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By Root 3999 0

with more than ease. But Marcus, the previous Ulfric, remained elusive. I’d thought with my newfound control I’d be able to call him, but not only was Marcus not there, no one was there. The clearing was empty of spirits. It shouldn’t have been. This was the spot where they consumed their dead, each pack member eating the flesh to take on the memories and courage, or faults, of the recently dead. They could choose not to feed, but it was like the ultimate excommunication. Raina had been a bad person, and I wondered sometimes what exactly you had to do to get excommunicated from the lukoi. Raina had been so bad that I would have let her go, but she was powerful. Maybe that’s why she was still hanging around.

Though hanging around implied she was like the phantoms of Verne’s pack, and she wasn’t. She was internal to me, as if she poured out from inside my body, rather than pouring into me from outside. Marianne still couldn’t explain why it worked that way for Raina and me. Some things you just accept and work around, because to do anything else is to butt your head against a brick wall; the wall will not break first.

Raina filled me like a hand inside a glove, and I was the glove. But I’d worked a long time to be able to control her. We’d worked out a deal of sorts. I used her memories and powers, and I let her have some fun. The problem was that Raina had been a sexually sadistic nymphomaniac when alive, and death hadn’t changed her much.

I opened my eyes and felt her smile curve my lips, felt my face take on her expression. I rose to my feet in a graceful line, and even my walk was different. Once I’d hated that; now I shrugged it off as the price of doing business.

She laughed, full throated, the kind of laugh that makes a man look in a bar. Her laugh was deeper than mine, contralto, a practiced seduction of sound.

Richard went pale, hands gripping the arms of his throne. “Anita?” he made it a question.

“Guess again, my honey wolf.”

He flinched at the nickname. In wolf form Richard is a ginger color, like red honey, though I’d never really thought of it like that before. Trust Raina to think of something thick and sticky when she looked at a man.

Her words came out of my mouth. “Don’t be bitchy, when you called me for help.”

I nodded, and it was my voice that explained to Richard’s confused frown. “I was thinking something less than charitable about her. She didn’t like it.”

Jacob walked towards me and stopped when I looked at him with Raina’s expression. “You can’t have called munin. You’re not lukoi.”

Strange, but it hadn’t even occurred to me that being a leopard might mean I couldn’t call munin. It might explain why the other munin hadn’t come when I called. “You said my necromancy wouldn’t help me, Jacob, can’t have it both ways. Either I’m lukoi enough to call the munin, or I’m necromancer enough to help myself.”

We—Raina and me—stalked towards the tall, shirtless man. Raina liked him. Raina liked most men. Especially if the man was someone she’d never had sex with, and among the pack that had been a short list. But Jacob and more than twenty others were new. She looked out over the pack and picked out the new faces. She hesitated over Paris and didn’t like her either. You can’t have too many alpha bitches in one pack without them fighting amongst themselves.

I felt something I hadn’t felt before from Raina—caution. She didn’t like how many new people Richard had allowed into the pack in such a short space of time. It worried her. I realized for the first time that it hadn’t just been love that made Marcus put up with her as lupa. She was powerful, but more than that, in her own twisted way she did care about the pack, and she and I were in perfect agreement on one thing: Richard had been careless with it. But we both felt we could fix it. It was almost scary that the wicked bitch of the west and I were in such perfect agreement. Either I had been corrupted, or Raina had never been quite as corrupt as I thought. I wasn’t sure which idea bothered me more.

Of course, she thought we should seduce Richard