Page 3 of Wolfsbane

Behind me, Aleks moved, and it snatched my attention. He was . . . he was standing. He was well.

More, he was staring at the fight, his eyes aglow with the most rage I’d ever seen on my brother. When he jumped into the middle of the fight between Grant and Fyse, well . . . I couldn’t have been more proud. Sure, Grant might have injured him before, but I had no doubt that had been something underhanded.

In a fair fight, Aleks could handle Grant easily. And he did, in under a minute, forcing the now former alpha to submit to him easily, then walking away, as smug and pleased with himself as he deserved to be.

As he should always be.

Aleks was smarter than Fyse, though. He didn’t turn his back on Grant, who naturally attacked the other alpha from behind. When Fyse killed the man and then seemed to have a mental breakdown over it, I was once again grateful for my brother.

Aleks was innocent in many ways, yes, and he’d never been one for unnecessary violence, but he wouldn’t mourn killing a monster. He had killed Marcus, after all, and didn’t even look for him after the fight.

I helped the Crescent enforcer with that part. He and I dragged the bodies into the clearing, along with some excellent branches, and burned them. He looked at me across the blaze, his eyes dark and knowing, and nodded.

He knew what it was to protect one’s alpha from his own weaknesses, even more than I ever would.

I wasn’t the Crescent enforcer, so my job was easier than his, but this moment dragged things into perspective for me. I had important people to protect. I couldn’t ever allow anything to happen to Aleks. Or Leo. Or Mama. Or Evie or Cash or Henry or hell, even that useless lump, Tommy.

I had a pack to protect.

CHAPTER 2

Daire

There was nothing quite like driving to meet the Crescent wolves.

I vastly preferred when they came to the coven house, because driving out to them was like stepping out of time and space. There wasn’t even a proper road once you got off the highway—just a path with enough old gravel to assume it’d been intentional, despite the branches that curved overhead and scraped the top of the SUV.

There’d be no chance in hell of finding this place if we didn’t know exactly where we were going, and I still needed Mother to point the way.

But now that they’d returned from the city, she was determined to get her hands on the witchwolf as soon as possible.

I’d read the articles online about him—Dakota Morris. He was the Igarashi heir, though he didn’t carry their name. Some circumstance of birth that had led to him getting bitten by a werewolf and becoming something impossible.

Before Morris had gotten bitten by a billionaire wolf, there were stories about the witchwolf. Those were the kinds of tales that kept our coven searching for more, awakening with witches and vampires and any other supernatural creature we could get in contact with. People said my great-grandmother had taken a fae to bed, but I’d never seen any proof of it.

The fae were notoriously hard to catch, and they didn’t offer anything that they wouldn’t get back twofold. Surely if she’d been awakened by a fae, we’d still be paying the price.

But before Ajax Fyse had bitten his mate and Dakota Morris had refused to die, I hadn’t been entirely convinced it was possible for a witchwolf to exist.

Confirmation had consumed Mother as soon as she learned about him, but I wasn’t sure the witchwolf would work with us. Unless Mother could turn his mind with magic, make him forget how he came to be, why would a mage work with witches?

No, there weren’t many practical differences between us—we were all mortal humans who practiced magic—but I’d never known a mage who wanted to be lumped in with witches. They thought we were wild, untrained, and honestly? Deeply unserious.

It was arrogance on their part, but there were a lot of hurdles before our coven getting their hands on a supernatural powerhouse like Dakota Morris beyond just getting him out to Idaho.

Turned out, the werewolves hadn’t gotten that far.

We arrived on pack lands to find they hadn’t even brought their alpha back, much less the witchwolf.

“Where is Grant?” Mother demanded once we’d parked and she confronted the wolves in their square. At the sound of our approach, they’d come out of their houses, looking hollow-eyed and wary. Looking at them made me feel the same as I felt whenever we walked past a homeless person sitting on the sidewalk in Boise—uncomfortable and guilty all at once.

Because I knew. I knew what we were doing to them.

And their discomfort with us was just as stark.

“Dead,” Aleks said as he walked forward to face us. He’d been a common fixture at Grant’s side, visiting us often. Plenty of witches were quite taken with him, and it wasn’t hard to see why. He was gorgeous. Blond and tall and fit, and somehow, he managed to look like he had a freaking skincare regimen out here in the middle of nowhere. “He challenged Crescent alpha—Crescent alpha killed him. Is over.”

His eyes scanned over all of us, and I swallowed hard and looked away, leaning back. I wished we could just leave. Clearly, they’d failed, and Mother would need to find another way to achieve her aims.