Hunter waved his hand around the room. “This is why we brought you all together. If we end up finding them, we will needourallies with us. We really don’t know what sort of powerful army Jewels is amassing.”
Warrick jolted in his chair. “Wait, what if there’s another way to track her? If Blaine’s spell doesn’t work?”
The room fell completely silent, and he took that as encouragement: “If she’s building an army,” he said, “they’re housed somewhere behind her shielding, right? But shielded or not, they’re going to use resources. Be that water, electricity, internet. And if this is a new gathering of hundreds to possibly thousands of shifters and witches, surely there’ll be a spike in one of those resources. Can that be tracked?”
Slade slid forward in his chair, his smoky scent growing stronger. “It’s possible,” he said, and I could see him calculating already. “I’ll start searching through all the networks and see what I can find. My instinct says they’re close to one of the shifter cities, so I’ll focus my search there first to try and find a surge of power that wasn’t present a week ago.”
Warrick looked pleased as he sank back into his chair, like he could finally relax.
Another one of the alphas, older than us, with brown skin, a bald head, and striking green eyes spoke up. “The more avenues we have to search, the more chances we’ll find her.” He raised his whiskey glass to Hunter. “My pack is ready to assist in whatever way you need. We received your magically resistant plates and weapons yesterday.”
“Excellent, Lionel,” Hunter said as he dropped his palms on the table and leaned forward. “Okay, so we know the plan moving forward, and all of us are prepared to move if we track any location. Before we finish up, Slade has some more information to add.”
“I’ve been deconstructing Fletcher’s research,” Slade began, not bothering to look at the non-pack members in the room. “And while most of it is irrelevant now that he’s dead, I will say that he was playing in spaces he should never have ventured, by manipulating bonds and our beasts. All in the hopes of manufacturing an army of shifters who bore strengths and abilities beyond our norm.” The silence was heavy as we processed Fletcher playing goddess in his lab of horror.
“From what I can tell, none of his test subjects survived, but he was getting close. I’d say within the next two years, he’d have perfected a hybrid version of our beasts, with wolves the size of a bear. It was lucky that his arrogance blinded him to Jewels’ deception, as he could have been a force that destroyed our world.”
“Why does Jewels hate shifters so much?” I asked, my mindfixated on the witch. “Why was she even so involved in the shifter world? I mean, as evil as it was, I understand what Fletcher hoped to achieve, but Jewels’ motivation isn’t as clear. She already has tons of power and controls the magical world…”
What more could we really give her?
My questions were met with silence, and I wasn’t surprised, since the only one with those answers was the witch herself. In the great scheme of things, her motivation probably didn’t really matter, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
Why was she trying to destroy our race?
CHAPTER 33
KELLAN
After our first official dinner to discuss tracking Jewels’ evil ass down, I spent the night blissfully snuggled next to my Shortcake. Hunter was on her other side, with Finley crashed out beside me.
The three of us took turns sleeping beside her on our nights, and then she split her other nights with the twins, who hadn’t quite figured out the joys of group snuggles. Yet.
Those big, scaled bastards would come around sooner or later.
Even every second night with Emme wasn’t enough.
Finley hadn’t really joined Hunter and I with anyothergroupactivities, choosing to squirrel her away for his own private time, but we were making it work in stolen moments.
Along with learning how to share like good fucking boys.
Before Emme, I’d never really thought about what being in a quintet like this would entail, and now I didn’t care as long as she was with us.
“No hockey today,” Finley said as the sun started to rise.
Emme didn’t stir in my arms, and since Hunter had only slipped into the room two hours ago after helping Constantine, he’d be passed out for the rest of the morning.
“Yeah, Coach sounded like he regretted giving us a day off from training as soon as he opened his mouth.” It amused me that we could still piss Coach off, even after all these years. The old bastard probably had strangling us in his permanent spank bank.
“He’s put up with a lot from us,” Finley said, “and he never takes it out on us during training or games.”
“Yeah, he’s a decent male, deep,deepdown under all his roar.”
Finley released a disparaging snort, and when he lifted his arm to rub a hand over his face, he cracked me in the ribs. “Shit, sorry.”
I waved it off, having barely felt it. “That’s a love tap, bro. Compared to that hit from Wilscher last night.” Big fucker had deliberately smashed me into the boards, and I’d never seen the check coming.
“True,” he said, and his bear was in his tone now. “Should have cracked him harder in that last few minutes.”
