Page 6 of Blood and Magic
“Don’t take that tone with me,” she said, putting her hands on her hips, her own wolf glaring at me from behind her gaze. “With one word, I could have you on house arrest. You’re already skating on thin ice with Kodiak. You want to stomp on that crack?”
I grumbled and took a deep breath, trying to calm the rising tide of fury in my gut.
“We’re worried about you, Van,” she said, using my legal name, the one she’d been calling me since we were children. “We love you.”
“I don’t need you to worry about me,” I said, recognizing the signs of exhaustion in her face. She had nearly wiped herself out to bring me back, and in the time since, she hadn’t recuperated. “When are you taking a vacation, huh?”
“Don’t change the subject.” She sighed and shook her head. “I need you to be honest with me. What else are you noticing?”
The utter frustration with literally everyone and everything. The urge to hunt down every fucking vampire I could until the world overflowed with their wretched, decaying blood. An overwhelming emptiness in my soul that nothing and no one could fill.
I was a zombie, and she’d made me this way.
She should have let me die. They all should have let me die.
I pushed my thumb and forefinger into my eyes, tired of this conversation and her incessant prodding. If I told her half of the things I had been experiencing, she’d slam me in the holding cell and dissect me like a science experiment. No other shifter we’d ever heard of had been dead as long as me and brought back by magic.
It bordered too close to things I didn’t want to think of.
“Wyn,” I said, putting my hands on my hips. “Our vice president is marrying a Vanderbilt tomorrow. Marx, the king of crusty undead bloodsuckers, is still on the run. I’ve got no clues about where to look for him.” As the pack’s tech guru, it was on me to find him, but the fucker was a Goddamned ghost. “Half the pack is pissed about Kodiak’s alliance with Guin, and our brother spent three days stuck in a cave with my best friend’s sister. Don’t you think there are bigger issues to worry about?”
She scowled. “I’ll add delusional apathy to the list of symptoms.”
“Let. This. Go.” I said the words through clenched teeth, hoping she’d get the picture.
“No.” Morwyn turned to her notes and jotted down something undoubtedly incriminating that would only piss me off more.
She was as stubborn as I was, and if she weren’t my dearest little sister, I’d already have snarled loud enough to send her scampering to Kodiak with her tail between her legs. As it was, she wasn’t scared of me and never would be. As much as my wolf hated everyone and everything else, I would never hurt my siblings. Never.
“If I did something while healing you, I need to fix it.”
The urge to bite her head off nearly overwhelmed me, but just then, my only friend and fellow RBMC member, Fenris, stuck his head in.
“Hey, buddy,” he said. “I thought I heard your dulcet tones.”
“The doc is trying to patch me back together like Humpty Dumpty.” I grabbed my cut and stuffed my arms into the leather before heaving it onto my shoulders.
“Good,” Fenris said, running a hand through his dark curly hair before stepping inside and smiling at my sister. “Someone needs to.”
She glanced at him and raised an eyebrow. “Fenris.”
“Morwyn.” He grinned. She rolled her eyes and returned to her paperwork, clearly not amused. Perhaps I should have been more concerned about Fenris’s blatant flirtation, but she’d never given him the time of day, which was a good thing. Fenris had never been serious about anyone or anything, except his younger sister, Lyra. And maybe me.
“What are you doing here?” I asked. “Is Lyra?—”
“She’s fine,” he said. “Being stuck in a cave with your brother was barely a blip on her radar.”
At the last new moon mating ceremony, she’d snuck off pack territory in a terrible storm and gotten stuck in a cave with Caelum when a tree collapsed in front of the opening. They’d been there for three days before Kodiak could find them. Other than reeking like sex, dirt, and earth, they’d emerged mostly unscathed. As long as Caelum kept himself out of trouble, I tried to stay out of his personal shit.
Unlike Fenris, Lyra was a mountain lion shifter, one of the over ten different types of shifters in the pack. Some were prey animals, some were predators, but Kodiak didn’t believe in speciesism, nor would he tolerate prejudice based on the status of one’s parents. Half-breed, pure-breed, none of that shit mattered to him. But old stereotypes died hard, and for beasts like Lyra, where one parent was human and one was shifter, being a member of a smaller group made life that much harder.
“Kodiak’s looking for you,” he said. “Something about needing a Bastard to watch over Vanderbilt Ranch while Orion’s on his honeymoon.”
I narrowed my eyes. “He wants me to do it?”
Fenris shrugged and shoved his hands in his pockets. “Moose has to play second while Orion’s gone. Ruby is on shift at the Fiver, and Serpent’s taking almost everyone else on that run to the Washington chapter.”
Fuck.
