Page 116 of Pack: Posy 3

"Wait. What is a shard, and what is figur— Whatever you said?" luna asked.

"A shard is a piece of something, usually with sharp edges," alpha told her.

"And figuratively is a way of saying something is a symbol of something else," Emerson explained. "There's more meaning than just the actual item."

"Have you used this spell before?" Nick asked Ariel.

"Hell, no! Are you stupid?" She pressed a hand to her own heart, breathing a little faster than normal.

"Whoa! Sorry, Miss Witch," he apologized. " I don't know anything about magic in the real world."

"Sorry, too. I didn't mean to snap. It's just, what goes around comes around," she said. "Even dark witches hesitate to do anything that affects the heart. Whoever did this to Gamma Landry froze his heart, and that means serious karma is going to catch up to the caster. No witch of the light would ever do this."

"Oh, I know this story!" Thoreau pulled his face from Spring's ruff and nodded really fast, making me smile at his cuteness. He started singing, " 'Strike for love and strike for fear. There's beauty and there's danger here. Split the ice apart. Beware the frozen heart.' "

"Reau, you know this spell?" she looked at him with consternation. "You know magic?"

"No, but like Grand Pappie says, 'The heart is not so easily changed, but the head can be persuaded.' "

"I don't know who he is," she admitted, "but that's true. And how did you know that little rhyme? It sounded like a chant you'd use in a spell."

"Grand Pappie is a character fromFrozen," Angelo chuckled, "and those were just the words to the opening song of the movie."

All our eyes went to the Angel of Death.

"What?" he scowled. "Reau likes us to watch Disney with him in the evenings. We've watched that one a hundred times."

"Fourteen," Thoreau corrected him with his own scowl.

"Anyway," Ariel brought us back on track, "was Gamma Landry's mate a witch?"

"No. Absolutely not." Alpha shook his head emphatically. "There was never any evidence of that, and, at the very least, Ty would have smelled her."

"With all due respect to Tyler's olfactory skills, she could have shielded herself."

"He smelledyouunder a shield," he argued. "That day you led the Tall Pines wolves to our border, he said he smelled a witch before any of you even came out of the treeline."

"He did?" Her eyebrows flew up in surprise. "I had a really solid shield up."

"He did, and Matthew told him he was imagining it. The rest of us didn't clue into your witchiness until that lead wolf knocked you unconscious and disrupted your spellwork."

Beta Tristan's low growl rolled around the room, and his face twisted with anger.

"Then I'll trust Ty's nose," she said, squeezing her mate's hand to soothe him. "That leaves only a couple of possibilities."

"She bought a spell-storing item from a dark witch or else paid one to cast a curse for her," Adam spoke up, "or this isn't magic-based at all."

"Exactly."

"Dude." Rio elbowed him. "How did you know that?"

"I read." Adam cocked up an eyebrow. "You should try it sometime. It's amazing what you can learn and how it can help you think more logically."

"And you've seen similar things in aDungeons & Dragonscampaign, haven't you?" Rio snorted.

"Maybe," Adam admitted.

"If we could keep our focus on the problem?" Ariel scolded them. "Do you have any idea where the girl is now? You could interrogate her to find out—"

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