Heir To The Pack (The Cursed Pack Book 1) (15 page)

Elaine and Marjie had better
not give him any shit about not marrying Irina. But with Annie and Jack here, he
had other things to think about.

He didn’t want to think
about what would happen with Annie. She’d been clear enough. She wanted a
human. To be a goddamned stepfather to
his
son. The thought nearly made him vomit.

He rubbed the rough
oatmeal soap vigorously over his aching body, giving himself a mini-massage. It
couldn’t wash away the tiredness, or the irritation.

Wrapping himself in a
towel, he looked for the jeans he’d shed last night. Where had they gone? Aha,
the laundry basket. Time for a fresh pair. He paused, the jeans triggering a
thought. Annie must have been cleaning up after him when she found the box. Great.
Now he felt like even more of a bastard.

Actually, he felt like
he’d cheated on her. And that was the most ridiculously overtired thought he’d
had so far. He needed to get his act together, get some clothes on, and take
his family to the Oracle.

When he returned to the
kitchen, Annie sat at one of the kitchen counter stools, eating cereal and
supervising Jack while he smeared his own breakfast all over the place. She
looked cute in a checked shirt this morning. Almost like she lived on the
ranch.

“Good morning,” he said,
and it came out in a growl.

She kept her gaze on her
breakfast bowl. “Mmm.”

At least Jack was looking
well. His cheeks glowed with color, some of it jam, but some of it natural. Dash
tousled his hair, making him squeal and giggle. Annie continued to keep her
eyes downcast. When would she bring up the Irina debacle? Any time would be too
soon, in his book.

Gaelan bustled about,
making coffee, unloading the dishwasher. “Do you want more coffee?” he said.

Dash cast an eye over his
busy domesticity as Gaelan wiped down the counter tops. “What are you now, the
den mother?”

“I’m the closest thing you
have, buddy, so you’d better appreciate me.”

Dash threw himself into
the chair next to Jack. “Yes, I’ll have coffee.” Gale raised an eyebrow at him.
“Please.”

The remainder of breakfast
passed in a tense silence, with the exception of Jack proclaiming that he was “done”
but required “candy”.

“I don’t think so, sport. Sorry.
Besides, we have places to go, people to see.” Dash set the boy down on the
kitchen floor.

“Ready?”

Annie nodded.

The three of them left the
suite, Jack holding on to Annie’s little finger. As the doors swung open, this
morning’s honor guards snapped to attention. He noted they, too, looked the
worse for wear after a night’s hunting. Perhaps they shouldn’t have stayed out
so late, but he’d wanted to find some decent prey for the visitors. The weather
was unusually warm, and the scenting conditions had been terrible. He may as
well have taken his guests to a steakhouse.

The guards fell in behind
them. Annie turned her head to survey the group. Her face grew pinched.

“Are they going to follow
that closely all the time?” She spoke in a stage whisper. Dash neglected to
point out that the guards being what they were, their hearing was much better
than hers, and they could hear every whisper, no matter how quiet.

“Yep,” he said as brightly
as he could. “It’s all part of the job.”

“I suppose I should be
grateful we aren’t being tailed by the paparazzi.”

“Where are we supposed to
go?” he asked, deliberately changing the subject.

“The greenhouses? I assume
you know where they are.”

“Sure. She likes to—”

“—visit the roses.
Michael told me.”

“Michael brought the
message?” Dash cast his mind back. He hadn’t seen the big man at the hunt last
night. Surprising, but apparently he’d had a reason. “Did he say anything else?”

She shook her head and
continued walking. Progress was slow. Jack couldn’t walk as fast as they could.

“Do you want me to carry
him?”

“I walk,” Jack said. “No
carry.”

“Okay,” Dash said. At
least one of them was talking to him.

He led the way downstairs
and out a side door, into the garden. It wasn’t exactly a palace garden. Lawns,
some trees, nothing really fancy. The sole exception was the greenhouses out
back. Dash’s mother had built them for a place to grow the vintage roses she
adored. Keeping them under glass was the only way to keep them alive through a
Montana winter. They were all he had left of his mother.

He opened the door for
Annie and Jack, and they preceded him into the greenhouse. He signaled to the
guards to wait outside, and stepped in, the spring-loaded door snapping shut
behind him.

Although the air outside
was warm this morning, the greenhouse was significantly warmer and stiflingly humid.
Sweat prickled on his scalp. The roses and other greenery pushed in on them
from all sides—thorns catching at his clothes, the scents of dank things growing
clouding his thoughts. The gravel underfoot crunched loudly as they made their
way deeper into the lush maze. Many of the plants were thick with buds. They
were ripening, ready, and waiting.

Annie stopped to pick Jack
up and put him on her hip. He began sucking his thumb and adopted his favorite
pose, resting his head on her shoulder, eyes wide and blue.

Dash raised a hand to pat
the boy’s back gently. “Is he tired?”

“I don’t want him to get
into anything he shouldn’t,” she said. “It’s pretty in here.” She glanced
around and shuddered. “Close, though.”

“My mom loved it,” Dash
said. He shrugged. “It’s pretty, but I always found it kind of menacing in
here. Like something was going to pounce out on me from one of the bushes. You
know?”

They came to the clearing
in the middle of the greenhouse. As he’d expected, the Oracle awaited them
here, Michael as always by her side.

She stood by the water in
a fake stone pool. A water feature, he supposed it was called. Weird thing in
an indoor garden, in his opinion, but what did he know. He squeezed Annie’s
hand.

*
         
*
         
*

The Oracle stared down
into the pool. Annie wondered if she was completely blind. Her gaze lifted to
track Annie and Dash as they approached, and she realized that yes, the woman
could see her, whether with her eyes or some other kind of vision.

Michael, standing behind
the Oracle’s left shoulder, smiled in welcome. “Good morning, Dash, Annie. This
must be Jack.”

Jack strained against her
arms until she set him down. “Splash!” he said, standing on tiptoe to peer into
the shallow pool.

“No, baby. Not right now.”

He grizzled and whined,
and she shushed him gently, patting his back. It was too early in the morning
for him. He’d always been a night owl, and he tended to be cranky when she got
him out of bed early.

“You are here about the
boy.” The old woman’s words fell between them, her voice resonant with age.

She took a deep breath. “Yes.
He hasn’t been well.”

“Doing better since he’s
been here?”

Annie thought about it. “He
has, actually.” She held tight to the spark of hope in her heart. Maybe she
didn’t need this woman’s help at all. Maybe this childhood illness was just one
of those things, and it, too, would pass, as with many of the trials of
parenthood.

“It is the pack magic,”
the Oracle announced. “It sustains him for a little longer.”

The Oracle’s sentence
didn’t make sense. “For a little longer? What do you mean?”

“Your son is a member of
the Lost Pack.”

Beside her, Dash drew in a
fast breath, between his teeth, and held very still.

“What does that mean?”

“We thought they had all
died out. But I have consulted with the spirits. He is definitely one of the Lost.”

“How is that even
possible?” Dash blurted.

Annie chose her words
carefully, and spoke as calmly as she could, not wanting to frighten Jack. “Could
someone take a step back, and explain what this means?”

Dash turned to her. “The Lost
Pack was cursed. They lost their wolves, and could no longer change. The males
all died, and the females were killed or shunned.”

“How primitive,” Annie
said. “But obviously they didn’t all die.”

“Well, you’re here.”

She opened her mouth, and
stopped with it still open. Doubt followed by confusion filled her brain, and
she sank down on to a nearby stone bench. “Are you saying...”

“You’re not human. You’re
one of us, and that is why Jack could be born at all.” Dash pulled her into a
hug, his big hands tight around her. “That’s amazing. It’s incredible that we
even met.”

“I’m a...werewolf?”

The earth beneath her feet
was the only thing she could focus on. She concentrated very hard on pressing
her shoes against it, in case someone should try and pull that out from under
her as well. She tried to remember something vaguely meditative from a long-ago
yoga class, but none of it came back to her. Instead, she tried to take a deep
breath, but it came out somewhere between a gulp and a squeak.

“Mama made a funny sound!”
Jack pronounced, giggling. Immediately distracted, he went back to poking at
the surface of the water feature with a stick he’d found somewhere.

God, she was sweating like
a pig. Her vision turned to grey around her as she stared.

“Are you all right?” Dash
sat down next to her and put an arm around her shoulders. It was heavy. “You’ve
gone white.”

“Right,” she said at last,
her voice tinny in her ears. “Only natural. Vasovagal syncope.”

“She’s not speaking
English.” The voice beside her seemed to emerge from a very long tunnel.

“I mean,” she said, “I’m
going to faint.” And she did.

CHAPTER
TWELVE

Someone jostled her. “Don’t
bump me,” she muttered. “Can’t you see I’m trying to sleep?”

“I’m putting you down on
the bed. Good girl,” Dash’s deep voice said in her ear. “Now lie still, don’t
try and stand up. Do you want a glass of water?”

“I’m not thirsty.” As she
said the words, she realized they were untrue. “Yes, a big one.”

“You're still talking
nonsense,” he said. “You did that before.”

“That wasn’t nonsense, it
was Latin.” She sighed, snuggling her head down into a pillow, and let her eyes
drift open. Dash knelt beside her, his gaze on a level with her own. “Where’s
Jack?”

“Daisy is with him in the
living room,” Dash said. “Are you feeling better?”

“I’m fine.” There was an
odd empty feeling in her stomach, and her clothes clung to her. She rolled over
on to her back, and the memories burst back into her brain. “Oh God. I fainted,
didn’t I?”

“Yes.” He remained
kneeling at her side.

She turned her face away
to hide the tears that filled her eyes. “I’m so sorry.” How humiliating. Especially
given the...bizarreness of the news she’d received. She ought to have laughed
it off, except it all made a horrible kind of sense. Her life had turned into
an HP Lovecraft story, full of terrifying truths that turned the world upside
down.

She was a werewolf. Something
that ought not to exist. But the logic of it was unmistakable. Humans and
werewolves were not the same species, and they couldn't interbreed. Logically
then, she had to be a werewolf. But…her whole family couldn't be from the Lost
Pack, could they? There had to be human blood mixed in, especially if there
weren't any living males. It didn't make sense.

But in this magical world,
a different kind of logic applied. If she was, indeed, part of this Lost Pack,
then she was betwixt and between, neither true human or true werewolf. And on
some level, she was werewolf enough to have a child with Dash. And human enough
not to have known she had werewolf blood.

Should she have known what
she was? Were there signs she had missed? Did her mom know something? No, Daisy
would have said something. She was terrible at secrets.
 
Was it from her mom's side, or from her
father's? Daisy was the black sheep of the family, but Annie knew little about
her father. She only had a handful of photographs. He'd dropped dead of a heart
attack and she'd never known him. He didn't look like a werewolf, in the
photographs. He looked like a physicist, which he was. Beard, glasses, socks
with sandals.

This was going to take
some time to process. And Annie knew she'd be lying awake at night, trying to
figure out how she'd missed that she was different. She should have known. How
could she not have known?

Then she remembered the
most important thing.

“Jack's illness. Did the
Oracle tell us how to treat it?”

He took her hand, squeezed
it between both of his, and her heart dropped even further if that were
possible. “It’s a curse, not an illness.”

Irritated, she tried to
pull her hand away from him. “What does that even mean?” He held tight, and she
turned to meet his gaze. Those eyes were still pools of blue, in a tanned face
turned grey.

“There’s no pill he can take
and get better. There may be magic. There may not. But if there is, there will
be a price. With magic, there’s always a price.”

“You told me that before.”

“Indeed. The Oracle didn’t
tell me anything else. You kind of broke things up when you passed out. We’ll
have to speak to her again, to see if she knows how the curse might be broken.”

Annie lay back down on the
bed. “I’m not stupid. If this curse wiped out an entire pack, it can’t be easy
to break. Perhaps even impossible.” Her vision blurred again, and she pressed
fists to her eyes. She’d been strong through this whole thing, hoped, prayed
Jack’s problem would be fixed somehow. First she’d tried science. When that
hadn’t worked, she’d somehow accepted magic in the belief it could help her. For
the first time, she knew what was wrong with Jack, and for the first time, she
acknowledged that she might not be able to fix it.

She wanted to scream, to
smash a window, to curse the universe, the cruelty of nature, science, and
magic altogether. Instead, keeping her hands against her eyes to hold back the
flood, she said in her calmest voice, the only thing she could think of to say.
“Dash, he might die.”

“Open your eyes.”

She swallowed, and turned
to look at him, dropping her hands from her face, her fingers releasing their
tension.

His eyes were icy blue in
that haggard face, his jaw locked. “He might. But I swear to you, if there’s
anything that can be done, anything that can be given, anything that can be
willed, any sacrifice that can be made to save him, I will do it. I swear it.”

The room seemed to darken
as he took his oath, and she wondered if the oath of the prince of wolves had
some magic to it.

She sat up and pushed
herself to her feet. “I would give anything to save him. You understand me? Anything.”

His fingers tightened on
hers, agonizing in their strength. “We will do this together.” From where he
knelt before her, he looked up into her eyes, and pulled down on her hand
gently, drawing her down to him. “Whatever it takes.”

She held still, staring into
his eyes, although she didn’t know what she was looking for. She had his oath. Now
all she needed was a cure—no, a way to break the curse.

As she came down to the
ground with him, his gaze traveled to her mouth. They were knee to knee,
although not quite shoulder to shoulder, despite her height. The fact that he
was a few inches taller than her had been one of the many things that had drawn
her to him in the first place.

He lifted his free hand to
her face, touching her cheek with his fingers. “Whatever it takes,” he
repeated.

His fingers left a trail
of warmth where they touched, and she breathed in his hot animal scent. Her
body betrayed her, and she swayed toward him, drawn like a magnet to true
north.

Seemingly without volition
her lips brushed against his, a kiss, a seal, a promise that sent shivers
rippling from her lips through her face and down into her body. The kiss drew
an aching sensation out between her legs, transporting her back in time.

This was how he’d kissed
her that first time, in the colorful fiesta bar at the resort. They’d both been
alone, tipsy, and talked nonsense half the night while they watched each
other’s mouths, learned the rhythm of each other’s movements, and he’d kissed
her, like this. Feather-light.

He withdrew his lips, and
she swayed toward him again, bereft of his touch. His brows drew together in
the middle, and his mouth turned down at the corners.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “You
don’t want me to kiss you.”

She hadn’t, yesterday. Things
had changed, although that was the understatement of the century. His touch
comforted her, but there was still this epic thing between them. Jack’s
illness.

She dared to think of a
day when he might be well again, and she might be free to move on. But he
wouldn’t stop being a werewolf.

Maybe that wasn’t an
obstacle anymore, if she really was a werewolf. There had to be an upside,
right?

She choked off a laugh. “You
managed to defeat one of my arguments.”

Dash looked confused,
opened his mouth and closed it again.

“I said we were from different
worlds. Apparently that’s not actually true.”

He took a moment to work
through that, and the frown lines faded from his face as he did. Finally, he
smiled, and it got broader by the second.

“So that means you do want
to sleep with me?”

She gave him a light
shove. “You know, for a wolf, you are such a man, sometimes.”

“Often.” He growled
playfully. “Besides, I made you smile.”

He had. She’d needed a
distraction from the horrors of the day. Her mind turned back to their
troubles.

“Hey,” he said softly, placing
a hand under her chin. “We’ll get through this. Trust me.”

“I don’t have a choice.”

A tap echoed at the door,
and immediately afterward it creaked open. “Dash,” Gaelan’s voice said, “I need
you out here.”

“It’s not a great time,”
Dash said, still touching Annie’s face.

“The Russians are here,
and they’re demanding a council of war.”

Annie didn’t even know
what that meant, but it couldn’t be a good thing.

*
         
*
         
*

Dash entered the suite’s
private dining room, with Gaelan close behind. Having the Russians here in his
suite made him uncomfortable, but his guards lined the walls, ready to act at a
nod or gesture.

The Russians sat at one
end of the table. Ivan, the alpha, was in the center. Their tribe witch sat to
his right, and his second to his left. The second slouched low in his chair,
picking at his long yellow nails. The witch—Dash couldn’t for the life of
him remember her name—looked nervously around, as though she’d rather be
anywhere but here. Irina was absent.

Ivan sat relaxed in his
chair, big hands spread on the table in front of him. Like Irina, he was white
blond, and had the refined features of an aristocrat, which hid the mind of a
thug. They were both beautiful, and Dash trusted neither of them.

“Dash,” Ivan said. “I wish
I could say it’s a pleasure to speak with you. But I am very disappointed. Very,
very disappointed, indeed.”

Dash sat at the other end
of the table. Although it put him in opposition to Ivan, he would not take up
the submissive position along the table’s side. Gaelan hovered before lowering
himself into the chair at Dash’s right.

“What’s your problem,
Ivan?” Dash chose his words deliberately. If Ivan had come to pick a fight, he
would give him a fight. The wolves around his town house had pissed him off. He
didn’t know if the attempted kidnappers, whoever threw the Molotov cocktail, or
the wolves who’d chased them on the freeway were Ivan’s men, but he was tired
of bullshit and aching for a fight.

“You have broken faith
with us, my friend.” Ivan sat back in his chair, and began inspecting his
fingernails as if he didn’t have a care in the world.

Dash waited. Ivan would
get around to it, in a minute. He wasn’t going to beg him for the reason.

“You and Irina have been
promised to each other for a long time.”

“There was no formal promise.
You know that. No betrothal.”

“Ah, but our families had
an understanding. Your father and my father. They discussed it many times, what
this alliance would do for our families. I am, as I say, very disappointed in
how you do business with us.”

Dash closed his eyes. He’d
known there would be trouble with Irina. There always was.

“We thought,” Ivan went
on, “that the formal pledge ceremony would take place at this Gathering. And
now, my sister, she is very upset. I don’t like it when she’s upset. You understand?”

“I have not done anything
to break faith with the Russian pack,” Dash said.

“Mating with someone else
when Irina thought you were hers? I’d say that counts.”

Dash couldn’t explain the
sequence of events to Ivan. When he’d slept with Annie, he’d thought she was
human, and could never be more than a fling. He couldn’t denigrate her by
telling Ivan that. He’d had no intention of fathering a child with her at the
time, but what was done was done.

There was something he
could say, though. “Whatever our fathers discussed, any potential arrangement
between Irina and myself would have been just that. An arrangement. I’m sure
she’s had other lovers, and I’m sure she expected me to as well. It’s the
twenty-first century, even for wolves.”

“She was very careful not
to get with pup. She saved herself to go through the pain, danger, and
indignity of bearing you heirs. You should have honored that commitment.”

Dash could hardly tell
Ivan that Jack had been an accident. Everything about this situation was awkward.
He had no romantic relationship with Annie, and despite his joke to her, he was
convinced she had no real interest in having one with him. Not until their son
was safe, and likely not even after that. But he’d have at least some chance.

If Annie hadn’t turned up
on his doorstep, he most likely would have gone ahead with a loveless marriage
to Irina. Everyone expected the Lycaon to mate for political advantage rather
than love. He would have tried hard to give her a pup to take over the throne
when he was gone and to cement good relations between the Big Sky pack and the
Russians. But now, everything had changed. He had to work things out with
Annie, and even if she wouldn’t have him, he had more important things to
attend to than getting married, like saving Jack’s life.