Page 37 of Wolfsbane

The dark gray wolf didn’t stop growling until the alpha put his hand on the back of his neck, just like Viktor had done to me. Aleks, that was his name. I’d seen him at the coven house before he’d taken over for Grant.

He recognized me too.

“You’re one of the witches.”

“He’s Ermengarde’s son,” Viktor offered.

“I’m Daire,” I squeaked, grateful for werewolf hearing, because it meant that even though I could hardly speak, they’d hear me.

“So why the hell are you running around as my brother’s wolf?” the one who looked so much like Viktor demanded.

Right . . . I needed to explain that. But my chest felt squeezed like I was trapped in a giant’s fist, and I couldn’t talk, and I was probably going to die anyway, so what did it matter?

“He’s not like the other ones,” Buddy piped up, staring at Leo with wide, dark, doleful eyes.

“How do . . . ” Viktor’s twin looked Buddy over. Not Buddy. Fuck, I needed to learn his name. But the werewolf shook himself. One problem at a time. “How do you know?”

“He fed me,” Buddy said, smiling. His eyes were gleaming as if in his world, that was truly the most generous thing a person could do, but we’d killed his parents. We fucking murdered people. “Even when he knew it was me eating it, he only put out more. He wouldn’t hurt anyone.”

Aleks’s nose flared. “It was Ermengarde’s spell, right? The one that was supposed to hit me.”

“Yes,” I whispered. “I didn’t . . . I didn’t know what it’d done, but I felt . . . something that day. I didn’t realize I’d taken anything until I—Viktor came to the coven house, and we captured him. Not—not me, but⁠—”

“But your people,” Viktor’s twin said, cool and unimpressed.

“Yeah,” I admitted. “There was a ritual, and I . . . I shifted. It is Viktor’s wolf, a-and he has my magic.”

“Why?” Aleks demanded. The wolf at his side had begun to growl again.

“Because . . . ” I didn’t really know, but I’d studied magic. Forces worked by rules, and everything wanted to return to its natural state. Magic meant convincing the energy in the world to do something else. “Because if you pull a bungie cord to the opposite side of the room, and you have another on the other side, and you do the same thing, as soon as you let them go, they’re going to spring back into place. I think my—my mother wanted to capture that energy in the middle and . . . and take it for herself.”

Viktor’s twin looked horrified, an overly dramatic widening of his eyes that was like an exaggerated mirror of what I’d seen from Viktor earlier that night. “She’d take your magic?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know if that was always her plan, but I think that was what she was trying to do tonight, yeah.”

“She would’ve killed us both,” Viktor said firmly.

My guts twisted up at the notion, but when my eyes fell to the ground, I still nodded. “I think so.”

“Fuck,” Viktor’s brother said.

“So how do we fix this?” Aleks asked.

And then, a svelte form came trouncing around the biggest house from an area I couldn’t see. Altair was in dark, tight pants and a button-up shirt that was crisp and rolled up to his forearms. He’d put on a vest and looked . . . well, he looked nothing like the half-mad beast I’d let out of his cage.

He grinned as he sauntered into the gathering, and his arm slid around Viktor’s brother’s waist. “There you are,” he said. “I see you found Viktor. Glad you’re home,” he said to Viktor. Then he kissed his brother’s cheek. Altair didn’t hesitate a second at his nakedness.

Then, he looked at me. His teeth glinted in the light, too sharp to be human. “Hello, Daire. Darling”—he curled forward to rest his cheek on Viktor’s brother’s shoulder—“this is Daire. He’s the witch who released me.”

Viktor’s brother sighed through his nose, but the anger in his face disappeared before the next time he glanced my way.

Maybe I hadn’t been so crazy to let the vampire out after all.

CHAPTER 19

Viktor

It didn’t surprise me at all that Cash was the one most angry.