Pack Ruin (The Splintered Bond #3)

37. My Hell

37

My Hell

FLOR

T hey’d brought guns into my pack.

My pack?

Yes. It was mine. I didn’t have time to pick apart why that thought sent a wave of acceptance through me—as if my wolf was curling around the idea of pack, of home, here of all places. I’d hated my life here. It had been hell. But it had been my hell. Filled with other shifters who’d been suffering right alongside me. And then, after I left, these fuckers had come in like they owned the place.

Glen went still on top of me. When I pushed at him, his limp body tumbled away, but I couldn’t muster the energy to sit up. Not that I would have been able to fight. My back was healing, but I still couldn’t stand.

Whatever had happened to my spine had been bad, but I could almost smell Brand’s pine and wild berries over the acrid bite of what had to be gunpowder. His power still flowed into me like a cold mountain stream. The hell I saw when I was able to focus my eyes, though, made my heart stutter.

Luke stood in front of Glen and me, his back to the ones who had been firing at us. He’d been wounded so badly that I didn’t understand how he was still standing. Then I realized the guns had stopped. The fighting, all of it, had ended.

Or had it?

I heard a voice, a female one. “What have you done, Torran? Shooting the Alpha Heir of Southern?”

“I had no idea he was here, Mistress. I only knew about the girl, and the rogue.”

“Hm, yes.” I half-closed my eyes as the woman came nearer. She kicked my steak knife out of my hand with her shoe. A high heel, with links of silvery chain that criss-crossed her ankle and vanished under black wool trousers.

I had a ridiculous thought that Vanessa would have killed for those shoes.

I couldn’t get away. I couldn’t protect myself. Best I could do was play possum.

So I held still, trying not to react when she picked up the steak knife and stabbed it through my stomach. It hurt like fuck, though.

I held my breath as she leaned close, humming. Sniffing. She smelled like magic. I knew all I smelled like was blood… though I was afraid she’d nicked an intestine, from the added odor.

“This one won’t make it. I’m vexed, Torran. The Heir told me she had magic. You knew I was hoping… Well, in any case. Take the Heir, clean him up, and put him in my vehicle. Alive. Not injured any further, do you understand? I need him.”

Her accent was weird, I decided, trying to focus on anything other than the pain I was in. Like the time I’d watched Pride and Prejudice with Glen at Northern, and we’d tried talking in those voices the next day. I’d still sounded Southern underneath. She sounded that way, too.

Luke’s eyes were still on me. I could tell he didn’t want to go, but he didn’t have the strength to fight. None of us did. In seconds, he was hustled away by two burly shifters, struggling weakly before he collapsed into their hold. In no time at all, he was out of my line of sight.

“And the Russian?” Torran’s tone was uncertain.

“He’s been contained. I’ll take him to the lower levels myself when I get home.” I felt her prodding at Glen with her foot as well. “Won’t this be sad news to give to the Hilliers when I do. Maybe I won’t tell them yet.”

“You can’t stay?—”

She cut him off, already walking away. “After I go, make sure these two are dead, won’t you? You know what to do.”

Torran snapped out an order for someone to bring gasoline. “At least have a meal with me. I’ve missed you.”

“I can’t look at you right now. You’ve failed me too many times. Losing half the females? Allowing the rogues to run unchecked in the woods? Honestly, I thought I could trust you to do this one task on your own.”

“Mistress…”

“And leave a few Southerners alive to clean up this mess, unless you’re planning to do it yourself.” Her voice was faint when she added, “Though I suppose we could just burn it all down and rebuild. I’ve hated this place since I was a girl.”

Torran called out, “Wait for me,” but I wasn’t certain who he was talking to.

The voices were gone then, and the only sounds were from the shifters who’d been fighting me. I could sense that Glen was alive, but only just. I kept my eyes closed, letting Brand keep healing me, and concentrated on pushing some of that healing power on to Glen.

I smelled the gasoline before I felt it, and wished I could close my nose to the pungent fumes. I sucked in slow, shallow breaths, waiting for my moment. I was hoping at least some of the Council Enforcers would leave, but none of them seemed inclined to do that.

A few made crude jokes about which packs made the best barbecue. Two of them called out that they were going to get some sticks and marshmallows. One of the men kicked Glen closer to me before they dumped more gasoline on the ground.

I wanted to laugh. These fuckers had no idea what they were doing. Once, a couple of stupid boys had decided to build a bonfire, and they’d used a half gallon of gasoline to wet the wood. They’d stepped back plenty far, but when they’d lit the match, the fumes all around them had caught as well. The younger of the boys had died from the burns, and the older had been forced to shift to heal, though his hair never came in right afterward.

I felt wood landing next to me. I was healed now, more or less, though no one had noticed. I opened my eyes a crack and saw Glen facing me. His eyes were still closed, his chest not rising noticeably enough to see him breathing, but I knew he was still alive.

Alive, but not for long.

The number of shifters around us diminished, and the ones left sounded restless. The scent of the fumes had to be bothering them, too. I heard engines in the distance, and the main gates of the compound ratcheting open, then shut.

Finally, the Enforcers nearby started moving around, though they didn’t seem to be doing much. “Looking busy,” is what Del would’ve called it. One threw a few more pieces of wood down by me. A heavy bit landed across my outstretched hand, and I peeked at it.

It wasn’t a mop or a broom. It was even better. An actual bo staff, one of the practice ones our Enforcers had always trained with, but broken to about two-thirds the normal length. This was a real weapon.

I shifted, trying to feel if my spine was healed enough to stand. It was, though the spot felt fragile. One good hit there, and I’d be down again. But I would die fighting.

“We’re ready to burn the corpses, sir,” a voice called out.

“Have you decapitated the rogue Heir?” Torran replied, his voice growing louder as he returned. “You know the traditional punishment for betrayers. Let’s not get sloppy just because we’re away from home. Mattias, hand me that machete.”

Glen was still out for the count. I didn’t have long, and if I didn’t time this right… Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the machete rise. In an instant, I had the broken staff in my hand and my feet under me, ready to throw myself at Torran.

But the blood around me made me slip. I fell back on my side, just as the machete came down with a hard thunk.

My mind began to buzz. Someone was screaming. Time stood still. When it started again, the world ran in slow motion as I found my feet.

Torran stood on the other side of Glen’s body, his head lazily turning toward me, though everything else was still nearly frozen. I couldn’t look down at Glen. If I did, if I saw what had happened, I might fall again. The buzz in my brain had done something to cut off the warmth where the bonds between me and my mates had been before.

Now everything was cold. Cold, dark, and razor-sharp. Something strange and malevolent—a beast?—slid into my thoughts. Into my core, where my spirit lived. Was it my wolf? Was it… Grigor? It felt powerful, magical. Evil. I didn’t know if it was. I didn’t care.

It pressed against my skin, filling me with power, pulling it into us until I felt bloated with it, then shoving it out into the world, into the air itself, holding everything still. The wind. The light. All of it. Particles of dust hung around me, like fireflies pinned to the air itself.

Somehow, my clawed hands already held the broken bo staff. It moved almost on its own, toward my enemy. Torran’s smile curled the sharp edges of his lips as he tumbled out of the way of my first strike.

“You,” he said, the word strangely elongated. Other shifters around us drew closer, circling me. “You’re alive.” My enemy snarled, showing blunt teeth. He raised his voice. “Kill her.”

Others leaped at me, four or five at a time, all in human form. The beast was pleased. It was so much easier to tear through skin than fur. It wanted—I wanted, we wanted—his skin, though.

His head.

The staff battered the others out of my way, and I sliced with claws at the few who managed to dart inside the circle. I slipped away again, allowing the beast to kill as it wanted. They deserved it. Deserved to die for what they had done to… to…

The beast wrenched my mind away from the pain.

Time skipped.

We stood in a pile of bodies, our true enemy out of reach. Enraged, we leaped over them, landing softly, like a dry leaf, like a spark. He bared his weak, small teeth, like he wanted to growl. All that came out was a whimper.

We breathed in the sound, tasting his fear, and batted three more shifters out of the way as he scrambled back. Did he think he could escape us? We would never allow it. We crouched to chase him, confident he would not elude us.

He barked a command, one word. “Now!”

Then, to one side, a hint of sulfur. A small flare of light. Fire. A distraction.

I fought for control of my mind. Fought to stay, rather than flee. Why? There was nothing here for… The beast clawed at my concentration as the enemy drew farther away.

“Flor.” The whisper of a name came at the very moment that the match was held up, to be thrown into the air.

Glen. He was alive. He was alive and… close to the fire.

The fire!

I wrenched control back from the beast, whose whole focus was on the enemy, and leaped back to my mate’s side. It took all my newfound strength and speed to drag him away as fast as I could, pulling him over dead bodies and away from where we had fallen.

Time skipped again, once more, and I was a hundred feet from the pile of bodies and wood when the fire caught.

The match had landed exactly where we had been, and the conflagration roared as high as the Pack House roof, then higher, forty feet into the sky. Small explosions went off, and a chunk of something came flying in my direction. I tried to run, but all the unnatural strength that had filled me before was gone, emptied out. I felt as weak as I’d ever been, before I’d shifted.

I flung myself over Glen at the last second, and felt the projectile hit me in the back, right at the spot that had been broken before. It didn’t make a sound as it broke, but I did. I screamed. Well, cursed. “Ratfucking, possum-jawed, toad-licking piece of snakeshit! That fucking hurts! ”

Screaming was probably not my smartest idea, even if the cussing helped numb the pain a little, as usual. I heard some of the Council fucks running my way, the ones of them who hadn’t caught fire or been exploded, or whatever.

I flipped myself over, locking eyes with the last person I wanted to see.“Why the hell couldn’t you have caught fire?” I muttered, though I noticed he was scorched on one side of his head. He marched toward me, his silver knife in one hand, his teeth bared. My death was in his eyes.

There was no beast to call on now. Brand’s energy had dried up. My bonds to the others were thin, like wisps of cotton wool pulled too far, too thin. Damnit. I wished I had my steak knife. Or any weapon.

I’d always feared dying at Southern with no weapon in my hand. With no friends at my side, no…

“Need a hand?” The voice came from directly behind me, just as a woman hurtled over me and Glen to land in front of us.

The voice was Iris, and she wasn’t alone. Suddenly, a whole slew of the wild boys, the Southern rogues, were there, surrounding me, and some of the girls, too.

But the woman who’d jumped over me wasn’t any of them. “Mama,” I breathed. She didn’t look my way.

The appearance of my mother, dressed in animal skins with her wild white curls flying, and screaming like a banshee, stopped Torran in his tracks. It stopped all of the Council Enforcers, at least for a moment.

But not the Southern rogues. In fact, it was obvious they’d planned Mama to be the diversion for my rescue. She was screaming gibberish, the crazy talk that Trevor Blackside had teased me about for so long. But somehow, it sounded like words. Maybe it was. Maybe it was a spell, or something.

I didn’t have time to wonder.

Iris had my arm over her shoulders, and two other girls had Glen in a hammock hold, carrying him toward the back of the compound, and the hunting grounds. My eyes widened as I saw a half dozen of the rogues, armed with long sticks and swords—though none of them had the antique silver ones, from what I could tell at a glance—wading into the middle of the Council Enforcers.

There were more fighters on our side than theirs, but the rogue males were so much weaker than the skilled Enforcers they faced. The boys fought bravely, but were still half-starved, and while I could see that Sergeant had trained them for a couple of weeks, it wasn’t nearly enough. The Council Enforcers started shifting to wolf form and attacking, and the boys didn’t—or couldn’t—respond in kind.

Torran reached my mother and leaped at her with his silver knife. Suddenly, her wild curls disappeared from my view. The boys cried out as one, as if they’d been struck. The ones closest to me staggered. One was immediately pounced on by two shifted wolves, who savaged his exposed stomach.Another three wolves attacked the boy closest to Glen, tearing out his throat.

“Lily!” Sergeant’s cry came from my right, and I saw him running toward where Mama had fallen, his Alpha roar affecting every shifter who heard it.He did have a silver sword, or at least it shone like one, and I heard the clang of metal as he ran to intercept Torran’s next blow.

There was too much to see, too much to follow, but Iris slid a sword into my hand as she stumbled, carrying me away from the worst of the battle, into the small grove of pines that marked the boundary between the main compound and the first ring of houses. A dozen of the women who’d fled the dorms with me the night before ran past us, armed with more of the weapons from the cave, and yelling some word.

Tenebris, maybe?

I couldn’t make it out. The shouts became screams of pain and anger as the women met up with the Enforcers who’d been chasing behind us.

Iris set me down at the base of the tree for a moment, panting. She was skin and bones, like the rest of the women had been, and I could tell she didn’t have magical reserves of strength like I did. Or like I’d had.

“We can’t leave them,” I managed to say as she picked me up again, a look of sheer determination on her thin face. “We can’t leave them to die.”

“Sergeant gave orders,” she grunted, moving through the trees, the two shifters carrying Glen right behind us. It was dark under the cover of the pines, and I realized night was falling. The light from the bonfire back by the Pack House was all the light we had here. “Gotta get you out. You and the pretty boy. They got Luke, I guess?”

“Yeah. That Council bitch took him to Eastern. But I’m going to get him back.”

“How?”

Before I could answer, she’d stumbled to a halt. Both the girls carrying Glen cursed under their breath.

I cursed right out loud. “What the fuck?”

There was a wall of shifters standing between us and the first row of houses, all of them armed with various things. Knives and sticks, mostly, though I spotted a couple of baseball bats. These shifters weren’t dressed in fancy uniforms, though. They wore cut-off jeans shorts and tank tops, ragged tennis shoes and shirts that had been washed until the colors were mostly faded.

These were the Southern shifters. The ranked ones, though none of them were the males who’d hunted me. Probably because Grigor had exterminated them.

I swallowed hard as Iris gripped me tighter. I could tell she was looking for a way out. There wasn’t one, though. But I didn’t think these shifters were here to kill me, or they didn’t want to, at least.

One of them, an older male, stepped forward. He had one of the baseball bats in one hand, held low, and I swallowed hard. I’d been hit with a bat before, and I knew exactly how much damage they could do. This guy was meatier than most of the others around him, and held my gaze for a few seconds longer than usual.

“Our Alpha’s been taken?”

I blinked. “Callaway?”

He turned his head and spat to one side. “Luke. Our Alpha. Or he’s gonna be. Those assholes had him locked up in the Pack House.”

“Yeah,” I said, my heart pounding. “The Council was trying to kill him, or get him to die. Almost did. He got free of the Pack House, but they took him to Eastern not a half hour ago.” I closed my eyes. I could feel him moving farther away, and I put a hand to my neck. “They’re moving fast.”

“That his claim?”

My eyes snapped open, and I sneered. “Yeah. What of it?”

He almost grinned. “Makes you our Alpha Mate-to-be. Second in command, accordin’ to pack law.” All the shifters in the line moved restlessly. This wouldn’t sit well with a lot of them. But this guy was their leader, or was acting like it for now. “Heard that Torran asshole say they’s gonna burn the whole compound down. Maybe we oughta ask for your orders about that, Alpha Mate.” The whole group went silent.

I didn’t wait. “As the Southern Alpha Mate, I command you to go beat the tar outta all those fuckers who came to burn us out. Kill every last one of them. Use whatever weapons you can hold, teeth or claws. Don’t kill the rogues, the Ghost Lady, or the tattooed Alpha named Sergeant. They’re on our side.” His eyes went wide, but he nodded. “Be careful. The Council brought guns into our packlands.”

He sucked his teeth. “Silver shot?”

It didn’t stink of silver. It was lead, or steel, or whatever humans used in bullets. I thought about mentioning the silver buckshot that we’d dug out of Grigor. But that seemed counterproductive, and Grigor had said he’d wrecked that gun. “Nah. But the shit still hurts.”

“It does indeed. Thank you, ma’am. Let’s whup some East Coast ass, boys.” At that, they all slid off into the trees, as fast as bare feet and treadless shoes would carry them. Only a few were shifted, probably because Callaway was still alive somewhere, and had forbidden shifts without his permission for most of the pack.

It was a ballsy move this guy was making, to declare Luke was the Alpha. But maybe the ranked shifters had been sick of Callaway, too. Or maybe they’d realized anyone was better than Torran.

I wouldn’t ever forgive them for the shit they’d pulled on all the unranked shifters here. For the abuse they’d heaped on us, and the way they’d all looked aside as long as it wasn’t them getting treated like crap. But who knew? Del had always said a common enemy could make friends out of anybody.

We’d find out.