Page 38 of Primal Bonds

“Good.” Adric looked around the table. “Well? You in?”

They nodded as one. “Fuck yeah,” Luc said.

“You’re elected, then,” Adric told him.

Jace made a sound of dissent, and Adric slashed him a look. “We need you here to work on the smartphones.”

“They’ll keep for a few weeks.”

“Do you really want to be out of the country if he sends someone after Merry? We’re not even a hundred percent sure he’s in France.”

Jace blew out a breath. Adric was right; he’d rather stay close for now. “Fine,” he said, even though his animal was scraping against his insides, coldly eager to go hunting.

Adric turned back to Luc. “Take Nash with you.”

“Nash Savonett?” Luc lifted a shaggy black brow. “You sure?” Nash was Leron’s youngest son.

Adric nodded. “He’s shaping up to be an excellent tracker, and he’s earned it. It’s been six years, and he’s proved his loyalty to me. It’s time we gave him a chance to work his way up the hierarchy.”

“What about Kane?” Jace asked. “He’s not going to be happy if you pass him over for his younger brother.”

“Then he can prove himself the way his brother has. He works hard, but he plays both sides. I don’t trust him with a covert job like this.”

Zuri cleared his throat. “There’s one more thing. You were right, Jace—you heard a third man that night you were attacked. Do Mar doesn’t know who it is, but he had the scent of an earth fada.”

Chapter 12

Adric loped across the broken-down Westside neighborhood he called home. A third of the houses were boarded up or turned into squats for junkies. But there were families here too—a tricycle was overturned on a small, neatly-kept lawn, and two women sat on a stoop, a toddler between them.

A man with a gangster tat on his neck strutted down the sidewalk, all broad shoulders and attitude. Then he got a closer look and continued past, eyes down. Adric was the most dangerous predator around, and everyone knew it.

Adric rented the house above his den to a pair of baby-faced drug dealers barely out of their teens. The older one leaned against the porch rail, arms crossed, a cigarillo hanging out of his mouth.

“Wassup, bro.”

Adric jerked his chin. The drug dealers were camouflage—no one would guess the Baltimore alpha lived here—but he was thinking it was time he cleaned up the neighborhood like Jace had.

The teenager’s flat brown eyes tracked him as he headed around the house. He pulled up the trap door concealed beneath the back porch and loped down the two flights of stairs to his den. As he entered the living room, the motion triggered the quartz wall sconces he’d installed when he and Marjani had first moved in.

The den had belonged to a family who had been completely wiped out in the Darktime, but Adric didn’t think about that. Not anymore. It was his home now, the first since his parents had died and he and Marjani had been sent to live with their uncle. Leron’s den had never felt like home.

The wall sconces cast a warm amber light over his sister, curled up on a rug in front of the fireplace. She was in her cougar form again. She’d turned on the fake fire—also quartz-powered—and was gazing into it, eyes slit. The flickering firelight turned her pelt a soft gold, but it couldn’t conceal her weight loss or that her fur was patchy with ill health.

Adric blew out a breath. Sometimes an entire day went by without his sister taking her human form.

“Did you eat today?”

Her head lifted, turned. Cool blue eyes examined him as if he were an annoying insect.

He clenched his hands, feeling helpless. “You have to eat, Jani.”

She tilted her head, considering that.

His claws pricked his palms, his cat wanting to slash something. He drew a slow breath and retracted them.

“You can’t go on like this. You didn’t go out the whole weekend. Jace asked for you. He almost died, you know. Would it have killed you to pay him a visit?”

That got through to her. She’d always liked Jace. Her furry gold brow knit, and she yowled a question.

---