Page 61 of Scarred Resolve

I sat beside Davor as he rubbed his face, having splashed it with the clear creek water.

“I used to give you all sorts of trouble about every little mistake,” he said, sighing. “Let me have it.”

“Shit happens. We’ll fix this,”I said, lying down to put my head on my paws.

“Thank you,” he said, washing and rinsing his hands for seemingly a second time. I could see how much damage he had done to himself, but none of it was severe enough to require stitches, and I wasn’t worried about an infection from the water.

Niko went to a knee and began cleaning himself off as well. In the silence, I stood back up and got into the water, letting it rinse away most of the shit from the cabin’s charred remains. I shook far enough away not to splash them and drank some of that very same creek water before sitting back down, waiting for them to feel ready to move. We had to. We had to chase them down, and we had to do it quickly.

Only a minute later, Niko stood back up and helped Davor up.

“This isn’t your mistake,” Niko said firmly.

I was suddenly thinking about Heath and once again, I knew exactly how much of the werewolf way of things actually sank into Niko and never left. He spoke like Landon, Ranger, or Shamus to the lower-ranking wolves. Not an Alpha with that supernatural authority, but a leader, nonetheless. “We all fucked up. Jacky was hit in the head, and we had to go. Alive is better than anything else.”

“He’s not wrong. Alive is much better than the alternative,”I said, nodding my feline head.“We can fix everything else.”

“Youcan,” Davor said softly, smiling wryly as he looked at me. “You seem to be the master of getting out of bad situations. I’ll just hope that some of that rubs off on me today.”

“She is, and it does. Trust me.” Niko slapped Davor’s shoulder. “Jacky, lead us to where the witch scents meet and begin heading away from here. You said east, right?”

“Yeah.”

I went that way, moving a bit faster than my brothers, but they were fine jogging to keep up. I stopped where I had noticed many of the scents had converged. Five different humans. The werecat had gone off in a different direction, which I knew we could follow, but I had a feeling.

“It’s here and continues on that way.”I pointed my body to the east. “The witches, at least. The werecat ran off a different way. I figure the witches have to take a more direct route back to wherever they came from, though. Better to follow them.”

“I believe you’re right. The werecat might have been searching to see if we were making a quick circle back to get them and defending them while they did what they wanted and moved out,” Davor said. “The scent is still fresh enough to think it’s only been a couple of hours.”

“It’s a good thing the smell of human stands out so much out here,” Niko said, beginning to walk, his path going with the scenttrail I had brought them to. “Let’s keep as silent as possible, just in case.”

Once again, we were moving, and the repetition of our mission was now killing me. Run this way, run that way. Follow that scent trail, ignore that one. I began to ponder things more, the shock of the witches now worn off, and really began to consider what we were dealing with.

“I have a question and a theory, sort of wrapped together if you two want to hear it.”

Davor nodded but didn’t speak while Niko kept a watchful eye on the trees around us.

“Do you think this was a test run of their werecat? They got it under their control and sent it out to kill two people to see if they could?”

Davor seemed to ponder it, his expression changing from thoughtful to curious to concern.

“Why are you considering that line of thought?” Davor asked in a whisper.

“Dallas. They wanted to control Tywin to control the pack, then unleash it on cities, build a bigger pack, and all of that. Imagine someone trying that with a werecat. Instead of amassing numbers because werecats don’t work that way, they would control it and see if they could get it to kill someone without it slipping.”

Davor nodded, his scent and expression telling me he very much understood how I was approaching this.

“Political assassinations with a monster that no government agent or military could stop quickly enough before the target was dead, then immediately order it to get out. It sounds crazy, but… What happened with the Dallas pack sounded insane, too, but they nearly made it happen. They had been plotting it since before I was ever involved with Heath.The coup was part of it. Their first attempt to get control with one of their own, the witch werewolf, Emma.”

“And now the werecat here, controlled by another group of witches,” Davor continued, still in that low whisper that only Niko and I could have ever picked up.

“Able to hide the scent of their magic just like the witches in Dallas. This has to be something. This must be connected.”

“We’ll figure it out once we eliminate the threats,” Niko said, looking over his shoulder at us, his eyes flicking between us. I sniffed the air and caught a smell I wasn’t prepared for.

Fear.

My brothers were afraid of what I was saying.

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