Page 94 of Pack Rage
Vanya smiled for some reason. “Too small. Twenty of us are still alive.”
“Only twenty?” Flor’s smile trembled. “Okay, lemme think.”
The woman waited, looking to my mate for the answers. She was the only one they would listen to, the one they felt comfortable with, which didn’t surprise me. She’d wiped herself clean, more or less, and her wounds from the battle had healed, leaving some new silver scars on her arms and one on her face. She still wore her mother’s sword and her steak knife, now tucked into the belt of a new pair of clean black jeans, her hair tied up with a length of string. Her ear tag glimmered in the light of the torches some of Brand’s shifters had relit so we could see who needed help.
That tag drew every eye, from the smaller pack shifters to the Eastern unranked servants, to the wounded foreign visitors, its existence turning everything they’d thought they knew on its head. But it was the shifter who wore the tag that no one could look away from.
She’d left the Mansion powerful, but the battle had transformed her. The balance of witchcraft and moon magic she’d achieved made it feel like she had her own gravity, pulling others to her. She was by far the most powerful female shifter on the continent, and her strength radiated around her like a force field. Not one shifter could meet her gaze and hold it, except her mates.
But maybe…I had an idea, and broke away from the group of Enforcers I’d been assisting to look for the one who might be able to help. Some of the smaller pack Alphas were making calls home, letting them know what had happened, and askingfor supplies. We couldn’t use human medical help, and Eastern’s supplies were already running low. Finn had called on his pack members—the ones who didn’t reside in the Mansion or on the grounds—to bring what they could from their homes, and to make their pledge to him, though I was almost certain he wanted nothing to do with his pack.
But none of them had shown up yet. A few stacks of blankets and bags of food had been dropped at the gates, but not one shifter who lived outside the Mansion had tried to enter. Finn was inside, making a video call to the Alpha of Novosibirsk, with Brand and Grigor both there to make sure the Alpha knew exactly who he would be dealing with if he decided to try and retaliate for “losing” Tana, or for the deaths of the Russians who’d allied with the McDonnells. We were fairly certain they were connected, some possibly even members of that Alpha’s pack, but even if they weren’t, he had to be put in his place.
The Mountain pack was so angry at what had been done to their own Alpha, they were ready to travel across the world to take revenge. Brand had been calm about the possibility when Dean had suggested it. “The only one who might need killing at some point in the future—but not until we take care of our own messes—is their Alpha. He’s a very bad man,” he’d said, then winked at Grigor.
Grigor had smiled like it was his birthday, but stayed silent.
The shifter I was looking for now was staying quiet, too, but I knew just where to find her.A grassy place behind the Mansion, as far from the battlefield as you could get without leaving the fenced area, was where the bodies of the fallen had been moved. The enemies had been stacked and covered with large tarps on one side, but the ones I walked toward were our own. Each one, whether they’d died in wolf or human form, was covered with a clean tablecloth or blanket, placed in lines with enough space to walk between them. The moon had almost set, and a fewgrieving wolves paced the edges of the area, but allowed me to pass.
“Margarette?” A blanket in the center shifted at my voice. I approached slowly and saw her lying under the cream-colored fabric, her arms wrapped around her dead mate, her head resting on his chest as she wept. I kneeled next to her. “Margarette, we need you.”
She stared blankly up at me, and I almost dropped my gaze. Glen’s mother was in excruciating pain, and there was no one to fight now, no place to find her revenge. All that was left was the emptiness of missing her true mate. I had a feeling her wolf would follow Bradley to the moon, if she didn’t see a reason to live.
I tried again. “Margarette, the girls of Eastern are scared to death. They won’t go back into the Mansion; it’s the place where they were tortured. They don’t feel safe in the woods. Some of them are too young to shift, others are too weak to even walk that far. They want to sleep outside, but there are too many strangers, too many males.”
“Flor,” she whispered after a long moment. “Flor can help.”
“She’s breaking, Margarette. She’s strong, but she’s only one shifter, and she lost her mother tonight as well. Can you help, just for one night? So Flor can sleep a little. So the girls can.”
“Get someone else.”
“There’s no one they trust. No female strong enough to protect them if they’re attacked again. They watched you kill the ones who hurt them. They know you would die for them.”
Her voice cracked. “I want to die, Luke. I want to die, and be with my mate. My Alpha.”
“I know.” I waited quietly, slightly queasy at what I was about to say. Every shifter knew how painful a true mate’s death was. Even if the pain itself didn’t kill the survivor, it was nearly impossible to entice the wolf side to stay alive. If Flor died… Ishook the thought away. I was doing this for her. “It would be easier to die, to let go. To not have to protect the pack anymore.”
Margarette growled slightly, her wolf offended.
That was good. I could work with anger. “But you’ve never taken the easy way, have you?”
Silence.
“I remember when you picked Flor up off the ground at Southern, and promised to protect her. Promised to be her mother. You broke that promise.” She gasped and raised her head, but I went on, my voice rising with each word. “You broke that promise, and if you don’t help her now, you’re breaking it again. You and Bradley both owe her for any honor your pack has left. She saved your lives in battle at Southern. She showed you the error of your ways at Northern. She broke into the lower levels here to save you. She gave Bradley, moon be with him, a chance to die with honor instead of being executed like a criminal.
“And now, she’s heartsick and exhausted, and the only female with enough power to protect the others. Do you thinkthisis what penance looks like, Margarette Hillier?” My voice was a shout.
She jumped to her feet, her face a mask of rage and pain. “It hurts!”
I yelled back, “I know! You’re still breaking your promise, Margarette.”
“You don’t knowshit!How can you be so cruel?”
“I had excellent teachers,” I answered quietly. “And years of watching my true mate being beaten and starved, tortured and hunted and hurt, but I wasn’t able to protect her then. I made a promise, too, you know. I promised to do everything I could to protect her from now on. To say anything, to be as cruel or as kind as I need to, to make up for all the times I couldn’t save her.”
“You wretched little shit,” she croaked. “Iwantto die.”
“I know what that feels like as well. You think I didn’t want a way out? But the only way out of this kind of pain is through. You get up, and you do your damned best to fight for the pack, for the weak and the scared, the children and the unranked. You get the fuck up and you move, even when it feels like surviving one more day will kill you. You stand up and you spend every breath making this world a place safe enough for your children to bring new pups into it, Margarette.”
