Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 515

Chapter 515

ARIA

The pack found out before we'd finished cleaning up.

This was not a surprise. Nothing significant happened in Shadowmere without the pack knowing about it within approximately eleven minutes, and the full wolf form of a cursed Alpha crashing through a clinic window during a full moon was considerably more significant than most things. The pack had heard it, felt it, and seen the tail end of it as Kael wolf made its way through the pack, scaring the shit out of them and then Killian's wolf had gone through the window, and the combination of those inputs had produced the specific reaction of a group of people who'd spent three years living with the worst version of exactly this and had just had their nervous systems informed that it was happening again.

Silver registered them before I saw them.

*Coming from the main building,* she said. *A lot of them. Fast.*

I was in the treatment area doorway when the first pack members arrived. Not a single person — several, coming from different directions with the converging quality of people who'd all heard the same thing and were all moving toward the same point. Some of them had equipment — the specific items that people in a pack grab when they think they're going to need them, things that varied by person. A woman I recognized from the northern flank had a length of rope. A man from the kitchen had, inexplicably, a large pot. Several of the pack members I recognized from the battle had the tense-alert quality of people whose combat training had activated and was waiting for direction.

Behind them, moving with the careful urgency of people who were trying not to run because running would communicate panic and they'd decided panic wasn't useful: more pack members. The elders. Morrison, who was moving faster than I'd seen him move, which said something about the state of his nervous system. Sona, who was doing the rapid assessment thing she did when she'd decided something required immediate evaluation.

And behind all of them, already coming from the residential wing with the determined pace of someone who'd heard something and had a very specific question about it: Edna. With her walking stick. Moving at a speed that suggested the walking stick was not actually required for the walking.

The first wave reached us.

"The Alpha—" someone started.

"Is he cursed again—"

"Are we going to the bunker—"

"Did the bond fail—"

"KAEL DERANGED IS BACK, SOMEONE—"

"He's not cursed," I said.

I said it loud enough to carry but not loud enough to be the kind of loud that communicated panic, because Ivory had taught me — in eleven weeks of training that had been about lunar power and had also, under the surface, been about how to be present in a room — that volume was not the same as authority and that the thing you wanted was the second one.

The crowd stopped.

Not everyone — there were people on the edges still moving, still processing the instruction, still catching up to the fact that someone had spoken. But enough people stopped that the ones still moving noticed the stopping and adjusted.

"He's not cursed," I said again. "The curse is not back. The bond is intact. What happened tonight was an external attack — not Kael losing control, not the curse returning, not the bond failing. Something specific was done to him by the people who've been targeting this pack for months. He was used as a weapon. We've addressed the immediate situation. He's being treated now."

"Traumatic," I said. "I know. A lot of you spent three years with that wolf form being something that represented a crisis, and seeing it tonight would have brought all of that back. That's real and it makes sense and I'm not going to tell you it shouldn't have affected you." I looked at the crowd. "But he's not gone. He's in there. The man is still in there and the bond is still there and we're going to fix this."

"Is Ivory hurt," Edna said, from the back.

The crowd went a different kind of quiet. The specific quiet of Shadowmere people being told that their healer might be hurt.

"She has some injuries," I said. "She's being treated. She's going to be fine."

"How bad," Edna said.

"Her hand and a head injury," I said. "Not serious. She's being taken care of."

"By who," Edna said.

"By the people who are with her," I said. "And by herself, because she has opinions about her own treatment that nobody is going to override."

Something moved through the crowd. Not laughter exactly — something warmer than that, the specific recognition of something that was completely true about a person they knew well.

"I saw the wolf form," said the woman with the rope. "I was in the residential corridor. I thought—" she stopped. "I thought it was the second year again."