Page 25 of Pack Witch
But I wouldn’t allow her to pay any more than she had. If she didn’t seem stronger after resting, or if I slipped closer to the end… I was weak, but not so weak as to drag her down with me.
“No, Leroy. You can’t eat the fish! Fish are Miss Zinnia’s babies, you know that!” The distant shout had me moving again, ignoring the pain.
A few minutes later, I’d descended into the valley and waded through the tall brush on the riverside, where the two boys were wrestling. Leroy was in his wolf form and had a fish by the tail in his jaws. Bo was human, an unusually stern expression on his face as he fought to free the trout.
“Give me the fish,now!” he barked, and I sucked in a breath as Leroy dropped it, sitting back on his haunches in the stream while the fish flopped away.
My jaw nearly dropped. There’d been more than a hint of something in Bo’s voice that I’d never suspected: the resonance and power of an Alpha command.
Sure, it had only been a hint of it, but to hear it come from the mouth of one of my boys had me simultaneously filled with pride and fear. They had come from the worst kind of pack and needed so much training to grow into the good males I knew they could be. I’d taken their training in hand partly at the request of my great-niece, and partly because they’d given me more reasons to laugh than anything else in my whole life. I didn’t regret it one bit. Over the past few years, they’d become the sons I’d never had.
Unfortunately, that meant I’d let them get away with behavior that I wouldn’t have allowed at Northern as the Sergeant at Arms. If one of them was a young Alpha, or might become one, I needed to change tactics.
“Leroy, come here,” I called, keeping the Alpha command out of my own voice. Leroy jumped up like he’d been bitten and ran to me, hiding behind my legs.
Bo blinked at me, his eyes filled with disbelief and fright, his lower lip trembling. “I… I didn’t mean ta?—”
“I know.” The shock of discovering you had the power of an Alpha inside you was one I would never forget. I’d known it from the time I was Bo’s age. When my pack found out, I’d been enlisted in the Moonblessed Warriors to train and learn how to handle it. But Bo came from unranked and lower-rank stock. He shouldn’t be showing this kind of potential.
Not that he would see it as a positive. Bo and Leroy had lived most of their lives with the worst, most abusive Alpha I’d ever met. He was what Bo was afraid of now, not me. That he might become like his first Alpha.
“Stay here, Leroy.” I set down the basket, jogged over the slippery rocks to Bo’s side, and grasped his arms in myhands, staring into his eyes. “You did nothing wrong, son.” He was panting, almost hyperventilating now. I folded him into a hug, ignoring the pain that rocketed under my skin where we touched. “You didn’t do anything wrong. You trust me, don’t you?” He nodded against my chest. “You know I’m not angry. Not upset at all. I’m proud of you. You were trying to follow my orders, right?” I knew he needed to be reminded that he wasn’t an Alpha yet. I was his.
“Y-yes, Alpha,” he half-sobbed into my chest. “I don’t want to be an Alpha, Alpha. Please don’t make me be one.” I patted his back as he cried, while Leroy paced on the bank, whining pitifully.
“What happened here?”
“He was… he was killin’ one of Miss Zinnia’s babies.”
I blinked. “A fish? Did she say they were her…”
He stopped sobbing long enough to shoot me an incredulous look. “Her family? She didn’t have to. You can see how much she loves all them critters. She’s a ve-ge-ta-ri-an.” He hiccupped another sob. “They’re all she has.”
Leroy whimpered again from the bank. I’d never heard such obvious remorse in a wolf’s voice.
“Come here, Leroy,” I called, and he joined us. He jumped up, adding his own wet, wolfish hug as he stood on his back legs. My legs trembled with weakness, and my skin burned like it was dissolving, but my heart was filled with love for these two. “It’s going to be fine. Bo, you’re good, deep down. You’re not like Callaway, not like any of the bad Alphas you’ve met. You’re going to keep learning and growing, and by the time you’re grown, you’ll not only be enough for your true mate, wherever and whoever she is, you’ll be one of the best Alphas to run under the moon. Do you hear me?”
Bo pulled back, and I smiled down into his guileless eyes. Well, not so much down as across. He’d grown half a foot in thepast year alone. He was still a pup in so many ways, but not for long.
“You’ll teach me, right? Alpha Heir’s what they call it. That’s what I’m gonna be, right, Sergeant? Like a trainee.” I nodded, and he relaxed slightly, not even flinching when Leroy gave him a happy lick on the side of his face with his wolf tongue. “I won’t freak out then. You’re my Alpha, and you’ll be my Alpha until I’m old. And if you’ve taught me everything, then I’ll be ready. But you’ll be there for a long time, right?”
“Right,” I lied, without thinking.Fuck.
Bo’s nostrils flared, his eyes filled with more tears, and Leroy yelped, falling onto his back in the stream. In the end, it was another fifteen minutes before I could settle them both down and admit to them what was going on.
Leroy was pissed.“So, you been plannin’ this whole trip as some sorta goodbye to the world tour? Wait, when we was back at the Alpha’s Den, and you sent us off to help babysit the pups, you were sick, weren’t ya?” His tone was less respectful than I’d heard it in a long while, and his brows were drawn together in a sullen line. After he’d shifted and heard my plans, Leroy had gotten mad.
Bo had spiraled into something more worrying. He’d gone down the stream to fish with the trot line, too upset to sit on the bank any longer with me. I didn’t blame him. I didn’t want to sit with myself either.
“Yes. I’ve been doing everything I could to get better. Every witch-wolf hybrid we know has tried, as well as a few strangerswho came out of the woodwork after the laws changed. What they did might have made it worse, to be honest. I shouldn’t have hidden it from you two.”
“What about Miss Zinnia? Does she know you’re goin’ back to Western just to die?” His gaze burned into my cheek as I watched Bo. “Does she know how bad off ya are?”
I pressed a hand to my chest, the only part of me that didn’t hurt. “Not completely. She’s trying to heal me. She did heal part of me, but it’s… it may be making the end come faster.” I spoke my greatest fear aloud. “It made her weak, too. She tried to hide it, but I could tell it drained her energy.”
He nodded once. “Then you take your time. You don’t ever hurt your true mate, right?”
“Not if there’s any way to keep from it. The moon’s highest law is to protect your mate and pups, and the pack after that.”
