Page 80 of Wolfsbane

Drew’s head bobbed, and I reached over to squeeze his knee. Without him, we wouldn’t have escaped. It was Ingeborg’s kindness that’d saved Viktor and me both, and I hoped that—that Drew stayed happy and with the pack. Obviously, Leo would prefer that.

Me too.

I liked that, with the Wildwood wolves, I wasn’t the only outsider. There were Drew and Altair, at the very least. But more than that, I didn’t mind a little coven of just Viktor and me. We could just figure ourselves out together.

In no way, shape, or form did I want any part of taking over for Mother in the coven, especially if half the witches I’d lead wanted to kill me.

My muscles stiffened every mile we got closer to the coven house. Obviously, I hadn’t been back since we’d fled the place, but it wasn’t like home anymore.

Home was the curve of the arm belonging to the man at my side. Nowhere else mattered.

No, not even hot showers.

We were going to fix that.

In a cab full of shifters, it came as no surprise that they could tell my energy was off. Viktor’s fingers swept up and down my side, and Drew frowned at me.

“You okay?”

I laughed, sounding harried even to myself. “Yeah. Definitely. I can, ah, pick up some of my stuff maybe? That’ll be good, and⁠—”

Ingeborg snorted. “I’ll handle the rest. You just get me up to speed on what’s happened since I’ve been gone.”

It probably helped to tell her, so she knew what she was walking into, but I had the acute sense that she was giving me a distraction. Still, I told her—Mother putting Viktor’s wolf in me to make the witchwolf, having to flee the sacrificial ritual, awakening my magic only for it to be in someone else.

I told her how good Viktor had been at magic, how now that it moved through both of us, we were going to learn together.

The way her smile softened at that made my heart skip.

She was happy for me. I hadn’t even realized I was waiting for someone I cared about to be happy for me until all my fears unwound like yarn off a spindle. I looked up at Viktor and found him looking down at me.

I took a deep breath and went on. “I hope one day, things won’t . . . won’t be so bad, between the witches and the wolves, but the coven has done a lot of wrong, especially since you’ve been away. Mother was—was fixated on the witchwolf story, and—” I shook my head. She didn’t need to know all of it.

Aleks sighed through his nose and shrugged. “A good first step will be getting someone in charge who isn’t a monster.”

Nervously, I swallowed. While I doubted the wolves and witches would ever be close, or that the coven could make up for the wrong it’d done, if we could find some peaceful coexistence, that’d be enough.

I wanted the pack safe and unmolested. I wanted the chance to figure out what came next, with Viktor, without having to worry about being attacked or hunted down.

The coven wasn’t going to get a witchwolf, but me? I’d get the best balance of all things.

CHAPTER 45

Viktor

The coven compound was a bit of a mess.

There were no guards in the building that led in from the road, but the gate was still closed, shutting the whole compound off from cars arriving.

Ingeborg scoffed and motioned expansively, and instantly, the gate shoved inward, faster than I suspected the mechanism could ever function.

My new understanding of the magic shared between Daire and me meant I felt it properly this time, when the wards went off. Or maybe it was just that this time, I understood what was going on.

We pulled down the drive to the front of the house, Aleks entirely unworried about the threat the witches might pose to us. I wasn’t sure if it was because of Ingeborg, or Daire, or if he was simply finished being frightened.

They had more reason to be afraid of us than we them, after all.

By the time he turned the truck off, witches were starting to pile onto the porch. Part of me wanted to immediately go into fight mode. I even had my wolf this time, and wouldn’t be such easy prey for them.