Pack Ruin (The Splintered Bond #3)

17. Parting Gifts

17

Parting Gifts

FLOR

“ Y ou ready, Dream Girl?”

Glen’s simple question was filled with compassion. He could probably hear my wolf already howling for Brand as we left him behind.

“Try to keep up, Glenda,” I retorted, pushing my way out the side door. We both ignored the rasp in my voice.

The sunlight was bright as I stepped out into it, but the sunhat hid my face. No one walked us to the truck; they didn’t want anyone to see them aiding and abetting Glen’s “escape from the pack jail cell,” which was the cover story if the Council came down on Samuel or Brand before they managed to complete the Alpha handover.

Of course, Ida had kissed and hugged me plenty of times, and packed us all sorts of food for our journey. Verona had stuck a stack of required shifter reading in my bag, but she’d shared more than that the day before. After Samuel had brought me back to the library and handed me over to her, she’d given me priceless information. And after she’d shooed him back out, she’d given me something else. Weapons.

Her words rang in my memory as Glen started the truck and drove us down the gravel road toward the nearest town.

“I’m breaking a number of Council laws right now, Flor,” Verona whispered, as she locked the library door behind us. “But I need to share a few things with you before you leave tomorrow.”

“What do you mean?” Did she have more contraband books for me?

“I gave you a book. Now I need to give you an explanation that no one else older than you, and no one who ever attended a Conclave, would be able to share: the reason why even speaking of the Western pack was forbidden.”

My jaw dropped. I’d assumed, from our conversations, that she couldn’t speak openly about them either. Wasn’t she under the same command as the rest? She was plenty older than me. “How can you…”

Her smile was sly. “I wasn’t at the great gathering after the war, when all the remaining shifters agreed to never speak of the Western pack again. So I wasn’t personally bound under the Council’s command. I never attended a Conclave after that, either, when that particular command was reinforced by all the Alphas. I knew better.” She sighed. “Samuel figured it out, of course. He commanded me not to speak of Western. But his Alpha command for me is no longer in effect.” Her lips twitched. “I love a loophole.”

I loved the sneaky way she thought, and told her so.

“Thank you. As the Centralis librarian, I have a sacred duty to share knowledge to help our pack.”

“Centralis?”

She walked me back to the locked cabinet and pulled out an assortment of things, laying them out on the table.“That was our pack’s name, years ago. My mate warned me that the backlash against magic would be severe, after the fighting ended. We were… broken, by the way the remnants of the Western pack had allied with the Russians and betrayed us, as well as the weapons they used to attack us.”

On the table in front of us, she had placed a small, plain-handled silver knife, a book, and something in a narrow leather case. I wrinkled my nose at the stench wafting up from the knife.“They used silver?” For some reason, my wolf paced restlessly at the thought.

“Yes, but more importantly, they used magic. They were the only pack in North America that had magic wielders in their ranks. They’d been punished for this after the Betrayal—that’s what many called the disastrous Southern Conclave four decades ago. At the end of the war, the victorious packs decided defeat wasn’t enough. They chose to eradicate them.”

We both sat in silence for a few heartbeats, thinking of that. An entire pack, killed. That would have been just before I was born. Not all that long ago. Had Samuel been a part of that decision? Had Margarette, or Bradley?

I didn’t ask. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

Verona went on. “The Council Head at that time was Bradley Hillier’s father. He commanded the packs to round up and execute every single Western shifter that they could find, even the prisoners of war. Any who were left were named rogues, and the Council ordered them to be killed on sight.”

Even if it made me sick, that made sense. But I didn’t understand why there’d been a command that no one could speak of them. I asked Verona, and she snarled.

“Fear makes people stupid. And stupid people do stupid things, like burn books. As if you can burn ideas with fire. Destroying these books would only mean that the next time magic wielders come against us, we will be defenseless.”

The way she spat the words magic wielders made me think of Grigor. Was he one of the ones we’d fought against? He was Russian, and he definitely used magic. Was he the enemy? My enemy?

Verona was still talking, so I shook the worry away.

“You know that pure silver blades are not legal for anyone other than Alphas and their mates to wield. There really aren’t many in existence; the metal is too soft to be practical. But if a metalsmith is clever, and wraps silver around the steel…” She pulled on gloves before showing me, picking up the small, plain dagger that I assumed had been made the way she described, then slid it into the spine of a book on Alpha ascension rituals.

I peered at the book. You couldn’t even see the knife inside, and the scent of silver was completely suppressed by the binding and the flap of leather she pulled over the top. “Nice.”

“Lethal,” she corrected. “Use the knife if you have to, but read the book as soon as you can. Remember that knowledge is one of the strongest weapons you can possess.”

Del had told me that. I nodded as she picked up the leather case and pulled out another small item, which looked like a metal dowel, or a fancy pen. On one side, it had a button like a pen, and it was silver colored, but it didn’t have that awful odor that made my stomach turn. “This one is more dangerous than the knife. It’s pure steel on the outside. But when you push this…” She pressed the tiny button to one side and then up, and a narrow silver blade, almost as thin as a needle, popped out.

“Ugh,” I said, fanning my face. It now smelled incredibly potent.

My wolf began pacing faster, panting, wanting to run far away from the odd blade, but I knew I might need this. I needed every weapon I could get my hands on, if I was going back into Southern.

I reached to take it from her, but she pulled it away quickly. “Not so fast. This blade is exceptionally dangerous. The silver is pure and brittle, made that way on purpose. If you stab someone with it, the metal will fragment inside their body. There’s no shifter alive who could survive this.”

She carefully tucked the blade back into the cylindrical holder, then the leather sleeve. I waited until she’d slid it into my bag to give her an enormous hug. “This is the most thoughtful gift I’ve ever been given. One of the only ones, to be honest. Though Margarette did give me clothes, and Sergeant gave me a sword.”

Verona perked up at the title. “Sergeant? What was his name?”

I swallowed hard. “I never caught his last name. Or his first. Is Sergeant a first name? Or a title?” I described him to her, and she pursed her lips.

“He must be the same shifter who came through our packlands. The one whose journal I gave you.”

My heart raced. I’d felt like Sergeant was related to me, the first time I’d met him. He’d given me his mother’s sword as well. What if… I tamped down the hope that he was related to me. I wasn’t even sure he was one of the good guys; he’d been in on the oppression of the unranked at Northern, and he’d defected to go who-knows-where after the Russians had bombed the Lodge.

Verona walked me to the door of the library, unlocking it, her expression concerned. “You said you hadn’t received many gifts. What about Brand’s courting gifts?”

I opened the door to find Brand there, holding a forest-green velvet bag. “He hasn’t given me any courting gifts yet,” I said as he leaned down to kiss me.

“A failing I am about to rectify, my wildflower.”

He had outdone himself. Now, as Glen drove us away from the Alpha’s Den, I held one of the carvings Brand had given to me. There had been seven in the small bag, miniature representations of his parents and grandparents. They were treasures, and had to have taken weeks to carve each one. “The next time I see you, I’ll have one of you, Glen, Luke, and Finn. Our pack.”

I’d left the bag with him, afraid the carvings might get damaged or lost. The only one I was taking with me was the one he’d done of himself. It was no larger than my thumb, but it was a perfect likeness in dark walnut of my Bearman, down to the hairs of his beard, his broad shoulders and chest, and the way his second toe was longer than the first.

Silent, I stared out the window for the first hour, until we reached the town. Glen stayed quiet as well, lost in his own thoughts. Worry and fear thrummed in our bond, but there was nothing either of us could do to stop that. We left the truck in a parking lot, took our backpacks and roamed through a bustling farmer’s market, then followed Dean’s directions to the next truck.

“This piece of shit?” Glen groaned. It was a Ford F-150, at least forty years old, with what looked to be three colors of paint and significant hail damage. I laughed as we got in and the engine roared and sputtered, a cloud of dark smoke pouring out of the tailpipe. “The whole damned pack will hear us coming.”

“Nah. This is perfect camouflage for Southern,” I told him as we pulled out onto the main highway, heading east. “Remember, Southern is the piss tank of all the packs. The burst septic line of shifterdom. The festering abscess on the hemorrhoid of—” He gunned the engine with a laugh to drown me out, turning on the radio to a country singer wailing about an ex-girlfriend, a broken-down truck, and a questionable number of beers that made all of the pain fade. I laughed and sang along, even though I was going home to hell.

Because I wasn’t going home alone, or unranked, or unarmed.

The trip to the ass-end of Alabama should have taken twenty hours, more or less, but the gas-guzzler Samuel had found for us made that impossible. We had to stop for fuel for the first time in New Mexico, and about five hours after that, at a wide place in the road outside Abilene, Texas. I was glad for the stop; my bladder was bursting, and my head spinning from all the pages I’d read so far.

Glen followed me to the ladies’ room in the back of the gas station, where I took care of business and washed my face with water that smelled like gasoline fumes and lead pipes. We didn’t bother going inside for food. We had provisions from Ida, and the fewer people who could identify us in case someone came looking, the better.

Another hour down the road, I shut my book with a sigh, closing my eyes. “What have you found out, Dream Girl?” Glen asked softly. “You feel…” He pressed a hand against his heart, and finished, “Conflicted.”

I slipped the book that I’d just finished into my pack and pulled out the one I’d been itching to begin—the journal.“Conflict is right. I’ve been readin’ that history about the war. I guess I knew it was bad—Del told me some stories—but I hadn’t ever seen it written down. So many shifters died. Like, half of all the remaining packs, and the whole Western one.”

“That pack wasn’t really whole by then,” he said softly, his eyes on the road. “The war ended a little over twenty years ago, but it began before that. Forty years back, at the disastrous Conclave at Southern.”

I nodded. I’d read about that, but I still had questions. “It said there was a fight, and an Alpha died. The Southern Alpha before Callaway’s uncle took over?”

Glen nodded. “Yes, Morton Callaway’s father. I think his name was Hollis.”

“Hollis got into an argument with the Western pack Alpha. The book didn’t name him.”

“I don’t remember his name, or maybe I never knew it,” Glen said. “We don’t speak of… them.”

“Yeah, I guess if I’d been at a Conclave, I wouldn’t be able to either. Do you think it’ll wear off? The command, I mean?” Glen raised an eyebrow. “Well, now that you’re, um, in between packs. If you aren’t under the Council’s command, and you don’t agree to it again…”

“I guess I’ll find out. I guess I’ll find out a lot of things,” he said, his tone grim.

I knew what he meant. Rogues had a reputation of going feral. Without an Alpha to lead them, they lost themselves to their wolf natures, or at least that’s what I’d been taught. That was why so many of them sort of hung around their old packlands, or the borders of other pack’s territories, trying to slip back in.

Their wolves wanted to belong, to have a family to protect them, and to protect.

It made me feel sort of bad for the rogues, though the ones in Canada hadn’t seemed feral at all. Murderous and violent, sure. But they’d had a leader, that Russian guy.He had been enough of an Alpha substitute that he’d kept them sane, more or less.

When I asked Glen, he seemed disturbed, but then nodded. “Maybe so. Or maybe they had an Alpha somewhere else. They didn’t act like rogues.”

“More like mercenaries or terrorists,” I mused, opening the latch on the journal. It almost flew open, like it wanted me to read it. Like it was as impatient as I was.

I thought about Verona, how she’d admitted she couldn’t open it. I had a weird feeling my blood on the latch had been what had done the trick. She’d said this book was forbidden. Was it magic?

A chill ran through me as a few puzzle pieces clicked into place. Things I really should have put together a long time ago, only they’d seemed so impossible. The journal warmed on my lap, like it knew I was feeling cold.

Ah, skunkshit. Magic for sure. I tucked my hands under my armpits, half-wishing I’d left the dang thing back at Mountain.

“Do you have any more questions?” Glen asked, our bond shifting slightly, ripples of reassurance and love moving through me.

I had more questions than answers now. “I still don’t get exactly what happened at that old Conclave. They’d already been worrying about infertility, right? The birth rates had dropped, and they planned to discuss it at the meetings they always hold at the end. But then the Southern Alpha got involved in some fight at the start of the Games, and died. So instead of working out why there weren’t enough babies, they ended up disciplining the Western pack. I can’t figure out for what, exactly.” The book had been long on blaming the Western pack for everything, but there had to have been something that started it. Or someone.

“They used magic to attack a young Southern girl who was at the Games, and then, during the fight that broke out, one of them killed the Southern Alpha, Hollis.”

I thought for a moment. “Maybe it was an accident, though? A fight that got too rowdy?”

“No. That was when witchcraft was outlawed entirely. From what I pieced together from my lessons, and what I remember overhearing when I was little, magic was used to kill at the Conclave, not just claws and teeth. I assumed that meant witches were at the Conclave. After that, witches weren’t allowed to cross any pack’s border.” For some reason, Verona’s cackling about loopholes echoed in my mind.

I frowned. I’d missed a lot of lessons after dropping out of school; maybe there were more books that went into greater detail about what had started the fight at those Games. They covered the ending well enough. “The history book said the pack name, the Western pack, was removed from the North American rosters like it never existed, and they were sent back to the West Coast without their Alpha. How could they survive without an Alpha?”

Glen shrugged. “It may be why their pack crumbled so fast.”

I thought for a moment about what I’d read. “There was a lot of infighting, Western wolves fighting for dominance. Within ten years, almost all the former members of the pack were either dead, injured or weakened, or had left the pack and become rogues. A core of them stayed, and made an alliance with Russian shifters to take over the continent. Russians like that Ivan guy, the general.”

I rubbed a hand over the spot where he’d scratched me with his silver-tipped claws. Somehow, Grigor had healed those cuts up until they didn’t show at all.

Glen hummed. “The Russian wolves were always rumored to have witches or wizards in their packs. There were stories about the old Alphas stealing young witches to use to breed magic-wielding wolves, though of course that’s impossible.”

“Is it?” I asked, thinking of Grigor. His mother had been a witch.

Glen shot me a weird look. “You know humans and shifters aren’t compatible that way. Right?”

“Sure.” I knew shifters and humans couldn’t breed. They’d taught us in school that there hadn’t been a single pup ever born that came from a human and a shifter. I’d wondered if it was true, but I’d overheard some of the ranked males in my old pack saying it was a good thing, or the closest city outside our borders would have had a hundred tiny Callaway babies running around. But… were witches not human?

Before I could ask, Glen went on. “If it were possible to have shifter babies by breeding with humans, or outside our own kind, there would be a hell of a lot more shifters in the world. Of course, it’s taboo.”

Of course it was. I forced my thoughts away from my biological father, and back to the conversation. “Still, it seems like overkill, to hypnotize all the remaining shifters in the whole country after the war not to be able to even talk about magic. Or the pack they wiped out.” I wiped my eyes, feeling an odd connection to shifters I’d never met. “It was a far smaller pack by that time, from what I read. Almost all women and children when the war ended.”

“Maybe they don’t want us to talk about it because they’re ashamed.” Glen’s pain seeped through the bond, and I laid a hand on his leg. He took it and held on as he spoke. “I am, though I never really thought of it that way.”

We rode in silence for a few more miles before I added, “If no one talks about it, someday none of the packs will even know what happened. What if shifters invade again, ones who have magic, or have witch allies? We won’t know how to protect ourselves.”

“That’s why for the last twenty years, the Council has had groups of Enforcers who do nothing but hunt witches, or rumors of magic. It’s one of the reasons the Council still exists, because of that possibility. Magic and shifters don’t mix.” He shot me a look, and I knew he was thinking about Grigor.

But I was thinking about another shifter, Sergeant J. Rain. I only had another hour or two to read before it got too dark, so there was no time to waste. I opened the journal and began to read from the beginning. It began very formally, but quickly became personal, and I could almost hear a rough, gravelly voice reading the pages in my mind.

I am Sergeant Julian Rain, son of Alpha Mother Dahlia Rain, and the late Alpha Ithil Mar, who fell to a silver blade and treachery at the fifty-second Conclave held at the Meridion packlands, leaving me as the last remaining male member of the Moonblessed Warrior division. Mad with grief, my mother attacked both enemies and allies at that Conclave, and was struck down as well, leaving no leader ready to hold the collected power and magic of the Occidens pack.

This journal contains the notes of all I learned from my father and the last Alpha Mothers of the West, of the nature of both wolfcraft and witchcraft. It is my hope that in breaking tradition and committing this knowledge to the page, it will not be lost forever upon my own death. I will also attempt to lay out my own theories of how the imbalance in the two great magics given to Her children by the Moon Goddess may have created a rift that draws energy away, not only from the remaining packs as a whole, but also those things that every individual shifter holds most dear: our true mate bonds, and our pups.

I have guarded this book with magic and blood, so that only one of my family, though we are all but gone, will be able to open its cover and read what I have written.

It is my hope that if she is alive, my niece Lily, the daughter of my twin sister Camellia Rain and the last child born to Occidens, may find it. That she may take up her natural role as Alpha Mother, though the survivors of our pack have lost all honor and may not welcome their rightful leader.

Lily, if you’re reading this, I hope you remember me. I wish I had spent more time with you before you were forced to flee our green home, the magic-filled, ancient forests that nurtured us all.

I pray the coven was the safe place we were promised. The war that I fear approaches may mean that there is no such place left for our line. Anger and resentment has festered in the hearts of those who remain, and their desperation has borne evil fruit.

In the years following the Conclave Betrayal, after the dissolution and diaspora of the Occidens pack, our pack was shunned entirely. Any Occidens wolf discovered more than one hundred miles from the Blue Mountains was put to death as a rogue. Trade was shut off, and our young were not allowed contact with other shifters, thus ensuring they would not find their true mates. Mating between one of ours and any other pack was outlawed. Any shifter who broke that law, even if they were answering the call of a true mate bond, would be cast out, rejected and reviled by the Council and its allies.

The world went dark as my mind spun, understanding blooming like a razor-edged flower. My last name was Wills, or so I’d believed. I’d thought my mother’s was, too. Lily Rain Wills. But it was just Lily Rain.

Who the hell was she? And who was I?