Moon Child (The Year of the Wolf #2) - Serena Akeroyd Page 0,51
his future.
Everyone knew that was what happened to the children of ex-alphas. It was how they were punished too.
I’d done nothing wrong.
But the Highbanks pack had to best me. Had to make us look bad.
I sped up, my power filtering through me, turbocharged by the moon’s rays as they fed me and nourished me. When we broke the territorial line, we all howled, singing our presence for the other pack to know.
I had no desire to slip in and slip out. No desire whatsoever. I wanted my arrival to be a statement.
I wanted them to know I was here.
Our howls were met with an otherworldly siren song that was unlike anything I’d heard before.
There’d been rumors, of course. Rumors of strange wolves in the forests around Highbanks, but there were always fairy tales, weren’t there? Always stories about our kind and the forests.
I was as American as Nancy and James, but I had a childhood of Korean stories to feed and nourish my ghoulish side. I’d come forewarned, prepared for what I’d heard from scouts who ran along the borderlines between our land and theirs.
News of larger than usual natural wolves, ones whose howls were impossible to understand, as if they spoke another language entirely.
This situation had been unrolling ever since the Highbanks alpha had met his mate.
The omega was just as strange, it was said. The humans who were neither on our side or theirs, spoke of the alpha’s woman’s kindness and how, since her arrival, the many businesses the pack managed had changed. The council had been turned over, replaced with lesser ranking folk, and the businesses were now manned by those same people.
All in all, it had boded well.
A pack that dealt with equality, just as ours did.
I wanted no trouble with them, and I knew they’d want no trouble with me. We dealt with things on our own up here. Each pack was twinned with another, usually on the opposite side of the country. It was how we let our kids spread their wings, and sometimes, we’d call them in for back up. But in this instance, there’d been no need for that. And apparently, vice versa, as we all rubbed along well enough together.
I should have known it would go to shit.
I barely felt the thirty miles we’d been running since we’d shifted on our pack land and merged onto theirs, but each passing yard proved how unkempt my territory was. A belief that was confirmed when I saw the packhouse in the distance, and there was simply no denying just how wealthy the Highbanks pack was.
For centuries, the Rainfords had been running the pack into the ground. Padding their own accounts while leaving their people to suffer and go hungry. I was changing that, but it was slow going, and damn if it wouldn’t be easier if I had the kind of funds Eli Highbanks had at his disposal.
Either side of me, I could feel the forest closing in as wolves that weren’t mine began to run with us.
That they sensed our lack of aggression was the only reason we weren’t in a fight right now.
We were here for the kid. Nothing more, nothing less. We had no reason to fight, no reason to come here on a suicide mission.
I tried to transmit that in a howl, but the sentiment was lost. My beast was just pissed at the presence of some kind of creature that was like me but not. Who was natural but somehow turbocharged.
And that wasn’t the only thing that was turbocharged. I could feel their totem’s power from across the way, and it seemed to sink into the ground, making each step I took feel heavier, like my paws were weighted down with concrete.
I’d think it was in an effort to slow me down, but that was impossible.
It was more a case of my body responding to the somnolent power of their totem.
The Rainfords had stopped using their circle, had stopped even calling on the totem for pack meetings. It had taken me three months to clear the circle once more, to be able to even access the obelisk.
No one in my pack, not since Gray Rainford, Daniel’s grandfather, had communed with the totem. Observed a covenant there. The Rainfords had done their damnedest to tear us apart from our roots, to keep us under their power…
I was clawing those roots back, but I realized what a way we had to go.