Page 10 of Wolfsbane

And it was still the right thing to do.

CHAPTER 5

Viktor

The raccoon started following me around.

I didn’t think it was because I’d fed him once—Leo fed him all the damn time—but still, every time I turned around, there he was, near at hand. He wasn’t mixing us up. Animals struggled less with the differences between my twin and me—they steered clear of me, and flocked to him like he was some kind of cartoon character.

If I hadn’t known Drew was just a creature who couldn’t possibly understand what was going on, I’d have said he looked . . . worried. About me?

Well, fair enough. A witch had killed my wolf. I tried hard to be happy she hadn’t managed to hit Aleks with the spell, but that didn’t help when Aleks accidentally dropped most of a tree, and all I could do was fucking stand there and watch it happen. Dodge out of the way like a coward, even.

Altair the vampire came, and stayed, and it became more and more apparent that I was useless to my pack. In the end, when Ivan arrived to threaten us all, I couldn’t even do the simple thing Altair asked, and kill him. Yes, that had been for the best in the end, because not only had I been useless in protecting the pack, but I’d been completely wrong about him.

All vampires weren’t bad. Something I’d have known, and probably wouldn’t have even been a consideration, if I hadn’t been living in terror of my own sudden inability to protect my pack.

If Leo hadn’t managed what he had—something I still didn’t understand, turning into a half-wolf creature because his love had been threatened—then we’d have all likely died.

But that invasion by Ivan and the witches he’d made into his pets showed me something important that I hadn’t realized before.

It wasn’t over.

All wasn’t completely lost.

The moment the little redheaded witch had cringed away from Ivan landing on the top of the car, it had been as though the world had stopped spinning around me, because I could see him there. Oh, not the terrified witchboy, cute and compelling though he might have been to someone he hadn’t come to threaten.

But my very own wolf, trapped inside of him.

The witch hadn’t killed him. She had only stolen him to stuff inside of some other witch, for gods only knew what purpose.

I’d barely been able to drag my attention away from staring at the boy to pay attention to Ivan, even as the vampire had recognized me and threatened my brother. Yes, my attention was all on the fight when I had to stop Altair, his desperate plea to kill him before he hurt my brother, even as I could see in his eyes that the notion of hurting Leo was tearing holes in his soul.

How had I ever thought him anything like Ivan? Yes, I’d been able to smell his emotions, even if my blunted senses could no longer parse them the way I could with my wolf, but how could anyone look into Altair’s red-brown eyes and not see the sadness there?

Ivan probably didn’t even know what sadness was.

More than any time previously, I cursed Ivan in that moment. Forcing us to make such a choice, between Altair’s life and my brother’s. But then something had shifted in Altair’s eyes, even before Leo had snapped and turned into a monstrous half-man, and he’d stopped me.

I’d known, before Ivan even died, that something had changed inside Altair. Somehow, even with magical compulsion affecting him, he wouldn’t have hurt Leo. He had overcome magic and vampirism and centuries of torment, to fall in love with my brother, the purest soul I knew.

Well, with the possible exception of the damned raccoon. And maybe Cash.

Not Evie. Evie was too much like me, and whether he knew it yet or not, Aleks was training her as his protégé. The pack knew it, instinctively, and had started following her lead when he wasn’t around. I was proud of them for learning the way things would be, and so quickly.

It seemed wolf instincts weren’t dead and gone from them after all.

That, almost as much as anything else, bolstered me when I made my decision to retrieve my wolf. Even if I failed, the pack was healing. They were learning how to be a real pack, a good pack. To take care of each other and follow leaders rather than whatever bastard was most likely to abuse them if they refused.

But me? I was no use to them without my wolf. And now that I knew he was still out there, there was no choice. Not any more than there had been a choice about escaping by myself and leaving the others with the government back in Russia. I’d had to get everyone out, because we didn’t leave our own in enemy hands. Maybe they hadn’t been my pack properly, but that hadn’t changed anything.

We didn’t leave people behind, not ever.

So I wrote the note and left it sitting where they couldn’t miss it.

The witches have him, and I have to get him back. I can be no use to the pack without him.

-Viktor.