I wasn’t, or at least not on purpose. I was just trying to get Celeste to understand some of the stakes if we didn’t act fast on this one.
Because what would it matter to her if a werewolf pack she’d barely spent any time around was wiped out? Why would someone raised to scorn shifters care if we were all forced to bow down beneath a Council who didn’t have our best interests at heart? Stolen children were the topic she was most likely to care about.
“Elspeth,” my sister said. “I don’t want to guess about this. Tell me what you need.”
The way she’d eschewed my nickname made me feel like a wolf trapped in a burning maze, no obvious way out and survival unlikely. And although I’d expected Celeste to stop meeting my eyes at some point, I was the one who now dropped my gaze to the desert sand.
But I still gave her the facts she requested, even though the words felt like sandpaper scraping the insides of my throat. After all, she deserved honesty, this woman I’d never fully known even though I’d thought we were close as sisters.
“Your half-glyphs are blocking our matebrand,” I admitted. “I’m sorry, Celeste. But I need you to break your connection with Finnegan so I can rebuild mine with Orion.”
Celeste didn’t answer immediately. Instead, she tugged Finnegan along as she walked away from all of us, glaring at Vega’s guards until they dropped back to watch from a distance. And within sight yet beyond shifter hearing, the two of them held a discussion so animated it might as well have been a pantomime.
To my surprise, it appeared Finnegan was the one arguing in favor of breaking their half-glyphs. If I didn’t miss my guess, he was promising that magic made no difference to his affections. That he’d be there for her no matter what.
Celeste, in contrast, clung to Finnegan the way I wanted to cling to her. Both of us had recently realized that the sole parental figure in our lives considered us lab rats instead of daughters. But Julius had been warmer toward Celeste during our shared childhood, so surely that loss had struck her harder than it struck me.
No wonder she shook her head adamantly when the man she’d become attached to suggested breaking their connection. No wonder she stopped speaking, likely lost in the same fear of abandonment that roiled my own gut.
In the end, I couldn’t tell what she and Finnegan decided. I only knew they were back in accord by the way their bodies once again curved toward each other. If they tried to flee now, I’d have to send wolves to capture Finnegan, which would break my sisterhood with Celeste even more thoroughly than the request I’d just made. That thought made my fists clench so tight I couldn’t unclench them even when the pair turned and began pacing back toward us.
When Celeste made it through the circle of shifters to return to the spot where I’d woken in her arms, her question wasn’t what I expected. “You’ll treat me like an adult after this?”
Celeste deserved the truth, so I gave it to her. “It’s never been a matter of thinking you’re less of an adult than me. It’s that I can’t bear the thought of losing you. When you walk into danger, all I want is to protect you whether or not you’re able to protect yourself.”
Her rebuttal was quiet, but not so quiet our audience couldn’t catch every syllable. “Do you think it was easy when you went out on jobs where your life was constantly on the line? It wasn’t. But I got used to it. The same way you’ll get used to me engaging in carefully thought out risks.”
Would I get used to that? No, I didn’t think so. But I could do the right thing when my sister was asking for so little in preparation for giving up so much.
“I promise,” I told her, wanting to ask if she’d still be my sister when all this was over.
But the words stuck in my throat and Celeste had already turned to face Finnegan. “Ready?” she asked in the tone she once saved for me. Warm. Trusting.
“I’ve been ready for you my entire life,” Finnegan answered.
Then their hands met, not the untattooed hands they’d linked earlier but the ones that boasted half-glyphs on the insides of their wrists. And, the instant ink made contact, the swirl of outpack magic rose to surround them in an undulating haze.
I’d seen similar clouds of rotating sand particles so many times now that the scene should have looked ordinary. It didn’t. The visual manifestation of outpack magic was like the voice in my head intoning a desert prophecy—awe-inspiringly beautiful and terrifying at the exact same time.
This was pure power and Celeste was about to harness it. In the midst of the swirl, her lips moved. But despite our proximity, I couldn’t hear what she was saying. All I knew was what I caught glimpses of between the light and sand and the pair’s mirrored bodies.
Half-glyphs rotating in the opposite direction than they’d rotated previously. Half-glyphs unspooling, curling out of Celeste and Finnegan’s arms and feeding into the magic of the desert.
My sister was doing as I’d asked. She was unmaking the half-glyphs to save werewolves she had no real connection to. To save children.
Or, perhaps, to save our sisterhood?
Whatever the reason, Celeste carried on even as pain hollowed out her cheeks and hardened Finnegan’s jaw. I knew what it felt like to lose the matebrand and I suspected losing the half-glyphs was no different.
I took a step forward. I had to stop this. I couldn’t let Celeste harm herself even for the sake of every werewolf on the planet.
But my aunt blocked my path. “Wait,” Vega murmured. “You promised.”
I had promised. Still, Celeste was now doubling over from agony.
Or, no, not from agony. Instead, my sister, who bore werewolf blood but who had been genetically engineered to be unable to shift, did the unthinkable. Her hunched torso shortened. A tail erupted. And she dropped onto the sand lupine.
Beside her, Finnegan did the same.
And as the swirling magic turned back into ordinary sand then filtered out of the air around us, Celeste yipped delight. Finnegan howled pleasure. Then they were testing out their new bodies, frolicking together…
…Which is when I lost track of what my sister was up to because Orion had finally woken. He came to his feet as smoothly as if he’d never been injured. His eyes were open and so full of starlight I wanted to fall into them as he paced toward me step by calculated step.
“I smell like you,” he rumbled as he drew closer.
“Do you mind?” I answered. After all, I’d made multiple decisions that affected him without his permission. I’d made promises to the outpack that played leapfrog with his mandated timeline. I’d begged Celeste to withstand agony in preparation for a matebrand Orion had explicitly told me he wasn’t ready for.
But he just smiled with starlight in his eyes. “Did you mean what you said earlier?”
“You heard that?” Despite everything, my cheeks heated. I’d assumed he was too far gone to catch my grand declaration.
“I heard it. Did you mean it?”
I swallowed. Nodded. “Yes.”
And in reaction, the swirling outpack magic woke again. It encircled us instead of Celeste and Finnegan as matebrand ink sprang back to life upon our skin.
Chapter 27
