Page 7 of A Very Armitage Christmas
She glanced up at me with far too much sharp intelligence in her eyes. Shit.
“Arik?” Matthew’s voice was as neutral as his expression. “What’s going on?”
I looked up at him, starting to bristle. He only sounded like that when he’d gone into full-on pack-leader mode, blue eyes cold, analyzing the latest fuck-up and already calculating how to deal with it. How dare he use that tone withme? Like I was just another one of his pack problems, and not his mate.
It hurt. It hurt more than I’d been prepared for.
And I wanted to lash out at him. I had five or six sharp retorts on the tip of my even sharper tongue.
But I’d joined this pack voluntarily, hadn’t I? I’d asked Matthew for his mating bite, after making him wait a lot longer than he would’ve if the decision had been up to him. I’d chosen not to live alone anymore, and Matthew had chosen me first, hadn’t he? Of course, it’d only been six months since we mated. Early days. You could learn a lot about someone in six months that would change your mind.
Especially if that someone was me, and raised revenants in the garden.
I licked my lips and fidgeted, but I managed to look Matthew in the eye. “I don’t know,” I said, the honesty of it scraping my throat raw. “I drew some power from the forest to revive the garden. It didn’t — there were some unexpected results.”
Matthew’s eyes narrowed as he stared me down. “Unexpected,” he said flatly.
I opened my mouth to defend myself, but Paul spoke first.
“We buried — six?” Paul straightened up from his examination of the body and looked at Jennifer.
“Eight,” she said.
“Eight,” Paul agreed. “Eight of the enemy weres in the same place. If this one’s up and moving, there might be seven more.”
Seven more. Including…Parker, whose name I had trouble saying even in my own head. Sweat trickled down my spine as my fingers went a little tingly.
It didn’t make any sense. He was a lot less dangerous undead than he’d been alive, and as a revenant he wouldn’t be any more interested in me than he would be in any other living thing he wanted to eat.
But I could tell myself that all I wanted. Believing it, and forcing my nervous system to accept it, weren’t as easy.
I ought to be taking charge. This was my mistake, and Nate didn’t have the specific magical expertise to lay the dead to rest, even though he’d knocked this one on its ass. It’d be up again, though. It was only a matter of time. And the others would be getting hungry. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t seem to make myself move, act, speak, do anything other than stand there woodenly and bite my lip to hold back the panic.
“Seven more,” Matthew said briskly, turning his attention from me completely. Dismissing me. “Ian, get Luke, Tony, and Megan, machetes all around. Fan out but stay close enough to make a dragnet, and go in from the south. I’ll take the north end. Jennifer, can you get Mark and Andy…” Matthew’s voice faded as the ringing in my ears intensified.
He wasn’t even asking me for help. No magic, no tricks. Just good old-fashioned beheadings, burn the bodies, move on.
He didn’t trust me.
I vaguely registered Matthew organizing getting all the kids and pack humans — we had a few, mainly female mates to overwhelmingly male werewolves — into the pack house, and telling Nate he was in charge of warding a perimeter around the pack house just in case. The council would be on guard.
All practical and quick, no dithering or panic.
Except from me.
I managed to get out of the way, stumbling over to the side of the house and leaning up against it where I wouldn’t impede anyone doing anything useful, which seemed to be everyone else.
Parker’s face swam in front of my eyes. I could hear his voice, low and mocking, telling me all the ways he’d use and hurt me.
He’d managed to do some of those things before I escaped from him the first time. Before he came looking for me, bent on doing it all again, only worse, because I’d defied him. I knew he wouldn’t have the same urges as a revenant. He wouldn’t even be able to speak.
It didn’t matter. I leaned against the wall and shook, reliving some of the worst hours of my life — and those hours had some stiff competition.
The meaty thunk of a heavy blade striking made me jump, and I came out of it enough to see Luke the were-mountain dragging away the two parts of the revenant, a machete in his other giant hand. One down, seven to go. Nate came back down the stairs from the back door carrying a big bag of rock salt, muttering something about really, really being sick of having to see things getting their heads cut off.
“I’m leaving the head on the Christmas turkey even if everyone thinks it’s gross,” he grumbled. “No, fuck that, I’m getting a ham. Are you coming?” he shot over his shoulder, and then disappeared around the side of the house.
Finally alone, I slid down to the ground and leaned my face on my knees.
