Page 80 of Pack Rage
Still, I made a joke, like I did in the worst times of my life, and the temporary lightness in Brand’s burdened soul, attached to mine, was a relief.
Then he set me on my feet, my legs unsteady even with his support, and I understood his despondency.
I’d thought I was surrounded before. But now, there were hundreds of enemies hemming me in, along with the others. Russians in their camouflage, calling out in their language, possibly every Eastern Enforcer and ranked shifter alive, and oddly, even Eastern staff from the Mansion, who were ill-dressed for the cold weather, and even more ill-equipped for battle.
Luke and Finn were across the crowd, or at least I thought I saw Finn’s red hair for a moment, and heard Luke cry out. Flor…Fuck.Another flash of red hair and a silver whirl of blades drew my attention. Flor was fighting for her life against Elina.
Before I could decide where to go, or even how to defend myself with my limbs so weak and my vision blurred, I was torn away from Brand by a wave of Enforcers, and carried dozens of feet across the fighting ring to another battle.
There, a female shifter defended a small patch of the fighting ring as if it were the heart of her own packlands, though she was a Northerner.
“Mom?” I cried out, shocked to my core. She leaped up, limbs whirling, as a male wolf lunged for her and she struck back at his snout, slicing off the tip of his nose. Then, in another fluid motion, she returned to her spot, crouching like a feral beast over what looked like an injured shifter.
No. The shifter wasn’t injured, but dead. And he was my father. This was the loss I’d felt, the missing part of my soul. My Alpha was gone.
Dad.
Images, memories, of all our years together, flickered through my mind like a book falling shut, the pages fluttering as it slid to the ground. I saw him teaching me to hunt rabbits as a young boy, and then showing me how to dress and prepare the meat over a fire, when I turned up my nose at eating the raw flesh.
A few years later, he’d drawn two lines on my face with the blood of the first deer I’d taken down on my own, declaring me a “Pack Hunter” to all of the gathered males, as if there were such a title.
When I’d finally reached the age when I could shift, but was afraid I wouldn’t manage it with the whole pack looking on, he’d whispered the story of his own first shift, when one of his feet had refused to take the form of a paw for a half hour, and his father had sat on top of it and given a long, boring speech to keep the pack from seeing.
“I’ll sit on your foot if you need me to,” he’d promised.
Now Mom sat beside his motionless, bare feet, her pain and loss practically vibrating in the air around her. She guarded his body as if he were still alive, and though I wasn’t certain who had killed him, it didn’t matter. Any of them who tried to touch him, or her, would die.
Mom held two blades, both of them taken from Eastern shifters, I presumed, as they were the same kind their Enforcers fought with, and at least two of those were dead a few feet away. A half-dozen Russian soldiers in human form were bearing down on her, coordinating their attack.
I snatched up a fallen knife from the ground and ran the last few steps to her side, adrenaline making my legs move far more smoothly now, cutting through two males in wolf form who were unaware of my presence, the knife slicing through fur and severing their spines like they were made of butter.
I didn’t know where all the extra power in my strikes had come from, though I had a feeling it was the strengthened bonds from Brand and the others that were planted in my soul. But I used it to fight beside my mom, my power and her blind rage forging us into one undefeatable force, until we found ourselves facing a new opponent.
The guards had fallen back and grabbed hold of a group of females, all of them dressed in maid’s uniforms and trembling with fear as well as the cold. There had to be two dozen of them, in messy rows of five or six. They were being shoved toward us by a solid wall of Eastern Enforcers.
At least one of the males held a gun to their backs as he snarled, “Fight!” and the girls stepped forward, tears and snot running down the face of the one closest to me. They held weapons, some of them grasping blades that might have been silver-edged, though the stench of the metal was so strong in the air, it was hard to tell. But they were not trained fighters.
“Cannon fodder,” Mom snarled.
I agreed silently. They were obviously hoping to exhaust us with these opponents, or distract us. “We can’t kill them,” I muttered.
Mom leveled a scathing glance at me. “Of fucking course not.” One of the Eastern males laughed, a short brutal sound. Mom lifted her chin in a sharp gesture at one of the females, a plain woman with silver-brown hair and a scar down her face that was the mirror of the one Mom had gained in her fight at Southern. “Do you want to fight?”
“Not you,” the woman spat back.
Mom’s face creased into a savage grin. “Good answer. Get behind me.”
The woman’s eyes widened for a split second before she did just that. The rest of the women followed suit, forming a circle around my father’s body, their backs to him and their weapons held up in defense. Mom and I didn’t wait to attack, leaping over the females in the back of the group to reach the most dangerous males.
Mom grabbed a guard who had shot one of the younger girls in the back. Before the guy knew what was happening, she’dchoked him, yanked his arm back and torn the whole thing off. She threw it toward me. “Get the gun.”
I let the limb fall to the ground, the moon-damned weapon still clutched in the disembodied hand. “No.” Mom bared her teeth at me. I snarled back. “No guns.”
She didn’t have time to argue with me, as the males had already realized their error and moved into the empty space left by the maids and kitchen workers. One of the maids darted out and grabbed the severed limb, though, taking the gun.
Mom shouted, “Good girl,” to her, and began killing again.
Not fighting, just killing. I’d only seen this once before, when Flor had gone into her rage at Southern. Mom’s face was frozen in a feral mask as we fought side by side, her arms and legs moving too fast for my eyes to follow. Far faster than the males who came against us were prepared to face. Every Enforcer who confronted her died for his trouble.
