She sniffed, as if offended by the mere possibility it wouldn’t be delicious, but her eyelashes stayed batty, and her gaze didn’t stray much from his face.
“I guess we aren’t getting anything,” Catcher muttered behind us.
“So these are the vampires?”
A shifter stepped beside Berna—a woman who was taller and thinner, with a short shock of platinum blond hair. She was muscled and rugged, her features better described as handsome than pretty. And she all but vibrated with irritated magic.
“Twilight,” Berna confirmed, pointing at me and Ethan. “Grumpy,” she said, pointing around me at Catcher.
She looked at Mallory for a few seconds before offering judgment. “Magic,” she finally said with the smallest of smiles, and it was obvious she meant the word as a compliment.
Mallory beamed, but Berna’s friend was not impressed.
“You shouldn’t be here,” she said, pointing at each of us in turn and flinging magic with each movement. It left a sting like tiny insects. “This isn’t any of your business, and it isn’t for you.” She stuck her nose into the air, slid Berna a narrowed look. “And you shouldn’t carouse with them.”
“We were invited here,” Mallory said. I think she might have put an arm around Berna, except that Berna had already puffed out her chest and was nearly buzzing with irritation.
“Go,” she said, flicking her hands at the woman. “Go elsewhere. Too negative.”
But Berna’s dismissal only seemed to encourage the woman.
“Mark my words,” she said, that finger pointed again. “This is all doomed because we didn’t go home when we could have. We should have left Chicago months ago, and we certainly shouldn’t be here now. The Keene family should have been removed a long time ago. They are leading us right into disaster.” Her eyes flashed with self-righteous anger. That emotion seemed to be in unusually strong supply among shifters lately.
She walked away before Berna could respond to the slight, joining up with two other women who gave us suspicious looks. But Berna’s balled fists made it clear she’d had words in the hopper.
“I see you’ve met Aline.” Gabriel joined us, made a point of putting a hand on Ethan’s shoulder. Aline and her troop of friends didn’t seem impressed.
“She’s a charmer,” Ethan dryly said.
“Where have you been keeping her locked away?” Mallory asked.
“She keeps herself locked away,” Gabriel said. “She and my father butted heads and she’s transferred that hatred onto our generation.”
Berna patted his arm collegially. “You are not popular, but you are doing right.”
“Maybe,” Gabriel said, “but I’d prefer to be both.” He towered over Berna and glanced down at her from his couple of extra feet. “We ready?”
She made a sound that made clear exactly how ridiculous she thought the question. Berna, apparently, was always ready.
Gabriel smiled. “My fanged friends, you’re about to be witness to a very special treat. Tonight, you get to hear us roar.”
He lifted his head and unleashed a howl that sent shivers down my spine—and invoked the rest of the chorus. Not all shifters were wolves, and the Pack’s sounds were just as varied and cacophonous. Howls, screeches, feline roars, and screams that might have been from birds of prey. Together, as the shifters formed a circle around the totem in the middle of the meadow, they lifted their voices and sang into the night, the very sound magic.
Goose bumps lifted on my arms. Ethan slipped his hand into mine as we shared the sight and sound of it. After a moment, the howls quieted, now a backbeat instead of a melody.
Gabriel looked at Mallory appraisingly. “You ready?”
She blew out a breath with pursed lips, then loosened her shoulders and nodded, this time confidently. And although nervousness still fluttered in the air around her, it was a good kind of nervousness. Excited anticipation—not the resigned dread I’d sensed before.
Side by side, they walked forward into the circle and stood in front of the totem. A hush fell over the crowd.
I glanced at Catcher. His expression was blank, but his eyes fixed on Mal and the shifter at her side. If he was nervous for her, he wasn’t showing it.
His hair pushed behind his ears, Gabriel looked more like a biker or boxer than Pack Apex, the king of his people, but there was no doubt in the set of his shoulders and grave expression that he stood as leader of them all.
“Tonight,” he said, hands on his hips, “we celebrate the Pack, the mothers, the sires. We celebrate our founding, our brothers, Romulus and Remus, and our future. We celebrate the wild things. We have voted to remain in the realm of humans and vampires. That decision was not unanimous, but it was a decision to stay, to join, to bind together with our brothers and sisters and become stronger in the binding.”
He looked at Mallory. “There are those among us who have erred, deeply and significantly. Who have wounded the world and broken themselves. The worst of them lose themselves in their errors. The best of them crawl back, one foot at a time, and seek to amend their breaches. That is the way of the brave.”
Gabe looked back at the crowd. “This woman knows only of the magic of sorcerers and vampires. Tonight, we sing to her of the rest of it. Of the truth of it. Of the magic the earth has to offer.”
Gabriel reached out his hand. After sucking in a breath, Mallory linked her fingers with his. She closed her eyes as magic began to spill out and through the shifters again. I closed my eyes and savored the hot rush of raw, unmitigated power. It was the life force of the earth, called up by the predators who gathered together to celebrate their community.
And then it transformed.
Mallory must have unlocked some magical gate of her own, because a new stream of magic—younger, greener, brighter—began to mix with the magic of the Pack. Her hair lifted like an indigo halo, and her lips curled into a smile of satisfaction and contentment. Of relief.
Together, the magicks swirled and danced around us, invisible but tangible, like an electric breeze. This wasn’t defensive or offensive magic. It wasn’t used to gather information, for strategy or diplomacy, or to fight a war against a supernatural enemy.
It simply was.
It was fundamental, inexorable. It was nothing and everything, infinity and oblivion, from the magnificent furnace of a star to the electrons that hummed in an atom. It was life and death and everything in between, the urge to fight and grow and swim and fly. It was the cascade of water across boulders, the slow-moving advance of mountain glaciers, the march of time.
The shifters moved around the circle, grabbing our hands and pulling us in, connecting us to the magic. Magic flowed between us like we were transistors in a circuit, connecting the shifters to one another and us to them. We moved in concentric circles around the center totem, heat rising until the air was as warm as a summer’s day, until sweat beaded on my forehead.
This magic was lustful, almost drowsy with sensuality, and I felt my eyes silver and my fangs descend in an answering call. This was the magic of feasting and fucking, of savoring the blood of a kill and calling the Pack to dine.
Mallory’s eyes were open now, her hair damp with sweat, her body shaking with power, but her hand was still linked to Gabriel’s, and she smiled with more contentment than I’d seen from her in months.
A year ago, I’d assumed my relationship with Mallory would continue just as it always had—that we’d be friends who shared silly inside jokes, griped about our jobs, dreamt about our futures.
And then I became a vampire, and she discovered she was a sorceress.