place that has a few demons in it than mess with Juana popping through the front door and making shit easy for these guys she’s bunking up with. Let’s get the whole pack there. It’s enchanted against threats. That should help.”
“Samael isn’t going to like that,” Caelum sighed, but I could tell that he agreed.
“Samael? Samael’s not gonna like any part of this. His day is fuckingbusted.”
“I don’t think she plans to knock down the door,” Kaci said, straightening up and rubbing her temples. “I ran right into Madame Juana in the escape attempt, and she told me I could go.”
We looked her over. Likethatmade a whole lot more sense. The pack tried to keep her, but the witchlet her go? Why the fuck would she let her go if her blood was supposedly so valuable?
