“I won’t be in danger. Take me to him now.” The air shimmers and pulses with energy. My body reacts to Madi’s words as if she’d used an alpha command.
Perhaps she did.
She’s not a wolf, but she’s been marked by an alpha. Maybe there’s some transference of his alpha power to her. I’ve never heard of it before, but it seems possible.
What other explanation can there be?
I reluctantly rise from the stool. I want to refuse, but my body’s already in motion. My wolf recognizes her as the boss. “As you wish,” I grumble, holding out an arm like I’m going to escort her to a fucking ball.
She blinks in surprise but moves to take my arm.
Believe me, I couldn’t be more surprised myself.
Aubrey stands blocking our way, her hand on her cocked hip. I want to throw her over my shoulder and carry her out, too. Keep her safe in the scuffle.
Except this has nothing to do with her.
She would only be in danger if I brought her to it.
Which I wouldn’t.
“I really don’t understand what’s going on right now,” Aubrey says.
Madi leans over and gives her a quick cheek kiss. “Sorry to leave the cleaning party. I’ll help when I get back.”
I yank a couple hundreds from my pocket and thrust them at Aubrey. “Call in a cleaning service.”
She looks at my money with scorn. “Bite me.”
I toss it on the coffee table. “With pleasure, buttercup.”
Brick
Bodies press in, a miasma of sweat and blood hanging thick on the air. The floor is slick with fluids. My coat is soaked in them.
As a human, I’d be aware of the whole room-the arguments, the infighting, the alliances formed and broken as the factions of my pack fight for dominance. I’d scan the loose circle of wolves forming a fighting arena for the challenge, and see who I recognize. See who I’d rank the most dangerous.
For the wolf, there is none of this. There is only the now, and the giant gray and tan wolf lunging for my throat. I turn, so the teeth score my side and use my bulk to knock him off balance. He snaps at me, but I’m too fast. I catch his right rear leg in my jaws and rip a chunk out of him.
When he scrambles to face me, he’s limping.
From there it’s short work for me to dart forward and overpower him. I flip him to his back and set my teeth at his throat. I bite but don’t clamp down.
“Yield,” someone shouts. Probably Nickel, hoping to insert some common sense into the chaos. “Damn it, yield!”
My wolf waits. He’ll respect any wolf who submits. He knows the pack needs as many fighters as possible to remain strong, so if a challenger acknowledges my leadership and dominance, my wolf will let them live.
But the wolf on the ground does not yield. I crunch down harder, tasting metal. A jerk of my head and it’s over. The wolf below me grows still.
Another challenge over. Another life lost.
I step back and shift. In man form, I’m naked and stained with blood. My left leg and right side throb where previous challengers got some good bites in.
Vance and Nickel rush forward to grab the dead wolf and drag him out of the circle cleared for my fights. They toss the body onto the gruesome pile of those who have challenged me. None have yielded. They’d rather die than submit to my leadership.
I pace the circle, meeting each glowing gaze. Some of the spectators avoid my eyes. Some stare back, but eventually all of them look down. I’m still the biggest and baddest here. But there’s no shortage of challengers, and eventually the fighting will wear me down.
A heavy body hits my back. Teeth tear into my flesh. I snarl and turn, but Jake is already there. He doesn’t bother to shift, just grabs the errant wolf by the scruff and tail, and hurls it aside. The crowd parts, and the wolf hits the wall, hard. It slides down and is still.
“No fighting out of turn,” Jake growls. A few onlookers growl back, but he bares his teeth and they slink away.
“Who’s next?” I call before more wolves decide to rush me.
Lowell Hunt’s son steps before me.
I search for Lowell in the circle surrounding us. “You’re sure?”
Lowell’s eyes flare bright green. Then he turns his head away.
His son, Junior, spits at my feet. “Face me or yield.”
I’ve hunted with these wolves. I’ve fought beside them. We’ve shared a kill and then a beer around the barbecue at a pack gathering. I know their families, fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers. And now they’re my enemies. They’re standing up to me, one by one, and watching their own pack members get cut down. Lowell Junior’s cousins stand by, ready to challenge me after he falls.
When will it end?
If it weren’t for the faint scent of Madi in my nose, I’d go mad.
I give myself over to the wolf and leap for the kill.
* * *
Madi
Billy breaks speed records zooming me across the river.
I keep a death grip on my seatbelt. “The meeting is in New Jersey?”
He grunts. “There’s too many of us to meet in the usual spot. It’ll attract attention. But nobody cares what happens in New Jersey.”
He weaves his souped up muscle car through a wasteland of a commercial district somewhere south of Newark and screeches to a stop beside an ancient brick warehouse. A faded sign leaning against a wall announces the place as “Blue Moon Burlesque, Discotech and Rodeo.” Billy parks illegally behind a dumpster and hops out.
I accept his help getting out of the car, wishing I’d had a few more minutes of drive time to compose myself. I guess it’s better to get this over with.
Billy leads me through the back door, into the darkness. Shouts and stomps echo around. It’s like being backstage at a concert-and then the smell hits me. The thick musk of wet dog, overlaid with the sharper scent of new pennies. Fur and blood.
Prickles run up my arms. The last time I was surrounded by shifters, I’d been kidnapped. My body remembers the desperate moments, the terror. Warrior shifters with red eyes and sharp, oversized teeth. Adrenaline fizzes in my blood, screaming at me to “Run!”
Billy pauses, glancing back at me. His eyes flare bright blue. I blow out a breath and set my shoulders. “I’m ready.”
He tries to lead me further, but there’s a crowd on stage. A bunch of shifters cram side by side until no one else can fit, jostling each other, yelling, and staring at something below. I can’t see what they’re watching. A few of them turn as I approach. Their eyes flare brighter.
“Human,” one of them mutters in a way that makes me feel dirty.
Billy growls at them. He puts a hand at my back, guiding me to a side set of stairs. We step out into the light, and the bottom drops out of my stomach.
When I imagined a pack meeting, I imagined something like a Moon Co board meeting-the kind in a big conference room. Rows of shifters in three-piece suits seated in folding chairs that strain under their powerful frames. At most, I imagined them standing and shouting like brokers on the trading floor. I’ve been to some late night meetings in the boardroom that got vicious. Corporate types can be animals. Especially lawyers.
The chaos in front of me makes lawyers look civilized. The hall is a seething mass of people, many of them half naked with glistening muscles on display. Shifters in furry form wind between the clusters of shouting humans. It’s louder than a football match, if the sports event had giant wolves in attendance and constant brawls breaking out between the spectators. People are screaming at each other, red in the face. Wolves snarl and snap at everyone and everything in their paths.
Billy nudges me. “You okay?” His voice is raspy like he’s been up all night drinking and shouting.
My breath shudders in and out of me. My hand is at my neck to protect the vulnerable spot.
I have a plan. I hope it works.
If it doesn’t, I might die here tonight.
But at least I’ll die beside Brick.
“Where’s Brick?”
Billy turns me to face the wild knot of people towards the front of the hall, in front of the stage. A half circle of onlookers protects a bare patch of concrete-the only empty space in the room. The people on stage lean down and jeer at the two wolves fighting.
“Those are the challengers,” Billy points out the row of shifters standing in the front of the circle. Most are men, the biggest and brawniest I’ve ever seen. “Brick has to fight every one of them.”
“How many has he fought?”
Billy points beyond them, to the far wall. “Those are the losers.”
It takes me a moment to register what the towering pile of blood-stained fur is. Dead wolves. So many of them.
I clamp my hand over my mouth. I am so out of my depth here. I could’ve had a hundred conversations with Catherine and Brick about their world, and it wouldn’t have prepared me for this.
This isn’t a pack meeting.
It’s the apocalypse.
“The alpha must face every challenge,” Billy continues. “He has to defeat them all in a fair fight.”
“But it’s not fair,” I burst out. “There are hundreds of them-he has to fight them all?”
“That’s the best case scenario.”
“What’s the worst case?” I’m afraid to ask.
“The rest of the room decides there’s no hope, and they all turn on him together and kill him.”
Oh my God.
“These are desperate wolves,” Billy says. “Without a strong leader, they know they’re in danger. A wolf in danger, with no options, goes feral.”
I sense the desperation. It hangs overhead, thickening the air. I see it in the eerie bright eyes, the flashing fangs.
These wolves have lost hope. Brick is fighting for them, but he needs help.
But what can I do? I’m one woman in a strange new world.
I’m not completely unarmed. After Sweden, I bought myself a weapon. It’s small and fits into my coat pocket, and I’m not sure how effective it’ll be against 200 plus pounds of shifter muscle. A bazooka might be the only thing that would stop a werewolf, and there’s not just one here. There are thousands.
Someone spots me, does a double-take and lopes over to the small staircase where Billy and I stand.
It’s Nickel. The British wolf is the most disheveled I’ve seen him-his shirt unbuttoned and smeared with dark red. His hair’s on end.
I barely recognize him until he says in his cut-glass accent, “For Fate’s sake, why did you bring her here?”
“I had to,” Billy says. “My wolf recognizes her as alpha.” He shifts on his feet and mutters, “She used the voice.”
Nickel blinks and looks at me with new eyes.
“I’m here to help,” I tell him.
“How?” He looks at me like I’m a puny human too weak to do anything.
I stare into his eyes.
Rule number one of Wall Street: never show weakness.
If I think I’m weak, I will be.
Strength isn’t always about muscles and speed. Fangs and claws.
“Get me on stage,” I order. I don’t know what Billy means by the voice, but I infuse my tone with all the force and certainty I can muster.
Nickel straightens. After a moment, he angles his head slightly, dropping his gaze. “Your funeral,” he murmurs, which isn’t exactly a vote of confidence. But he turns and shouts for Jake and Vance.
Jake and Vance emerge from the crowd and leap up the stairs to close around me. We shuffle backstage.
I’m the center of the knot of four men. Billy’s at my back, Nickel in front. I feel like Goldilocks surrounded by four papa bears.
I push to tiptoe, but can’t see over Nickel’s broad shoulder. “Get me on stage,” I say with more confidence than I feel.
“This way.” Nickel charges forward. A few men stand in his way, their eyes on the crowd below, and he savagely shoves them away. They growl, and he snarls back, showing thick white fangs. “Come on,” he motions.
Someone plows into Jake, and I’m jostled as he whirls and snarls. Blood flies. Vance gets a face full. He licks his lips, his eyes gleaming.
My stomach drops to my toes. What am I doing? This is crazy. A part of me wants to run and hide.
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