But the whole thing—casting, brewing potions, accounting for the movement of stars and the winds and who knew what else—felt needlessly complicated.
No wonder they were such assholes. They’d earned every drop of their arrogance in long hours spent learning this crap.
“Here,” Dakota handed me a cup when he was finished.
I arched a brow skeptically down at the dense, golden liquid. “It’ll wear off before the full moon?”
He nodded. “We’re just hedging our bets. No more interference from Grant until the actual day. You’ll just be... less likely to fall into misfortune. That’s all.”
Thing was, if Dakota had handed me a cup of mud and told me to drink it, I would’ve. And this—well, he’d clearly poured himself into the effort of making it.
I drank every drop.
As unpleasant as the viscous potion was to swallow down, afterward I felt... light. There was a bubbly certainty in my stomach that everything would be fine.
And for the next few weeks, they were. When Charles was driving us around San Francisco, we never hit traffic. All our contracts went off easily. When we ordered out food, it showed up early.
It was a bunch of little stuff, but it all stacked.
The day of the full moon, I couldn’t tell if that warm, certain confidence was due to lingering effects of the potion—a condition I wasn’t going to think too hard about, because I didn’t see a lot of sense concerning myself if the timing was slightly off or demanding more compliance with the law to myself than I applied to assholes and users—or if it was simply that when things went right and right and right, it was easier to believe that they would continue to do so.
We weren’t putting off the challenge again, no matter how convinced I was that Grant would try and pull something to get out of it. Everything on our end was falling into place, and I couldn’t take another season, another month, anotherminuteof this shit hanging over us.
I’d half expected to see Kent on the other side. I’d braced for that final betrayal.
When we got to the lake, there wasn’t anyone on the other side at all.
Well, at least there wasn’t the lineup of snarling wolves at Grant’s back that I expected. Grant himself was nowhere to be seen.
But there was a figure on the ground, legs folded, hands braced hard on the ground, and an enormous gray wolf stood beside him.
Aleks.
I held out a hand to keep the others back. Most of the pack had insisted on coming, though I’d wanted to encourage them not to.
I didn’t know what kind of fight this would turn into, but by law, there was no scenario in which both our packs should fight each other. It was a challenge between Grant and me.
And still, they’d insisted on coming. They wanted to have my back, even if their presence was unnecessary.
I adored them for it, and I didn’t want them an inch closer to that snarling wolf behind Aleks than they needed to be.
This was wrong. The air carried the sharp, metallic scent of blood, and there were only the two of them where the Idaho pack ought to be. Where was Grant?
“Aleks?”
He looked up at me. His skin was pale, a sheen of sweat across his own face. His lip curled in pain, and his arm was wrapped around his middle.
Grant always went for the softest part he could get to, and I stared, horrified, at the dark red stain on Aleks’s shirt beneath his arm.
I had a sick, sharp stab of gratitude that we’d left Cash behind for this.
As I stepped closer, into the field of grass enclosed on three sides by trees, the enormous gray wolf bunched its shoulders and lowered himself toward the ground, growling.
Grant wasn’t nearly as big.
Fuck, I wasn’t sure I was as big as the wolf next to Aleks.
I held up my hands, palms out. “I’m just checking on him,” I told the wolf, whose mouth pulled back in a vicious snarl.
