Page 61 of The Sacred Wolf

No sooner had the word son registered in my mind than I remembered what I hadn’t told Sebastian, and my heart seized. I should have listened to my wolf and told him right away. I cursed myself and my hesitation. I couldn’t let him hear that news from Damien. It would kill him.

“Sebastian,” I nudged him with my muzzle. “Wait. There’s something I have to tell you.”

Damien slid his hand slowly up Yara’s back to her neck, where he wound his claw-like fingers through the thick black hair she shared with their child.

Sebastian’s scent metamorphosed from tire-fire to full-on forest conflagration. The stink of it rocked me as he leaped past me and charged Damien, knocking a swath of humans from the crowd into the pillars on his way.

“Get your hands off her, you bastard!”

“No!” I called. “Stop, Sebastian. Don’t give him what he wants!”

He roared, a charging bull ignoring the spear of my words driving into his flesh, and the sound was amplified by the microphones until it became the sound of the final impossible tornado from Twister. Sebastian slammed into Damien’s back, taking him to the ground.

A human eruption exploded around him, with shrieks both advancing and receding depending on whether the human from which they emanated was under Damien’s control or not. Sebastian’s lips rippled back over his slavering jaws a breath above Damien’s face, his chest heaving, but my view of him was blocked in seconds as Damien’s human minions surrounded them, makeshift weapons in hand. Some began beating at Sebastian with the posts of their protest signs.

Agony rippled through me as if Sebastian’s pain were my own, and I howled, launching myself into their midst and shoving those hitting him back. I bared my teeth to the human zombies encircling us, my throat humming with my growl. A heavyset man lunged forward with an aluminum bat and my mind went red at the sight of that weapon. I snapped, finding the bat's handle and ripping it from his hand, but I didn’t touch his flesh. I was still focused on the mission and my determination not to kill an innocent human. These humans might want to kill us, but that wasn’t their fault, just like Kiana and I being at each other’s throats our whole lives wasn’t our fault. It was Damien’s.

The bat clattered to the ground, and the man pulled back, and then went stiff as new screams filled the air in a wide circle all around us. I peered between the legs of the nearest humans, searching for the source of the commotion and saw a flood of strange shifters pouring from the trees and street, launching themselves at nearby humans and ripping them instantly to shreds, blood spewing in burgundy torrents.

“Gods, help us. No!”

I stared in horror. The attacking shifters appeared starved and scarred.

Damien’s pack of outcasts.

As I watched, more shifters burst from the shadows to face the interlopers, including one handsome charcoal grey wolf, who I knew had no business in this fight. I began shaking, torn between my desire to go help the Manhattan pack and protect Evan, and my need to stay with Sebastian. The Manhattan pack was outnumbered, not just by humans, but by Damien’s pack as well.

I took one step toward them and was stopped by a force as strong as a shackle, yanking me back to Sebastian.

The fate bond.

It would never let me risk Sebastian, even if he were safer than my best friend.

Furious and frustrated, I swung my gaze to Damien, lying beneath Sebastian with a smile curling his lips. I knew then that everything had gone according to his plan. With Sebastian having made the first move, no one would ever believe this wasn’t a coordinated shifter attack. Or that some shifters were good and some bad. The humans wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between Damien’s murder mutts and the Manhattan pack that was now doing its best to protect the humans and take the mangy dogs down.

Three loud cracks rang out, two to the north and one to the east.

Guns.

My heart began to pound as I turned back to the crowd. A human wave of panic was cresting in every direction and anyone carrying a weapon was swinging—or firing—at the nearest shifter. Any shifter. Anything that moved, practically. I gasped as something collapsed against me and turned to see Yara, unconscious now that Damien’s control was gone. She’d slumped over Damien’s legs, but all of Sebastian’s focus was on Damien, his jaws opening over the traitor’s human throat for the kill.

“Sebastian, no!” I pleaded. “You can’t! If you kill him in front of all these people, it will prove him right! His minions will rip us apart!”

Damien began laughing beneath Sebastian’s frothing maw. “You should listen to the mother of my future grandpups, my boy.”

Sebastian stopped, confused, saliva dripping onto a manic face whose similarities to Sebastian’s own were few but not zero. How would I ever unsee it?

“What are you talking about?” Sebastian demanded.

An eyebrow raised, Damien looked at me. “You haven’t told him?”

Snarling, Sebastian held Damien down with a massive paw, his claws slicing Damien’s shirt and drawing blood. He turned to me. “Told me what?”

I hesitated, panic making my blood turn watery in my veins. “I was looking for the right time…”

“Tell me, Elyse,” Sebastian growled, his claws digging deeper into Damien’s flesh, eliciting a moan of pain from…

…his father. How could I tell him? I couldn’t even do it now while humans and shifters were dying all around me, and his mother lay nearly lifeless beside us.

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