Page 149 of Empowering the Wolf's Heart

Little things started to pop up. How she and Grandpa had always argued over how to treat us kids. How he’d stood up forus and told her not to talk about us like we didn’t know what she was saying. How he’d said that a six-year-old was too young to train. He’d tried to protect us.

But he’d never known what he was up against.

"Dear child, one must always take the time to properly plan the destruction of your children's children," she said, sneering. "There were keys to set into place. And I had yet hoped the people themselves would turn back to their senses if I just gave them time to see what an inept leader you were. Butyou." The smile fell from her face as her blazing eyes locked on me. "Youturnedthe people. It shouldn’t have been possible. You were everything I waited generations for, and yet I never suspected the benevolence you would hold and how it would destroy centuries of work."

Fear. Cold, hard fear rushed over the bond between me and Shen. Panic.

Something cold slid between the chain-link and angled up beneath my cloak toward my heart. A massive black wave knocked me and the assassin behind me over.

I rolled, trying to gather my breath. I put my hand to my side that felt oddly numb. My hand came away red. Black spots danced before my eyes, but I saw Shen, his jaws poised over the black-haired woman who had been there when his mother died. She bared her teeth, staring him in the eyes.

“If it was not forher, mother would have never chosen you. She did not have todie!” she said.

Shen's sister just tried to kill me. Whelp, some things run in the family, I suppose.

Shen’s mouth began to close, fangs penetrating the soft skin of his sister’s throat.

“Shen,” I whispered. “Don’t. Your power is your freedom. Don’t return to bondage.”

Shen’s eyes darted to mine. Ifelthim. His need for vengeance, for pain, for a way to numb the guilt growing like a seething mass in his chest. His fear that now, finally, I would see him for what he was.

A tiny smile tugged at my lips.I do not fear you,I whispered to that cold, detached mind that was trying not to feel.

His cold wall burst.

Emotions I couldn’t read flickered across his eyes. Guilt flared, then he stepped back, grabbed his sister by the shoulder, and threw her into a tree hard enough to knock a normal person silly. She grunted and kicked his nose.

“You can’t stop caring long enough to see the grand image. And you’ll die for it. Bring me the hellhound,” Kingpin said.

Blood seeped from the wound between my ribs. I stuffed it with cotton strips soaked in yarrow powder from a packet within my cloak. Mages circled me, and a black mage brought Fenbutt by the scruff. Fenbutt was snarling and trying to bite at the man, but the mage slapped him. Though I tried to get up, my legs were too weak to hold me.

IfeltShen’s rage as his sister fought, preventing him from getting to me and Fenbutt. Other werewolves yelped as they were stopped by the mages, all trying to get to me. And failing.

I struggled to get at the mage holding the pup. “Don’t youdarehurt him.”

Kingpin tsked. “This all would’ve been different had you chosen another route, Aurelia.”

That’s when Fenbutt glanced up and saw me. His tail wagged and then it went rigid as his nose twitched. His lips lifted, showing hints of his tiny puppy teeth.

Then his eyes turned red. His body twisted and twitched. It morphed from a tiny puppy to a furry little goblin creature with a bowed spine near his neck and metal spikes all along his back.His fur turned a metallic gray and became as coarse as a metal brush.

The man holding him dropped him with a yell as a spike rose from Fenbutt’s back and pierced the mage’s hand.

Fenbutt bounded to me, licking my ear. He got on my chest and released a sound I had no words to describe. It was the scream of promised death. It was the sound of a hundred werewolves in one voice. It echoed and reached beyond the veil of this world and into something else entirely. I’d heard of these creatures.

I didn’t learn of them as hellhounds, though.

We called them Timber Wolves, wolves that shake the earth with their howls and cause the trees to fall.

Fenbutt was aTimber Wolf?!?

“Fen, hon, can’tbreathe,” I gasped.

He whimpered, jumped down beside me and licked my chin. He growled again at those around us, turning and snapping sharp teeth, trying to keep them all in his sight.

The mages stared at the little wolf.

“Is he supposed to transform so soon?” a mage asked.

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