Page 96 of Golden Eagle

“You can only help Lanny as much as he’ll let you,” Harvey said, unrelenting. “After that, he has to want to be a good person. Or, at least a responsible one. You have to decide what you can and can’t live with, and go from there.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“I told you I wasn’t good at this.”

“No, no. You’re right.” Trina slumped back in her chair, tired though the day hadn’t even officially started yet. “Hey, would it be possible to bring someone else by to see the vics’ remains? If I need him to, I mean.”

Harvey rolled her eyes. “Lord, deliver me from storybook creatures. Yeah, sure. What’s one more?”

A young under-coroner in blue scrubs came to knock tentatively at the door and tell Harvey – with polite hesitance – that it was time for the first autopsy of the day.

“Gotta keep the kids on their toes,” Harvey said, a touch smug, as they got to their feet.

Trina bid her goodbye, trashed her half-eaten muffin, and went back out the heavy auto-locking metal door. It was still dark. Over the building tops, she could just make out the barest thread of pinkish light. Dawn would be along soon, but the air was at its sharpest. She zipped her jacket, shoved her hands in her pockets, and headed off down the sidewalk toward the precinct.

She’d gone about a block when she heard it: the growl.

An unusual lull in traffic, a quiet stretch of sidewalk without pedestrians, save the handful a hundred yards ahead at the bus stop. She wouldn’t have heard it otherwise; wasn’t sure she heard it even now.

She froze, and glanced back over her shoulder.

There were two of them. A dozen paces behind her, heads low, some stray bit of light from an upper window catching in their eyes. They could have been dogs, big dogs, in the dark like this. Shaggy, unkempt, stray dogs, the kind that became urban legends.

But she knew they weren’t. She also knew, with a start, that she’d seen them before. In a dream, once. She remembered the snow, and trying in vain to plunge through it, growing weaker and slower with every step. Remembered the way the wind had played with Prince Valerian’s long pale hair, a flapping banner against the soot-colored sky as he whirled into existence and took their lives, quick and bloody, with a flashing length of steel.

But that had been a dream, and this was real.The wolveswere real. And there was no dashing prince with a sword to save her.

Her first instinct was one of violence. Her hand went to the gun on her hip. But she was on a street that would soon be busy, in the middle of a city. And even if they meant to tear her to shreds, these were no mere animals, but werewolves. Would a bullet even stop them?

She didn’t have time to debate that, because they charged.

Trina bolted.

Panic welled up and threatened to choke her.

But there was no time for that.Run, every part of her screamed, and she ran.

First order of business: draw them away from civilians.

Second order: don’t die.

She leapt into a sprint, the cold air scraping down into her lungs right away, adrenaline seizing all her muscles and darting along her nerves like lightning. She didn’t run everyday anymore, not like she had in the Academy, but she could still turn the speed on when she needed to, and she did now.

The slap of her feet on the pavement drew gazes from the bus stop. She ducked left and down an alley, between two office buildings. A long alley, dotted with dumpsters and smaller, silver trash cans. At the other end, she could see the first silvery threads of daylight suffusing the air, a beacon drawing her.

But a snarl and the scrabble of claws on pavement told her she’d never make it that far. Already her initial burst of speed was failing. A sudden side stitch grabbed at her, took her breath.

Shit.

The pulled-up ladder of a fire escape loomed ahead. She slowed – snarling, growling, snapping, wolves gaining behind her – crouched, and launched herself into the air. Reached, flailed – and just managed to grip the bottom rung of the ladder. Her weight pulled it down – stomach swooping, skin prickling, she nearly lost it – and the moment it stilled, she scrambled up. Hand over hand, panting, soles of her shoes slipping. It seemed to take forever, but then she was on the landing, flopping onto its cold metal like a landed fish, gasping for breath.

The wolves went nuts down below, leaping, whining, and snarling at her. She looked through the metal mesh and saw the flash of ivory fangs, and the glimmer of eyes. She shuddered. They didn’t look like the wolves in nature documentaries: savvy, majestic. Intelligent. There was a hazy blankness to their rage. Rabid. Soulless. Val had explained it to her in the dream, and Will had again over the phone just an hour ago: ferals were the result of a foul turning. Somehow, these had lost their humanity.

They could still take a human shape, though, she realized a moment later, when one of them shifted, and put shaking pale hands on the rungs of the ladder.

“Oh,shit.”

She scrambled up, legs weak from her run, lungs struggling. Her pulse throbbed like a wound. She hurried up the next ladder, the whole fire escape shaking beneath her as the shifted wolf hustled up behind her. He was still snarling. When she hit the landing, she risked a glance. He was so much faster than her, so much stronger, not even winded. But his face–

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