Page 73 of Junk Magic

The job of guarding the Wolf’s Head rotated between the local clans and was considered an honor. The last time I’d been here, the two wolves at the entrance had been a matched set of giants, with seven feet tall frames draped in four hundred pounds of muscle—and that was in human form. Both had been minimally dressed—in loin cloths and ceremonial necklaces—in case they needed to transform quickly. And should have looked like professional wrestlers on Halloween, or cosplayers doing a burly version of ancient Egyptian guards.

They hadn’t. Torchlight had gleamed on the precious metal in the necklaces and the oil on all those muscles, or maybe that had been sweat. But they’d stood out, as hard as the rock face behind them, and just as intimidating.

Yet tonight, there were just a couple of overdressed guys who looked about as tense and unhappy as I felt. It made my spine itch, and didn’t seem to be doing Sophie any good, either. Because her voice roughened. “We’ll all go.”

“No!” I turned in my seat to look at her, squashed in between Aki, Jen and Kimmie in the back seat. Kimmie was snoring in a corner, wiped out by her display back at the funeral site. But the others were bright eyed and curious about another new thing they got to experience tonight.

Only they weren’t; they definitely weren’t.

“None of you is going in, you understand?” I said.

“Why not?” Dimas asked, poking his head through the sliding rear window. He and Chris were sharing the truck bed, since nobody else was fitting onto the back seat. But with the windows open now that the desert had cooled, they could hear us, too.

“Yeah, why not?” Sophie agreed, looking past me. “I’ve never been inside a Clan structure before—”

“And you’re not going in this time, either!” I snapped, anxiety making my voice harsher than I’d planned.

“Why?” she repeated, bristling. “We’re suddenly not good enough?”

“That’s not what I’m saying—”

“Then what are you saying? I thought tonight was all about inclusion—”

“It was, it is—”

“Well, it doesn’t sound like it. It sounds like we could go to the funeral, because it was out in the desert where nobody could see us. But as soon as there’s other people around, we get hidden away.”

“I’m not hiding you!”

“Then why can’t we come with—” she broke off, probably because of the massive, transformed Were who’d just jumped onto the hood of my truck.

He wasn’t one of the guards, who had remained by the entrance. He’d probably been lurking in the shadows around the cars, although how he had I didn’t know since he was approximately the size of a car himself. And heavy enough to dent my hood, while the three-inch claws on the end of his paws damaged the paint.

I didn’t mind that so much; the old clunker already had an impressive collection of scratches and dents, and the blistered paint job was mostly a thing of the past. I did mind the disrespect, however, especially when I recognized the beast’s markings. I managed not to throw the truck into reverse and watch the bastard hit the dirt, but it was a close thing.

I slammed out of the door instead, getting in his face, which was easy, since he was busy getting in mine.

There were some squeaks from inside the cab, despite the fact that the girls had already seen plenty of transformed Weres tonight. But Ulmer was a different story. Ulmer was freaking huge.

He’d have paled in comparison to the monster that Colin had become, had they been standing side by side. But they weren’t. And with the added boost of looking down on me from the hood, he was a mountain of black and gray fur.

But not a sleek and silky one. Instead, Ulmer’s coat was a mess of old battle scars that caused the fur to stick up in tufts, giving him a shaggy, unkempt appearance. It matched the deep tear that bisected his face, the mostly missing right ear, and the absent left canine that caused his muzzle to be slightly lopsided.

He was a mess, but he was a deadly mess, which was why the clan elders had appointed him as Sebastian’s bodyguard, after three assassination attempts recently. Sebastian had been less than pleased about that, as I doubted Ulmer was great company. But to give the shaggy bastard his due, there’d been no more near misses since he’d come on board.

Maybe it was the stench, I thought, as a blast of fetid breath hit me. It was almost bad enough to cause me to step back a pace, but I caught myself in time. And stared defiantly up into narrowed, golden eyes.

Right before the end of that bisected nose smeared wetly across mine, leaving a trail of mucous that slimed its way across my cheek.

“What the fuck?” I demanded, and did step back then, the gross factor overriding any attempt to look cool.

Sebastian’s bodyguard grinned, showing some broken, yellow teeth, but plenty of whole ones, too.

“About to ask you the same,” he said, with the wolf speak so thick in his voice that I doubted anyone inside the truck understood a word.

But they understood something, because the next second, Sophie tried opening the back door, only to have Caleb reach over and slam it shut again without a word. “What the—”

And then I guessed he made good on that gag spell, because she said nothing more.

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