Page 62 of The Sacred Wolf

I couldn’t.

I had to.

My eyes scrunched shut. I took a deep breath. “Damien is your biological father, Sebastian. I’m sorry—”

“No.” One simple word, not Luke Skywalker’s drawn-out scream. But then his beautiful head twisted on his mighty shoulders to look at his mother’s still form, and I watched him shrink into himself right before my eyes. “That’s not possible. My mother would never cheat.”

At this, Damien’s laughter turned to yelps of glee, despite the rivulets of blood making their way down his chest. Sebastian wrenched his head back and stared at his true sire, eyes flickering with unwanted recognition.

“Of course, she wouldn’t.” I lowered my muzzle to check that Yara was still breathing and nuzzled her cheek. “She… she probably doesn’t even know, Sebastian. You know his Beta powers. He did something to make her…compliant.” Acid burned my throat and mouth just thinking about it.

Sebastian shook his head, his fur standing out on all sides, his tail erect with fury. I expected him to stab his fangs through the sides of Damian’s hysterical face and rip it right off, but instead, he whirled toward me, his chest puffed out like a poisonous fish. I tucked my tail between my legs, and my knees shook.

“Why? How… how could you not tell me?”

I ducked lower before him as each word left his mouth, cutting me as deeply as he could have with his claws, severing the sinews of the bond, the pain like the ripping of scarred flesh.

“I just found out, Sebastian, and I didn’t know how…or when…I…”

He stood on his toes and howled with every bit of blood in his veins, the sound turning me to stone from the inside out. Without another word, he shifted human, scooping up the limp cashmere puddle that was Yara, and ran down the front stairs, dodging fighting shifters and humans on all sides.

And then I was alone.

With Damien.

And the revolver he’d just pulled from his impeccable suit.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

A massive white wolf lunged past me and clamped down on Damien’s wrist. He screamed as a spray of blood took flight along with his gun, which landed on the concrete tiles with a clatter. I grabbed it and flung it over the fence into the bushes as Kiana slammed into Damien, who was still screaming as my sister shook him like a chew toy on the ground.

A blow hit me between the shoulder blades, and I yelped, crouching away in reflex. I turned to a heavyset man raising a pipe over his head for a second strike.

“There’s two of them!” he shouted. “They can multiply!”

He swung the pipe, and I leaped away, snarling and tossing a glance over my shoulder at my sister. Damien’s cheek was sliced, and his shirt was bloody as he thrashed beneath her snapping jaws. She sank her teeth into his flesh between his right shoulder and neck and he howled. With a grunt, she dragged him down the stairs, his legs kicking, and they both disappeared.

I dodged Mr. Pipe a second time and turned to find my sister. Her head came up roaring, and she tossed Damien over the iron fence at the back of the castle, his neck and shoulder streaming blood. I bounded to her just in time to see Damien’s body bounce off the rocks, limp and flailing like a rag doll, before he landed face down in the Turtle Pond.

Ribbons of red blood coiled around him, but he didn’t move. I stared, transfixed, at the object of all our hatred and loss, floating still like a bit of scattered plastic or lost paper napkin, drifting on the water's surface.

“He’s dead, Elyse,” Kiana said, tugging at my mane. “We have to get out of here.”

I looked up, momentarily jarred by what here meant as I took in the scene. All around us, as far as I could see in every direction, humans were fighting for their lives with Damien’s shifters, who didn’t seem to have gotten the memo that their putrid excuse for a leader was dead. At least the humans who’d been influenced by his Beta powers seemed to have been released, many shaking their heads or eyeing the weapons in their hands in confusion before dropping them and running.

A moment later it dawned on me that if Kiana was here…

A new wave of shifters burst through the trees and began hunting Damien’s pack, leaping on backs and grabbing at haunches as the evil shifters continued their efforts to harm as many humans, or Manhattan shifters, as possible. My wolf jaw dropped as I saw Blaze followed by his eldest daughter, her teenage eyes gleaming with the exact same battle thrill.

“You brought them all?” I leaped after Kiana as she raced back to the front stairs and onto the lawn.

“Of course, I did. Besides, they wouldn’t have let me come alone. This is our pack’s mess to clean up.”

She said this with as little love as was possible above none, but my heart thudded with exhilaration and gratitude anyway.

Howls rose to our left as two Bronx wolves ripped a tattered black shifter off one of the Manhattan crew who’d been in a protective crouch atop an injured human, a teen girl who was bleeding, but alive. In the trees, I heard yips of joy as a knot of Manhattan shifters welcomed a wave of reinforcement from more Bronx shifters. Despite the chaos and blood that surrounded me, my adrenaline surged with newfound hope. Damien was dead. The cavalry was here. Maybe we could still win.

As Kiana and I headed for the hardest fighting, a clearing where Damien’s group still outnumbered the others, I thought of Spot Conlon from Newsies, as he and the Brooklyn crew came to the aid of the Manhattan newsies just in the nick of time. If I were still in my human form, my wolf would have knocked me silly for thinking of movies at a time like this, but I couldn’t help it. The inspiration—and the song now stuck in my head—made me more determined.

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