She knew he would do anything she asked, and all she had asked was this.
22
Exhaust, burning hot dogs, trash, asphalt, and the stench of the five hundred people who passed by this intersection in the last fifteen minutes.
Mateo knew academically that his nose would eventually desensitize because he’d lived his entire life in this city, and it did not smell like this, or rather, it had always smelled like this, and eventually he ceased to notice out of sheer self-protection. He did not know how.
When he got up to his office on the top floor, he had the opposite problem. It smelled like nothing except the slight fry of the HVAC. He knew he’d spent twelve plus hours a day in this room. How? Why? So a payment processor’s website didn’t get hacked?
He knew that was important, if not for the payment processor, then for everyone who was submitting their credit cards. He’d always gained a sense of satisfaction from this kind of protection, even at a distance, but he couldn’t bring himself to care today.
It had been forty-eight hours since he’d gotten on a jet and flown into the sunrise. One wolf had not returned with him.Romeo insisted that his kids were thriving in the mountains. Gianna loved being free of the pack of teenagers dominated by the two shifters in the next generation. Romeo also insisted that if Mateo was ceding the field, someone had to protect the land that had stood abandoned for decades. The rest of the pack flew back with him happily enough.
Mateo ordered food from his favorite restaurants for every meal: pizza with dough so thin and crispy it shattered in his mouth, Chinese food with enough peppers to burn his intestines, and everything else from around the world that was only found in New York.
It hadn’t helped. Not even coding helped. He used to dive into a computer and lose the entire day, but now the slightest error sent him into a towering rage. He knew he was overreacting to a bit of musty code. He was responding to a hangnail as if his hand was falling off, but he couldn’t seem to moderate his response.
His wolf, formerly on top of the world and happy to dominate everyone else in his family, suddenly realized it was on top of the world with nowhere to go and nothing else to do, and all it wanted was her. The family was safe. The territory was well defended. Its job here was done.
The only thing more dangerous than an alpha werewolf was an alpha werewolf who did not have what it wanted.
They were in a power struggle he hadn’t felt since he was five years old with a fresh wolf who wanted to be on top of the world and yet was at the bottom of the pack, because they were five years old. His entire childhood was a game of tug of war within him. He forgot how exhausting it was. The food he had delivered every three hours wasn’t coming fast enough, and he was eating protein bars out of a drawer in his desk, which also reminded him of her.
“You have to stop,” he told himself.
It had only been forty-eight hours. He knew this would get better. Hot dogs would start smelling good again, and the smell of trash, well, would calm down in intensity at least. His pack would need him. There would be some genuine crisis at work, some major hack job or something like it that would get his adrenaline flowing.
It could also get worse. He missed her. That wound might not heal but only grow deeper with time. He’d lose control, and that would be it.
He took a deep breath of flavorless air and turned back to his desk. The only thing that seemed to help, or at least distract him enough for him to lose track of time, was the book.
His first instinct had been to buy a safe deposit box at a bank he never used under a new name. Creating identities was laughingly easy in the age of the internet. But he couldn’t let it go. It lived in his office on his desk.
He’d been afraid to open it, but once he had, he couldn’t stop reading. He hadn’t started with the oldest spells, the ones to do with shifters. He flipped to the back of the book to read more mundane spells for keeping up wards and potions to subdue shifters and control them.
It seemed once the witches had created their defenders, they had to write a bunch of new spells for all the unintended consequences of that. From the very beginning, the wolves had not done what they wanted.
He began to understand the spells themselves. It really was like a coding language, a bunch of if-then statements tracing through various witchy talents. He’d recognized some of the ones he’d so recently violently encountered, but there were others he didn’t understand.
At three in the morning last night, instead of sleeping, which he also wasn’t really doing, he went on a search through the internet for witches’ talents.
It had taken all of his abilities as a computer scientist to unearth what he believed to be an accurate list of actual magical talents. There was so much other witchy content online from humans to wade through, plus actual witches had a real interest in staying under the radar. He’d spent a useless hour on a page of spells that someone made up for their blog and taken a detour down the Renaissance witch hunts, a term that was now a metaphor but used to be the lifetime vocation of a lot of furious men.
He glanced at the book. It looked like it came out of the Renaissance. It was bound in leather with pages that weren’t made of paper. Is that what the witches made shifters to defend against? The Inquisition? It was a little easier to forgive them when he thought of it that way.
He finally found a comprehensive list on a matchmaking website, of all places. It had the usual ridiculous series of questions, but one had stuck out: if you had a magical power, what would that power be? At first, he’d thought it was the same as speculation about ice cream flavors or dream vacations, but there was a pattern to people’s responses.
He wrote a quick code, the first not to enrage him, and pulled out all those responses from all profiles. There were only twelve answers to that question, and they included the four talents he already knew about: divination, telekinesis, healing, and potions.
The other talents were charms, books, spells, rocks, plants, animals, weather, and feelings. Those could not be the official names. How was a rock or a feeling a talent?
He noticed another pattern in the last names of people on the site. Boys from one family looked at girls from others, and vice versa. The witches were marrying amongst themselves. He wondered why Cat had mentioned nothing about it and then remembered the wall of photos, the ragtag coven they’d cobbledtogether made of foster kids. He supposed the fancy families on this site weren’t interested in a witch without a real coven. He could give those crazy twins a tiny amount of credit for that. It didn’t make up for the spikes, but they were better than this.
He wished he could scan the book and get it online and searchable, but if it objected strongly to being burned, he did not know how it would react to being scanned, and given that they were on the eightieth floor, that seemed like a bad idea.
So he scanned it himself, rereading and rereading, picking up more patterns in natural elements and seasons. The spells wove those together to do things that should be physically impossible, but he’d seen them happen. It broke his brain, which was excellent, because it was the perfect distraction from his broken heart.
When he finally turned to the spell for shifters, he was well prepared. Animal magic featured prominently, of course, as did the charm magic if he had to guess, given that it was all about fixing things in place, but there was an equal amount of transformation and healing. It was a little horrifying to contemplate, though he knew this spell lived in his bones. Specifically in his spinal cord, which was even more horrifying.
