Dire Needs: A Novel of the Eternal Wolf Clan (12 page)

Rifter knew the Weres were in far more danger than the Dires were—and since the Dires were sworn to protect them, they knew the fate of the pack leader who sat in front of them in the hospital bed. Sincere and strong, but inexperienced, and facing the fight of his life. “We’ll need to make some confirmation of our own about all of this,” he said, and Jinx nodded.

“I’m going with you,”
Liam said, and Rifter stared at the man who would be king.

“Tomorrow night. Tonight, you rest and heal.”

Liam nodded, seemingly satisfied.

“I’ll keep an eye on him tonight with Cyd—I don’t think we’ll need to call in Doc E,” Jinx said.

“And Gwen’s here. She’s awesome.” Liam looked pale, but his eyes were bright.

“You saved her, she saved your life, so you’re even,” Rifter told him.

“Still can’t believe you brought her back here,” Vice muttered.

“We should get her the hell out of town and warn her to forget all about you,” Jinx added, stepping in front of Vice. Liam just watched all of them carefully.

“And let the weretrappers take her?” Rifter asked.

“Why would they want her?” Jinx looked confused, the way Rifter felt.

“Because of me. I can’t leave her vulnerable,” Rifter said, trying not to roar.

“At some point, she’s going to figure out the difference between dream and reality,” Liam said, and they all turned to him.

Rifter had to admit, the young wolf had balls of steel, because he didn’t flinch at all. In the presence of the Dires, most young wolves pissed their pants at the very least.

He was most definitely Linus’s son.

“So why did you go out of your way to help her?” Vice demanded of Liam, still not seeing the benefits of any human.

“She was in trouble—Cordelia was coming. And she’s sick…” Liam trailed off as if he couldn’t quite explain his actions.

Rifter interjected. “
He probably sensed her seizures the way I did.”

“Great, we can rent ourselves out as seizure-alert wolves if we need scratch,” Vice said.

“Why wouldn’t we be able to sense seizures?” Jinx asked, ignoring Vice, which wasn’t easy to do. “I mean, it’s not like we’ve had the opportunity, but it makes sense that we could.”

“In all these years, I’ve never scented a seizing human,” Rifter said. “But at first… it smelled like a shifting wolf.”

“I have—and it does scent like a wolf shift. Difficult to tell them apart,” Stray added.

Rifter frowned. “That can’t be good.”

“It’s not like we’re supposed to be out do-gooding individual humans. We have our own problems,” Vice pointed out. “What good can a human with no gifts of her own bring to us?”

“She’s a doctor,” Rifter reminded him.

“Human. She bleeds,” Vice argued.

“So do you.”

“Cut us both and see which one survives.”

Rifter didn’t move, but his tone was deadly enough when he said, “I’d make sure you didn’t.”

“So we’ve got a wolf with a target on his head living with us. We’re housing a human, and Harm’s back. Merry fucking Christmas,” Vice muttered, but he held up his hands in mock surrender.

“We’ll have to train him if he has any hope of controlling the New York pack again,” Jinx said quietly, his gaze on Liam.

“Oh fuck.” Vice threw the hand-rolled smoke he’d lit seconds earlier to the ground. “Are we running a halfway house for these wolves?”

“
What the fuck do you think you are?”

“I’m way more civilized.” He bared his teeth even as he said it, exposing the gleaming white, longer-than-normal canines.

Vice was telling the truth—as odd as it seemed, Weres had no control over the wolf they became when they turned, making them hard to reason with. Brother Wolves could control a turned Were, but the Dires hadn’t wanted to take control of the werepacks. They had enough trouble with the weretrappers and the witches.

Vice ran a frustrated hand through his hair and pointed at Jinx. “You’ll have to train wolf boy the way you’re training the twins. I’ve heard three are as easy to handle as two.”

“I’ll just bet,” Jinx muttered. “And this one’s all yours.”

“Seriously?” Rifter eyed Jinx. “That’s not going to end well.”

“Yeah, but for which one?” Jinx asked with a smile.

C
ordelia burned.

Seb’s own forearms and chest blistered with painful, third-degree burns, and for a half hour, he writhed on the floor, unable to do more than scream.

He’d hated her with the same intensity he felt during her dying moments—Cordelia had always known that her younger brother couldn’t stand her. This blood-bond binding spell was her way of ensuring he kept his word and worked with the weretrappers after she was gone. She’d lost her immortality when she’d sold her soul.

He’d felt her die earlier—felt the sharp, stabbing pain at his throat and lost the power of speech. Whatever Were had claimed her life had surely taken a piece of his as well. And although the last breath left Cordelia’s body long before she burned in the fire, her spirit hadn’t surrendered until her bones were ash, a long and tortuous process that left him prone on the floor and barely breathing.

It took hours, but Seb literally died and regenerated behind the closed door.

When he woke, the blisters and pain were gone, and so was his sister.

Making Rifter pay had never been his top priority. It
would have to be now. It was the only way his coven, who’d joined in with the weretrappers—and the trappers themselves—would have it.

Seb had to remind himself that there were still good witches out there. Hopefully, the majority of the white witches would remain strong. Once the lure of the weretrappers and their promised power began to spread, it could cause complete chaos. Which, of course, was the weretrappers’ plan. Start in one state, take it over, and once they controlled the New York financial markets, there wouldn’t be much that could stop them from continuing to dominate other states.

There was a time he’d considered the Dires—especially Rifter—as more of a family than he’d ever had. His own had been long abandoned—he’d left his coven at twenty for refusing to practice the black arts. While it interested him as a student of serious magic, he knew the consequences. Black arts could turn men—even witches—mad. He wasn’t willing to risk it, not the way Cordelia had.

When she first approached him about coming back to the coven, he knew he wouldn’t be able to resist for long. As powerful as he was, black magic was much harder to outrun.

Good might prevail over evil in the end, but most of the time, it was pure dumb luck. And so he’d taken off and he’d run. Figured that maybe splitting entirely from the wolves would be enough to satisfy the coven that he was completely neutral.

It wasn’t. The witches sent demons who chased him throughout the world, and Seb lost track of time, spent the majority of the last six years running, living like a hermit, trying to find someone he could pass his powers on to.

The only way an Adept, or master witch, like him
could die was to release his power into an unsuspecting child. Then he would become mortal and he could kill himself.

But to burden someone else—there was no way. One other witch he knew had done so. The rumor was that she’d branded a young girl the weretrappers now watched carefully, waiting for her powers to unfold. Passing powers on was such a risky proposition at best, and if Seb did so to the wrong person…

No.
He could trust himself only to do the least amount of harm. And that was still, unfortunately, a great deal.

The binding spell his coven placed on him ensured he was bound to them, which meant he was bound to help the weretrappers as well. And so he worked spells that would help his coven and avoid the searing pain he endured every time a witch in his coven, or a weretrapper working with them, was killed by a wolf.

Now, after months of searing pain, he was beginning to break apart. He may have given his mental strength too much credit. By selling his soul in return for access to the black arts, he’d allowed the dark side to own him. He was no better than any of the demons he tried to get to do his bidding.

Their plan was so horrifying. He knew the Dires would survive, or maybe they wouldn’t, but there was no way to let them in on the scope of everything without hurting himself beyond repair.

Beyond the curse, the coven threatened him with possession if he tried to stop or leak information to the Dires. Possession was worse; to not be in control, to do irreparable harm—he couldn’t bear the thought.

His immortality was also now a curse, which the coven felt was a fitting punishment for abandoning them for the Dire wolves. And he was none too slowly going insane, losing any sense of humanity he had. The pain of
death each time was nearly enough to make him renounce any and all wolves.

Seb was definitely being forced, but that detail wouldn’t matter to Rifter. To the wolf, loyalty was everything, no matter the cost. But if Seb hadn’t taken this curse, the coven would’ve given it to Rifter. And although it was impossible to tell if a cast spell would take on a Dire wolf, Seb wasn’t willing to take that chance.

Seb would never tell Rifter any of this because there was nothing Rifter could have done to free him. Pain was a powerful motivator—pain without the hope of any end could drive a man insane, no matter how strong he was.

The less the Dires knew of the black arts—or had ties to it—the better. It was the best Seb could do for his old friends before he was roped into trying to take them down the road to hell.

He was sure Rifter would have done the same for his wolves. Even as he thought of his onetime friend, the man he’d served proudly next to in the Navy, his body rejected the thought.

The Dires were memories of a distant time he did not want to be reminded of, because he’d been happy then. Today he knew happiness was the biggest illusion of them all.

Finally, he opened the door, behind which the weretrapper named Marlin Shimmin—aka Mars—waited none too patiently. He had to have heard Seb’s screams but was at least smart enough not to mention it.

“The wolves are growing in number,” he told Mars without a greeting.

“So are we,” Mars snapped back.

In reality, the trapper groups were spread too thin to be truly effective. They were attempting to gain force and rebuild the center the Dires blew up after Rifter and Rogue escaped, where the scientists could continue to
experiment on wolves. Most of the trappers’ smaller efforts to that end had been semisuccessful in pushing their agenda forward. A few well-placed Weres in local government offices they could control was an experiment that was going well, but now Mars wanted more. His ultimate plan was to use the demons Seb raised to possess other government officials, no matter how many times Seb told him that demons were tricky to control once let loose.

Mars told him it would be Seb’s head if they weren’t controlled. Seb knew he wasn’t kidding.

Mars’s relatives traced back to Viking times, to those slaughtered by the Dire wolves. Those early weretrappers didn’t have the vision the group had today. Back then it was all about vengeance and honor—keeping the world safe.

At first the goal of these humans had simply been to destroy wolves. Over time, that morphed into a power play in which the leader and his followers wanted far more.

Today it was about glomming all the power and glory for their own group, and using the wolves to do so seemed the perfect revenge.

The weretrappers were now a paramilitary organization with human volunteers trained in the art of capturing and killing Weres. They’d been trying to do the same to the Dires, but that was a pipe dream. The methods they used, and their purposes, were secrets handed down over hundreds of years. During that time, they’d also kept the fact that there were such things as witches and werewolves to themselves, propagating myths and making sure that no traces of these real-life creatures were discovered. In time, to avoid detection, the individual weretrapping groups were forced to become as insular as the wolves they hunted.

“The
world is too crowded,” Mars would tell them. “We need a simpler way of life. A better way to protect our country’s boundaries, since the politicians can’t seem to do their jobs.”

He would always get applause at rallies when he brought politics into the mix.

Currently, their main trapper cells were in California, Texas and Wisconsin, and of course the biggest group was in New York, mirroring where the largest Were packs were located. Smaller factions were scattered throughout other states as well, mainly wolf watchers who scouted areas and scoured the Internet for any chatter about wolf sightings from ghost-hunting groups and the like.

The Dires were the most slippery, despite their size. That was until Harm’s true Dire nature was discovered, thanks to Cordelia. She’d followed Harm to his current lover’s house and discovered that while the woman was human, Harm certainly wasn’t.

Humans had far too much greed and hubris—and the kind of power Mars wanted would drive him into the ground faster than he realized. Everyone around Seb was using black magic to take things further and making deals with demons. If they thought they had control over their decisions, they were truly insane.

“We need the girl,” Mars seethed now. He’d been practicing black arts with the coven for years, and he’d sold his soul for paranormal powers. That had turned him over the past year into an entity Seb no longer recognized. “And we need the Dires.”

“The house spell cannot be reversed,” Seb reminded him. “They’re protected.”

Mars moved closer to him, and Seb forced himself not to shudder under the man’s touch. Mars massaged his
shoulders, and the pain of the regeneration made it ache more than comfort.

The demon who wrestled with Mars for control of the man’s body loved him, wanted him, body and soul. Sexually. Seb understood because the lure of his blood bond was now much like the fateful siren song. Like Vice, the Dire, no one could resist.

At one time, Seb thought he could use it to his advantage, to get Mars to help him leave the coven if he promised to help with other dark magic not related to the wolves, but the curse Cordelia placed on him wouldn’t allow it.