“She is not your true mate,” Uven repeated.
A heavy thump sounded on the roof of the keep.
“What was that?”
The other Chrechte were staring at the ceiling, questions rising around them in a steadily increasing cacophony.
“Proof Shona is my true mate.”
Uven’s glare would have impacted Caelis at one time, but no longer.
A minute later, Eirik walked through the door to the great hall, Ciara and Audrey behind him, Eadan and Marjory each holding one of the women’s hands.
“Who is this?” Uven demanded, but the way his nostrils flared said he knew.
“This is Eirik, Prince of the Éan and protector of his race.” Caelis watched to see if Uven understood the implications of that statement.
The pack leader paled and said, “Impossible.”
“Possible,” Caelis disagreed.
“Kill him.” Uven pointed to Eirik. “He is our enemy.”
“He is my friend!” Caelis shouted now, not with a loss of control but with an absolute demand to be heard above the din. “The first to try to touch him will face my wrath.”
Uven tried to look unimpressed, but he could not hide the lines of concern creasing his brow.
Good. It was time for the selfish leader to face the consequences of his egotism.
Once again, Caelis let his voice boom throughout the room. “I claim the right to challenge you for leadership of our pack and our clan.”
“You are not MacLeod anymore.” But even the youngest babe would be able to tell Uven was grasping at a threadbare rope to safety.
“I wear our colors. I am our clan, just as everyone here is.”
And everyone in that room was Chrechte. Everyone could smell both Caelis’s and Shona’s scents mixed in Eadan, not to mention his marking scent on Shona. They could also hear and scent the truth because Uven in his conceit had done so little to hide it.
The man was so blinded by self-interest, he thought he was right.
“You assume you can dismiss our laws, murder all who oppose you and lie to any who will believe you without compunction or accountability.” Caelis drew his sword and held the hilt in front of his heart. “I challenge you.”
“You believe you can beat me, boy? You are a fool.” Uven looked around him, but even his inner circle did not step up to deny the right of Caelis to challenge for the position of alpha.
The fact that he had strong warriors standing as a living wall at his back may well have impacted that.
“You would kill me over this little human slut?” Uven barked.
“I am no slut and I am not ashamed to be human,” Shona enunciated, righteous indignation lacing her every word.
Caelis knew what Uven was trying to do.
He thought he would get under Caelis’s emotions and cause him to act hastily, but Caelis didn’t question his mate’s strength or her ability to stand firm against Uven’s stupidity.
She cared nothing for her former laird’s opinion. His words could not hurt her even if they made Caelis burn with the need to feed them back down the laird’s throat.
“You threatened him,” Shona accused Uven, but Caelis did not know what she was talking about.
Thus far, the laird had done little but puff and posture. His assertion that Caelis was not strong enough to beat him hardly constituted a threat.
She turned to Caelis. “Uven threatened my father. He told him that if you and I mated, he would kill me to give you your freedom.”
Fury washed through Caelis, but he did not understand how she knew.
“I can hear his thoughts,” she said with awe. “I…I think it’s my Chrechte gift.”
“That’s impossible. You are human,” Uven disparaged.
Shona glared at him, loathing in her eyes. “You killed your own true mate because you believed Chrechte should never mate humans. You saw my father as an abomination because he was a human born of a Chrechte-human pairing. You raped my mother to teach both my parents some twisted lesson. That is when she changed.”
Shona turned to Caelis, her eyes wet with tears. “It wasn’t me. It was Uven and what he did to her. She didn’t hate me; she wanted me away from him at any cost.”
She loved me, but he broke her. The words came across their mate bond. His actions nearly broke me, but they didn’t.
Even the fierce pride in his mate’s voice could not control the the fierce rage gripping Caelis, but then his wife sent him an image that pulled him back from the brink of disregarding Chrechte law just as Uven had done.
It was a memory so beautiful it touched him to his very souclass="underline" the sight of his son drinking at his mother’s breast for the first time.
Caelis pushed back his conriocht and reined in his wolf. “Accept my challenge, or concede and leave this holding never to return,” he bit out to Uven.
Uven paled and flinched, but then rallied and boasted self-importantly, “You will die this night, upstart.”
Caelis laughed and did not even bother to reply.
Uven shifted and attacked without warning or waiting for the formal challenge to begin.
Caelis did not bother to shift. He had been trained by the best to fight a Faol in his Chrechte form without shifting himself.
Avoiding the snapping jaws aimed at his jugular, he spun away and then turned back, landing in a fighting stance just as Talorc had taught him to do.
Uven snarled, saliva dripping from his fangs, his eyes yellow with madness Caelis used to mistake for Chrechte power. The beast lunged again, but this time Caelis was ready for him. He feinted and then lunged, taking hold of the huge wolf by its scruff and one foreleg.
Caelis twisted into a spin, waiting until he had built up enough momentum to release. Uven’s beast sailed through the air to hit the wall so hard, the crack of a beam could be heard.
Clansmen shouted, but none came to the corrupt laird’s aid.
The wolf slipped the first time it tried to stand. Caelis let Uven find his feet, though.
He would kill the old bastard with honor and take pride in his strength to do it.
Rallying, the beast growled, gnashing its teeth as it stalked toward Caelis, only veering at the last second to lunge at Shona.
Caelis roared and leapt, his warrior’s hands closing around the neck of the beast before once again tossing it into the wall.
This time, Caelis gave the bastard no chance to regroup, but simply crossed the hall in a few long leaps to land against the wolf’s chest with his knee.
He grabbed the wolf’s head and looked into Uven’s eyes. “For your sins against our people, you have been judged guilty and will die at the hands of the Cahir.”
The spark of recognition in Uven’s eyes lasted only as long as it took for Caelis to snap the wolf’s neck.
He stood, one foot pressed against the neck of the dead Chrechte. “I am your laird. I am your alpha. Accept it, or leave.”
“What if we want to challenge you?” one of Uven’s inner circle asked.
Caelis laughed just as he had at Uven’s overweening confidence. “Then challenge me.”
Two did and two more Chrechte lost their lives. Caelis had given each the option to submit or die. Both had chosen death.
Three dead Faol lay on the floor of the great hall and Caelis turned to those remaining. “Are there any others who would challenge my right to lead?”
“You haven’t even shifted into your wolf,” the young sentry who had been guarding the door said.
“Humans are not weak like Uven always claimed.”
“But you are not human.”
“And yet as a man, I defeated three Chrechte wolves.”
One man dropped to his knee, put his hand over his heart and swore fealty to Caelis. Over the next few minutes, every male in the room followed the first Faol’s example. But the women remained standing.