Page 85 of Pack Ruin
Screaming was probably not my smartest idea, even if the cussing helped numb the pain a little, as usual. I heard some of the Council fucks running my way, the ones of them who hadn’t caught fire or been exploded, or whatever.
I flipped myself over, locking eyes with the last person I wanted to see.“Why the hell couldn’t you have caught fire?” I muttered, though I noticed he was scorched on one side of his head. He marched toward me, his silver knife in one hand, his teeth bared. My death was in his eyes.
There was no beast to call on now. Brand’s energy had dried up. My bonds to the others were thin, like wisps of cotton woolpulled too far, too thin.Damnit.I wished I had my steak knife. Or any weapon.
I’d always feared dying at Southern with no weapon in my hand. With no friends at my side, no…
“Need a hand?” The voice came from directly behind me, just as a woman hurtled over me and Glen to land in front of us.
The voice was Iris, and she wasn’t alone. Suddenly, a whole slew of the wild boys, the Southern rogues, were there, surrounding me, and some of the girls, too.
But the woman who’d jumped over me wasn’t any of them. “Mama,” I breathed. She didn’t look my way.
The appearance of my mother, dressed in animal skins with her wild white curls flying, and screaming like a banshee, stopped Torran in his tracks. It stopped all of the Council Enforcers, at least for a moment.
But not the Southern rogues. In fact, it was obvious they’d planned Mama to be the diversion for my rescue. She was screaming gibberish, the crazy talk that Trevor Blackside had teased me about for so long. But somehow, it sounded like words. Maybe it was. Maybe it was a spell, or something.
I didn’t have time to wonder.
Iris had my arm over her shoulders, and two other girls had Glen in a hammock hold, carrying him toward the back of the compound, and the hunting grounds. My eyes widened as I saw a half dozen of the rogues, armed with long sticks and swords—though none of them had the antique silver ones, from what I could tell at a glance—wading into the middle of the Council Enforcers.
There were more fighters on our side than theirs, but the rogue males were so much weaker than the skilled Enforcers they faced. The boys fought bravely, but were still half-starved, and while I could see that Sergeant had trained them for a couple of weeks, it wasn’t nearly enough. The Council Enforcersstarted shifting to wolf form and attacking, and the boys didn’t—or couldn’t—respond in kind.
Torran reached my mother and leaped at her with his silver knife. Suddenly, her wild curls disappeared from my view. The boys cried out as one, as if they’d been struck. The ones closest to me staggered. One was immediately pounced on by two shifted wolves, who savaged his exposed stomach.Another three wolves attacked the boy closest to Glen, tearing out his throat.
“Lily!” Sergeant’s cry came from my right, and I saw him running toward where Mama had fallen, his Alpha roar affecting every shifter who heard it.He did have a silver sword, or at least it shone like one, and I heard the clang of metal as he ran to intercept Torran’s next blow.
There was too much to see, too much to follow, but Iris slid a sword into my hand as she stumbled, carrying me away from the worst of the battle, into the small grove of pines that marked the boundary between the main compound and the first ring of houses. A dozen of the women who’d fled the dorms with me the night before ran past us, armed with more of the weapons from the cave, and yelling some word.
Tenebris, maybe?
I couldn’t make it out. The shouts became screams of pain and anger as the women met up with the Enforcers who’d been chasing behind us.
Iris set me down at the base of the tree for a moment, panting. She was skin and bones, like the rest of the women had been, and I could tell she didn’t have magical reserves of strength like I did. Or like I’d had.
“We can’t leave them,” I managed to say as she picked me up again, a look of sheer determination on her thin face. “We can’t leave them to die.”
“Sergeant gave orders,” she grunted, moving through the trees, the two shifters carrying Glen right behind us. It was darkunder the cover of the pines, and I realized night was falling. The light from the bonfire back by the Pack House was all the light we had here. “Gotta get you out. You and the pretty boy. They got Luke, I guess?”
“Yeah. That Council bitch took him to Eastern. But I’m going to get him back.”
“How?”
Before I could answer, she’d stumbled to a halt. Both the girls carrying Glen cursed under their breath.
I cursed right out loud. “What the fuck?”
There was a wall of shifters standing between us and the first row of houses, all of them armed with various things. Knives and sticks, mostly, though I spotted a couple of baseball bats. These shifters weren’t dressed in fancy uniforms, though. They wore cut-off jeans shorts and tank tops, ragged tennis shoes and shirts that had been washed until the colors were mostly faded.
These were the Southern shifters. The ranked ones, though none of them were the males who’d hunted me. Probably because Grigor had exterminated them.
I swallowed hard as Iris gripped me tighter. I could tell she was looking for a way out. There wasn’t one, though. But I didn’t think these shifters were here to kill me, or they didn’t want to, at least.
One of them, an older male, stepped forward. He had one of the baseball bats in one hand, held low, and I swallowed hard. I’d been hit with a bat before, and I knew exactly how much damage they could do. This guy was meatier than most of the others around him, and held my gaze for a few seconds longer than usual.
“Our Alpha’s been taken?”
I blinked. “Callaway?”
