Fucking selfish asshole.
I couldn’t tell if I wanted to throttle him, or applaud his sneaky cleverness. So I quietly congratulated him for getting precisely what he’d wanted from me all along.
Then I punched him square in the mouth.
Pain flared in my hand, and Santiago hit the dirt like a pile of bricks. I hadn’t put my all into the punch, but there had been more than enough anger behind it to really throw the poor guy for a loop. He probably wouldn’t have any broken bones, but he was going to have one hell of a bruised face when he got home.
He lay on the ground moaning slightly, and Memere gave me a solid whack in the ribs with her wooden cane.
“What?” I asked.
She narrowed her eyes as if to say you know what, young lady.
Oh, but hitting him had felt so good. It was like all the anxiety and fear and uncertainty I’d been feeling finally had an outlet, and by punching Santiago, I’d been able to let it all go.
The nagging awareness of my own guilt, the weight of what I’d kept pent up for years without knowing why was still there. And I had a feeling it was going to take me many, many more years to sort through it all.
But the woe-is-me mopey feeling had lifted even as the bloom of pain from where my bones had met Santiago’s face had flowered across my knuckles.
Wilder hung back, with a hint of a smirk on his lips, and watched as Santiago struggled back into a sitting position.
“I probably dese
rved that,” the witched admitted.
“You definitely deserved that,” I replied, then bent over and offered him my hand. Surprisingly, he took it without hesitation and let me help him back to his feet. On solid ground he was taller than me, but I could see there was a newfound respect in his eyes that hadn’t been there the last time he looked at me.
“In my defense,” he said. “Even though I knew who had cursed you, there was no way I could have explained how. I’m not sure you would have believed the truth unless it came from someone you trusted. My motives might have been shady, but there was still a little altruism to it.”
I frowned at him and grunted, which was about as close as I would come to admitting he was right.
After Santiago had collected his bag, we made our way back to where his boat was pulled ashore.
In spite of all my wariness and everything that had kept me vigilant up to this point, I was still somehow surprised to see a group of three men standing next to the fiberglass boat, rooting through the contents as if someone had just dropped a Christmas present at their front door.
They looked up when they heard us arrive and we all froze, a stunned portrait of seven people who had no idea what to say or do to the others.
The men had a smell of wolf about them and I knew right away they had to be werewolves, but what I didn’t know was if they were just run of the mill lone wolves who were living beyond the scope of Callum’s pack, or if they were the last vestiges of the men who had been living out here back when I did.
They were dirty and smelled of sweat and rotting. The lean, hungry expressions on their faces told me it had been quite some time since they’d had a proper meal, and also, I suspected, since they’d seen a woman.
Hunger looked the same regardless of what menu item it was they were craving the most.
Each of the three sported a patchy beard. One had dark hair and dead eyes, the other two were both gray-haired and gaunt, their expressions showing only need rather than any kind of personality.
I knew what they saw when they looked at us. An old woman, a girl, and two men who they might have some trouble with.
Then the breeze shifted and three pairs of nostrils wrinkled in unison. They realized in that moment two of us—though they probably couldn’t tell which two—were werewolves, suddenly making the odds a lot less simple.
One of the gray-haired ones cast a glance down the shoreline, and I suspected he was weighing his odds if he decided to make a break for it. The dark-haired one, though, was who I was most worried about. His gaze hadn’t moved from me since the second we’d walked onto the shore, and in spite of Wilder and Santiago flanking me, his attention never wavered.
“Hello,” he said. His voice was calm and even, but ice cold. I shuddered as the two syllables reached my ears.
“That’s my boat,” Santiago announced, and I had to give him props because he didn’t sound shaken in the least.
“Oh, is it? We found it unattended. You see, usually unattended things in these parts don’t belong to anyone. Finder’s keepers.” He was still staring at me when he said this, which made the phrase finder’s keepers sound especially ominous.
“Well, that belongs to me, so if you fellows don’t mind we’ll just be going now.”