Page 38 of Pack Ruin
I thought about Verona, how she’d admitted she couldn’t open it. I had a weird feeling my blood on the latch had been what had done the trick. She’d said this book was forbidden. Was it magic?
A chill ran through me as a few puzzle pieces clicked into place. Things I really should have put together a long time ago, only they’d seemed so impossible. The journal warmed on my lap, like it knew I was feeling cold.
Ah, skunkshit.Magic for sure. I tucked my hands under my armpits, half-wishing I’d left the dang thing back at Mountain.
“Do you have any more questions?” Glen asked, our bond shifting slightly, ripples of reassurance and love moving through me.
I had more questions than answers now. “I still don’t get exactly what happened at that old Conclave. They’d already been worrying about infertility, right? The birth rates had dropped, and they planned to discuss it at the meetings they always hold at the end. But then the Southern Alpha got involved in some fight at the start of the Games, and died. So instead of working out why there weren’t enough babies, they ended up disciplining the Western pack. I can’t figure out for what, exactly.” The book had been long on blaming the Western pack for everything, but there had to have been something that started it. Or someone.
“They used magic to attack a young Southern girl who was at the Games, and then, during the fight that broke out, one of them killed the Southern Alpha, Hollis.”
I thought for a moment. “Maybe it was an accident, though? A fight that got too rowdy?”
“No. That was when witchcraft was outlawed entirely. From what I pieced together from my lessons, and what I remember overhearing when I was little, magic was used to kill at the Conclave, not just claws and teeth. I assumed that meant witches were at the Conclave. After that, witches weren’t allowed to cross any pack’s border.” For some reason, Verona’s cackling about loopholes echoed in my mind.
I frowned. I’d missed a lot of lessons after dropping out of school; maybe there were more books that went into greater detail about what had started the fight at those Games. They covered the ending well enough. “The history book said the pack name, the Western pack, was removed from the North American rosters like it never existed, and they were sent back to the West Coast without their Alpha. How could they survive without an Alpha?”
Glen shrugged. “It may be why their pack crumbled so fast.”
I thought for a moment about what I’d read. “There was a lot of infighting, Western wolves fighting for dominance. Within ten years, almost all the former members of the pack were either dead, injured or weakened, or had left the pack and become rogues. A core of them stayed, and made an alliance with Russian shifters to take over the continent. Russians like that Ivan guy, the general.”
I rubbed a hand over the spot where he’d scratched me with his silver-tipped claws. Somehow, Grigor had healed those cuts up until they didn’t show at all.
Glen hummed. “The Russian wolves were always rumored to have witches or wizards in their packs. There were stories about the old Alphas stealing young witches to use to breed magic-wielding wolves, though of course that’s impossible.”
“Is it?” I asked, thinking of Grigor. His mother had been a witch.
Glen shot me a weird look. “You know humans and shifters aren’t compatible that way. Right?”
“Sure.” I knew shifters and humans couldn’t breed. They’d taught us in school that there hadn’t been a single pup ever born that came from a human and a shifter. I’d wondered if it was true, but I’d overheard some of the ranked males in my old pack saying it was a good thing, or the closest city outside our borders would have had a hundred tiny Callaway babies running around. But… were witches not human?
Before I could ask, Glen went on. “If it were possible to have shifter babies by breeding with humans, or outside our own kind, there would be a hell of a lot more shifters in the world. Of course, it’s taboo.”
Of course it was. I forced my thoughts away from my biological father, and back to the conversation. “Still, it seems like overkill, to hypnotize all the remaining shifters in the whole country after the war not to be able to even talk about magic. Or the pack they wiped out.” I wiped my eyes, feeling an odd connection to shifters I’d never met. “It was a far smaller pack by that time, from what I read. Almost all women and children when the war ended.”
“Maybe they don’t want us to talk about it because they’re ashamed.” Glen’s pain seeped through the bond, and I laid a hand on his leg. He took it and held on as he spoke. “I am, though I never really thought of it that way.”
We rode in silence for a few more miles before I added, “If no one talks about it, someday none of the packs will even know what happened. What if shifters invade again, ones who have magic, or have witch allies? We won’t know how to protect ourselves.”
“That’s why for the last twenty years, the Council has had groups of Enforcers who do nothing but hunt witches, or rumors of magic. It’s one of the reasons the Council still exists, because of that possibility. Magic and shifters don’t mix.” He shot me a look, and I knew he was thinking about Grigor.
But I was thinking about another shifter, Sergeant J. Rain. I only had another hour or two to read before it got too dark, so there was no time to waste. I opened the journal and began to read from the beginning. It began very formally, but quickly became personal, and I could almost hear a rough, gravelly voice reading the pages in my mind.
I am Sergeant Julian Rain, son of Alpha Mother Dahlia Rain, and the late Alpha Ithil Mar, who fell to a silver blade and treachery at the fifty-second Conclave held at the Meridion packlands, leaving me as the last remaining male member of the Moonblessed Warrior division. Mad with grief, my mother attacked both enemies and allies at that Conclave, and was struck down as well, leaving no leader ready to hold the collected power and magic of the Occidens pack.
This journal contains the notes of all I learned from my father and the last Alpha Mothers of the West, of the nature of both wolfcraft and witchcraft. It is my hope that in breaking tradition and committing this knowledge to the page, it will not be lost forever upon my own death. I will also attempt to lay out my own theories of how the imbalance in the two great magics given to Her children by the Moon Goddess may have created a rift that draws energy away, not only from the remaining packs as a whole, but also those things that every individual shifter holds most dear: our true mate bonds, and our pups.
I have guarded this book with magic and blood, so that only one of my family, though we are all but gone, will be able to open its cover and read what I have written.
It is my hope that if she is alive, my niece Lily, the daughter of my twin sister Camellia Rain and the last child born to Occidens, may find it. That she may take up her natural role as Alpha Mother, though the survivors of our pack have lost all honor and may not welcome their rightful leader.
Lily, if you’re reading this, I hope you remember me. I wish I had spent more time with you before you were forced to flee our green home, the magic-filled, ancient forests that nurtured us all.
I pray the coven was the safe place we were promised. The war that I fear approaches may mean that there is no such place left for our line. Anger and resentment has festered in the hearts of those who remain, and their desperation has borne evil fruit.
In the years following the Conclave Betrayal, after the dissolution and diaspora of the Occidens pack, our pack was shunned entirely. Any Occidens wolf discovered more than one hundred miles from the Blue Mountains was put to death as a rogue. Trade was shut off, and our young were not allowed contact with other shifters, thus ensuring they would not find their true mates. Mating between one of ours and any other pack was outlawed. Any shifter who broke that law, even if they were answering the call of a true mate bond, would be cast out, rejected and reviled by the Council and its allies.
The world went dark as my mind spun, understanding blooming like a razor-edged flower. My last name was Wills, or so I’d believed. I’d thought my mother’s was, too. Lily Rain Wills. But it was just Lily Rain.
