Page 82 of Pack Ruin
“Son?”
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. It was all I could do not to shift. “She’s in danger. They all are.” I whirled on my heel and grabbed Dad’s arms when I almost fell over.
I wasn’t certain what Dad saw in my face, but his own was glowing from the light that must be shining from my eyes. “A plane,” he said. “You’ll have to fly.”
“You have a plane?”
“No, you do,” he told me, shouting as we ran to the house. “Dean! Get your plane ready. Now!”
It took an hour to get everything we needed packed. The plane only seated four, and we’d have to stop every eight hundred miles or so to refuel.
“I don’t like you going on your own,” Dad muttered as I packed a quick bag with weapons. Grandma already had a hamper of food ready and in the plane, and Grandmother had come in a moment before and hugged me goodbye, an unusually affectionate gesture.
“Your mother would be proud,” she’d said, with tears standing in her eyes. “She was the strength that made your father the Alpha he was, and is. Go and take care of that magical mate of yours. Save her, so she can save the rest of our packs.”
“Magical?”
I’d hugged her back, and she’d whispered in my ear, “Magical, moonblessed. There are many words for what she is. What you are. Go quickly.”
I would. The pressure to leave was growing intense, and my wolf clawed at me to run. Dad handed me a short sword. “I could go with you.”
“No. I need you here. The pack will be arriving, and they need to know what’s going on, why I’m not here to meet them. Put together a group of our best fighters. Brief them, get supplies and transport. I want them on their way to Southern by morning,” I said as we went through the front door. We jogged side by side to the long stretch Dean had chosen for a landing strip. A few shifters were still hurriedly mowing the tall grasses there, and chasing out a few startled rabbits.
Above us in the sky, something glinted in the late afternoon sun. It was too small to be a plane.
A drone. “Eastern is watching,” Dad muttered.
“From a distance, like the sneaks and cowards they are. Let them watch. We’ll give them a closer view of our wolves soon enough.” And with that, I was running to the plane, where Dean was waiting.
The flight was silent, and almost peaceful, though after our first refueling stop, that changed. A rough voice shouted in my head:GET HER OUT!
I fought to control my shift, Dean sweating next to me as he took off from the rural airstrip. “Is she okay?” he asked.
I couldn’t answer. I had no idea.
Thirty minutes later, I felt a surge of need that had me shifting, my clothes tearing. “Shit!” Dean shouted as the plane rocked. “Sorry, Alpha.” He kept his head tilted away, his neck exposed. I was in my half-shifted form, and the cockpit echoed with my growls.
I closed my eyes, fighting for control. She was hurt. Not only that, she wasbeinghurt, again and again. Worse, Luke and Glen were being injured too fast for their shifter healing to matter. The oily power that I’d sensed connected to my flower was… absent.
Had Grigor turned against her? Against all of them? The need to kill him filled me like a flood coming down a canyon. I pushed power down the bond to Flor, more than I ever had, even when I’d reached through her to Luke in the river. It wasn’t enough.
No. I would not allow this. I took a deep breath, then let it out, and instead of pushing, I pulled. I gathered the bonds of all the shifters who’d tied themselves to me, who’d given their vows.
“Alpha, I have to fly,” Dean wheezed. I flicked a glance at him. His face was pinched, and his hands shaking on the controls. I focused, and stopped pulling at the strand that connected us, putting it to one side.
Then I turned my attention back to the other three thousand and forty-six souls who had promised to serve me, and I held them to their vows.
37
My Hell
FLOR
They’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 beenmyhell. 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.
