Page 11 of The Sacred Wolf

Nancy’s eyes narrowed, and my wolf lengthened into a crouch, taking up most of the space in my quickly constricting chest. Stay down, girl.

I don’t like the way she’s looking at us.

Well, I’m pretty sure I could handle her without your help, so sit.

But would you? Do that again?

I pushed down the memory of spitting out the arm that had been holding the gun that shot Charlie, that might have shot Evan or Jayla next if I hadn’t stopped her. I didn’t feel bad about it, but no, I wouldn’t do it again on a whim. Certainly not on the Roosevelt Island tram.

“Oh yeah? Well what about this story in your own city’s newspaper then?” Nancy reached into her giant purse and pulled out a crumpled tube of paper. She thrust it into my hand, and with my heart lodging in my throat, I unrolled it.

Murderous Rampage Linked to Shifters! the headline screamed above a collage of images that shouldn’t have been legal to print. The faces had been blurred out, but somebody out there had loved these ravaged bodies the way I’d loved Charlie. They shouldn’t have to see them like, lying on city streets with their limbs torn off and their bowels pulled out. It was obscene, even for the Post, but I knew why they’d put it on the front page. They wanted people to know humans couldn’t have done it.

“Uhhh,” my voice wavered as my long-forgotten breakfast threatened to make a second appearance. “This is the Post. You can’t trust anything they print in the Post. It’s a silly tabloid.”

Nancy reached for her paper like a security blanket, and my eyes scanned the story wrapped around the graphic images at breakneck speed.

—also wanted in relation to the disappearance of several pro-human activists who were last seen on station cameras boarding the 6 train at the 86th Street stop on Lexington Avenue on April 15th. NYC Transit reported finding unexplained damage to a train on that line and remnants of blood, but no bodies have been recovered. Police believe the disappearances and the attacks are likely to be linked, but are not releasing information about any persons of interest.

“Actually, do you mind if I keep this?” I asked faintly.

Nancy bit her lip and then gave a reluctant nod. “Go ahead. You need to pay more attention to what’s going on around you. It’s never safe out there for a pretty young woman like you.”

Woman! My wolf bared her inner fangs even as I felt a forbidden thrill—maybe because I felt a forbidden thrill. No one ever called me that. I was a female to everyone in my life except my friends, and to them I was only a girl, a stray kid sister they’d picked up along the way. It was silly, but I felt like this woman who could have been Charlie’s mother had knighted me.

The tram swayed as we began our descent. Ronnie wrapped his arm around Nancy’s shoulder and tugged her toward the doors so no one could get to the Smallpox Hospital ahead of him. Those were the kind of problems I wished I had. Nancy glanced back at me, eyes narrowing once again, and I knew for sure she’d seen the photo of my sister. Fantastic. I was going to have to get my Bronx on and ask my sugar daddy to pay for plastic surgery, wasn’t I?

Chapter Six

With the Post rolled up in my fist and plans to fix Sebastian rather than my face, I stepped off the tram and jumped on the shuttle north toward an event space called The Sanctuary, which had nothing to do with it being on pack-neutral ground and everything to do with it being tucked inside a historic human church. That’s right. Anti-shifter activists weren’t the only people who could hold their meetings on hallowed ground. Okay, technically, the Sanctuary was partly a bar now, but whatever.

I spent the shuttle ride stewing over the pack-wide conspiracy to treat me like a no-rank pup. This had already happened to me once before in the Bronx when my family conspired to keep me in the dark about the rising tide of anti-shiftism, and now it was happening all over again. But this hurt worse. Because the version of Sebastian I might have loved had taken the time to explain everything my family wouldn’t tell me, but I knew now that was only because he’d believed we were both being coy about feeling like fated mates. Now that he knew winning me over wouldn’t be easy, I wasn’t even worth talking to.

You miss him.

I miss a dream I had for like two seconds, alright? But it wasn’t real.

Maybe you haven’t done enough sleeping…

Stop it, or I’ll spank you with this newspaper!

She huffed and curled up, hopefully for a nap. Which was not what she’d been suggesting I needed. Her feelings for Sebastian the wolf weren’t as complicated as my feelings for Sebastian the human, and I was pretty sure his wolf had already picked out nursery curtains in spite of his human insistence that we could wait for that part of mating as long as I wanted. I hadn’t forgiven either animal for their behavior on the Third Avenue Bridge. We might have stopped Kiana from deposing Father if they hadn’t stopped to flirt. Now I was going to have to fight her for something I wasn’t even sure I wanted.

The shuttle dropped me off near the Sanctuary, and as soon as I glimpsed the crimson paint adorning both the doors and the fretwork around the stained glass, I felt grossly underdressed. I’d never been in a church before, and even though this one had reinvented itself as a business, the beauty of the architecture filled me with reverent awe. Crafted completely from large stones that looked as if they’d been quarried last century and topped by a steep slate roof, it felt cozy but not cramped—a rare feat in a city of eight million people. I could see why so many humans lined up to have their weddings here.

The thought of weddings brought up uncomfortable memories of Kiana’s failed mating ceremony, reminding why I was here and who I was finally going to see. My emotions flip-flopped between anxiety and anger as I hurried up the walk, and when I reached the gorgeous red doors, my fingers tightened around the paper still clutched in my hand. Maybe I would just swat the bitch across the nose with it.

Taking a deep breath, I slammed open the doors.

Well, not entirely. They were so heavy and thick that my attempt to stride through with an assertive BANG turned into more of a grunting, heaving, exercise in humility. At least I made it through before they slammed shut behind me.

A male’s stern voice floated into the foyer. “I’m sorry that your mate has chosen to disappear with this supposedly magical Bronx Beta, Alpha Maximo, but I hardly see how that is our long-term problem. We’ve all searched our boroughs and found no trace of them. It is time to move on to more pressing matters.”

“Your concern for the well-being of my mate is duly noted, Julius,” Max responded, his voice as cold as I’d ever heard it. “But these matters are one and the same. The human trouble only began in earnest after Damian escaped—”

“The same night your son was involved in the murder of four humans,” a younger male voice drawled. “You don’t think that might be what pissed people off?”

“Three,” Sebastian’s quiet voice barely reached my ears. “The fourth was their victim. An innocent bystander. I acted in her defense.”

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