Page 39 of Junk Magic

I blinked slowly at him.

“Can I . . . have that?”

I looked down, where his eyes were focused. A man was underneath me. There was blood on his neck.

“He’s not going to challenge you anymore,” Caleb said, slowly and carefully. “You won, alright? He’s submissive.”

I growled, unable to answer as my teeth were still buried in the man’s flesh. I could rip it out, I thought, almost idly. I could feel the gush of warm blood, see it pour over the floor, saturate the old carpet tiles. They needed changing anyway—

“Lia!” I looked back up. “He challenged you and he jumped for the boy. He was wrong. He fucked up and found out. Just . . . just let me have him now, okay?”

Caleb’s hand reached out and I growled, deep in my throat. My prey. Mine.

“Hit her with a stun spell,” someone said.

“We’ve hit her with five!” someone else snapped.

“Then try something else!”

“We’ve tried everything nonlethal and she shrugs it off. What do you suggest we do? Kill her?”

“She’s going to kill him if we don’t!”

“Shouldn’t have challenged,” a rougher voice said, a wolf voice.

“No, he shouldn’t have,” someone else said. Another new voice, but this one . . . this one, I knew.

It rang like bells in my ears, sweet and joyous. I made a happy little sound, and a new figure replaced Caleb. Mate.

“He shouldn’t have,” Cyrus repeated, smiling at me.

I smiled back, although that was not a thing that wolves did. But I was betwixt and between now, my mind caught between two identities, and unsure which was me. I was still unsure when Cyrus reached out a hand and did what Caleb had been denied.

He touched my prey.

“He was a fool,” Cyrus said, speaking to the others but keeping those whiskey-colored eyes on mine. “Lia is Arnou. She outranks him in clan order, something of which he was well aware. When she gave a command, he should have listened.”

“She’s honorary,” a man’s voice said, melting halfway through the comment from wolf speak to human. “She hasn’t been bitten, doesn’t Change. He thought she had no right—”

“Don’t talk to him!” Someone else said. “He’s vargulf, too! You dishonor yourself!”

“I’d do a lot more than that to get my brother back safely.”

The speaker came into view a moment later. Fiftyish, hair half gray, half still a vivid red. Lined, weather-beaten face under a short beard. Strange expression as he regarded me.

But he made obeisance, getting low, almost to the ground since he had to be lower than me and I was currently crouched over my prey. His brother, I realized. My brain almost broke as conflicting commands raced through my synapses:

Get off him.

No! Ours!

Let him go!

Wild yips and growls and aborted howls flooded my brain, ones I felt all the way to my bones. Like the reply. No!

“Lia,” Cyrus’s voice came again. “He made a mistake. His brother begs forgiveness, and for the Were’s life. He asks that you show pity.”

My eyes flicked to the brother, now face down on the floor in front of me. Close enough to grab his brother’s arm, to jerk my prize away. Yet he did not.

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