Page 69 of Secrets and Ruin

“No, you can’t. This isn’t your mess to clean up, Dirk. I won’t put it on your shoulders. It’s something I should have been more careful about. My decision to leave Rainer out here and not checking if he was properly dead was my mistake.”

“You were half-dead yourself, from what you told us earlier,” Landon said, shrugging. “It’s a pretty common mistake people make when they need to find shelter and heal themselves. Better to keep living another day than stay in a vulnerable position and possibly die to another threat.”

“Rainer was a powerful werewolf for one so recently Changed,” Niko said, staring into space. “Even for what he was.”

“He must have been holding back for years,” Landon said, beginning to pace. “I can overpower him…or thought I could.”

“It’s probably more complicated than that,” I said, clearing my throat nervously. “Brin couldn’t do the same things as Brion. He could still tap into it at times, but he was less powerful in general. That’s what made King Brion’s return complicated. He needed to avoid his enemies while shedding the limitations of his identity as Brin. Fenris was the face he wore while in….” A light bulb would have lit up over my head as I put another piece of the puzzle into place. “Callahan.”

“No, let’s not even get into that,” Landon said, waving his hands as he shook his head.

“What?” Niko’s curiosity had an edge to it. “What does Callahan have to do with any of this?”

Landon threw his hands in the air and went back to pacing.

“Callahan moved Fenris around a lot, trying to keep him out of trouble. Fenris was too powerful for most Alphas and had to resort to respecting them out of his own effort rather than properly falling into a pack structure. Callahan didn’t want to keep him close. They didn’t like each other, and Corissa apparently hates Fenris, but why go through all the effort for a broken wolf?”

“He was pissed when Fenris decided to stay with my father,” Landon added. “But he didn’t force Fenris in line right there. He just let it happen.”

I looked at Niko to see if he was putting this together.

“The only conclusion I can come to is Callahan knew Rainer Brandt, and he’s been helping him hide all these years. They crafted a fake identity for him and a mostly fake story for his past when he came back from his fight with you. Fae magic can be tricky, and it saw the need for this identity, so it made it the truth for that werewolf, and his lie couldn’t be detected. It wasn’t a lie toFenris. Rainer became something in the background, a foundation for Fenris, but Fenris became an individual of his own. That’s why he could learn not to attack me every time he saw me. How he evolved, changed, and…became his own. He was healing from the trauma of Rainer, trauma that wasn’t really his.” I put my hands on the counter.

“I don’t think Fenris or Rainer really knew what was happening because this is weird fae magic. King Brion was even a bit annoyed, if I remember correctly. It was a couple years ago.”

“I heard what you said to him. Do you think they might have figured it out? Rainer and Fenris?” Landon asked, stopping his pacing next to me.

“I…don’t know?” I wished I had more for them. I wished I could be more confident in what I was saying. “Most of this is based on theories. I’ve seen this kind of play out under vastly different circumstances. Brin and Brion were on the same page, or Brin sort of disappeared without a fight. I don’t know if Fenris and Rainer are. Rainer thought he had his contract on him, wasconvincedof it. I found it in Fenris’ house back in Texas. All I could think was Fenris did that… for us.”

“Jacky, don’t get your hopes up for Fenris,” Landon said carefully.

“It’s not a bad theory, though,” Dirk said, seeing my side.

“It wouldn’t be hard to figure out what triggered Rainer to come back in full force if this is what we’re going with. He met another Brandt. He met Dirk, and Dirk is my son. I know you’ve tried to keep that quiet, but Rainer would have noticed it rather easily. With that obvious connection and a hunter’s mind, Rainer saw a vulnerability he could finally exploit. He just needed to bide his time.”

“I asked him about that. Initially, he guessed because of who Jacky is and confirmed it, thanks to me. It was the way I walked, the way I talked.” The scent of Dirk’s guilt caught my attention. “Sometimes, he claimed to smell the Black Forest on me. Every so often, especially in my wolf form, he thought he caught it.”

“It’s not your fault,” I promised him, looking over my shoulder to meet his eyes.

There was a long silence until Dirk nodded, his eyes never leaving mine.

“You know, Callahan probably thought Rainer had lost his mind over the years,” Landon said, breaking the moment. “He would have seen Rainer slowly become this other person who was always broken. Not angry and wanting vengeance against his brother, but properlybrokenbecause he didn’t have a full identity. He had a construct of half-truths and half-lies he was made to believe, thanks to the magic Rainer had bargained for.”

“That’s dark,” Dirk mumbled.

“The fae have their fair share of darkness,” Niko said wisely. “In fact, the progenitors of the Sidhe, Oberon and Titania, are counterparts, one of the light and one of the dark. Forever bound together, forever wanting the other, but never able to be with the other. It’s a really common trend in the mythos. Sun gods and moon goddesses are very common in many religions around the world, spanning all of history. Even now, Sidhe, who still follow the oldest bloodlines of their kind, say they are creatures of the light or dark, and their powers canalmostbe divided as such. There are powers less easy to classify and some that can’t properly be named. And that’s just the Sidhe. What we call fae is really a wide variety of peoples and creatures from that realm.”

“We don’t need the entire Fae 101 class today, Niko.” Dirk’s eye roll could be heard. “Why don’t we get to how we stop all this?”

“It’s easy. I’ll escort you to the estate. We’ll use these to cover our scents.” Niko pulled down the stick thing from earlier. “Once I know you’re all secure at home, I will hunt Rainer. You will heal, tell everyone you’re okay and that I will be okay, and no one is the wiser. The family will never need to know this insanity happened.”

“Davor knows we’re out here and about Rainer,” I said quickly, shattering his plan in one swift sentence.

“I’m going to come over this bar and strangle you,” Niko said, dropping the stick to the counter. “How, of all our siblings, did you end up telling Davor?”

“We illegally read your will to get the key to your armory, and Davor had to tell us where it was hidden,” I explained. “We needed weapons. We had just learned what this place really was.”

To his credit, Niko didn’t come over to the bar. He glared, oh how he glared, but he didn’t attack me.

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