Bloodfire (Blood Destiny) (5 page)

“You will do as I say.
 
Until we know what we are after, we
cannot afford to let this happen again.”
 
She reached out and gently touched my shoulder.
 
I fought the urge to not pull away.
 
“You will get your revenge, Mackenzie.
 
As will we all.”

“Amen to that,” murmured Tom.

From somewhere inside the keep the phone
rang.
 
Julia seemed to slump ever so
slightly.
 
“That’ll be the
Brethren.
 
I called them and left a
message as soon as John was found.” She tightened her grip on me for just a
second and then left to answer it.

I sat back down.
 
I couldn’t avoid the Brethren now, no
matter what happened.
 
The Way
stated that whenever a pack alpha passed away, the Brethren had to be present
to ensure that the move of power to another was without incident.
 
Way Directive number
forty-three.
 
Apparently, in
years gone by, there had been bloody battles between potential successors, with
candidates whose Voice manifested being mysteriously bumped off at appropriate
– or, depending on whose side you were on, inappropriate - moments.
 
The rites and formalities to properly
acknowledge a new alpha traditionally took three days.
 
I could only hope that the Brethren
wouldn’t stick around for longer to try to investigate into John’s death.
 
I could probably fool them for a short
period of time with Julia’s lotion but I doubted I’d be able to keep up the
pretense for any length of time, especially when sooner or later I’d be
expected to shift.
 
But I was damned
if I was going to be run out of my home before I found out who had murdered the
only father figure I’d ever had.
 
One plus side was that they had a new Lord Alpha, because Xander Brandy,
who’d been alpha up until recently and by all accounts was a vicious
bloodthirsty werebear, had retired.
 
I wasn’t exactly a celebrity follower but even I’d have had to
have been
hiding under a rock to have not noticed the
chatter on the Othernet about it.
 
I
didn’t know much about who his replacement was, in fact it seemed few did, but
a newbie might be easier to fool.

For several minutes, nobody made a sound.
 
Shifters were, as a rule,
pragmatic
 
about
death.
 
When you spent your time chasing after
nasties, killing them yourself and often seeing your friends killed by them
too, you tended to become somewhat inure to nature’s most reliable
outcome.
 
But we hadn’t had a death
by unnatural causes for almost 13 years, which was virtually unheard of amongst
the shifter world, and the fact that it was John, the alpha, made it doubly
hard for everyone.
 
Eventually one
of the younger shifters broke the brooding weight and unearthly stillness by
reaching over to her friend and hugging her.
 
It was if she had released
everyone.
 
Suddenly there were tears
and exclamations and hugs happening all over the hall.
 
Tom pulled me to him and wrapped his
arms tight around me, then Betsy, then Johannes,
then
almost everyone.
 
It felt briefly
cathartic, and whilst I knew that for most of the shifters it genuinely was, it
didn’t waver my resolve to hunt down and kill whatever had done this as soon as
was humanly possible.

Eventually Julia returned.
 
As soon as her presence was registered,
everyone stilled and looked at her in unhappy anticipation.
 
“They will be here by noon
tomorrow.
 
Their delegation will
stay for the requisite three days, during which time they will also investigate
John’s passing and the manner of it.” Her voice was quiet but it completely
filled the space.
 
“They will
perform the rites to appoint a new alpha and release any pack members who wish
to depart, as is the Way.”

“Will they stay for longer if they can’t
find John’s killer straightaway?” someone asked.

I felt a frightened heat rise at the
thought being voiced aloud.

“Not unless there is evidence of further
imminent danger,” she said.

Bloody lazy arses, I thought, contrarily.
 
One of their own alphas had been
murdered and they wouldn’t see the investigation through to its conclusion
because they couldn’t bother themselves to take the time.
 
I knew that was what I wanted but, still,
it irked.

“Take this time to come to terms with
tonight’s events and to decide what your personal plans are, whether to stay
with the Cornish pack or to move on.
 
Make sure you choose the right path for you, because once it’s made
there will be no going back.”
 

The Way stated that pack members were tied
to their alphas for better or worse, no matter what happened.
 
However, once an alpha passed away,
members were free to choose other packs.
 
It happened from time to time.
 
Johannes in fact had joined us from another pack when his alpha had died
several years ago.
 
It occasionally
meant that packs were weakened considerably from within in more ways than one,
but the Brethren apparently kept a close eye on the situation and would allow a
small number of humans to be turned and recruited if it was deemed absolutely
necessary.
 
They generally frowned
upon it happening too often, as that put all shifters at greater risk of
discovery.
 
Potential newbies were
chosen very carefully and I’d heard it was a particularly bureaucratic process,
even though those who turned down the option were spelled by mages to forget
they’d ever come into contact with shapeshifters.
 
In fact, it had only happened three
times in the last decade.
 
After all
pack members did not, as a rule, have any trouble reproducing all on their own.
 
It was extraordinarily rare that
shapeshifters left without joining another pack, of course, as then they would
deemed
as rogue.
 
In those situations, the Brethren would get
all uppity
and track down said shifter to prevent them from doing anything that might be
considered unsavoury or even dangerous.

Julia continued. “We may need some
intervention at some point with the local law enforcement.
 
Mackenzie?”

“If they come sniffing around, I’ll deal
with them.”
 
One of the advantages
of having a policeman as an ex-boyfriend I supposed.

“Good.
 
I will need to talk to you about the
– other issue too.”

Anton laughed coldly.
 
“You mean the fact that she’s human?
 
We’ll all be dead if the Brethren find
out.”

“Which they won’t,” she said, without
looking at him.
 
“The geas still
stands.
 
Not just for Mackenzie’s
sake but for all our sakes.
 
The
Brethren’s ways are an unknown quantity to me.”

I had to batten down the urge not to stick
my tongue out at him, as if she had been particularly protecting just me when I
really knew it was about everyone.
 
I held no illusions that even though most of them liked me, their lives
would be simpler and safer without me.
 
They had all been bound and forbidden to speak of me as a human to any
outsider, even another shifter, after my arrival when I was just a kid.
 
And it was pretty much universally
believed that if I was discovered they would all be put to death.
 
No-one
really
knew that much about how the Brethren would actually react though.
 
Probably because no human had ever been
stupid enough to stick around shifters for any length of time without being eventually
turned – not that the Cornwall pack hadn’t already tried to turn me.
 
I was clearly defective in some way if
even a lycanthropic bite wouldn’t do its stuff.
 

Regardless of any of that, it was usually
only the alpha
who
would travel to London every
trimester to meet and talk to the bigwigs so it was only John who’d ever known
that much about them.
 
He’d give
them reports on the pack’s well-being and activities, and receive his orders
which could range from, ‘Keep doing what you’re doing’ to ‘Destroy any fairy
circles you see’ to ‘Scary things are heading your way so kill them all.’
 
Julia had been to visit them only a few
times, usually for particularly glamorous and important social
celebrations,
whilst I didn’t think any of the rest of us
plebs had ever even been close to them.
 
Elitist scum.
 
The girls
spent inordinate amounts of time following the Othernet gossip about some of
the more visible Brethren members, oohing and aahing about the ongoing fights,
relationships and power struggles, but I’d never really been able to muster up
the will to care.
 
I should probably
change that now, I figured.
 
Know
thy enemy.

Julia crooked her little finger at
me.
 
“Come.” For now, I followed.

*

The office was a small cramped space piled
full of papers and odds and ends.
 
It led into John’s study on one end and the great hall on the
other.
 
I was never entirely sure
what it was really supposed to be used for.
 
Whenever there was paperwork to be
filed, usually whenever there was a kill order fulfilled or an incident deemed
serious enough to be written up, then one of the pack would be designated as
secretary.
 
I saw it as demeaning
and worthless to spend any time at all cooped up writing about crap that had
already happened but I was well aware that were plenty of shifters who enjoyed
the quiet – and the mind-numbing safety - of the four walls.
 
I picked up a loose sheet that had found
its way onto the
floor which
said something about
Directive 98 of the Way being breached without probable cause.
 
I almost laughed.
 
Directive 98 referred to ‘wearing
clothes unbecoming an officer of the pack’.
 
Given that shifters transformed naked, I
had a hard time working out how any clothes could be more shocking than seeing
it all hang out all the time anyway.
 
There were 232 Directives in total.
 
Clearly, someone somewhere had absolutely no sense of humour and no
life.
 
Then it occurred to me that
the fact that I knew all the Directives inside and out probably meant that it
was
me
.

Julia pulled up an ancient swivel chair
that had bits of grey stuffing sticking out of the back of it and sat down
heavily.
 
For a few minutes she didn’t
say anything at all.
 
I laid the
paper down on the cluttered wooden desk and waited.

Finally she spoke.
 
“We need you here and we want you here,
Mackenzie.
 
Don’t ever forget
that.
 
This is not just about the geas
or about the Brethren.
 
It’s about
us too.”
 

I was taken aback at the honesty in her
eyes and suddenly found myself blinking furiously.

‘Don’t take me wrong,” she continued, “
you
’re antagonistic and temperamental.
 
You don’t follow orders and you can’t be
compelled.
 
And whatever it is
you’ve got inside you that
flares
up causes me great
concern.
 
God only knows how you can
do some of the things that you can do.
 
But I would trust you with my life, and the pack’s lives, and I know
they feel the same.
 
I also know
that there is nothing you wouldn’t do for us.”

“Anton might argue with you on that one.”

“He’s young.
 
He’ll get over that chip on his shoulder
soon enough.
 
My point is,” she
leaned forward, “that I am not protecting you because I’m being forced to as a
result of some spell.
 
You might not
be a shifter but you are still one of us.
 
Not only that but we need you to find out what happened to John, just as
soon as we know it’s safe to do so and we have all the information we need.
 
I love everyone in this pack but I have
no illusions that we don’t have many able fighters.
 
And you appear to have certain skills
and abilities that are closed to us.
 
So we need you emotionally and physically.”

I struggled to find my voice.
 
“I…I…need you too.
 
I need all of you.”

She picked at the arm of the chair.
 
“I know, dear.
 
Which is why we need to make very sure
that the Brethren don’t have any reason to pay you any attention whatsoever.
 
I can gloss over your part in John’s
final hours and I’m confident that we’ve improved on the scent lotion from last
time.
 
As long as you regularly
apply it every six to eight hours,
no-one
will smell
human on you. We need you to act nondescript, however.
 
Become grey.”