She strode up the steps of the pack mansion just ahead of me instead of at my side, and I knew I wasn’t imagining the wall she’d rebuilt between us.
One step forward, two steps back. But we’d shared a real moment, and she might have been running scared, but there was no way she could forget that.
When we stepped through the doors, I had to shove my personal life aside to focus on the packs. The room was filled with panicked faces, and it didn’t take long to see why.
The omega stone sat in the middle of the desk, its usual crystalline beauty marred by thin red spiderweb cracks of light. It looked like evil was trying to choke the goodness right out of it.
“What in the nine hells,” I murmured under my breath, leaning down to get a closer look, but careful not to touch it.
There were no physical cracks—it was still as whole as the women’s power had made it—but something had clearly gone sideways.
“What happened?” Elodie asked, frowning as she studied the stone by my side.
“I don’t know,” Brielle admitted, voice wobbly as she stood at Kane’s side, his arm tucked tightly around her, as if the great Alpha was afraid to let her go.
“We were eating dinner, and I just got this sudden, sharp pain in my chest, like somebody was trying to tear something out of me.” She lifted a shaking hand and rubbed the area over her heart. “Kane panicked and shoved his power into me when he felt it through the bond, and then… we saw the stone.”
“We need to call the head priestess,” Elodie said, turning to Galyna. “She or Lisanne might know what’s going on.”
Galyna nodded gravely, whipping out a slim black cell phone and pressing it to her ear. As soon as the priestess picked up, she put it on speaker and held it out for us to hear.
“Lisanne. We have a problem.”
“Speak, sister.” A rich, sonorous female voice I didn’t recognize poured from the speaker.
Galyna quickly summed up what was happening with the stone, and Brielle repeated her description of what she’d felt.
Heavy silence was the priestess’s only response for a long moment.
“You need to get back to the pack castle. Something is wrong, but you won’t be able to fix it away from your ancestral seat.”
I furrowed my brow, utterly confused why the advice to fix a magical rock would be to leave a comfortable, functional pack and go to a burned-out husk of a castle.
Or perhaps that was just my shame at what my old Alpha had done. I wanted to hide my head and not see the destruction my pack mates had wreaked, but that was cowardice. I was no coward.
“Because of the ley lines?” Kane asked, clearly knowing more about his own castle than I did.
“Yes. Your ancestry has long fed from that power, and whatever has gripped the stone may require greater strength than even you have to defeat it,” Lisanne said. I didn’t like the somber timbre of her voice, the gravity of what she left unsaid.
What the fuck was attacking this stone, and how could it betoo powerfulfor the strongest shifter on the planet to fight?
But the evidence sat on the mahogany desk, clear as day. What was beautiful, pure energy was now tainted, despite his instinctive reaction to fight it.
Kane scanned the room, eyes dark with worry. “We’ll leave at first light, then.”
“As quickly as you can, Alpha. I and a few of the other priestesses will meet you there.”
“Thank you, priestess.” Galyna hung up the phone, turning her own stormy expression on Elodie.
The whole room broke into sidebar conversations, while I stood alone, watching. The Blackwater pack had welcomed me into the fold as Lucien’s second, but in many ways, I was still an outsider looking in. Sometimes, though, that gave me the clearest view. And something was off about Galyna.
It’s like she knows something she isn’t sharing. My wolf’s read of the situation startled me, but he was on high alert with a new, unmarked, and unbonded mate at our side, so it shouldn’t have been a surprise.
Elodie’s partner means her no harm,I responded, studying the two of them carefully.
The maiden partner does not think Elodie’s separation from us is harmful.
Hmm. Was he right? Probably. He usually was.
