From the Ashes (Force of Nature Book 1) (24 page)

“New friend of yours?” he asked sardonically.

“Apparently.”

“You didn't seem too cozy the other day.”

“We appear to have worked things out a bit since then.”

“So I see...”

When I reached Knox, I stood in front of him, turning my back on him to face the pissed-off grizzly bear. He was anxiously waiting for the wolf to make a wrong move.

“See? He's my friend. No problems with the werewolf. Okay?” The bear sat down on his haunches with a harrumph. “Now, Knox...I think you should apologize to my new friend.”

He looked at me like I had three heads.

“Yeah, I think I'll pass on that.”

“Alphas don't apologize?” I said, baiting him.

“Not to ordinary bears. Besides, I'd rather figure out what the fuck just happened here. Are you some kind of bear charmer in your free time?”

I laughed.

“Nope. This is my first bear charming to date.”

“Interesting,” he replied, losing his sarcasm. “Well, if you don't need me, I'll just head back.”

He started off into the woods, not giving me a chance to apologize for how I'd left the house.

“Knox! I'm sorry,” I yelled after him. The crunching of pine needles and branches stopped. “I don't know how to explain this gracefully, so I'm just going to say it; I'm a danger magnet. Trouble finds me regardless of what I do, and I have no way to combat it. I hate that about myself more than anything. And I don't want to get you or your boys hurt in the crossfire of a battle you don't need to fight.”

He emerged from the woods, an intense expression on his face.

“What if I want to fight it? What if I want to be in the crossfire?”

I exhaled heavily.

“You don't know what you're volunteering for.”

“Who cares? I like danger, Piper. A lot. Maybe too much.”

“But why would you want to throw yourself into a war for me? You barely know me. It makes no sense.”

“It doesn't have to,” he said coolly. “And you're far from helpless, Piper. You just don't realize it.” His expression tightened slightly before continuing. “You have power; I'd venture to say a fair amount of it too. And if today doesn't make you see that, I don't know what will.”

I looked back at Grizz, still sitting in my front yard, waiting for me.

“I don't think my Dr. Dolittle routine is going to save my ass, Knox. I'd hardly call that a power. A cool party trick, maybe, but not a power.”

“That's part of your problem, Piper. You don't see things for what they are.”

“I can't fight warlocks with bears,” I pointed out sarcastically.

“I'm not saying you should.”

“Then what are you saying, because I'm clearly missing something here...”

“I'm saying that you're deeply connected to the creatures around you. You shouldn't ignore that.”

“Creature,” I pointed out. “Singular.”

He frowned instantly. Taking a step closer to me, he put his hand gently on my face.

“No, Piper.
Creatures
. Plural.” That hand lingered on my cheek, sliding down it lightly, circling the angle of my jaw. “I feel it,” he said, low and soft. “We all do.”

“Oh,” I whispered, my heart suddenly racing.

“We'll stand with you, Piper. Come what may, we'll stand with you.”

“You wouldn't say that if you knew—” I cut myself off, reminding myself that the less he knew, the better.

“Well, I'm saying it anyway.” I could feel the tickle of his breath on my face; my eyes closed instinctively. “Stay,” he whispered, his body pressing nearer to mine. “I know you want to run, Piper. But I'm asking you to stay.” His hand reached up, grazing my waist, and I jumped away from him, wrapping my hand around my midsection. Grizz was at my side, growling, in a matter of seconds. “I'm sorry, I didn't mean to—”

“It's fine,” I interrupted, feeling a mess of emotions all at once. “I need some space. I need to think about this. Whatever I decide, I'll let you know. Okay?” I retreated from him as I spoke, my stomach guarded by my arms the entire time. The bear remained at my side while I walked backward toward the cabin.

Knox opened his mouth to speak, then snapped it shut, giving a half nod before disappearing into the trees again. His expression haunted me. The sadness in his eyes—the empty, dejected stare they’d held—dominated my thoughts. I'd turned on him so quickly and unfairly. He didn't know what he'd done, and that fact clearly pained him. But all I could think about when he’d laid his hand innocently on my body was how wrong things had gone the last two times I'd let my walls down with another being. How quickly things had gone awry. I was starting to really trust Knox, even against my better judgment, but letting him close to me like I had Kingston or Merc was out of the question. I’d narrowly survived both of them. I didn't dare put myself in a position where I'd be forced to survive Knox. If I were to stay and take him up on his offer of refuge, even for a short while, then I would need to maintain an emotional distance from him and the rest of the pack. That was the only way it could work for me. An arm's length friendship was all I could offer.

Hopefully that would suffice.

I was halfway up the porch steps when I heard Knox shouting for me. He barreled into the yard, a look of horror on his face.

“What's wrong?” I asked, hurrying down to meet him.

He never replied.

For the second time in less than twenty-four hours, Knox threw me over his shoulder and took off at a sprint. This time, he was headed for the lodge. As we neared it, I could hear the boys shouting, Foust barking orders at everyone. Something was wrong. I could feel it. Whatever had happened in Anchorage, it wasn't good.

When we arrived at the lodge, I saw firsthand just how bad it was.

* * *

I'd never been a part of such chaos before, and I felt utterly useless. The boys were yanking bodies from the line of SUVs parked in front of the lodge and carrying them into the house. And there were a lot of them (bodies, that is).

Knox and Foust were ordering the others around, but their words were choked off by the mounting grief within me. It blocked out virtually everything. I stood in the middle of the melee, staring at them as they scurried around like frantic bees diving in and out of their nest. I didn't hear what had happened to them in Anchorage, didn't hear how they'd escaped. I didn't know if anyone had been left behind. All I heard was the pounding of my heart in my chest echoing up through my ears.

I had no idea how long Knox had been yelling my name until he grabbed my arm and wheeled me around to look at him.

“Piper! We need you!” he said tersely, not awaiting my response. Instead, he started ushering me toward the lodge. At that point all the others were inside doing God only knew what to save God only knew how many. But I would soon learn just how great that number was.

Soon I would witness the carnage I had brought upon them.

The second we broke through the front door into the foyer, it all hit me. The living room looked like a makeshift triage unit, bloodied bodies strewn about on multiple surfaces. Those not injured raced around assessing their fallen brothers to see who was most in need of help. Knox ran in to grab medical supplies and brought them back to me, forcing them into my hands.

“Can you take care of the two in the corner?” he asked, pointing to two of his pack members I didn't really know. “They're not in too bad of shape. They just need to be cleaned out before they can start healing.”

Start healing,
I thought to myself. And then it dawned on me why this scenario was so outside the realm of possibility for me. They were all werewolves, strong and powerful and capable of healing injuries almost effortlessly. Just earlier I'd seen Knox's cuts all but disappear from his body before my very eyes. Why then was his pack not only wounded, but unable to heal during the long car ride back to the middle of nowhere?

I nodded to Knox that I could do as he asked.

Satisfied with that response, he made his way over to the far side of the room where two of his pack members were laid out on the kitchen island. I hadn't seen them taken out of the SUVs when they’d returned. I knew that for fact because I would have remembered that sight. It would have struck an undeniable chord.

Both men were charred beyond recognition.

Swallowing the rising bile in my throat, I turned away from the macabre view and did as Knox had requested; I went to the boys with minor injuries and helped to clean them up. One had a deep gash in his arm, most likely from a magical blade. The other had a similar injury across his back. Both were starting to heal, evidenced by the tender pink flesh surrounding the wounds. But they both mentioned something about infection—silver—so I did as I was asked and flushed out the open area as best I could with a bottle of some concoction Knox had given me and then bandaged them up. Once I finished with them, I wandered around the room, helping out wherever I could. By then, the unmistakable stench of burnt flesh and hair had coated my nostrils. It was inescapable, as were the memories the familiar scent gave rise to.

I instinctively clutched my stomach, rubbing the scars I bore—the scars given to me by the very same group that had attacked us in Anchorage. That thought made me keenly aware of something that, in all the chaos, I hadn't yet considered. Warlocks were powerful, Monroe especially, but even he alone couldn't have inflicted that much damage to an entire pack of werewolves. My blood ran cold at the thought. He hadn't been a scout. I'd been ambushed by the warlocks yet again.

Only this time it wasn't me who’d paid the price.

I rose slowly from my crouched position next to one of the wounded wolves, scanning the room for Foust. When I found him, he was standing next to the kitchen island, covering one of the bodies with a sheet, head and all.

“How many?” I asked, my voice too quiet for even the werewolves surrounding me to notice amid the ruckus. “Foust!” I shouted, garnering his attention, along with his irritation. It would seem that he too blamed me for what had happened. By the end of the day, I expected that count to rise considerably. “How many were there?”

“Casualties?”

“No. Warlocks.”

His brow furrowed at the mention of the enemy. Then his gaze fell to Knox, silently asking permission to discuss the matter with me. One nod from his alpha was all it took.

“At first, there was only the one in the club. By the time I'd gotten back there to inform the others about what was going on, he was already making a break for it down an adjacent alley. While I followed him, I called Jagger and told him to get as many of the pack as he could quickly find and follow my scent—that I was tracking the warlock after Piper. It didn't take long for them to catch up to me, right about the time I had that fucker cornered in a dead end,” he explained, his jaw flexing hard as he tried to restrain the anger he felt, recalling the events that had happened. “He should have been shitting bricks, one lowly warlock against a dozen or more wolves. He was a dead man walking. But the way he looked at me—the smug grin that spread to an evil smile—I should have known something was up. That there was more going on than I realized. And that's when everything went to shit.”

“There were more of them,” I added, knowing how Kingston's crew operated. They weren't known for playing fair. For a clean fight. Those concepts were foreign to them.

Foust nodded sharply, acknowledging my observation.

“A lot more of them. They came out of nowhere behind us. It was an ambush, and we were caught in the crossfire. Literally.”

I hadn't realized that I'd been walking toward Foust as he spoke, the fear and desperation I felt carrying me.

“How did you get away?”

“We took out as many of them as we could, then we got the fuck out of there before any more of us got fried or sliced.” He looked at me thoughtfully for a moment before continuing. “If that's who you've been running from, Piper, I can understand why. They're no joke.”

“I know.”

“You should have called me. I would have come,” Knox growled, though his anger was not truly at Foust. He was frustrated with himself. Mad that he had failed his pack.

“I gladly would have if one single cell phone had survived the fight, but none did. And I sure as fuck wasn't going to hang out and search the area for one with flying balls of fire whizzing past my head every five seconds.”

“The fire,” I whispered, staring at Foust. “Was it blue?”

“What?”

“The fire that you were attacked with, was it blue?”

“Yes,” Foust growled.

My face went pale.

“Did you see who attacked you with it?”

Another growl, this time from the entire pack.

“Yes,” Foust said, stepping closer to me. “A hand-less cowardly motherfucker that ran away through some kind of black vortex and left his brothers to die.”

“Kingston,” I exhaled, not realizing his name had passed my lips until I heard it ring through the room that had fallen silent. “I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry this happened. This is my fault. All of it. Your blood is on my hands.”