Page 5 of Blood and Magic (RBMC: Helena, MT #2)

“If you won’t talk to me or our trained healer, then talk to Fenris. Talk to Caelum or Moose or a fucking therapist; I don’t care. Bottling it up is only going to make you explode.”

I nodded once, and in the deafening silence afterward, I scrambled for a way to get out of there. “When do you need me at Vanderbilt?”

Kodiak sighed and straightened, moving back behind his desk again to sit before shuffling through some papers. “The day after the wedding.”

Two days.

“Okay,” I agreed, pushing to my feet. “Is that all?”

He shifted his shoulders. “Give me an update on the Scorpions.”

I ran through the latest status on Marx and whoever he’d been able to salvage from the wreckage of his nest. We’d wiped out a lot of them, but even more got away.

“I’ve got facial recognition running nationwide,” I said. “It’s a lot of ground to cover. He set off a ping out near Crow Res three weeks ago, but he’s been quiet after that.”

Kodiak nodded. “You think he’s regrouping?”

“He’d be stupid not to. He still thinks of Sol as his.” Even though she wasn’t my mate, she was pack, and I didn’t like the thought of some undead fucker laying claim to her. She belonged to Orion. She belonged to us. “We never found her brother’s body.”

After everything went down with Sol, her eldest brother, Percy, ran to Marx for safety.

Sol said the Scorpions had turned him into one of them.

Once we saved her, we rounded up the corpses to burn them, ensuring they didn’t heal themselves and reanimate.

Guin had been certain he wasn’t among them, which meant he’d escaped and still walked with the undead.

“So Marx has someone who knows the ins and outs of Vanderbilt Ranch,” I said. “Not to mention leverage to pull with the siblings.”

“I don’t think we need to worry about Sol or Guin,” Kodiak replied. “But Liam may be a problem.”

I couldn’t disagree.

“Keep an eye on him,” the alpha continued. “Guin will be handling most of the business in Bozeman while Sol is away, and Lycan is escorting Ava on her business trip to Paris. Which means Maeve will be there alone.”

I nodded, hearing what he wasn’t saying as much as what he was.

I wouldn’t just be there to run things while Orion was out of town.

I’d be playing bodyguard, too, which was fine with me.

If any Scorpions came sniffing around, I’d give them a taste of their own bullshit.

I’d been antsy for revenge since I died.

“Here’s the operating plan.” Kodiak handed me a stack of papers. “And it goes without saying…don’t fuck with the Vanderbilt, alright?”

I snorted. “That won’t be a problem.”

“I’m serious,” he said. “The last thing I need is Guinevere dragging her Louboutins in here to bitch me out about another one of my brothers putting their paws where they don’t belong.”

The visual made me laugh, and I covered my mouth to hide it from a clearly displeased alpha.

No one talked to Kodiak the way Guin did and got away with it, and maybe that was because she wasn’t officially part of the pack.

She changed with us at the full moon and came to some pack meetings, but she hadn’t made an oath to the alpha.

Nor had she cut her hand and sealed the blood bond.

I’d never ask her about it, but Sol indicated Guin preferred to be a lone fox.

That would only go so far with Kodiak, and I secretly begged to be a fly on the wall when they finally had that confrontation.

They’d been known to have shouting matches that could be heard halfway across the homestead.

“I don’t know, Prez,” I said. “I think you like it when the eldest Vanderbilt gets all hot and bothered.”

He snapped his gaze up, features twisted into an angry scowl. “Was that a joke?”

I couldn’t help my shit-eating grin. Years ago, Kodiak’s wife had tragically died in a car accident caused by the Scorpions, leaving him with two little girls.

It was part of the reason we hated them all so much.

Since then, he’d insisted Kendra would have been his mate had she lived, and he gave up on the whole dating scene in general.

But most of us suspected that was bullshit.

If she were his mate, his wolf wouldn’t have been able to live without her.

Kodiak would have gone rabid just like our previous alpha.

Orion would have had to put him down or die trying.

Being that he remained the most competent man I knew, Kodiak could (and should) mate someone else.

My money was on the eldest ginger Vanderbilt.

“Get out of my office,” he said.

Shaking my head at how blind he was choosing to be, I turned to leave.

But he called out to me as soon as my hand hit the door handle.

“Will I see you at the rehearsal tonight?” he asked.

“I’ve got patrol,” I said. “But Lycan promised to fill me in. I’ll be there tomorrow.”

Kodiak nodded. “Have a nice night, Mill.”

“Yeah. You too, Prez.” I left him with his thoughts and headed back to my cabin to prepare for my perimeter run.

On the way, I stopped by my little brother’s room in the dorm to check on him and let him know I wouldn’t be around tonight if he needed anything.

At twenty-five, Caelum was only two years out of his transition and acting like it.

He ran through the females in his age group like he’d just discovered his dick and couldn’t wait to show everyone.

I tried not to slut-shame him, even if I’d never been the same way.

The pack had a more liberal approach to sex than the rest of society.

As beings that regularly got naked together each month to shift into our animal alter-egos and fought off attacks from an enemy herd of vampires, fucking around seemed like the least of our worries.

The camaraderie it created kept the pack strong.

But I found I could never really get into it with anyone else. I’d had a few flings when I was younger, but nothing substantial, and nothing that held my interest for longer than a night.

I knocked twice, raising an eyebrow when bangs and hushed shifting echoed from the other side. The door opened, and a miniature version of myself peeked around the corner, naked from the waist up, purposely hiding what was going on below that.

“Hey,” he said, doing his best to play it casual.

The reek of sex, sweat, and sin wafted out of the room, and I winced, taking a step back. Then, I recognized the female’s scent and sighed.

Lyra. Fenris’s little sister.

Whatever. Not my circus.

“What’s up?” Caelum asked, running a hand through his blond hair, nearly the same shade as mine.

“I’m going out on patrol tonight,” I told him. “Tomorrow, I’m heading to Vanderbilt Ranch.” I filled him in on the next two months and what Kodiak had required of me. “Wyn will still be around if you need anything.”

Caelum nodded and glanced behind him before disappearing for a moment and returning with a towel wrapped around his waist. He stepped out into the hallway and shut the door behind him.

“Two months, huh?” He whistled. “You gonna be okay that long on Vanderbilt territory?”

“I’ve done it before,” I said.

“Yeah, but that was then.” He raised his eyebrows as if to add, “ Before we knew about Sol and Guin.”

Technically, I had known about Guin the whole time, but he didn’t know that.

“Don’t piss off Moose,” I said. “And don’t go running off with Kai and Nix and get into all kinds of stupid, okay?”

Those two idiots were the ringleaders of Caelum’s age group.

Kai had been born with the scent of an alpha on him, and one day, he’d branch off to form his own pack, possibly taking some of his age group with him.

Kodiak would never begrudge him such a thing.

It was the natural order. If he didn’t, we’d grow too large to contain everyone, and an overcrowded pack was a powder keg waiting to explode.

Caelum rolled his eyes. “Like you’re the one to talk. Don’t go dying on us again, okay?”

I tsked through my teeth and rubbed a hand over his messy hair, ignoring his fraternal jape. Then I nodded toward the door. “So you and Lyra, huh?”

“Shhhhh.” He glanced around to make sure no one else had heard me. “Keep that to yourself, brother. It’s not like that.”

“Oh?” I bit back my surprise. “I thought you two hated each other. I thought the three days you spent stuck in a cave together were the worst time of your life.”

He blew out a disbelieving breath and shook his head. “It was.”

“It doesn’t smell like it.”

Objectively, Caelum had always been a good-looking kid. The women flocked to him, especially because he was a wolf and came from a dominant bloodline.

“She’s not my mate, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

I held my hands up to say I meant nothing by it. “Just play it safe, Cael.”

He nodded and grinned. “Yeah, you too, Mill.”

“Alright, I’m heading out.” I gave him one more swat on the head before he turned back to his dorm and, smiling, closed the door behind him.

Gods, it was like looking in a fucked-up twisted mirror.

Charming, hilarious, happy—Caelum was everything I used to be.

We were two chips off the same block, once upon a time.

And now… I took a deep breath and calmed the rage of injustice in my gut.

It would do no good to wonder why this had happened to me or how I could start feeling something… anything… again.