Page 41 of Griffin Undone
“Katherine.”
My hackles rose. Deep inside, my wolf growled his fury, the sound escaping my control.Hell, no.“She’s missing.”
“Explain.”
I held my tongue. Fink, seeming to figure out who we were talking about—I hadn’t shared the female’s name with anyone, including the team with me that night—piped up. “She…uh…disappeared from the scene after her…triggering.”
“Disappeared?” That smooth voice took on deadly splinters. “How could a team of shifters lose one incapacitated psych?”
Guess my memorieswerea bit fuzzy on all that, what with my entrails scattered across the alley floor.
Again Fink stepped in. “They were…dead, sir.”
“Dead?”
“Yes. Dead.”
“I see.” The two words were so cold my blood congealed. “All of them?”
“A-Almost all of th-them, s-sir.”
I resisted the urge to snatch Fink’s stuttering tongue from his mouth. “We’ll find her. It’s only been a couple of days.”
That gaze drilled into me. I refused to flinch.
The unnerving glow of his eyes grew brighter. “You’ve been careless, Maddox. You’ve drawn attention; the wrong attention.”
I cut my eyes toward Fink. “No kidding.”
“The Archai know about your boy Arik. His little prize.” The shifter leaned across the broad surface of the desk, closing the distance between us. “Like I said, the wrong attention.”
The Archai had never been a threat. “And?”
The male leaned even closer, dropping his voice to a whisper. “And you can’t succeed with that attention. A two-sided war? You’ll fail, and I don’t tolerate failure.”
I stared into those bright eyes as if I could find the answers to my complete confusion there. Why would a powerful Anigma want my rebellion to succeed?
“What war?” Fink was asking. “Why—”
The stranger raised a single arched eyebrow. I watched as time seemed to turn to sludge, the moments stretching out into what felt like hours as the male’s lashes slid closed, then opened. Green light flashed.
Time resumed. The stranger was still staring me down, still challenging me. Nothing had changed except a peculiar gasping to one side of the desk.
Wary, I turned my head, keeping my eyes fixed on the shifter before me until the muscles around my eye sockets strained and my mind screamed the necessity of discovering the source of the horrible sound filling my ears. The edge of my desk came into view, then bookshelves, a rickety chair—and Fink. I watched with fascinated horror as my second’s head slowly tipped back, the red line across his throat growing wider and wider, blood beginning to trickle down, until finally its own weight severed the rest of Fink’s half-cut spinal cord and tore the head from the male’s shoulders. It tumbled to the floor, rolling a few feet away to come to rest, terrified gaze fixed on me.
The body crumbled to the floor with a strange elegance the weasel could never have achieved while alive. As flesh began to fizzle into ash, I pivoted back to the stranger. Only one question filled my mind.
“Who. Are. You?”
The stranger blinked again, and I found myself flinching against my will, swallowing hard to check the intact status of my throat.
“I am the Source. And that”—he tipped a chin at the ashes swirling in a random air current—“is what happens when you get in my way.”
Violence and terror fought for supremacy inside my chest.The Source.The Anigma others only whispered about, the one weaker shifters—which was all of them, according to lore—feared. Executioner. Angel of death. Nexus of all evil, if fairy tales could be believed. Some even dared to hint that he was the ruler of the Anigma itself. And if you were planning to leave the Anigma, he was the last shifter you wanted to come face-to-face with.
So why was Fink’s body dissolving on the floor while I sat semi-comfortably behind my desk?
“Now.” The male’s voice had returned to its original quiet, silky-smooth state. “About your little Archai problem.”
