Page 133 of The SnowFang Storm

Cye kept petting my hair. His scent became an old, buried anguish, mingled with ferocity. “No. SnowFang is my pack and my family.”

“We’d have understood—” I tried to say.

“Well, I didn’t,” Cye retorted. “We’ve argued about this.”

Jun carefully hugged me to his beefy chest again, and his hands sort of explored my back and arms. To Cye’s glazed-bright ferocity, he was more tentative, uncertain, but he said, “Nobody else wants any of us, right? A grimy city bastard, a reject, a spare male, a human-raised bastard, and the princess.”

“Sounds like something for the history books to me!” Cye said brightly.

Burian slunk out the door but hung back, fidgeting under all the emotional fuss.

Jun asked, “What’s going to happen now?”

Sterling is going to die.

I swallowed around the dryness in my throat. “I don’t know.”

Cye pushed Jun. “Not right now.”

Jun dug in with his questions. “I want to know if we’re going to leave Manhattan. Go to a different country. What are we going to do? Sterling’s got to train for this, so where are we going to try to do it? Here?”

Jun was right about that: Sterling did need to train and condition himself, but he needed to do it in war-form, not just human and wolf form, and he needed to do it with other competent males. I went out on a mental limb and assumed Sterling had, somewhere, acquired some competency and experience in war-form, but it wouldn’t be the lifetime of quality and experience that Alan had. Where could we find training partners?

Burian pushed his way between us and used his arm to wedge me free of the Jun/Cye hug. “She just got here and looks like she’s been on a bender. Jeez. Give her a minute.”

“We were worried about her.” Jun shoved back. “Back off.”

Burian defending me?

Burian shoved Jun. “Yeah, I know, but let her breathe. Come on, we have to finish rewiring that ceiling fan or Cerys will kick our ass into the donkey’s pasture.”

Burian grabbed Jun and Cye by their sleeves and dragged them back into the house and up the stairs.

I stepped into the foyer—since we were clearly heating the outdoors for deer that wouldn’t appreciate it—closed the big door and leaned back against it while I took in everything.

Sterling’s scent led up the stairs to the second floor. I passed Jun and Burian wrestling with a stepladder and a fountain of wires protruding from the ceiling in one room. I slid past before they spotted me, and into the room at the end of the hall, which might never have been a child’s room, unless Sterling had been a very serious and entirely too mature kid.

This one was the same warm spartan look of the flat: dark hardwood floor, smokey, pale-blue walls. One wall had a number of floating shelves dotted with trinkets, and the other had a bookcase crammed with books. I scanned the book spines: religious texts, philosophy, history books, books on biology, physics, outer space, wildlife, field guides, home appliance repair, truck repair, how to modify a toaster into a robot battle drone.

“You were a weird kid, weren’t you.” I plucked Battle Toaster Death Match off the shelf.

He poked his head out of the closet. “So you wouldn’t have read it?”

I sat down on the bed to flip through the book. A girl might never know when she needed her own private toaster army.

The mattress sunk and pulled me into the embrace of a hungry, vengeful marshmallow. I flopped and tried to escape its squishy grip. “Ack!”

Sterling dropped whatever he was holding. “What happ—what are you doing?”

“Have you felt this mattress?” I demanded, peering up at him like a turtle stuck on its back.

He sat down next to me. “This is new.”

With his weight, I was able to roll to the edge of the bed and flop onto the floor. A jolt of pain rattled my bad arm, but my knees took most of the impact. Not graceful. “It’s like a hungry marshmallow!”

He managed to get off the bed without much effort. “It’s foam. It won’t squeak.”

I groaned at the terrible joke and let him pull me to my feet.

---