Page 36 of The Alpha's Warlock
“Why would you stay and help us defend our territory?” he asked, with understandable wariness. Well, at least whatever was scrambling his brain had left him with a few neurons to rub together. “What do you want?”
“You’re welcome, by the way,” Charlie drawled. “And I don’t want anything, except a return to equilibrium in the neighborhood. Oh, and Sam Kimball’s head on some kind of spike, or possibly mounted on a plaque. I used to do some taxidermy in my younger —”
“Oh my fucking gods, shut up,” I choked, bile rushing up at the image of pretty little fucking evil Charlie humming a tune as he cheerfully stuffed Kimball’s skull with cotton balls. “No more. Please.”
Dor rolled his eyes. “Humans are so squeamish.” He let out a long-suffering sigh. “I’ll cut off his head as neatly as you like, and we’ll discuss the display arrangements later. For now, the point, please, Fenwick?”
“The point,” Charlie said with a glare in Dor’s direction, “is that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, isn’t that so? We’ll polish off the Kimballs together, and then we can go back to ignoring each other in public and being moderately hostile in private. I’m comfortable with that.”
Ian eyed Charlie for a long, fraught moment. “My territory. My rules. I’m in charge, and if you don’t like it, you can go fight Kimball on your own, outside of the Armitage boundaries.”
“Technically, he’s in charge,” Charlie replied, gesturing at Matthew, who still hadn’t stirred. Dor’s magical whammy really did seem to hit weres harder than humans, or maybe I had some immunity from my own magic. It was actually really nice to not be the weakest link, in some small way, for once. And not to be the one passed out on the ground. “What are you going to do when he wakes up and starts ranting about Kimball’s supposed son?”
Ian shrugged. “I’m going to hand him off to the pack council and tell them Matt’s gone nuts and I’m taking over temporarily.”
“And if they want to take over themselves, and negotiate with Kimball instead of fighting?”
“Then they can bite me.” Ian bared his teeth.
Charlie threw his head back and laughed. “All right, Lassie, your territory, your rules. But Dor’s in charge of our magical defenses. No offense,” he said, with a nod to me. “But I think you might be better off taking second chair on this one.”
“Nate’s not taking any chair at all,” Ian put in hotly. “He’s staying here in the pack house where he’s out of the way until —”
I yanked myself out from under Ian’s arm, missing its warmth the second I did. I shivered a little in the chill. This stupid borrowed hoodie really wasn’t doing it for me, even though the length of the sleeves meant I didn’t need gloves. Ian stared at me, mouth open, like he was actuallysurprised. “Fuck you, Ian. You don’t speak for me. Dor, you want to go scope out the edge of the territory? Set some quick and dirty wards?”
“Nate, come on,” Ian said, sounding halfway between furious and pleading. “You’ve been through enough today, and this kind of fight isn’t your thing. You can keep an eye on Matt —”
“Fuck. Off.” Rage boiled up in my belly like a simmering teakettle. I spun on my heel and marched off, hoping I was going in the right direction, and hoping Dor would follow, and hoping I didn’t trip over my own feet and faceplant into the pine needles like a moron and prove Ian’s point. How the fuckdarehe? He’d havediedif I hadn’t been there. He’d have died at least twice over. And he still thought I was useless! Untrustworthy, too, probably, underneath his weird coddle-my-mate freak-out. He thought I’d, what, change sides and flip for Kimball? Fuck up and get everyone killed? Fuck. Him.
A burst of argument flared up behind me — it sounded like Charlie trying to get Ian to shut up and focus on his brother and the pack council instead of messing around with me.
Good. I hoped they bit each other, the assholes. All of them.
I’d gone about fifty feet, and was stomping my way through a grove of pines and cursing at the spiderwebs spiraling out of the drooping branches to cling to my face, when Dor caught up to me, falling into step beside me with his usual silent grace.
It didn’t look like he had any spiderwebs onhim, the bastard.
“Don’t say a goddamn word,” I growled. “Yeah. I’m no good in a fight. Don’t fucking want to hear it.”
Without speaking, Dor gestured to our right, and started to lead the way at an angle from the direction I’d been going. My face heating up, I followed along. At least I hadn’t gone the complete opposite of the right direction.
We trudged through the woods for a while, with only my crunching footsteps — Dor didn’t seem to have any — and the light wind shushing in the branches above us to disturb the silence.
After this was over, I promised myself I was never going hiking again. Nothing even hiking-adjacent. The farthest I was going to walk was from a nice warm car into a Starbucks and back again, and if I got flabby and pale, or flabbier and paler as the case may be, so fucking be it.
Dor stopped at last and held up a hand for me to do the same. “You don’t need to use hand signals,” I said, sounding a little peevish. I felt more than a little peevish. I wondered if Dor could conjure coffee out of thin air along with all his other tricks. “I mean, tell me what you want me to do. I know I’m not the expert here.”
“Ah, am I allowed to speak now?” Dor quirked an eyebrow at me, an expression that took on a certain sinister cast in the washed-out glow of the moon.
“Shut up,” I grumbled. “You don’t need to make fun of me.” He just looked at me for a long minute, and then it dawned on me. “Not, literally shut up. Jesus fuck, Dor.”
He chuckled. Gods, what a dick. Charlie so deserved him. “Thank you for the clarification. I’ll tell you what we’re going to do in a moment, but first — I wasn’t going to criticize your abilities, you know.” He crouched down, somehow managing not to run his sword into the ground or overbalance, and started to brush pine needles away from a small area of the ground, clearing a circle of bare dirt.
I tucked my hands into the sleeves of the hoodie and then under my arms. If only Ian weren’t such an overbearing, suspicious dick, he could’ve been there to keep me warm. I was trying so hard not to ask, but curiosity got the better of me. “Yeah? What were you going to say?”
Dor finished clearing his circle, cocked his head to examine it, and nodded to himself. “From my admittedly cursory examination, it looked like Jonathan Hawthorne died from magical electrocution. I was wondering if it might’ve been your signature Unimpressive Finger Lightning.”
Ouch. “You know, that’s not really my preferred name for it.”
