Unhappily Ever After

Chapter 79 - The Close

It was a nice morning for a murder. The sun was shining, the birds were singing in the trees, and it was warm enough to go without a jacket despite it being late March. I stood beside the border of Silver Lake with my hands in my pockets, and I smiled to myself. Yes. It was a nice morning. The sunlight was turning the canopy into a curtain of glittering emeralds.

"Ready," Tom said through the link.

"Ready," each of my raiders echoed, one by one, and I counted them off. I had seven raiding teams wrapped around the territory. That meant more than two hundred rogues, so we would outnumber the flockies handsomely.

"Okay," I said aloud. "Slowly does it, boys. We don't want to scare the bastards, do we?"

The patrol was coming. I could see them through the trees as flashes of pelt. Twigs snapped beneath their paws, and the carpet of rotting leaves made a distinct squelching sound. They weren't bothering to be quiet. Why should they? This was their land, and we were supposed to run from them. We were supposed to be afraid.

They padded closer. It took them a long time to notice me, standing alone with my toes on Silver Lake territory and my heels on the bone fence. When they did, they recoiled, darting away in their shock. I just grinned at them. Watching. Waiting.

It was only a matter of time before they got their act together and mind-linked for help. Or attacked. If I was them, I'd have done the latter. It was five against one, and I hadn't even shifted. But they were young, they were cautious, and they had seen the wanted posters.

Their eyes glazed over. Sighing, I reached for their minds. It was a lazy, half-hearted tendril of thought. If they'd had walls, I would have been knocked backwards, but they didn't, of course. The Alphas didn't teach the average pack member how to defend their minds so that they could be controlled if necessary. It made it easy for me to stroll inside and begin sifting through the contents.

I was looking for memories of a certain afternoon, nearly twelve years past. I'd seen glimpses of it before — mist and slate and screams which had gone unheard. These men were too young to have taken part, but I checked anyway. We were going to be thorough today.

I didn't find anything. As I was leaving their minds, I knocked them unconscious with half a thought. Then I opened my eyes and started walking. It was a few miles to the pack house, and we didn't have all day. The raiders picked their way through the trees behind me, a handful of them pausing just long enough to muzzle the unconscious wolves and chain them to trees.

"To your left," a voice said from behind me, and I adjusted my course accordingly. "Just a little. Yes, perfect."

Maggie. She had the baby nestled in her arms, but it didn't make her any less terrifying. She'd come here for blood, same as me. She was also our guide, given that she'd lived her entire life in this pack. She knew every sapling and every stone.

"How far?" I asked her.

She harrumphed. "For you? Twenty minutes. For my old legs, closer to thirty."

"It's not too late to go back to the cars. Once we've cleared the road, you could—"

Her answering glare was nothing short of disgusted. I was wise enough to trail off.

"At least give me the kid, then..."

Surprisingly, she obliged. Babies weren't very heavy until you had to carry them two miles through dense forest. Lauren Saunders was nearly four months old now, but she was still smaller than Rhys. Quieter, too. She stared at me with a pair of huge grey eyes, and she made an expression which looked suspiciously like a frown. Maybe she knew I was about to hand her back to the flockies. Maybe she missed her sister. Or maybe she was just hungry.