Page 6 of The Forbidden Wolf

I shoved my fists deeper into my pockets, snugging the jacket tightly around me, and quickened my pace. On top of chapping my skin into oblivion, the wind was carrying my scent downwind. I’d had a few close calls on nights like this before, but I’d never been confronted, reported, or consumed.

Yet.

Shut! Up!

“Confidence is the key to safety,” I muttered as I approached the darkened pizza joint at the corner of Lex and 125th. Charlie loved that place. Occasionally, I had managed to slip out early enough to grab a big greasy slice with the gang before a show. Pizza was the one exception to all of Jayla’s rules. She said they’d probably suspend her New York driver’s license if she ever gave it up.

I paused under the store’s wildly swinging sign to breathe in the lingering garlic aroma. Upside down stools sat on the bar that cut the floor-to-ceiling window in half. The freshly waxed black and white checkerboard floor gleamed in the dim light, free from the pizza crusts and basil leaves that collected under the tables throughout the day. My stomach growled, and my throat tightened. I might never walk through the door and up to that wood-paneled counter to order off that faded overhead menu again.

You don’t need to.

Technically, she was right. I could get pizza any time I wanted back home, either delivered from one of the many equally delicious pizzerias in the Bronx or made from scratch in the compound’s’ communal kitchen. I could even go out with pack mates and pretend we were just normal human friends for a bit. Food was one of the few aspects of human culture we didn’t turn our noses up at, and our advanced healing abilities meant that we could pretty much eat anything without having any long-term side effects.

But pizza would never be the same without Jayla, Evan, and Charlie.

Nothing would.

I fished my burner phone out of my back pocket, thinking I would shoot a quick text to the group chat about meeting up early tomorrow, but then I remembered Evan’s date with The Snack. It would be just us girls watching Ever After, which was fine, but I wanted everyone present for my unspoken good-bye. I slipped the phone back into my pocket.

My friends had gifted me the simple smart phone a few months after my eighteenth birthday when they realized legal adulthood hadn’t changed anything about my mysterious living situation. Up until then, they’d always assumed I was just a rich girl with a dead mom and overprotective father. But when I made no plans for college, only excuses for why I couldn’t move into the apartment with all of them, they decided I was in a cult.

I had never corrected them.

The chains holding up the sign overhead chimed and whined with a fresh burst of wind. I watched the hair snake across my reflection’s translucent face. It looked more like my sister than me, just as her reflection looked more like me than her. We were mirror twins, identical yet opposite. This was only obvious to others in that I was right-handed and she was left, but it was clear to me in every reflective surface I had ever passed. I wasn’t really me. I was just a runaway image of her. Like Peter Pan’s shadow cast in living color.

Shivering, I sidestepped the subway entrance and rounded the corner onto 125th. The wind immediately relented enough that I could tuck my hair behind my ear and it would stay there. Traffic whizzed by even at this time of night, yellow taxis and inconspicuous rideshares, drowning out the sound of my lonely footsteps as I hurried toward Third Avenue.

Halfway down the block, the blank white marquee of the old Principal Theater stood out like a boxy Cheshire grin. The big yellow bulbs that framed it had been dark for almost a decade now, but Jayla had shown me photos of the condemned building back in its glory days. Long before the rising price of tickets and the convenience of streaming had slammed the majestic single-screen cinema’s gilded doors.

I paused in the deep shadows under the awning that stretched over the sidewalk. Those shuttered gilded doors were recessed several feet. Empty poster frames lined the inward-slanting walls, most of their small round bulbs smashed out over the years. A tight seal of trash had formed in front of the doors, as if the rats had learned how to construct a beaver-style dam out of candy wrappers, dogwood blossoms, and soda bottles. A single sheet of paper hung on each of the double glass doors, marking the building for demolition.

It had once been the kind of theater they made movies about. Red velvet curtains and plush matching seats. Ornate columns and arches holding up the balcony in the back and private boxes along each wall. The pictures on the defunct website reminded me of the theater from Last Action Hero, and I liked to dream about one day stepping inside and walking right through the screen, which was three times the size of the Last Century Cinema’s. I would enter Hollywood’s version of New York City where Evan was right and shifters had never existed. My wolf would stay behind. I would truly be free.

Danger.

Dammit, just let me—

No. Danger. Behind us.

I stood up straight, widening my shoulders and my stance. The doors in front of me were much too filthy to offer up any reflections, but now that my wolf had my full attention, her nose and my visitor’s pheromones told me everything. He was standing almost directly across the street. A male shifter in his early to mid-twenties. Mated, many times, but never officially, if you know what I mean. My lips curled with disgust. Males could get away with that sort of thing.

He’s not alone.

Wonderful. Where’s the wingman?

Right around the next corner. She paused. And one on the other side of Third Avenue.

I swallowed hard. So, they were hunting me then. They must have picked up my scent and rushed to pull even with me on the other end of the block so that when I crossed 125th they could all fall in behind me. How I’d missed the one across the street I didn’t know. Maybe he’d been behind me all along, or maybe he’d just come up from the subway. Either way, I was well and truly screwed.

Stay calm.

Should I let you out?

That’s… not calm.

I took a deep breath and weighed my options. Third Avenue was obviously out. I could still get on the bridge from Lexington, but it added an extra block, and there was no guarantee they wouldn’t follow. Technically, the border lay at the midpoint of the Harlem River. I was fast, especially on four legs, and if we’d been in the middle of an open field, I would have no doubts about my ability to outrun them. But Manhattan was pretty much the opposite of an open field. There would be oncoming cars at every cross street.

A distant rumble pricked my wolf’s ears, and I knew what I had to do, even though it would almost certainly end in a panic attack. I pulled out my phone and pretended to answer it.

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