Charmed Wolf by Aimee Easterling (best ereader for pdf TXT) 📕

meet mine. “Both children look alive to me. You did good work, friend.”

Chapter 41

Friend was enough to unstick my feet. Especially when Erskine’s head popped up out of the hole in the ground.

Rune’s brother didn’t look as suave as usual, and not just because of the explosion. His voice was gritty as he pointed one hand back over his shoulder. “I suggest we get a move on.”

Every muscle in his body tensed, as if he was holding up the earth upon which we stood. And maybe he was. Because the ground rumbled beneath our feet as he spoke. Loose pebbles clattered as they fell into the darkness. The gaping gash didn’t look particularly inviting after that.

But the hole had brought my friends to me. Well, one friend plus a duty-sworn ex-Consort and a no-longer unicorn.

My throat was tight when I nodded. “Good idea,” I agreed, heading for the hole.

We picked our way down the rubble slope, Kale helping his mother while Natalie clung to the baby. Erskine held up a cell phone set to flashlight mode, but the light was barely enough to keep us from tripping over jagged rocks.

Rune and I were last, and my balance wasn’t assisted by the way my eyes kept flying to him. We were almost at the bottom when I finally asked the question I both did and didn’t want the answer to.

“Who...?” I started, only to trail off as Rune’s fingers grazed across my neck.

When he’d first reached out, I thought he was helping steady me. Instead, he barely touched the sore left by the Queen’s chain and the scab I kept picking at. Questions lingered in Rune’s features. But when the silence between us lengthened, he offered me the airspace. “You first.”

I swallowed, dropping to my butt to slide down a particularly difficult boulder. We were in the cave now, rushing forward into near darkness. Avenues branched off in multiple directions, but Natalie continued forward without hesitation. I only realized how she was able to be so decisive when my fingers trailed across a glitter arrow on the wall beside me. My friend had painted markers to guide us home.

I only wished I knew how to guide myself around whatever barrier had lodged itself between me and Rune. Finally, in the absence of a better idea, I did what he’d asked me to—I spat out the rest of my question.

“Who survived the battle?”

“Battle?”

His gaze scorched me, then was gone so fast I couldn’t catch his eyes when I turned my head.

“The battle with the Guardian,” I elaborated, unsure how Rune could forget something so horrendous. Unless....

“There was no battle.” Now Rune’s gaze latched onto mine, his brows drawn down. “I wouldn’t leave your pack, Alpha, if they were in danger.”

I winced at his use of my title rather than my name. Winced...then froze as pack bonds slammed into me. They were faint, but I could still tell who each one belonged to. Could tell that Rune calling me “Alpha” had helped them reconnect.

Blinking away the irrelevance, I reveled in our reunion. One by one, shifters I’d thought were dead tied themselves back to me. Shifters I’d seen being swallowed by the earth turned out to be very much alive.

So the episode in the mirror had been nothing more than the Queen teasing me? Or perhaps she’d showed me one possible future the same way Erskine had learned Rune and I would later meet each other. No wonder getting my way had been so easy—the Queen had tricked me into thinking I was gaining far more than she was.

And none of that mattered. Because my pack—Caitlyn, Ash, every single one of them—was alive.

I only realized I was crying when Rune’s thumb slid beneath my left eye. “Tara,” he started.

Then the cave collapsed.

NOT ON TOP OF US. IN front of us. The turn Natalie had been about to guide us into disappeared beneath a mass of rubble. Erskine and Natalie and Kale and Hazel landed on the cave floor in a pile. It was hard to tell who was shielding whom.

It was easy to tell who picked them up. Rune crossed the intervening space before my muscles unfroze. “Thanks, brother,” he murmured as he helped Erskine off the top of the pile.

So, I guessed, Erskine had been the one in the most danger. The fae nodded, something flickering across his face. “I still owe you,” he started, but Rune had already turned to lift the next uninjured body up.

“We’re fine,” Natalie informed him, pulling herself and her children off the ground with Rune’s assistance. “We aren’t, however, taking the short route home.”

For a moment, I had no clue what she was talking about. During the fracas, Erskine’s phone had landed face-down on the cave floor. So I don’t think any of us had taken in the full extent of the cave-in until Natalie mentioned it.

The dim light, however, was enough to show what had happened once Natalie’s words pointed us in the right direction. There was the next glowing marker...just barely visible at the edge of the rubble pile.

The path forward was entirely blocked.

No wonder Kale’s lip quivered slightly. He was only twelve, after all. He hadn’t signed up for fae awfulness and tunnel cave-ins and endless life-or-death stakes.

He needed to be home, watering his flowers. He needed to be doing kid things, whatever kid things consisted of.

My stomach lurched as I realized that was what Rune had been trying to tell me about Caitlyn also. I’d been grooming the girl to be my Heir’s Beta just as coldly as my father groomed me to take his place. It hadn’t just been the Guardian dragging down Clan Whelan. I’d been implicated as well.

“What are you thinking?” Rune was back beside me, persimmon swirling warm from his skin to mine.

“Thinking of mistakes I intend to fix,” I replied honestly. “Once Natalie blows up the ceiling and lets us out of this cave.”

“Blows up...?” Erskine squawked.

“Cool.” Kale became abruptly cheerful.

Rune