Page 77 of Pack Rage
Elina was obviously still pissed about it. “When I learned what he’d done, I wanted to rip his head off to see if his brain rattled around like a peanut inside that skull. The only way he could have circumvented that vow was if he truly believed he’d fulfilled it.Florida Witch. What kind of an idiot names a baby Florida Witch?”
I still hated my name, but I might’ve liked it a little more now, witnessing how mad it made this bitch. But she was getting closer to attacking, I could tell. I needed to delay. I thought about what Del had taught me about bait, and distraction. I needed to give her a little fresh meat to keep her talking.
“You’re tellin’ me. Yeah, Callaway wasn’t the sharpest nail in the box. Good thing my mom was a badass, bein’ an Alpha Mother and all that.”
She went still. “That’s how. That’s where your power came from! She was from the Western pack, I discovered that. But now, it all makes sense. She was the last Alpha Mother. By the moon, I’m sorry she died before I arrived here. The power of her death would have fueled me for a year.”
This bitch here was talking about devouring my dead mom? She couldn’t die fast enough.
But it wasn’t time. I forced my wolf down, shoved the growing pool of power and incandescent rage back inside me, knowing if we attacked now, we’d lose. We were still too close to Glen, who was helpless right now, and she’d put up that second bubble, keeping us hidden away from everyone but Brand, it seemed like.
I also had to figure out exactly how I was going to take her down on my own once she got sick of talking. I had my steak knife, but I was pretty sure she’d have some spell that could meltthe steel before it broke her skin, or something equally fucked up.
Elina swiped at me with the sword, giving an annoyed grunt when I ducked her quick stroke. But she wasn’t trying all that hard to kill me. Why not? “You would have killed Mama, then? Not just drained her, like you did your own children?”
“Oh, has Finnick been whining about that? And here I didn’t think he’d ever figure it out.” Her smile grew savage as she pulled a four-inch-long silver dagger out of an odd, dark arm sheath. I hadn’t scented the silver at all, though that may have been because there was so much of the stuff around already.
We’d circled to where my mother lay. I’d covered her up, but someone else had slid her sword under the shawl at some point. I’d noticed it earlier, though the cloth had obscured all but the very edge of the hilt. I could almost hear Del’s voice in my head, talking me through what came next. I would have to pick the right moment to grab the sword, and I couldn’t go for her throat. I had to be unpredictable.
“Perhaps I would’ve kept her alive. Mother taught me not to waste power.”
There it was. She didn’t want to kill me. She was hoping to capture me, turn me into a shifter battery for her magic. “My mama did the same. When you’re poor like we were, you learn to make do with less. To put up with hunger and pain. She gave me so much, lessons on how to keep going when you don’t think there’s any hope left.”
“So tragic.” Elina lifted her sword, turning so the silver dagger was slightly hidden. I knew I had to lay out my own bait, and hope it was enough to stop her from trying to chop off my head for at least a couple seconds.
“Ya know, she wasn’t the last Alpha Mother.” I dropped to one knee and placed a hand on Mama’s chest for an instant,hoping Elina hadn’t noticed Mama’s sword under the shawl. “She gave that honor to me before she died.”
“What?” Elina breathed the word with amazement, like I’d just given her proof Santa Claus was real. She had to have heard the truth in my words. Even if I didn’t think anything had changed in me when Mama said it, I could tell it meant something huge to this bitch. “You, an Alpha Mother?” She lowered her sword slightly. “Put down your little knife, and come with me. I won’t kill you; I swear it.”
“What, so you can suck me like a crawdad head for the next year? I was born at night, but not last night. No fucking thanks, lady.”
Her eyes narrowed. “If you die, my son could as well. And possibly Brand, Luke, and Glen. It’s a waste of so much potential.” There was no mistaking what she meant. A potential power source for her to feed off of. “Come with me back to the lower levels. I’ll let you live, and your mates.”
“You know somethin’?” I chewed at my lip and screwed up my face in thought, acting as dumb as she obviously thought I was. “My mama was crazy as a June bug almost her whole life. She never taught me much. But there was a guy who worked in the kitchen named Del. He taught me plenty.”
She had no idea where I was going with this. “How to cook?”
“Nah. But he did make sure I knew how to take out the trash.”
I snatched up the sword and drew my steak knife in the same instant, leaping away from Mama toward my enemy. I struck fast, almost knocking the sword out of Elina’s hand and avoiding the quick, perfect parry she executed with the silver knife.
“Ah, shit. You can fight, too?” I grumbled. Was it too much to hope I’d only be fighting a witch, and not some kind of a trained warrior one?
Apparently so. She struck out again, her moves as fluid as Finn’s had always been, but each one that connected, ourswords and knives clashing, sent a shock up my arm that almost numbed me.
Was she stuffing her blades with magic? Probably so. Maybe I could… I almost laughed. I might have magic, and I might be bonded to more than one magic wielder, but I didn’t know how to use it. We parried a few more times, the crowd around us moving away, still seemingly unaware of the battle going on in their midst, until I managed to score a hit on her arm with my steak knife.
The scent of her blood filled the air, and I smelled…Glen.Glen, and a little bit of Finn, and a dozen other shifters I didn’t know. And not one hint of wolf.
“You’re not a shifter,” I gasped. “You don’t have a wolf?”
Her laughter was the only pretty thing about her as the realization hit. “Oh, I have a little wolf left. Just enough to keep Aidan alive.”
The cloud that had been over the moon moved, and the light that fell on me felt like a warning, and a command. What she had done was a crime against nature itself. I thought of the things my great-uncle had written in his diary about the imbalance between witchcraft and wolfcraft, and how that had been the reason all shifters were suffering. The North American packs had swung one way—exterminating any wolf who had witch magic, and cutting off the Western pack to keep their packs “pure.”
Elina had done the opposite. She’d nearly killed off her own wolf, giving her witchcraft all the power.
My heart ached for a moment.Her poor wolf.“Why would you do that?”
