Verity slipped out of the shadows of the tree with her half-eaten plate of food and crept around the edge of the fire until she was behind Alatar. Across the flames, she met Wade’s eyes and did not doubt that the alpha werewolf knew exactly where she had been hiding, and who else was in the shadows there.
Alatar jumped as Verity slid onto the bench seat next to him. “Verity!” He exclaimed. “I was looking for you.”
“I am sorry,” she lied. “I found a quiet corner to sit with my plate whilst you were inside with Rune and didn’t see you until a moment ago.”
“It is hard being the unfamiliar face,” Alatar said to her sympathetically. “The pack is very friendly, however, Verity, so don’t be shy. It can be intimidating, however, to newcomers when they all know each other so well.”
“Once your pack gets to know you,” Rune said. “You will find them very supportive.”
“I really can’t stay,” she said quietly. “I have to get back to my mates.”
Alatar sighed heavily.
“We will discuss it more in the morning,” Rune decided for them. “Evenings are not times for argument, but for unity. You will enjoy yourself, Verity. After everyone is eaten, they will bring out the instruments, and there will be music and alcohol, and maybe some dancing.”
There was an exclamation from behind the tree, a woman and a man’s voice, the words half-heard by Verity, but obviously understood by the pack as they all turned their heads and several people laughed. Rune was one of them. “Ah, Maverick,” he shook his head on his laughter.
“Maverick?” Verity asked.
“F-king pain in the arse,” Rune said. “There is one in every pack.”
“Maverick struggles with authority,” Alatar said in an undertone to Verity. “And seems unable to keep himself out of trouble.”
“Lauren will get him to heel, if he would only accept her mate claim,” Rune sighed ruefully. “But the stubborn fool is determined to reject the last luna who will have him.”
The young werewolves circled, collecting used plates and utensils, and several of the pack drew out their instruments. As they began to play, filling the night with song, the young returned with cups and a variety of alcohol.
“We are working on a distillery,” Rune told her. “And we have a vineyard, so next year will be bottling our own wine.”
The pack, Verity thought, was, as Alatar said, organized and efficient. There was much she had learned from her day with them that she could see being useful back in the city, not the least filling the gap between the supplies that Elior was hoarding and the rooftop gardens by magically growing the gardens. But it was not something she could do alone. She would, she thought grimly, need to reach out to the coven if she were to be successful.
And she would need to get free of Alatar’s pack and make her way back to the gargoyles and Charon.
She saw Wade discretely make his way into the shadows, and around the rear of the tree. She wondered what he spoke to Maverick about, and she wondered who had placed the cuffs and chains around Maverick’s ankles.
She could not ask Rune and Alatar without betraying that she had seen the werewolf, and she did not want to draw their attention to him or to the fact that they had spoken. She sat, sandwiched between Rune and Alatar, as the men drank and sang along with the pack with abandon, feeling as if she were caught in some waking nightmare.
Her brother wanted to sell her to another pack. Perhaps sell her was too harsh a term, she thought as she sipped the liquor in the glass she had been handed. She did not doubt that Alatar thought he was doing her a favor, offering her the opportunity to find the same happiness with the pack that he had found. And he was happy. She only had to look up at his face, to see that, he radiated his contentment with the pack and his love for Rune.
She did not think, for a moment, that his plans for her were malicious, despite his dislike for the circumstances around her birth. But he would not have bothered retrieving her if doing so was not advantageous for the pack that he held in far more esteem than the child his father had sired on a student, who did not even share their last name because Theo had never bothered to formally claim either mother or child once his expulsion from the coven had meant there was no advantage to doing so.
Alatar might despise her father as much as she did, she thought with misery, but he was just as quick to use kin when there was an advantage to be made from doing so.
“I am really tired,” she was rubbing the heel of her hand against her sternum again, and she saw Rune exchange a look with Alatar over her head. “Is there somewhere that I can sleep for the night?”
“Sure,” Rune said readily, standing and drawing her up with him. “The accommodation might be a bit odd looking, but it’s got all the mod-cons.” The two men led her back towards the main house and down into the basement, where the two cages are. “There is a towel in the bathroom,” Rune checked as he spoke. “Alatar, have you got something you could loan her to wear in the morning? She’s nearer your size in clothes than mine.”
“Let me see,” Alatar went into the next cage which he and Rune obviously had made their home and dug around muttering as he did so.
Rune fluffed the pillow and added a blanket to the futon bed. “It looks a bit rough,” he said apologetically. “But it is actually pretty comfortable.”
“I am sure I will be fine,” she agreed, touched by his concern and his little gestures to assure her comfort. She liked him, she decided. Her brother had excellent taste in men, even if he was, altogether, a lousy sibling.
“Here,” Alatar hung a creased t-shirt and pair of shorts over the partition that only partially shielded the bathroom. “Alright then,” he hovered uncomfortably. “You will be okay, Verity?” He said as if unsure how to withdraw.
“Yeah, thanks,” she toed off her shoes and slithered fully dressed into the bed. “I am so tired. Thanks, Alatar and Rune. In the morning… In the morning, we will talk more. I really do have to get back to my mates.”
“We will talk more in the morning,” Rune agreed. “Goodnight, Verity.”
They withdrew up the stairs.
She waited until she heard the door at the stairs closed, and sat up in the bed, pushing her feet back into her shoes. She crept across the room, the only light being through the long windows against the back wall and the slightly pink spill of moonlight. Almost a blood moon, she thought, and remembered what Alatar had said about her being born under one. Well, she hoped that this time it would bring her good luck.
She tiptoed up the stairs and inched the door at the top of the stairs open. The grand room was empty. She crept into the kitchen and opened the doors until she found the ones that opened into a hidden butler’s pantry, just as Maverick had told her.
It was dark within and took a moment for her eyes to adjust. As she searched the unfamiliar layout for the key hook that Maverick had told her would be there, she listened warily for any sound in the house beyond the little room. She could hear the faint sound of the sing-a-long around the campfire, a misleadingly wholesome sound, she thought, for a bunch of people complicit with stealing her from her mates, holding her prisoner, and trading her to another pack in exchange for the use of a canning factory.
“What happened to you, Verity?” She murmured to herself as she groped desperately along the walls. “Well, my half-brother sold me into sexual slavery to a werewolf pack in exchange for access to a processing plant.”
Sexual slavery might be an exaggeration, she told herself. No, no actually, she asserted angrily, it wasn’t really. The whole idea was for her to find a werewolf mate. But if she had no choice in the trade, would they give her a choice in her mate? Or would they just assign someone to her, and the next full moon, would that man or woman turn her, binding her to them irrevocably?
“F-k you Alatar,” she decided. And her fingers closed over keys. “Yes.” There were many more than she expected. How many shackles did they have in use? She wondered. How many doors locked? Probably the cages downstairs, she added. She put them all into her pockets, feeling their weight drag against the fabric of her clothing.
She felt every slide of metal against metal, every jangle, every chime, like church bells as she edged out of the butler’s pantry and across the kitchen and living area to the front door. She creaked the door open, the hinges overloud to her nerves. The porch was empty. She crab walked, her back against the wall, to the corner of the building and froze as she heard Alatar’s voice fade off.
“It is not right,” Rune said, his voice dark. She could see them outlined against the brighter light cast by the fire pit. Rune leaned over Alatar, though there was only an inch between them in height. The alpha werewolf had his hands on Alatar’s hips, holding his mate still, and their foreheads rested against each other, their eyes locked. “It was one thing to bring your unmated and in danger healer sister here for the trade, and quite another to steal her away from her mates. We cannot force her to go into another pack, Al. We cannot force her to take a new mate. There is a word for that, and it is not a pretty one. Starts with R, if you need a hint, ends with Ape.”
“I know,” Alatar sighed heavily. “But what can I do? You know what the pack sacrificed to get the spell components to bring her here. How was I to know that somehow in the last week, she had managed to get herself mated? They are so hopeful. They are counting on this trade.”
“The trade of a willing girl who needs a mate,” Rune replied. “Not a girl who is obviously feeling the pull of an atrophying mate bond. We don’t even know what will happen if we don’t return her Al. No one knows much about how gargoyles mate. You know what happens when someone loses a mate. It is rough.”
“I know,” Alatar’s voice broke. “I know, Rune, I do. But she spent one night with them, one night. And a couple of weeks with the other one. We’ve been together longer.”
“And the mate bond is strong, Alatar,” Rune’s voice had alpha command in it, the magic of it sharp in the night. “You know that the full moon ceremony ties the bow to a bond that already exists, it does not forge it anew. Why would you think it any different for her? She was rubbing her chest, all night. That is not a good sign. I have seen that before, where a mate has died.”
“Shit,” Alatar groaned. “What am I going to do? I promised a healer, Rune.”
“This was beyond your control, Alatar,” Rune was soothing. “You delivered. You brought a healer here. A young, fertile, female healer, as the Corbyn clan requested. It was not your fault that in the time it took the pack to gather the components, she has taken others as mates.”
Alatar moaned.
“It is alright, Al,” Rune crooned the words. “It is alright. Wade understands. You could see it on him tonight that he wasn’t mad.”
“That is because I haven’t told him.”
“He knows,” Rune replied with confidence. “He is an alpha wolf, he can judge mated from unmated in an eyeblink, as can Diedre. They know she hass been taken in the interim. They are just waiting for us to sort out what we are going to do about it.”
They moved off the porch and Verity remained where she was. As intriguing as their conversation had been, it didn’t help her. She had pockets full of keys and a werewolf waiting on their delivery. She ran off the porch, crossing the bare expanse of road that ran around the house, and plunged into the tall growth of the cornfield.
Although only one row of corn shielded her from where the werewolves gathered around the fire, she immediately felt better, safer, hidden. She hurried between the rows, pausing when she heard a female giggle followed by a male groan further into the corn and realised that the corn-field was also used by lovers seeking more privacy than the caravan city offered, and grimaced, hoping that sensible lovers went deeper into the rows than she.
She edged around the outer edge of caravans, listening to moments of captured domesticity within, a man reading with a pre-school child, correcting the words they were using, a woman washing dishes in the sink, a woman hanging a hand towel off a string to air-dry overnight, before she came upon a man urinating in the dark. He met Verity’s eyes as he zipped up without curiosity before making his way back towards a caravan.
People skulking through the shadows behind the caravans was commonplace, she realised, and unremarkable. She proceeded with more confidence, smothering her laughter as she imagined the many, varied reasons werewolves would sneak around in the shadows of their own caravans. Most revolved around the same reason they would slip into the corn to f-k.
She reached the tree where Maverick still sulked. “Do they leave you out here all night?” She whispered to him as she crept up to him.
In the way of werewolves, he was not surprised by her appearance, having scented, heard, or spotted her in the dark, or a combination of all, his senses keener than her own. He grinned, a flash of strong white teeth in the darkness, the pre-molars and canine teeth sharper, something that he shared, she thought, with her gargoyles, and indicative of him being a member of a predatory Other species.
“The weather is mild,” he replied as she emptied the keys onto his lap, feeling through them. “So, yes, they often leave me to sleep here.”
“That is mean,” she observed.
“That is the pack,” he replied. “In their minds, I have the choice. I could sleep warm and buried in Lauren, but as I refuse her, sleeping in the roots of the tree will sharpen my appreciation for what she offers me.”
“Does it?” She wondered.
“Sometimes,” he admitted. “My mother used to say that we have a choice in life, to take the smooth or the rough handle. I have always been one to reach for the rough, out of sheer stubbornness.”
“Is Lauren your mate?” She asked him.
“No,” he was quiet with his answer. She heard the click of the lock releasing, and he slid the cuff almost soundlessly off, laying it into the grass. “If she were, I would not refuse her.” He rose, standing to his full, impressive height. For the first time, Verity realized that he was a massive man, almost as big as Dior, and as impressively built.
He caught her hand in his. “C’mon, witchy,” he said with a wicked grin. “Let’s chase the moon and get the f-k out of this shit hole.”