Page 71 of Isabel and the Werewolf Beast

“I’ll see who it is.” She strode from the room so fast, her body left a blur in my eyes.

“I’ll go too,” Maximus said.

Now I was highly suspicious. I longed to see who was at the door, but what if Asher woke and no one was here? I couldn’t leave my little brother alone. And to think I would have left him alone in the new wolf pack. What had I been thinking?

The sound of muffled voices drifted through the castle, but I couldn’t work out the words. Was Isabel okay? I tore my gaze away from Asher. Perhaps I should go to my mate. Every part of me was torn in two. My mate or my brother. I stood. Mate it was. My feet carried me to the door and out of the hospital-style infirmary and into the formal section of the castle where priceless works of art adorned the walls and surfaces. Toward the voices.

Raised voices.

Isabel’s raised voice.

I rushed toward Isabel’s loud voice at a run, every instinct inside me screaming to protect my mate. Should I shift? Let that feral monster loose once again? Did Silas have more people come and attack us? It didn’t sound like fighting with fists, there were no sounds of flesh hitting flesh, no weapons clanging against each other, this was a fight with words. My hand curled around the intricate doorknob of a room I’d never been inside, andI thrust open the door to where the voices were coming from. To where my Isabel was arguing.

Vampires’ eyes snapped in my direction.

Many pairs of vampire eyes. Not just the three pairs I was used to. A red-haired woman sat beside a dozen vampires all wearing the same black tailored suit with an embroidered red crest on the lapel. Each was as immaculately presented as the last, not a single hair out of place, or a speck of lint on the black suits. They glared at me, which I was used to vampires doing, but these men and women were even creepier than the vampires I’d already met. Their eyes were fathomless depths tinged with a dark stain of red. Calculating. Assessing. They continued to stare.

The grandfather clock ticked in the otherwise silent room. My gaze skittered around the room quickly. A gold oval table sat in the middle of the room, the surface so shiny the vampire’s faces reflected from the tabletop underneath the chandelier. They sat on gold-trimmed chairs, carved legs, and white upholstery. Their black suits seemed out of place in this white and gold room. Isabel looked right at home though as she sat across from the vampires with Lucian and Maximus by her side.

She opened her mouth, but an older-looking male vampire with hair the color of golden straw and eyes a combination of steely gray tinged with red, held up his long, pointed finger. Isabel snapped her jaw shut with an audible click. The vampire pointed his finger at me.

“You,” the vampire said, his voice sweeping across the room in a hypnotic cadence.

“Yes?”

A black talon stretched, then poked from the end of his finger. “We should kill you.”

Isabel squeaked a tiny noise in the back of her throat.

Well, shit, more vampires want to kill me. Nothing new here. This was growing tiresome.

I folded my arms over my chest. “Go ahead and try.”

His long limbs rose from the chair as though ready to test me. The vampire beside him placed a hand on his forearm and urged him back into his seat. My hands tightened into fists. The looks coming from the other vampires were strange. It was as if they feared me. Which was weird since they were the ones who killed werewolves and not the other way around.

I ground my teeth together. “Does someone want to tell me what’s going on so I can get back to my brother?”

“The arrogance,” the first vampire said.

“It is,” the second vampire said.

“Dante,” Isabel said. “His name is Dante. He saved my life multiple times.”

“You should be strong enough to do that yourself,” the first vampire said.

I snorted. “Against an evil warlock who was stalking her? My brother is lying in a coma because he saved us.”

The vampires whispered back and forth between themselves, speaking so quietly that even I couldn’t hear them. They turned their attention back to me. Their shifty eyes darted back and forth between Isabel and me. Cold. Calculating. But there was an interest in their eyes that made me realize they would not kill me. Not today at least. I assumed these were the professors from the academy since Lucian had mentioned them earlier. The teachers who’d helped Isabel harness her vampire powers when Lucian changed her. The same ones who trained new vampires to kill werewolves.

“What’s the real reason you train vampires to kill werewolves?” I asked.

They blinked in unison. That was the only sign my question had thrown them, but I’d bet my life on them knowing all the secrets they’d kept over the years. Hell,they’d probably made them. There was one perk to being a bookworm, and that was all the knowledge I’d amassed through my reading. Learning to decipher what words were truth and where red herrings came from those pages. There was more here than what met the eye. These professors were old even though they appeared to range in age from late twenties to mid-forties. Their vampire years were much longer than their human years had been. How much longer was a guess, but I’d find out one day.

“Lucian told you,” Vampire Two said.

“Yes, but that was a smoke screen, wasn’t it? Like the books in Isabel’s library. You give everyone enough information to keep them happy, but you don’t reveal all. Why?”

“Who do you think you are talking to us like that?” Vampire One asked, flashing the long length of his fangs.

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