“So, my uncle’s alive.” That left a bitter taste in my mouth.
“He is,” Dimitri agreed, watching me carefully. Likely waiting to see when I would shatter.
“Elias?”
He snorted, his lip curling in disdain. “The doctor is also alive, last I checked.”
“Preston?”
Dimitri frowned. “Him I don’t know about. Hopefully in pieces spread out on that mountain in Wyoming.”
“He didn’t leave with my uncle?”
Now he grinned at me, a calculating glint in his eyes. “No. I didn’t bring him along for the ride.”
It took a moment for his words to register, but when they did, I sat up and looked around the plane with wild eyes.
It was still us, the four men I didn’t know, and a currently unconscious Tate across the aisle from me. Panic and fear sent my heart galloping.
“Relax,” Dimitri told me with a laugh. “They’re in the back, and even more sedated than Tate.” He jerked his head behind me.
I twisted in my seat. There was a door at the rear of the plane, two of the men I didn’t know sat in front of it.
“Why did you bring them?” I asked, slowly turning back to face him.
“Because Elias screwed us over, and he’s going to pay for that.” One of his large hands curled into a fist.
The dark look of fury that passed his face set me on edge.
“How so?”
“I told you before that he came to our pack?”
I nodded, remembering him mentioning that.
“My father,” he paused, “our father, has spent the last two decades working with the packs in our region, and the Romani in the area, to figure out the issue with the declining birth rates.”
“Did they figure it out?”
“We’ve made progress,” he admitted, somewhat reluctantly. “A lot of progress, actually.”
“How so?”
“It’s complicated, but a lot of it has to do with the link we have with our wolf. The more modernized the world has become, the less time we’ve spent as wolves. This is especially true of younger generations.”
That made sense.
Technology and life had evolved the world, and shifters evolved with it. It was easier to remain human and smother our wolves. I had perfected the art of silencing my own wolf when I shoved her into the farthest recesses of my soul while living in Long Mesa.
“How can you fix that?” I focused my attention on the conversation, clinging to any type of distraction to help me survive the reality that the bomb going off at the Summit had completely ended life as I knew it.
Even if Remy had survived, I knew that people I knew hadn’t. Allies, maybe even friends.
My gaze drifted to where Tate was still unconscious.
She had just as much to worry about as I did. Her father and one of her boyfriends were in that mess we had been pulled out of.
My stomach twisted violently, and I snapped my gaze back to Dimitri.
I needed to focus on the here and now, starting with what he knew about our people.
“We developed a system,” he said slowly, starting to explain. “It’s complicated and rudimentary at the same time. The first step is getting wolves, especially female wolves, back in touch with their animal counterparts.”
I frowned. “Okay. How do you do that?”
“By keeping them in wolf form for a full lunar cycle,” he replied, a small smile hooking up one corner of his mouth.
My brows shot up. “A month as a wolf?”
He nodded. “Yeah. The point is to give complete control to your wolf. To let them embrace what they are, so you can find who you are.”
“And they do everything as an animal?” My nose wrinkled. I didn’t love the idea of hunting down and slaughtering animals for food, and I didn’t even want to think about the bathroom situation.
He smirked. “Yes. Everything.”
“And people agree to this? What if they shift back?”
A ghost of a smile flickered in his eyes. His gaze dropped pointedly to my bracelet. “We make sure they can’t. It’s a commitment, and not one to be entered into lightly. It requires absolute devotion to your wolf. And at the end? I’ve seen several shifters who never regain control from their wolf.”
“They stay a wolf forever?” I whispered, stunned.
Another sharp nod. “It’s intense, but it puts you in harmony with your wolf. Several mates in our pack have bonded during that month.”
“Have you done this?” I asked curiously.
He nodded once again. “Several times. So has our father.”
“And you told Elias all of this?” His name tasted bitter and wrong in my mouth now.
Anger flickered in my heart, dark and hot. I had trusted Elias Samuels. Remy and Gabe had trusted him. And he had betrayed us all.
Another swift nod. “Elias came to our pack a little over two years ago. He seemed genuinely interested in our methods. Dad invited him in, but we had a feeling there was more to him. We let him observe what we were doing to an extent. The good doctor had a reputation that was mostly positive, and Dad thought they could form a partnership.”
A scowl overtook his face and he glared out the window. “We had no idea he was going to take what we were doing and twist it around.”
I swallowed hard. “Twist it how?”
His green gaze swung back to mine, hypnotic in his fury. I could see the truth glittering there.
Elias had betrayed him, too.
“Elias told Damien everything that we had done, but you have to understand, Skye, our methods take time. We only ever took volunteers, and we’re careful about when and how often we do it. Not every lunar cycle is ideal for people to spend a month as an animal.”
The confusion must have been evident on my face because he kept going, leaning forward in his seat.
“I don’t fully understand the moon shit,” he said with a mirthless chuckle. “It’s something the Romani figured out, but apparently different moons mean different things. There’s only two or three moon cycles a year that work with what we’re doing. It has something to do with the timing of when the first shifters were created and a lot of other earthy shit I kinda tuned out.”
“Earthy shit?” I echoed with a skeptical snort.
His teeth flashed as he grinned. “That’s a technical term.”
“Clearly,” I muttered as I grimaced. His lack of understanding wasn’t making me feel any better about magic or witches or whatever.
“Anyway,” he said, his mood changing, “Elias and Damien didn’t want to wait to figure out the best times of the year, and they sure as shit didn’t wait for volunteers.”
“So, they started kidnapping people.” My jaw clenched as I scowled.
He nodded grimly. “Yeah. And that didn’t give them the results they wanted. They picked off lone females. Females who weren’t strong enough to withstand being a wolf for a week, let alone a month. The older the person, the harder it is to retrain them to merge with their wolf. They’ve spent too much time as a human. It literally breaks their mind, and they either die or become a vegetable mid-shift. It isn’t pretty.”
“They started taking younger people,” I whispered, realization slipped over me like an oily blanket until I shivered.