Broken Moon by Laken Cane

Chapter Six

My mother had taken in another stray. She was wandering up the winding driveway to my mom’s house, and I stopped to pick her up.

“Heading to Susan Silver’s place?” I asked, though I knew she was.

“Yes.” She climbed into the back seat. “Thanks for the ride. It’s getting cold. I like the cold, but I’m not really dressed for it.”

I stopped the car in front of the house and we all climbed out, the girl chattering away about nothing. She reminded me of Lucy, though Lucy was currently uncharacteristically subdued.

The girl was human, eighteen or nineteen years old, wearing a calf-length off-white strappy dress despite the chill in the air. Her long, stringy dark hair was loose and tangled, and she wore a pair of worn black ankle boots. Her legs sported tattoos from the knees down, disappearing into the tops of the boots, and as I had ink myself, I looked at them with an admiring eye after we exited the car.

She noticed, preening a bit as she returned the admiration by running her gaze over the ones she could just see creeping up the sides of my neck and the moon tattooed on my right hand. “Nice,” she said.

“Back atcha.” I grinned, then held out my hand. “Kaitlyn.”

“Oh, I know. Your mother talks about you all the time. And there are all those pictures on the walls…” She snickered, then, “I’m Hannah.”

I sighed. I hated clutter, and a bunch of framed photographs on the walls and tables and windowsills was definitely too much clutter. I gestured at Lucy. “This is my friend Lucille.”

Lucy moved a little closer to me and smiled. “Pleased to meet you, Hannah.”

At that second the front door flew open and my mother strode out onto the porch, all smiles and energy. “Get in here, girl! I’ve been waiting since you reached the main road.”

My mother was fifty-three years old, but you’d think she was in her thirties to look at her. I’d gotten my long, light-brown hair and hazel eyes from her, but my height came from my father. Mom was five feet five inches tall, which still put her a few inches above Lucy.

As soon as she saw my mother, Lucy’s reserved attitude disappeared. She ran across the yard and up the porch steps and threw her arms around my mother, enthusiastically joyful.

My mother’s expression didn’t change at being hugged by a stranger. She was accustomed to people being drawn to her, especially, she’d told me once, the lost ones. Always humans, as she didn’t appear to have quite the same effect on supernaturals.

“Mom, that’s Lucy,” I called, as Hannah and I walked to the house. Hannah watched the exchange with the tiniest of lines between her eyebrows. She was a little jealous, or maybe just a little threatened. She’d find out soon enough that my mother didn’t have favorites.

Mom patted Lucy on the back and pushed her away. “Come in, everybody. Laura Jean and Maria are in the kitchen making lunch. Everybody hungry?”

“I could eat,” I said, patting my tummy.

“Are you serious right now?” Lucy asked. “After what you put away at breakfast?”

Mom stepped into the house, glancing back at me over her shoulder. “You finally get serious about someone, honey?”

I frowned. “Huh?”

“Lucy. She mentioned breakfast, so I assumed—”

Lucy laughed. “She doesn’t look at me like that. She’s more interested in the hunky Mr. Jared Walker.”

My mom stopped walking. “Lucy and Hannah, into the kitchen. Tell Laura Jean and Maria we’ll be in directly.”

I glared at Lucy, who shot me an apologetic look and rushed to obey my mother. I started speaking before she had a chance. “He came to visit me. That’s why I’m here.”

She lifted an eyebrow.

“One of the reasons I’m here,” I amended.

“We’d better sit down.” Once we were sitting on the couch before the big picture window, she nodded. “I can’t say I’m surprised. You can’t leave what you are behind. Not forever.”

“Twelve years,” I growled. “Asshole didn’t come to welcome me into his pack, anyway. He wants me to work for him.”

Now her eyebrows nearly disappeared into her hairline. “Work for him.”

“Apparently he knows I investigate supernatural crimes.”

“Oh, I’m sure he knows your reputation. I’m sure he knows everything about you. And he wants you to stop whatever it is that’s killing his wolves.”

I gaped at her. “How do you know what’s happening in his pack?”

“I hear things,” she said mysteriously, then, “What did he offer you in return, besides a boatload of cash? Did he offer to give you a place in his pack? Make you one of his?”

“I don’t want in his pack,” I said coolly. I looked down at my clasped hands, calming myself by concentrating on the busy, happy sounds coming from the kitchen. The sporadic laughter, the clink of glasses, the clank of pans.

My mother put her hand over mine. “Tell me,” she said quietly.

“He said he can free my wolf, mom,” I whispered, hesitant to say the words because I was terrified she’d tell me there was no fucking way he could free my wolf.

“Oh my,” she murmured, and then she pulled me into her arms while I sobbed almost silently, my heart bursting and breaking at the same time.

At last, I sat up and mopped my face with my shirt. “He can’t, can he? He’s lying?”

“Sweetie, if Jared Walker tells you he can unhobble your wolf, then I would believe him. He must have touched her.”

“Then why wouldn’t the bastard pull her out right then and there?” I asked.

“It’s going to be dangerous when it happens. You know that. There will have to be some planning and securities in place. You’ll have to be protected from yourself, Kaitlyn. And maybe for weeks. He wanted to get the evil spirits out of the way first, I’m sure, so he could concentrate on you.”

“You really believe this,” I said slowly. “You think he can bring my wolf.”

“Yes,” she said simply.

“The chances of an alpha being able to undo what another alpha did to one of his own wolves…” I took a deep breath then blew it out slowly, but still my voice was watery when I continued. “I would never have believed it. If I had, I’d have gone to every alpha in the world, trying to find one to set me free.”

She shuddered, and there were oceans of sorrow in her eyes when she looked at me. “I am so sorry for the horror of your life, sweetheart.”

“Not your fault,” I said, surprised.

Twelve long, dark years.

“When it happens,” she said, getting to her feet and pulling me to mine, “I’d like to be there, if he’ll allow it.”

“He’s not my alpha, mom. He doesn’t need to allow anything.”

She said nothing, and I knew she wasn’t convinced. I also knew she understood things that I didn’t, and that she apparently believed it was best to keep her secrets. It didn’t matter. It only mattered that she believed Jared Walker could break my chains.

She was worried, I could see it in her eyes, even though during lunch and the rest of our visit she acted like nothing at all was wrong. She couldn’t hide it from me. I knew her too well.

Before we left, I needed to give her something more to worry about. I pulled her outside so we could walk off our meal in the cold sunshine and I could tell her one more thing and again, hope she could offer me some advice.

“I killed a demon,” I told her abruptly. “A powerful demon. I’ve sent lesser demons back to hell before, but I never actually killed one.” I showed her the demon blade. “I took this from him. I’m not sure what’ll happen now. Will others come for me?”

She stopped to stare at me, shock in her eyes. “Dear God, Kaity. What is going on with you? Twenty-six years of quiet and now your life is blowing up with alphas and demons and psychic girls?”

“Um, first of all, my life has hardly been “quiet,” Mother. Second of all, how do you know Lucy is a psychic? She didn’t once—”

“He cut you, didn’t he?” she interrupted, her voice the kind of soft that happened when I was in danger, hurt, or doing something extremely stupid. “He cut you, and then he got your blood inside him, and that’s how you killed him and stole his blade.” Her grin stretched her face, but she did not look amused. At all.

And once again, I could only stare at her with my mouth open. How the hell did she know these things? “Yes,” I said, finally. “That’s exactly what happened.”

“Show me where he cut you.”

I pulled down the neckline of my shirt and showed her the pink, almost invisible scratch across my chest. “It healed, I guess. I felt the pain of it, and the blood…there was lots of blood. But all it left was this little mark.”

“He knew you were different,” she murmured. “When you cut his bastard face. That was why he hobbled you.”

I frowned. “What are you talking about?”

She came back to the present with a blink. “Adam. Adam Thorne. He realized when you cut him that there might be something inside you, though I can’t imagine what kept him from killing you right then and there.”

“He hobbled my wolf so I couldn’t come after him someday? Because he thought I was different?”

“He thought you were dangerous,” she said, her voice flat and her eyes dark. “You need to prove him right, Kaitlyn.”

“What do you mean?” I stared at her, feeling like I didn’t know her at all. There was something strange about her right then, something I didn’t recognize.

“You know what I mean. He killed your father. If you can kill a powerful demon, you can kill a fucking werewolf. You just need to wait until Jared returns your shift, and once you’re…sane, you will go after the alpha.” She turned to me and grabbed my forearms, her grip tight, a savage light in her eyes. “This is what you deserve after what he did to you.”

“I deserve to get revenge?” I asked, shocked and just a little confused.

“You deserve,” she said, her eyes like flints of steel, “to be the new alpha.” She tugged me until I leaned down so she could whisper into my ear, as though somewhere out there in the cold land, someone was listening. “Kill Thorne, Kait. Avenge your father, take back your pack, and become the alpha of the Moon Stone wolves.”