Page 4 of Witch Slap

If I was going to start a war with Danika, I was going to need better shoes for that.

Chapter Two

The gate to pack lands used to be a formality.

A gate is a suggestion not a necessity when the thing behind it can smell you coming from two miles out. For as long as I'd been going there, the wrought iron had sat open against its posts with weeds growing up through the hinges, and whichever wolf had drawn the short straw would lift two fingers off the porch railing of the little guard house and wave you through without getting up.

The gate was closed when Ace slowed the SUV.

Four wolves were parked in front of it. Two on four legs and two on two. The two without visible fur were armed, which shifters never bother with, because a shifter with a shotgun is a shark with a hammer. If they ever did it, it was mostly for show around humans. They were the only ones wary around guns. One of them came to the window and looked at Ace, then at me, then at the blood dried down my forearm in a long brown stripe. He didn't say a word. He just stepped back and lifted a hand. The gate rolled open on a motor I hadn't known was there.

"When did you install an electric gate?" I sounded like an idiot even to myself.

"Tuesday." Ace's jaw flexed hard enough to grind gravel. He looked like it hurt him to push words out from how hard his teeth were clenched, so I zipped my lips shut and let him be.

Gravel popped and rattled under the tires the whole way up to the house reminding me of popcorn being popped. It sounded soothing. I pressed my forehead to the window like a kid and watched the land go by, but the land looked wrong. Nothing out there was broken. It was braced, the way you brace for a hit you already know is coming. Somebody had cut back the tree line thirty feet on both sides of the road, and the stumps sat there raw and pale as broken teeth. The horse fencing had been doubled. Every hundred yards or so a shifter stood in the open field doing nothing at all, which meant they were doing the only job that mattered, and every single one of them tracked our car with their chin up as we passed.

Hundreds of acres of nature and freedom, Alex had told me once. We need to be free. It placates the beast.

They'd turned it into a fort.

Because of me.

"Don't." Ace hissed but didn't look over at me.

"I wasn't doing anything."

"You were plotting something, or drowning in guilt." He took the last curve too fast and the big house came up out of the trees, three stories of warm wood and lit windows, the wrap-around porch spilling yellow light onto the grass. "I can hear you doing it. It sounds like a garbage disposal with a fork in it."

"That sounds like my inner monologue when I think about you.” I drawled with a smirk I knew he hated. “I'll thank you to stay out of it."

He snorted despite of his anger.

I would like to say the good mood lasted. It didn’t.

Sissily was on the porch steps already. Which was fine, and normal, and lovely, except that my best friend was sitting instead of standing, and her ponytail was askew on the side of her head. She also had a sheet of heavy cream paper in her lap that she was holding by the edges with two fingers like it might bite.

Sissily only sits when her legs can’t hold her up.

With dread pooling at the pit of my stomach I was out of the car before it stopped moving. My heels sank into the gravel and I nearly face-planted when I started to jog toward the porch. Ace's hand caught the back of my already ruined shirt and hauled me upright without breaking stride, because eleven days had made us disgustingly good at this sort of thing.

"What is that?" My chin jerked at the paper without greeting my bestie first. "What is it, Sissily?"

"You're bleeding." Her blue peepers snapped up and went straight to my palm, and every scrap of color drained out of her face like she’d seen a ghost. "Hazel…"

"It's glass, I'm fine, I'll heal, what kind of paper is that?"

She turned it around so I could see the seal.

Three keys, pressed into red wax. My family's mark, my coven's mark, the same three keys that hung above the double doors of the Gatekeeper's building in blood-red paint, and under them a second seal I'd only ever seen twice in my life. A ring of small marks, one for every coven that had sent someone to Cleveland to decide whether I was too dangerous to keep breathing.

The Council.

"They sanctioned the pack," Sissily muttered through lips that appeared to be numb.

The word landed on me like a dropped anvil on top of my head, and for a second I honestly thought I felt the ground shake, until I realized it was my own magic answering the tightness in my chest.

I clamped it down so hard my molars clicked.