call.
Yips and soft barks come from the direction of the Great North’s territory. The sound is so clear to me, but none of these men seem to be able to hear and suddenly all I want is to have them gone. I will not have them near Homelands.
I pop the tail end of the beef stick into my mouth, crumple up the empty plastic wrapper, and toss it into the Red Devil’s ATV.
“What the fuck?” he yells, looking for the trash I threw onto his muck-covered floor.
He can’t find it in the shadows. He turns around, tossing his jacket over the seat, and rolling up his sleeves. There is a tattoo of a skull with a tongue of fire.
The other two remove their jackets with the usual knee bouncing, pointless stretching, and air boxing of men who haven’t spent their lives fighting and have no idea how tedious it is.
Ziggy moves beside me. I know he’s fought—I’ve learned enough to know that’s the way wolves move up in their echelons—but his fists are clenched around his thumb like a child, and I realize for all his size and power, he’s probably never fought in skin.
“Hold back. You come if you see I need help,” I say, knowing full well that I won’t.
“What the hell happened to your face, freak?” the Red Devil shouts, pointing at Ziggy.
Ziggy steps back into the shadows, his hand to his cheek, and something inside snaps like a dry twig and kindles something I haven’t felt for a long time. I feel it take root and burn, and then I lean into the fire of being angry.
Red Devil swings at me with his helmet, but helmets are bulky and Red Devil hadn’t counted on air resistance, allowing me to hit him hard in the armpit. When his arm goes limp, I hit him in the temple with my elbow. There is a soft crack and he goes down.
“Get the fuck up.” I drag the unconscious man up from the ground, shaking him. Trying to force him to fight me because it was over too fast. I am only barely aware of the two other men coming behind me. I throw the Red Devil’s prone body at them and, as they stumble back, crack the two Gremlins’ heads together. I stride back over to the Red Devil, but Ziggy steps in front of me.
“That’s enough,” he says, grabbing my arm. “The Alpha will not have it. Killing humans just brings more humans. Help me toss them in the truck.”
I help him toss them in the truck and drive them to the edge of the road. I soak them in cheap vodka as a finishing touch.
“What is a brother?” Ziggy asks on the way back.
“What?”
“A brother. You told them I was your brother. I don’t know what it means.”
“It means having the same mother and father.”
“But we don’t have the same mother and father.”
“No, neither do Magnus and I. It was really just a way of warning them, in a way that humans would understand, that I would fight for you.”
“Like Pack, then,” he says.
Chapter 17
Evie
What does the Gray remember? It’s not that I expect her to remember the Pack with its laws and hierarchies and histories. All I’m hoping for is some familiarity with my scent, some vague recollection of trust.
I can’t afford to take any chances with our fragile understanding. Most every night since the Iron Moon, I have changed and run the perimeter of her territory, making sure the Bone Wolf’s injury is healing. Those first few days, the Gray was preoccupied with her mate, so I herded a deer with a broken ankle toward Westdæl, a kind of wolfish Meals on Wheels.
Varya could have killed it with a sneeze, but I didn’t know about the Gray until I heard her explode from the trees and take it down with a single jump. The smell of blood, the growl in the back of her throat as she started the laborious process of pulling it higher up into her territory where her mate was recovering.
The first two nights, I split my time between watching the Shifters and making sure the Pack understood these new boundaries. Now when I go up, I lie down somewhere nearby and sleep. I feel her watching me. It’s not aggressive and not frightened, more curious, like she feels she knows me from somewhere but can’t quite remember from where.
Tonight I hope she remembers enough to let me protect her.
As soon as