Bloodfire (Blood Destiny 1) - Helen Harper Page 0,1

with the laughter lines around his eyes, hinted at the wisdom and experience contained within that smart mind of his. John had been alpha in Cornwall for thirty-two years, and was universally liked and respected by the pack, but that didn’t mean that I couldn’t still have a little fun.

“So what is it this time? Don’t tell me, I’ve got it, a sheep has gotten lost on the moor and its bleating is terrifying the farmers.”

He held out his palm. There was a small shiny black object resting in the middle. “I wish that’s what it was,” he said grimly. “Take a look at this.”

I picked it up from his hand and rolled it through my fingers. It was almost entirely weightless, and very smooth. There was also something else. I held it up to my ear and heard an odd chiming sound.

John looked at me sharply. “You can hear it?”

“Sure,” I said surprised.

“Describe it to me.”

“You mean you can’t hear it?” I was puzzled. Compared to my own hearing, John could hear a leaf drop from fifty paces away. “It’s like bells. Only not, it’s more continuous than that. Like a never-ending echo of a chime.”

He pursed his lips, clearly unhappy. “It’s a wichtlein’s stone.”

“A mine fairy’s? They knock three times and a miner drops dead?”

“You’ve been reading too many fairy tales. Wichtleins do sometimes hang around old mines and tease the men that work there, but more often than not they are true harbingers of evil. I don’t think one has been seen in the British Isles for more than a century.”

“What do you mean ‘true harbinger of evil’? What kind of evil? Vampire evil? Shadow men evil?’

“Try large scale death and destruction evil.”

“Oh.” I paused. “So not bunny rabbits then.” I felt a brief shiver of heat inside me.

John held out his hand and I dropped the stone back into his lined palm.

“So what’s next?”

His brow furrowed further and he looked at me with troubled eyes. I had a nasty feeling I knew what he was going to say next and felt a brief nervous tremor.

He sighed heavily. “I’ll have to file a report with the Brethren.”

Damnit. Up till now, at least for as long as I’d been old enough to be aware of how the pack was run, any reports John had sent to the Brethren had been after any otherworldly messes had already been cleared up, and the details had been purely informative and retrospective. In other words requiring no further action. This reeked of a mess that was about to begin instead – and for me that spelled danger, especially if the Brethren were going to gallop on down to ‘save’ us.

I eyeballed John with hopeful skepticism. “Really? We can deal with death and destruction without them.”

Unfortunately his voice was flat. “No. Something on this kind of scale is something they need to know about.”

“Will they come here? Do I need to leave?” I asked quietly, curling my nails painfully into my palms.

He didn’t pause before answering, which I suppose was slightly reassuring. “I shouldn’t think you’ll need to. Even if they arrive to see our little pack with a delegation, we can mask you well enough – of course as long as you’re not in a position where you’d be expected to shift. Julia’s been improving the lotion since the Brummie delegation were here last autumn. With that on even the Lord Alpha himself won’t be able to smell a hint of your humanity.”

I felt an immense wave of relief. As far as I was concerned, this was my home, even if the Brethren would strongly disagree. And probably summarily execute me for daring to think otherwise. Because I was human - and humans were not permitted to even know about the Brethren or the mere existence of shapeshifters, let alone live with them for seventeen years.

As for the lotion, shifters have an animalistic sense of smell. The first time that another pack’s members had visited us, years before when I was just a kid, Julia had set to work creating the potion that now, on occasion, we used to hide my all too human scent. She’d been getting better and better at it. Fortunately the fact that I spent all my time with my pack meant that the worst of my so-called human stench was already covered from just sheer transference, whilst the lotion did all the rest. I had been meaning to ask what was in it for years but had