Page 3 of Pack Rage (The Splintered Bond #4)
Chapter 2
Pack Protector
FLOR
S ometime earlier that day, in between bouts of lovemaking, Brand had mentioned he’d left his pack halfway through their vows of allegiance, unable to stay any longer when he felt me panicking here at Southern. He’d said there was a spike that drove him to start the trip.So much had happened, I wasn’t even sure which spike of panic he’d responded to.
After landing, Dean had spent the past few hours tracking Brand through the forest, though he’d sensed in the pack bond that his new Alpha was all right, and waited for us to come out rather than barging in.
I, for one, was glad. We’d needed that time in the cave. Dean was just as glad to hear that Southern was under our command, more or less, and that we could go back and get food, showers, sleep, and set up a place for the rest of the Mountain fighters to join us when they arrived.
On the walk back to the compound, Dean filled me in on exactly what Brand had done to get here, and my heart started racing almost as fast as it had during the battle.
“So I was flying him here, right? And he starts to shift. But he’s gotten bigger, and you’ll have to ask the moon how it works, but he’s heavier, too. I thought the plane was gonna go down. Then, a couple of hours later, you must’ve been going through something pretty dicey, because he started pulling on the pack bonds he did hold. But he forgot that his pilot was one of the first to pledge to the new Alpha, and I almost passed out.”
Brand grumbled, “She doesn’t need to hear everything. We got here, didn’t we?”
“We?” Dean’s lips went tight. “Flor, I haven’t even gotten to the good part.”
I swallowed hard. Brand was still carrying me, but I pushed his arms off me and scrambled down. “Go on.”
“So we get to the dirt road where you and Glen left the truck, right? Of course, I can’t land in the middle of the forest. My flight plan was shot to hell anyway when Brand started having what I thought was a seizure on the plane, flopping all around, fur and teeth sprouting everywhere?—”
Brand grunted. “You try siphoning thousands of pack members’ energy through a metaphysical bond into a mate miles away.”
Dean raised his voice. “And I tell him to hold tight, that I’m gonna circle, look for a field or a deserted road big enough to touch down. Hard as hell to do, as it’s the middle of the damned night, and there’s nothing but a bonfire coming from the center of the compound, which is enemy territory. I’m pretty low, maybe a hundred feet over the canopy, maybe less, with a crazed Alpha next to me, and not nearly enough flight hours under my belt for this shit. So I turn back toward the road into town, looking for lights. And guess what? He didn’t wait.”
For a moment, nobody said anything. Leroy and Bo were ahead of us, Glen behind, but everyone went still when I let out a screech. “Brand Becker, you didn’t .”
He refused to look down at me. I kicked him in the shin.
“Ow!”
Dean let out a laugh. “Good. I was gonna have to kick his ass if you didn’t.”
“I didn’t kick his ass. ”
Glen snorted. “You would have if your leg went that high,” he teased, then ducked out of the way as I aimed a donkey kick at his balls. I didn’t need to be tall to take down a male.
“He needs his ass kicked if he did what I think Dean’s saying.” I turned my attention back to Dean. “Please tell me he had a parachute.”
He shrugged. “You’d smell the lie.”
I rubbed my forehead, a headache coming on fast. “How many bones did you break when you jumped out of a moving airplane, Bearman? How are you even alive?”
“I had to get to you, my love. I couldn’t wait.” His reply was immediate and raw. Filled with stark emotions that took me back to where I’d been the day before. Terrified that I would never see him again. Wishing I’d been able to tell him, one more time, what he meant to me.
I sighed, and finally said, “You healed up pretty fast.” I took his hand in mine and squeezed once, sending my love through the bond.
He squeezed back, gently. “I’m the Alpha.”
“A hell of an Alpha,” Dean said as we approached the fence. “Even his dad would have taken at least a week to hea… What in the hell? ” He stopped, staring in disgust at the pink piles of guts and body parts on the ground just inside the fence. Bo and Leroy held the hole in the fence open, and Glen, Brand, and I stepped through. Dean followed hesitantly behind, tiptoeing around the piles of magically preserved entrails.“What are they?” he muttered, as he took in the scene.
“Ah, they’re my courting gifts,” I began, but Bo and Leroy cut me off, practically falling over themselves to explain.
“It’s the work of the Flower Arranger, see? He took all of Miss Florida’s enemies?—”
“Not us, we was kids when we hunted her, right? We never meant her no harm, we weren’t even gonna mate her, all we wanted was the prize, the food rations for bein’ a mated pair?—”
Leroy shoved his friend over. “Shut up, Bo! Like I was saying, the Flower Arranger hunted down ever’ one of her enemies, and made flowers out of their guts, and even fingers, see?” He’d fallen over the pile that had Lyndal’s fingers spelling my name. The fingers hadn’t moved, and Leroy ran his own hand over them, sounding it out. “Flor, right? That’s the kind of courtin’ a woman like her needs.”
“That better have been a compliment,” I snarled, my face burning as Dean stared at me like I was some sort of space alien.
“Oh, it was. Any female like you, a bona fide homicidal ninja, who can get shot a thousand times and walk away?—”
Bo gasped. “Who’s fireproof! And faster than lightning. I heard from the girls that Miss Florida can move faster than any shifter born?—”
Leroy cut him off. “ And she’s an Alpha Mate seven times over.”
“Seven times? Something you want to tell us?” Glen managed to ask through a clenched jaw. Shooting him a death glare, I swiped out at him with a fist. He tripped over one of the arrangements and fell on his ass in the middle of what used to be Lyndal Fentress.
“You idiots better shut them up before I do. Permanently,” I growled at the three fully-grown shifters, two of whom were red-faced and wheezing with laughter. Only Brand had managed not to lose it completely, but I could feel his humor in the bond.
None of them said a word. Well, Leroy and Bo did, but in whispers. They went on and on, making up wild stories about me under their breath, and the others kept on listening, breaking out into quiet chuckles.
“I give up. I’ll see you fuckers at the dining hall.”I broke into a jog and went in the back door to the kitchens, steeling myself for the flood of memories I thought might overwhelm me. But the kitchen was buzzing, filled with men and women, working together to cook what looked like a massive dinner. The scent of garlic, simmering meat, and melted cheese filled the air.
One of the women I’d helped escape the dorms, Deb, stood in the middle of it all with her back to me, wearing a white apron and holding a wooden spoon that was as much a threat as any knife. “Stop tasting the sauce, William Robert Spinnaker. None of the rest of us want your spit in our dinner.”
“Yes, Chef. Sorry, Chef,” a narrow-shouldered man called back, his cheese-sauce-splattered face turning even redder when he saw me. “Chef. Chef, it’s her.”
Deb turned. “Flor!”
The kitchen went silent, except for the bubble of cooking sauce, the sound of a mixer running on a counter, and the breathing of a half-dozen shifters. Well, a couple of them were holding their breath. Rogue males, looking like they might freak out and shift. Or… holy shit, surround me. Were they going to attack?
Deb moved up alongside one and laid her hand on the back of his arm. “It’s okay, Caleb. She’s a friend.” She offered me a half smile, which I returned shakily. “She’s pack. She’s our pack protector.”
Before she finished speaking, the rogues all dropped to one knee around me. “Pack protector,” Caleb repeated, in a voice that sounded rough, like he hadn’t spoken words in a long time. The others echoed him. I blinked, unsure what was happening.
Sergeant came to my rescue. “That she is,” he said from the door to the dining hall. His eyes met mine, and I saw relief in them. I wondered what he saw in mine. Whatever it was, it made him frown, before he cleared his throat and went on. “But if any of us want to have a pack left to protect, you’d better let her through.”
As soon as we all found seats in the dining hall, it was time to eat, and food was arriving on the long tables. Somehow, they’d found or hunted enough supplies to pull together a decent meal, with steaming bowls filled with venison stew, baskets of warm cornbread, and even peach cobbler in the long metal pans that were a bitch to get clean. Not that doing the pack’s dishes was my job anymore.
That felt weird. It felt weird enough just to eat at one of these tables myself, and not the scraps that had fallen underneath, or the leftovers that made it back to the kitchen. Not that there would be leftovers tonight; we were all eating like the plates might grow legs and run off.
I was impressed at how well the mealtime ran. Half the shifters in the compound ate in the first shift, while the others stood guard and did work to clean up after the battle, or care for our wounded.
Then the other half came in and repeated the process. We’d shown up near the end of the first dinner round, and witnessed the calm transition from one group to the next. The first group was almost half female, with seventy-some women, both ranked and unranked, sitting side by side. For the most part, the ranked females weren’t acting like they had any right to more food or drink than the others, and the few I saw trying to pull rank had a wild-eyed rogue snarling at their throats within seconds.
That settled them down real quick.
The second group was mostly the remaining male Southern shifters. More than one of those rat’s asses sneered at me when they entered, though I had a feeling it was meant to hide their fear of me or my mates. The rest of the group were male rogues, though most of them were wearing real clothes now, instead of animal skins. The rogues still smelled sour, and acted wilder than the others, except for one pair of males who sat close together. Those two exchanged subtle, affectionate touches more than once during the meal. One was a rogue, and the other an older, ranked male who I’d seen at Southern, but never spoken with. When the older male turned his head to press a gentle kiss to the young rogue’s shoulder, I noticed a mating mark on his neck, and realized they were a mated pair. True mates? It seemed possible.
Had this young male been drawn to Southern somehow, seeking his true mate? I tucked that thought away to ponder later, and tore into the stew that Caleb set in front of me.
When we’d finished our meal and a group of the males got up to clear the dishes without being asked, Glen let out a low whistle. “Sergeant’s only been inside the compound for twenty-four hours, right? Can you imagine what it’ll be like in a month?”
“Possibly a pile of rubble. We’re sitting ducks inside this fence. They can come back and pick us off at their leisure,” Sergeant said, sitting next to Brand.
Sergeant gave a quick whistle, and in twenty seconds, every other shifter had left the dining hall. Only Sergeant, Brand, Glen, Dean, and I were left. When the door shut behind the last shifter, Sergeant pulled out a pad of paper. I peered down at his notes. He’d been making lists: numbers of Enforcers in each main pack as well as some smaller packs, numbers and types of weapons, and vehicles with locations marked beside them.
“Nobody here had a laptop for you to use?” Glen asked.
“Welcome back to Southern,” I muttered.
Sergeant sighed heavily. “We have to assume the laptops and phones left behind are Eastern’s. So we aren’t using them. But it means we’re cut off from our allies. Until we can get our hands on some… What did the girls call them? Burner phones.”
I almost smiled. “The closest town is a couple dozen miles down the main road. Are we at a point where we can send someone out?”
“Not yet. We know Torran and a few of his Enforcers left, but we don’t know how far they went.”
“I have the sat phone from the plane,” Dean offered. “Samuel has another one back at Mountain.”
Across the table, Glen perked up at that. “Patrick has one, too. We can call them both and coordinate an attack on Eastern. We have cars and trucks, enough to bring a good number of fighters to their doorstep within days.”
Brand shook his head. “They’ll see us coming and be ready.”
“Not if we move fast?—”
“They have drones, and maybe even satellite surveillance. They knew Dad was still alive, that I was Alpha, and that the pack was making their way to the Den to give their pledges to me. They’ve been watching us. Hell, they knew when you crossed into Mountain, Glen. They had Dad on the phone within an hour, commanding him to lock you up.”
“From the trees,” I mumbled. “I bet they had cameras installed.”
“Cameras. Like trail cameras?” Glen asked. I nodded. “What if they have those here at Southern?”
Before he could finish speaking, Sergeant had whistled and two rogues came running through the door, dropping to one knee beside him. “Yes, Alpha?”
“You’ve got a job. Get help from the women.” He sketched out what they were to look for, then sent them away. “I should have thought of that last night. Northern didn’t use that kind of tech, or not much anyway.” He faced Glen. “Your brother was always asking to bring some in, to train our Enforcers, and to have extra eyes, but your dad believed in tradition…” We all went quiet, remembering just how wrong that had made things go at Northern.
Sergeant broke the tense silence. “Brand tells me he’s been called to an emergency Council meeting. If he attends with an army at his back, Aidan McDonnell won’t hesitate to use everything at his disposal to stop him, and make him out to be an Alpha gone rogue.” I frowned. It was kind of the truth. Brand wasn’t planning to join the Council. “Brand will be thrown out of the Council, and his vote removed from the emergency meetings.”
Brand grunted. “That leaves only Aidan and Luke as voting members. He can ram through anything he likes, except for major changes of pack law.”
Like rescinding the law that stated Alpha’s children couldn’t leave their own packlands without permission. But wouldn’t there have to be a majority vote?
That wouldn’t matter. “Luke would never vote with that possumfucker.”
Sergeant shrugged. “He wouldn’t need to. As Acting Council Head, Aidan can break a tie. And Luke is only Acting Alpha of Southern.”
“Shit. We don’t even know where Callaway is,” Glen murmured. “If they have him, Aidan will find some way to use him.”
“If they do have him, I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what they planned all along,” Sergeant said. “There is no other Heir to Southern, so far as they know. If they…” He hesitated, his eyes falling on the mate mark on my neck. “If they remove Luke from the equation and put Callaway back in, then Aidan will have all the votes he’ll ever need.”
“But Callaway lost to Luke.”
“They’ll find some way to stage another fight. Make sure Luke’s too weak to win, juice the old Alpha up somehow. There are plenty of ways to cheat the moon. I would know.” His tone was filled with shame, but I didn’t have time to think about what he’d done at Northern, under Bradley Hillier’s command. How he’d cheated so many of the unranked there, mostly females.
I cradled my head in my hands, my mind whirring, trying to see the way through this mess. “Can this situation get any more fucked?”
“I’m afraid so,” Sergeant said, speaking so softly it was hard to hear him, even from this close. “Bradley’s still Northern’s Alpha, but the moon’s full in four days.”
I blinked up at him, unsure why that mattered, but Glen gasped. “No.”
Brand cursed. “Yes. Bradley’s being held for the crime of killing his own Enforcers without cause. If he’s found guilty and executed on the full moon, and no one’s there to stop him, Aidan could take over Northern. The moon and the power of Bradley’s death would be enough…”
He didn’t have to go on.
“Fuck,” I whispered.