Page 26 of The Wolf Professor

Honestly, she’d feel safer getting right away from here.

Charlie hurried down the path and along the street, checking her phone for the Muber’s location. And then—oh no, seriously?—the little blinking light on her app turned and went in the other direction.

Damn.

They were so unreliable. Only the hover cabs could be counted on, but they were three times more expensive; she simply couldn’t afford one.

She kept stabbing at the app to try and locate a nearby car, and kept walking.

At a crossroads, she hesitated, trying to get her bearings. The street to her left should take her back to the main part of Motham, she thought. She turned and headed down it, but instead of being surrounded by residential dwellings, she seemed to be walking into an industrial area. Large warehouses, dark and forbidding, towered behind barbed-wire fences. A huge dog threw itself at a fence barking wildly, giving her the fright of her life. Its chain pulled tight, and it whined.

Charlie walked faster, hugging her coat tight around her, her icy breath coiling into the dim light from the occasional streetlamp. She hurried through an underpass covered in graffiti, and out the other side, where things looked even more desolate. Had she stumbled into the Wastelands? Or worse, onto the edge of The Tip, the lands where hungry ferals eked out a meager existence in the city’s rubbish, fueled by drugs and stolen goods.

Fear rode up her throat. But all she could think to do was keep walking.

Charlie pulled her collar tight around her ears, squared her shoulders, and strode toward what she hoped were the lights of the city.

Max stood on the corner of Pack Street and took a deep breath.

There had been an early tradition in Motham to name streets according to which species had settled there.

Labyrinth Lane was where minotaurs had set up their original homes, not so far from here.

Faun Hill was a steep craggy part of town on the edge of Motham Hill, where goat shifters had built little dwellings in the cliff.

Some streets had more generic names that indicated which species might hang out there.

Fly By Night Boulevard had been a hangout for dragons and gargoyles. Even some moth folk and fae set up home here, and they’d all lived in relative harmony. The buildings were turreted with large, flat roof areas to allow for take-off and landing.

As a historian, he enjoyed tracing the streets’ architectural roots back to their origins. But not so much Pack Street. It had too many memories.

Now he disembarked from the hover cab, thanked the driver, a neatly uniformed crow shifter, and, squaring his shoulders, made his way up to the gates that read:

Hunt Wreckers and Car Dealership

So now they’d branched into selling used cars, had they?

His lips curled with slight distaste as he viewed the smashed-up vehicles, some squashed into squares and piled in mangled towers, others lined up ready for the crusher, tattered and torn like offerings to some metal-eating god.

Behind the yard he could see the low dwellings that ran in a rectangle around an open dusty area, with a large bonfire burning in the middle of it.

The Hunt Saturday night barbecue.

Urgh, he remembered them all too well.

This was where the pack gathered after a six-day working week, to drink beer and tear apart a wild boar—or, if they got lucky, a sheep that they’d catch on one of their monthly forays into the forests just outside Motham. They’d done it for years when it was considered illegal poaching, sometimes getting shot at by humans, but as Max understood it, they could get a permit to hunt in the hills north of the city these days.

Yeah, he guessed times were changing… And then of course, there were the damn ruts. He winced, remembering Charlie working out he was part of the Hunt pack this morning. Embarrassing to say the least.

Max straightened his spine and marched through the gates, circumnavigating the twisted car wrecks and moving toward the crowd that had gathered in the flickering light of the fire.

A big pig carcass turned slowly on a spit and Max found his mouth watering. It did smell fucking amazing. But it had been a long time since he’d torn meat off an animal with just his hands.

He hoped they at least had napkins.

He hovered in the shadows, wishing he’d brought a case of beer instead of a fine Avella Hills wine. And then one of the guys raised his head and his nostrils flared.

He strode over, dragging Max into a bear hug and smacking him hard on the back.

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