Pack Ruin (The Splintered Bond #3)

15. A Ruined Pack

15

A Ruined Pack

GRIGOR

T he wing of the Southern Pack House where Luke Callaway’s sickroom resided was dark and deserted. Almost too quiet, except for the sound of the machine that pumped air into his lungs and the buzz of electricity that ran the device.

I stood in a shaft of moonlight, unconcerned that I would be seen. No one in the pack cared enough about this male to check on him. I wasn’t even certain the pack knew he was alive. If this could be called living.

I stared at his gaunt, wasted face, half-obscured by a mask, wondering how the moon could have seen fit to burden my little behrserk with such a mate. I’d heard stories about him from many members of this pack. Well, perhaps it was more accurate to say I’d forced stories from the lips of former pack members, before I killed them to add their entrails to my bouquets for Flor.

Only two of them had shared tales of this dark-haired male standing up for his true mate. An older male had mumbled something about Luke as a child taking a beating meant for my little mate when she was barely old enough to walk. He’d died before I could glean any details, and no one else seemed to remember that moment.

A younger shifter had shared that a few years ago, not long after the rest of the worthless males had begun to hunt my mate-to-be, Luke had stepped in again, protesting her treatment. Supposedly, he’d been starved for weeks, locked up for months, and beaten on the Alpha’s orders. I might have softened toward the useless Heir, except for one thing. After that, he’d allowed the Hunt to go on, leaving Flor to evade forty males for years on her own.

Though had she truly done that? I suspected the mate bond, even if he hadn’t felt it, would have driven Luke to do something to protect her. Small things, perhaps. Unnoticeable by the other Enforcers.

Enforcers. I stifled a growl. In my first centuries, I’d culled hundreds of shifters like these. Their removal was no loss to the world, and the paltry few I’d slaughtered at Southern would never be missed.

I’d devoted myself to killing every single one of her former pack who had chased her down. Every hand that had touched my little mate needed to be cut off, every head removed from unworthy shoulders, after they’d confessed their part in her torture.

My rage had grown with each story, along with my frustration that I could not find two of the wolves who needed killing most. I paced around the room as I thought, my senses alert for any noise from the hallway or outside. I had to be cautious. If I was stronger, I could cloak myself in shadows and erase any trace of my presence. As it was, I had to sneak. I glared at the unconscious shifter who was the root of my current weakness.

He was the reason I had to remain here. I had to protect him, not only for my little mate, but for myself now. I rubbed absently at my chest, feeling the painful pull there. It was an unusual, unwelcome sensation. My well of power had been full, or nearly so, for centuries. Even when I’d needed to use a more significant portion of my magic over the years, I’d had more than enough time for it to replenish, and I’d never felt… emptied. Weak.

But I’d expended so much, saving Luke. No, saving the Southern Heir wasn’t all that had weakened me. I didn’t like to admit it, but the distance from my true mate was sapping me at a dizzying rate. It didn’t help that I’d sent a burst of power, one I didn’t have to spare, to answer her need at the Mountain pack. Answering the desperate call of her mate, Brand. I needed her beside me, soon. I needed her claim on my body, and mine on hers.

Her dying mate, Luke, needed her as well. If moving him wouldn’t have meant his death, I would have taken him away long before now. Carried him to her, or dragged him at least. A wave of vertigo flooded me.

She would have to return here, even if I wanted her to stay far away. I closed my eyes and reached for her along the narrow ribbon of magic I’d planted in her soul the first time I touched her, and reinforced at Northern, in the forest. I need you, little one. Come to me.

I felt her startle, felt her fumbling inside her own spirit as she reached for me, listening.

He needs you. I need you. Come to me.

There was no answer, but I had faith she would come. I had made Southern as safe as I could, though at least two of her enemies still lived.

At least I knew Trevor Blackside and Calvin Callaway were nowhere near Southern. At first, I’d suspected the old Alpha was hiding among the rogues outside the pack’s borders, but there had been no sign or scent of him there. The white-haired woman, Lily Rain, was the leader of that group, and she kept them all well-hidden.

They were a pitiful group of half-feral, starving outcasts, though I had a feeling that Sergeant had been feeding them recently, taking care of them along with Lily. I’d watched him running with some of them in the woods, saw them bring down a deer.The two scrawny males who’d hunted with him hadn’t known what to do with the beast once it was downed. Sergeant had shared the kill, then shifted and carried the rest back to the pack.

I turned the word over in my mind. Pack . Yes, the rogues were a pack, though I hadn’t seen it on my first visit to Southern. They hunted together, so far as they were able, and denned together. Even though they were led by the crazed female, they had an Alpha in their midst now as well, his presence steadying the group. If I trusted Sergeant even the smallest bit, I would approach him, enlist his aid in watching for Callaway to return.

Pity that I trusted no one, other than my little mate.

Another wave of fatigue swept through me as I crossed to the window, sliding it up soundlessly and dropping to the ground below. When Flor arrived, I would need to be rested enough to protect her, not only from the rogue pack on the border, but the newly appointed “leader” of Southern, Torran.

Something was wrong with that one. He spent his days torturing various small groups of ranked Southern shifters who had balked at his commands, though he called it training. Most of the ones he’d damaged were those I’d planned to add to my bouquets anyway. He hadn’t actually killed any of them, so I could still add them to my collection. But even if none of the Southern pack were worth a moment of my concern, his brand of leadership made my wolf rage.

Though my mother had not been a shifter, she had been the one to instruct me in what the moon had intended. Before pack laws were ever written down, they were sung and chanted at firesides for centuries, and she’d spent enough time in my father’s St. Petersburg pack to have heard them all. She’d whispered them to me at bedtime, when I was very young, before my father understood my power and took steps to contain me.

Packs were formed to protect the weak, to give children a safe place to grow, and the elders a place to share their knowledge. Alphas were meant to lead by example, to sacrifice their own safety and comfort for the ones in their care. No one had informed Torran of that, I assumed. And none of the shifters at Southern seemed to expect anything other than his abuse.

The ranked shifters moved about the compound with wary expressions. The unranked, metal tags still glinting on their ears, worked in fearful silence, with heads lowered. The single females had all been sent to live in one dormitory, six and seven to a room. I had a suspicion that Torran visited the dorms during the daytime, when I was hidden in the forest, sleeping. He wasn’t there now, but as I passed it in the darkness, running silently, the stench of despair that wafted from the building burned my nose, and the sound of muffled sobbing was louder than the hum of cicadas.

This pack had been close to ruin before, but thanks to Torran, it was beyond saving. The world would be better without him in it, and even though I knew I didn’t have energy to spare, I began pondering how best to bring about his end.

He would be my final courting gift to Flor, I decided, as I vanished into the darkness of the woods. I would kill him, skin him, thread every one of the unrankeds’ ear tags on a silver chain, and hang him from the tallest tree by the Pack House, like a… I searched for the word in my memory as I ran. Many of the humans in the South had them by their doorways, to frighten away evil spirits, I assumed.

Ah, yes. A wind chime. A perfect courting gift.