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Her eyes raked up and down, as if noticing me for the first time. “I suppose you’ll do.”
Without a backward glance, she walked toward the exit. Her boyfriend still crying in the distance.
“For what it’s worth, I’m sorry about what happened to him,” I said.
She stopped walking but didn’t turn to look at me. “I’m working with you on this because we have a common enemy right now. That does not mean we are friends. You will refrain from any conversation that resembles small talk or discusses my personal life.”
“Even better.” I didn’t care how we got the information we needed, I just wanted to solve this and find out how at risk my pack was.
As soon as we walked into the golden late-afternoon sunlight, I knew something was off.
Zoe froze and even Scarlett stopped. There was an absence, like what I’d been feeling in the woods. Only, this time, it was right on Main Street.
“What is that?” I asked, not bothering to care if it made me sound insane.
“Magic,” Scarlett said.
“Old magic,” Zoe clarified.
“Luke Shaw, you’re a difficult man to find,” a deep male voice called.
Chills ran down my spine as I turned to face the stranger. Someone beyond our pack had breeched our wards.
“They’re all down,” Zoe said as if she’d read my thoughts.
I didn’t need her to clarify. It was our greatest fear. Without the wards, we were unprotected. We were too small to defend ourselves from the larger packs and it would be a matter of time before human technology picked up on what was under our territory. Those wards had to get back up. “Can you fix it?”
“I’ll help her,” Scarlett said.
The two witches left me staring at the stranger. It was like a scene out of an old western film. Two men standing in the middle of a dirt road, staring at one another.
The stranger was tall and muscular, with a long gray beard and skin tanned by years spent outdoors. I caught his scent on the wind and quickly placed him as a wolf shifter, but as suspected, he had no connection to my pack. Somehow, he’d found us and gotten through our wards.
A woman materialized out of thin air and approached slowly behind him, long black hair whipping around her face as if she herself was a storm. I didn’t need to be able to sense magic to know she was responsible for the addled humans. Possibly even for my father’s death.
“State your business,” I said.
He smirked and stared at me through wild eyes. He looked nearly as unhinged as the humans. My brow furrowed slightly as I wondered if he was the one calling the shots or if the woman behind him was running things. Neither would surprise me.
Witches had teamed up with shifters for thousands of years. Some packs had distanced themselves as witches grew more powerful. I wasn’t sure where I’d stand on the situation if I hadn’t befriended Zoe when we were young. But it was impossible to know if this man was working with the witch or if this witch had coerced him into coming here.
“You are trespassing,” I said, trying to get him to say something. Anything.
A crowd had gathered, shifters hanging back near the buildings and shops, watching the stranger. I could feel their fear. They had to know our wards were down.
“I won’t be trespassing for long,” he called, stopping about ten feet from me. “By our sacred rights, if one alpha challenges another, he may claim his opponent’s pack.”
My jaw tensed, and I growled. “You have no business here, old man. Leave before you do something you regret.”
“I came here to take down the alpha of the Lost Pack.” He scoffed. “I expected a mighty shifter, not a pup. You can’t be who I’m looking for.”
The words hit harder than they should have. He’d reminded me how young and inexperienced I was, and that my father was dead. But, he’d also made me question my initial impression. I thought for sure this was our enemy coming out of hiding. But if he didn’t know my father had passed, either he wasn’t in on it, or the witch could be working on things without him knowing. Or maybe this was a coincidence, and they weren’t related to my father’s death.
My gut told me that wasn’t the case. They were the villains I was looking for. I balled my hands into fists. “You sure you’re up for this, old man?”
He grinned. “I’m going to tear out your throat, then I’m take everything this pack has kept hidden.”
My chest tightened. He knew what we were hiding. My ancestors had protected our secrets for generations. I was less than a month into my role as alpha and we were near losing everything.
