Page 49 of Pack Rage (The Splintered Bond #4)

Chapter 48

Threads

FLOR

A day later, the leaders of all the North American packs sat around talking about what exactly it meant to have no rank. Except for Alphas and Alpha Mothers—a title they all agreed needed to come back—they were more or less agreed on doing away with the separations, and all of them swore to stop marking the unranked with physical signs, like ear tags.

Three days after, as they decided about what to do with the silver weapons that were left, and how to punish or rehabilitate the Eastern Enforcers who were twisted in ways that could never be fixed, shifters in the Mansion began to whisper about what had happened in that ring when the fires had lit, and after.

Sergeant took some of them into the parlor and began teaching them about the balance of witchcraft and wolfcraft. About the Western pack, and what had happened to cause the war, and the eradication of the most powerful magic-wielding shifters in the world. Not all the smaller packs allowed their members to sit and listen, but some did.

A week later, the foreigners had gone home with new treaties signed between all the North American Alphas, from the smallest pack to Mountain, and scribbled on by me as well, though it made me feel like the biggest faker to see my name on the documents. Even worse was how the strangers had treated me before they left, making sure I knew their names, where they came from, and even inviting me to their packs.

“Why the hell would they want someone like me as a guest?” I asked, when the last one—a gorgeous, dark-haired guy from Italy—had dared to bring flowers for me to the front parlor. I sniffed them now, enjoying the heady scent of jasmine and gardenias in the bouquet.

Finn was staring at the shifter’s back as he exited the room, like he was deciding on the best angle to stab him for a mortal wound. Brand was trying to incinerate the bouquet with his gaze.

“What?” I grumbled. “I can’t like flowers?”

“I gave you a bouquet,” Glen muttered.

So did I, Grigor added. Whole arrangements. Maybe you need another one.

Don’t kill the Italian! I warned, but he didn’t answer.

Glen cleared his throat. “I’m pretty sure it, ah, has something to do with the stories about Alpha Mothers.”

I scowled at him over the bouquet. “What stories?”

“Mom told me there was something about… fertility boosts?”

I was horrified. “They want me to have sex with them?” All my mates howled so loud in my mind that my temples pounded.

Glen rushed to explain, though what he said wasn’t much better. “Fuck, no, princess. Supposedly, having an Alpha Mother even as a visitor can increase the chances of conceiving a pup by a factor of ten.”

Ew. They wanted me to, what? Sit around and send out some kind of woo-woo fertility vibes in the middle of an orgy?

“You’re not planning to go to any of their packs, are you?” Luke asked. He’d been the one taking notes on the meetings, and had a list of invitations.

I hesitated. Do I owe it to the world’s shifters to help them have more pups? The silence from my bonds as I pretended to ponder the idea was… okay, it was hilarious. “Of fucking course not. They can get their own Alpha Mothers. I’m gonna spend the rest of my life at my lake.” I sent the guys a mental picture of some of the things I wanted to do in the little cottage at the lake, or even on the shore, and they all relaxed.

When the last foreigner had left, and all that was left were our own North American packs, the whispers about what had happened on the pack run under the full moon became stories. Vanya and some of the other ex-kitchen staff loved sharing the best ones to me in private.

Brand was supposed to be some kind of avatar for the Moon Goddess, and Grigor was his alter ego, the shadow that drained the blood from the evil when they stepped away from the moon’s light. “Like two dark gods,” Vanya had giggled. “And you’re the blood-red wolf goddess herself, calling them to do miracles and murders. One of the Tenebris fellas is making a comic strip about you.” She held her hands out over her chest. “Your boobs in it are enormous, and it looks like some monster ate half your shirt.”

“I heard there’s a bloodsucking shadow god draining the lower levels like they’re his personal juice bar,” I teased Grigor that night as he started what was becoming a nightly ritual: a kiss for every year he’d waited for me, a soul-shattering fuck, and then the lullaby he’d sung me since we met, before he slid away and left me to sleep with my other mates. “You told me you weren’t a vampire, Grigor.”

“I’m not,” he said with a placid, creepy-as-fuck smile. “And I’m only drinking the very bad guys. I always check, I promise.”

I didn’t ask how he checked, and I didn’t want to know what he meant by drinking. I wasn’t going to fuss on behalf of the assholes in the dungeon.

Vanya had admitted that Grigor let her and the others accompany him some nights, so they could “get closure.” Becca in particular had gone down there with him more than once, Vanya said, and the older woman was looking a solid fifteen years younger.

Now that the Council had been disbanded, and the Alphas of each pack had their own rules, the ban on speaking about Western had vanished. Becca’s mother had been from a smaller pack close to Western, and she wanted to go back and see if any of her family, or her mother’s friends, were still alive. Sergeant had spoken to her privately, and I had a feeling both of them were feeling a pull to their familial packlands.

Sergeant would be tied down at Southern, though, and we weren’t certain what would happen when Luke tried to give his Alpha power over to my great-uncle. As far as we knew, no Alpha had even voluntarily disbanded a pack and given his mantle to another. But Brand knew who to ask about that.

A month later, after Brand’s grandmother Verona had traveled from Mountain and brought copies of the old laws with her—books which Finn scanned and printed out for each of the packs—all the Alphas went home and took copies of the old ways, and about twenty true mates. Brand had given the foreign shifters a gift, when the full moon magic was still showing him what he and Finn called the “threads” of the mate bonds. Some of them had true mates already, but a few of them had what looked like threads stretching in different directions. Brand showed them where they led, or at least the direction, and they left happy and eager to follow his guidance.

But in some cases, he’d seen too much. Three of them had lost their true mates in the battle, before they’d ever met. He couldn’t bear to tell them, though one of them had guessed it somehow. Brand and all of my mates had spent a night drinking with the poor male, finishing off far too many bottles of expensive whiskey.

“I told ‘im about my little buddy Rebin back at Mountain,” Brand hiccupped. “Rebin and Annalise. S’good to know we don’t just have the one time to get it right.”

Becca had been helping me get Brand into bed, and she’d pestered me for the story afterward. When I’d told her about the true mates who’d met that year at Mountain, and their wild story of falling in love forty years before, when Annalise had been a teenager, Becca had gotten starry-eyed.

“Are you saying that if we miss our mate in this life, we might find her in the next?” If hope had a face, it was hers right then.

“Yeah, I am,” I murmured. “The moon loves Her children. You’ll find her, Becca. I know it.”

The smaller pack shifters who’d stuck around for the whole month tried to get Brand to do his magic with them, too, but once the moon waned, he’d lost the threads.

Luke had suggested having some dances instead. The smaller pack Alphas invited all of their unmated shifters to attend, and Finn emptied the Eastern coffers to make it possible, flying and bussing them in from all over the continent. Margarette had set up a whole tent city on the grounds, and she and Sergeant stayed out there with all the most vulnerable.

Every night, we’d filled the Eastern ring with music and laughter, replacing some of the terrible memories with good ones. Watching the square dancers swing past each other, one after another, and then stopping all of a sudden as a mate bond formed, did something to heal everyone who watched. Even Margarette, whose eyes I still couldn’t meet without wanting to burst into tears.

“I have to go,” she said one night, after two more females had found their other halves. This time, one had been a mature shifter from Northern who hadn’t ever left her packlands.Her mate had been part of Cilian’s pack, just over the border. Something about the two middle-aged shifters meeting like that had sent Margarette into a tailspin.

“Where are you heading?” I asked after I’d finished hugging her and gotten myself under control. Glen stood at my shoulder, listening. Her eyes lingered on us, then moved to the shifter from her pack, who was smiling so brightly, the nearly full moon couldn’t compete.

“Western,” she answered, shifting her backpack over one shoulder. Her hair was long stubble, and she wore a knitted cap Ida had sent her for the cold. “I was wrong about so much, for so long. I have to assume everything I learned about your mother’s pack was just as wrong. I’m going to look for what’s left, or who.”

“All you have to do is call,” I told her. “We’ll come, if you need us.”

“I need you to stay, to build this new pack on the ashes of the old.” Her voice broke, and she gave Glen a fierce hug, whispering something in his ear for a moment, sobbed at his reply, then turned and jogged into the forest.

“What did she say?” I asked that night.

“She told me I’d made the right decision, to give up being Alpha. That the only thing worth fighting for in this world is love.” He kissed my head. “I told her I’d learned that from her.”

That full moon, Glen transferred the power of Alpha to his brother, and no one died, though Patrick’s face when he got a call the next day from Northern, made me think someone had. “Kristin left,” was all he said, before he shifted into his wolf form like a total idiot, and ran straight to Canada.

Sergeant had made a deal with all the Alphas, that any rogues they found be duct taped and shipped to my old pack’s front gate, for him to rehabilitate. When he heard some might already be on the way, he left, too, taking the Tenebris boys and their mates back to Meridion—nobody called it Southern anymore—to rebuild.

We would follow soon enough. With Verona’s help, Sergeant and Luke had patched together a ceremony of sorts to perform under a new moon, weirdly enough, that they thought would work to combine the remains of my old pack and the Tenebris ones. As long as the old Southern pack members wanted to belong to Meridion, and were willing to give up their ties to Luke, Sergeant said, it would be a bloodless transition.

“By the time you get there to consolidate the packs, I’ll have them straightened out,” he promised. “By hook or by crook.” I didn’t know what that meant, but it didn’t sound entirely bloodless.

“Good,” Brand agreed, scowling at Sergeant’s slightly bloodthirsty grin. “We can’t lose any more.”

“I can’t lose my only great-uncle either,” I warned him as we said our goodbyes. Bo and Leroy were waiting in the van, grinning like idiots, glad to be going back to the hellhole. I grinned back. “Say hello to Iris and Delia and the girls for me. Tell ‘em I’ll see them soon.” I wasn’t about to let Luke and Sergeant do some experimental ceremony without me there.

“You’re coming back, too? You promise, Miss Flor?” Leroy asked, eyes wide.

I laughed. The one place I’d never wanted to go back to kept pulling me in. I guess even if it was a shithole, it was my shithole. “Yeah, I promise. I gotta check on my flower arrangements, don’t I?”

Sergeant grumbled the whole way home about those arrangements, according to Bo, who texted later.

And the month after that, I had my very first real date.