Page 18 of The Sacred Wolf

To extremes.

I leaned my shoulder lightly against his. “I appreciate that, Sebastian, but you may have over-corrected. I only meant that I wasn’t ready for any lifelong commitments, to you or the Bronx. I never meant I didn’t want to be around you.”

“Ah.” He looked down at his shiny dress shoes and tugged his cap down to his eyebrows. “Duly noted.”

I stared at his profile. Duly noted? I’d practically invited him to spend time with me, and that was all he could say? I understood he had a lot on his mind, at the moment and in general, but I guess I thought my confession would perk him up a little. Maybe we were a perfect match because if I were the Queen of Mixed Signals, he was definitely the reigning King.

Well, I wasn’t going to throw myself at him, if that’s what he wanted. I scooted a few inches down the bench, making space for Leto as the tutors used to say when teenage males and females sat too close together on the field trips. I wished the wolf goddess would come sit between us and tell me what to do about Kiana. How were we supposed to get along if my twin had anything to do with these murders?

My gaze traveled south past the bridge to the skyscrapers of lower Manhattan. Somewhere in those concrete canyons lay the mangled remains of an unknown number of innocent human students, but in spite of the pain and sorrow rippling through their inner circles and out into the larger world, you’d never know it from way up here. The city continued without them. Just as it had without Charlie.

“It’s such a strange place for shifters to live,” I mused to fill the awkward silence. “We say we don’t want to be like the humans, yet we insist on staying in a city where we can’t even go outside in our own skin. Just look at it, Sebastian. Have you ever seen anything so beautiful and yet completely unsuitable for a wolf?”

Sebastian responded with a strange sound not unlike a cat being strangled, and I turned in confusion. His eyes were shut tight, his hands gripping the edge of the seat.

Holy Mother of Chann. He’s scared.

The minutes since we left Roosevelt Island rewound rapidly through my mind, and suddenly his cagey behavior made perfect sense. “Sebastian, are you… are you afraid of heights?”

“No.” The word barely made it past his lips. His knuckles whitened as the car crossed over another set of rollers, making it sway. “Not specifically.”

I scooted close again and peeled his fingers off the seat. Instead of pulling away as I’d expected, he gripped my hand like it was a life ring in a stormy sea. The nakedness of his need, stripped of his usual simmering desire set my own on fire. Heat licked its way up my arm, boiling the blood in my veins.

“It’s this thing,” Sebastian hissed through gritted teeth.

“The tram?”

His gaze locked on the roof of the cabin. “Yes.”

My brow furrowed as I looked around the innocuous empty space. “If you’re not afraid of heights, what’s so scary about the tram?”

He rubbed the back of his neck with his free hand. “You’ll laugh.”

“I won’t.” My thumb rubbed the veins below his knuckles, and I wondered what would happen if I pulled it to my mouth and kissed each one.

“Oh, but you will.” He laughed darkly at himself.

“I promise I won’t.” The words came out weirdly breathy because I was really just thinking about what might happen if I leaned in and kissed him on the crinkled corner of his self-deprecating smile while my chest pressed softly into his solid side…

He took a deep breath and blew it out. “I can’t stop thinking about the damned climax of Spider-Man.”

“You—” Words left me as my fantasy bubble burst, releasing all my giggles. I slapped one hand over my promise-breaking mouth and gripped his fingers tighter with the other. “I’m so sorry. That’s just not what I was expecting.”

“How?” He gestured widely between the bridge and the river, and the offending scene flashed through my mind—Spider-Man’s impossible choice between saving Mary Jane or a tram like this hurtling down to the river. “How is that not all you’re thinking about? And don’t pretend you’ve never seen it.”

“Only recently.” I lifted our hands off the bench and pressed my knee against his. “Before all this, I’d mostly only see what they played on Friday and Saturday nights at the Last Century Cinema.”

“That explains the shirt.” His eyes lit briefly on my chest but left a weight that kept me from breathing. He knew the schedule. He knew which nights they played which decade of movies. He had been there more than once.

“Why were you watching The Princess Bride that night?”

“Because it’s what they were playing.” Sebastian shrugged. “I liked it well enough, except for the part where he slapped her. They should cut that out.”

My friends and I had had this conversation a dozen times, and we all agreed, but at the end of the day Hollywood wasn’t in the business of re-editing problematic old movies when they could just remake them. It was only a matter of time before there was a new Westley and Buttercup without all the gross stuff you had to learn to ignore when you could only watch movies from another century.

“So why were you there if not to watch that movie?” I pressed. “And you’d better not say you were following me, or I swear to the gods—”

“I wasn’t. I do swear.” He squeezed my hand, which now rested atop his jittery knee. “I didn’t even clock you as a shifter until later. That place certainly has a smell.”

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