The light in his eyes snuffed out so fast, it took her breath away. “Because I’m an alpha wolf. He would die without a pack.”
She wanted to protest. She wanted to bring that light back into his eyes, but she knew nothing about alpha wolves or packs. As he pulled her further down the lane, she realized he might not be too sad if he lost the wolf, but she also understood instinctively that it would rip him apart. One did not exist without the other. What were they going to do?
“Mateo, we need to head to the purple house. We need to get those books away from them.”
“We need to keep all of this from escalating. And you need to eat.”
“But –”
“Call me crazy, but the spell I saw in those books looked a lot like computer programming.”
“What?”
“It’s an instruction manual, right? For magic? Say this, do that, apply pressure here. And if there’s one thing I know about computer programming, it’s that it’s a lot more complicated than the instruction manual. So we’re going to eat, and then tonight, late at night, we can go steal those books, and you can tell me if there really is any way that any witch could do this.”
“But—”
“Because the other thing it seems to me is that during all our wars and all of our fighting, no one else has succeeded in undoing it. That would’ve been the time to unmake us, right?”
She took a deep breath for the first time in hours. The twins were hardly unique. A lot of witches hated werewolves. In fact, most witches hated and feared werewolves. That there were still a lot of werewolves running around was proof that undoing the spell was a lot harder than anyone thought. Someone definitely would’ve done it already.
“You’re right.”
“I know. So come and eat some pasta, meet the pack.”
“Meet the pack. Mateo, what are we doing?” A thread of humor snaked through her terror. “Pasta, really?”
“Some stereotypes have a basis in fact.”
They came around a bend in the cliff, and Cat saw a car covered in stones and froze for a moment. “What happened to them?”
“Oh, you know, my other problem.”
“Erosion?”
He broke out laughing, and the sound shivered through her. “Erosion implies something was whole to begin with, so definitely not erosion. Competition?”
“Would you just talk English for like two seconds?”
“The other pack.”
Cat spun in a circle. She couldn’t help it. “The other pack came here?”
“You know about them?”
She thought of the wolves northeast of town with their homemade clothing and dead eyes. “They’re the source of most of the twins’ paranoia. That’s what all those weapons are for. They live in the woods northwest of town.”
“Do they not believe in clothing?” he asked.
Cat pinched the bridge of her nose. One thing was for sure with Mateo; she would never be bored. “Why on earth would you ask that?”
Then abruptly, it stopped being funny because the Koenig Pack believed in clothing; they just believed in making it themselves, along with all their food, shoes, and everything else. You could tell that by looking at their rough-spun garments. The only reason he would ask that question was if he saw them.
“Did they come here?” she asked. “Did they threaten you?”
“No. In the mountains.”
Her vision sparked, sending her magic shivering. “Did we leave somebody out there in the snow?”
