“I’ll make sure that Aura knows you felt like she was unfit, and therefore we had to bring a few back for you. No problem.” She continued on, obviously having a different conversation with him than he was having with her. “Like I said. We need to get going, can’t miss the blessed occasion, but you’ll have plenty of people watching over you. Don’t worry.”
He let them carry him for a while, then finally lifted his head and looked at her. “Don’t you ever get tired?”
“No,” she said with the first genuine response to anything he’d said all night, “but I know you do.”
He just hung his head again, letting them carry him, since he had no way of getting out of the hold of the Earthborn carrying him. After a moment or two, though, he looked up at Alina again and opened his mouth, sticking out his tongue at her, and a single jolt of electricity shot out at Alina, catching her in the neck, though it wasn’t very powerful.
She winced and twitched as it tingled down her spine, but then she only glared at him. “You know, maybe I’m more interested in bringing back your puppies as gloves and a hat than alive.”
He sighed at the fact that he hadn’t gotten much out of himself, and closed his eyes, letting them do whatever they wanted with him without reaction.
Alina stopped and the guards moved past her to take Orlando away while she turned the other direction. She had a lot of work to do.
As Orlando was finally thrown in the back of another heavily-lined van, he couldn’t even struggle to look out the front windows to see where he was. What good would the knowledge do him anyway? They had taken him, and taken Candra the same way. He knew they wouldn’t kill her, just as he knew they wouldn’t kill him. He was too useful. So was she. But Aura…that was something else altogether.
And if her pups were actually his…
“I’m sorry, Aura.” He whispered into the floor of the van with his eyes closed, just as the drivers gunned it into motion and slammed him against the doors he’d been shoved through. It didn’t matter where he was being taken. It wasn’t back to the ones he belonged with.
* * * * *
Stuck in her wolf form, Aura wasn’t able help in the rebuilding of the compound, but she did everything that she could. Her house had been more or less restored, though it was shaped differently so that she wouldn’t constantly be reminded of what she had lost. Several houses had gone up quickly, and she helped with the building of the monument that was over all the buried bodies of the lost Ironborn.
Ziem was among them, as he would have wanted to be. He didn’t think himself special, and even in death he wouldn’t have wanted to be set apart from the rest who died. Every pack had their own monument that they were building, even the Stoneborn packs and Earthborn packs that formed from the remaining wolves of Osvald and Sedovin, those few that had turned out to be more trustworthy than their Alphas had been.
Nick was near her most of the time, though they very rarely spoke directly. He was in his human form almost all the time, working on the monument and the rebuilding effort. He still walked with a limp as he made his way around the monument and smoothed the edges of all the metal so that the walls were of one seamless piece. The power of an Ironborn was better than any welding job.
Aura watched Nick as he did his particular aspect of the job, mainly because she missed the touch of metal more than she missed almost anything else about being human. Soon, though, very soon, she would have it back. She would also have a bunch of fatherless puppies, which was hard for her to think about.
She paced back and forth for a little while not far from Nick before she went up to sit down next to him as he stood back to look at what he had accomplished so far that day.
So that he wasn’t so far above her, he crouched down, apparently to look at the lower part of the wall to inspect it for blemishes. He didn’t look at her beside him, but he put out a hand and laid it in the fur on her shoulder, letting his considerable power flow out of him and into her. In the last month of her pregnancy, she would need all she could get. There was a lot of talk about her and about Ziem, and about the fact that she was putting herself under too much strain by trying to help with the monument, even though no one moved to stop her.
It felt good to have the fresh power run through her, even though it made the puppies stir inside of her wildly, some of them reacting to the feel of the Ironborn energy. She didn’t know if the puppies were his, but she was glad that he was at least acknowledging the fact that she was alive. She licked the top of his hand to thank him for the boost, and then she looked back at the monument. It was a beautiful thing, the way it was shaping out to be.
He didn’t speak to her but patted her fur a few times before he got back up and walked around to the entrance of the crypt itself, completely disregarding what he’d done beforehand. The Ironborn within the monument, hundreds of them, were perfectly sealed in steel that had been shaped around their bodies by those that loved them in a likeness of themselves. Their every feature was preserved, down to the last curl
