“This was not exactly how I pictured bonding with my pack-mates.” Marcus tossed a large amethyst wand into the air, catching it and twirling it between his fingers like it was a marching baton or a cuban cigar. “There’s no alcohol, or naked chicks. No one even brought snacks.”

The four of us were crowded into the back room of Astarte, Clara’s occult shop on the high street. Ryan and Luke had their noses in some of Clara’s shapeshifter mythology books, looking for clues that might somehow link my family to the Bairds. Marcus and I were huddled in one corner, a laptop screen between us, scanning recent issues of “Shift in Focus,” a membership-only news site that curated content relating to the worldwide shifter community. Apart from some recent articles about the discovery of the caves, and one with a shot of my back and the headline, Lowe Pack Re-Established?, we’d found nothing.

“Shut up and keep looking,” Ryan said, without even looking up from a thick volume of English folklore.

“There has to be a connection.” Luke mumbled as he tossed a book called American Werewolves in Europe against the wall, and picked up another from the stack.

“No matter how many times you say it, doesn’t make it come true,” Marcus muttered, pretending to stab the cover of the book with the tip of the wand.

Clara popped her head around the corner, and wrenched the wand from Marcus’ hand. “Can you boys keep it down in here? I’ve got customers out here, and it’s hard for them to feel the spiritual connection to my overpriced crystals if all they hear is you lot cursing at each other.”

“Sorry, Mother.” Marcus tried to grab the laptop off me, but I held it out of reach. “The new alpha won’t let his minions help.”

“I did let you help,” I shot back. “But all you wanted to do was look up videos of tractor accidents on YouTube.”

“Why not? That shit is hilarious. Did you see that one in Russia when the tractor ran over that bicycle—”

Clara rolled her eyes at me, and I stifled a snort. “Marcus, dear. Why don’t you pop down to the bakery and get us all some lunch?”

Marcus grumbled as he got to his feet.

Ryan grabbed the waistband of his brother’s jeans. “Get me a piece of that Heaven & Hell cake, would you?”

“Hang on.” Luke leaned forward, a thick volume open on his knees. “I might have something.”

I slid the laptop off my knees and scooted over, peering at the page upside down and trying to make sense of the strange diagrams.

Luke jabbed his finger at the page. “This says that the Lowe pack was once in possession of a powerful artefact, an ancient ring called the Benedict ring. It’s quite a unique design – two snakes curled around a bloodstone.”

“They sell those at every goth store at Camden Market,” Marcus growled.

Luke ignored him, which I was beginning to understand was the best way to deal with Marcus. “Apparently, the Benedict ring had been passed down through one of the most powerful witch families since the time of the Great Plague. The last descendant of that line lived here in Crookshollow. When the witch hunters came, she knew she would soon be burned, and the ring would fall into their hands. So she gave it to the Lowe alpha, who was her lover, for him to hide away. Apparently, it was never heard from again.”

“What’s this ring supposed to do?”

Luke consulted the book. “Apparently its original owner, a Lord Benedict, was a powerful magical worker. He would suck out the magic of other witches, and store all that power inside the ring. It enabled him to have many times the power of any equivalent witch. Apparently, he could even use it to fly. With that power he controlled a vast kingdom, until he was killed by his own daughter. Here’s a picture of him with the ring, see?” He jabbed his finger at a woodcut of a cold-looking dude in an elaborate coat. His right hand clasped the hilt of his sword, and his left hand rested against his breast, over his heart. The ring was on his left index finger, drawn large, to emphasise the detail of the coiled snakes circling the stone.

“How come we never heard of this before?”

Luke shrugged. “Maybe our parents and grandparents didn’t know about it. If the artefact was lost in the eighteenth century, perhaps it passed out of all knowledge, the way the one ring in Lord of the Rings came to be lost until Bilbo Baggins—”

“That’s enough of that, Gandalf.”

“Right, sorry.”

Ryan said. “Are we assuming the Bairds know about this artefact?”

“It’s definitely plausible.”

“Could there be any reason why they’d believe Caleb has it?”

“Of course, the caves!” I grabbed the computer and navigated back to the article with the grainy picture of me near the Crookshollow caves. I turned the screen around to show Ryan and Luke. “Shift in Focus were speculating that Luke and I were re-establishing the Lowe pack in Crookshollow, which I guess isn’t really speculation anymore.”

“Guess not.” Luke grinned back at me.

“The fact that we’ve marked out new boundaries for our pack around the forest probably solidified the rumour,” I continued. “If the Bairds saw this article, and they knew about the ring, they might theorise that the artefact would be hidden in our ancestral caves. They’d assume that I was staying in Crookshollow in order to obtain it and use it.”

“They could believe Caleb would use this ring to gain control over all the wolf clans,” Luke said, his voice tight with excitement. Ancient rings of power were just his kind of thing.

“And they want it for themselves,” Ryan said. “That, or they want Caleb as an ally while he builds up his power.”

“This whole thing sounds insane,” Marcus snorted. “Rings of power, bloodstones, seriously? This isn’t Harry fucking Potter.”

“I agree, but it’s no more insane than some of the other stuff that’s gone on in Crookshollow over the last year.” Luke looked over at Ryan. “Do you agree?”

“Fair enough.” Ryan grinned. After all, he was the centre of much of the drama that had put Crookshollow front-of-mind for shifters in the last couple of years …

“So does this mean we have to go hunt out an ancient ring?” Marcus asked, sighing.

“We don’t have to actually have the artefact,” I said. “We just have convince them we have it, which should be pretty easy. Like you said, there are dozens of rings that look like this in every goth store in the country. Clara might even have one.”

Ryan ducked his head out the door and explained what we wanted.

“Hold on.” Clara returned a moment later with a small black tray displaying several garish rings. “I think this one would be perfect.” She plucked one from the tray and handed it to me.

It was perfect. A huge, chunky band decorated with elaborate filigree, with two snakes coiled around a glittering red stone.

“That’s not a real bloodstone, of course,” Clara said, as I slipped the ring on my finger. It looked ridiculous. “It’s glass. But it is silver-plated.”

“Well, isn’t that fancy?” I grinned.

“Right, we’ve got our fake magical ring,” Marcus said. “Now what do we do?”

“I think we’re going to have to go see my friend Irvine Baird,” I growled, flashing my finger at him. “He needs to know that he can’t mess with the Lowe clan.”