Page 1 of The Awakened Wolf

Chapter One

Wolves didn’t leave their mates, but Sebastian hadn’t let that stop him.

So when I truly needed him by my side, there was only my unhinged twin, laughing defiantly at the one-eyed man, her long pink tongue dripping bloody froth from her last kill.

Wearing a long Nordic cloak over a leather jerkin, with ropes of stony gray hair plastered to his head by the ongoing downpour, the stranger should have been laughable. If I’d passed him on the street, I would’ve assumed he’d gotten lost on his way to Comicon. Or maybe to his starring role in a Viking musical way off Broadway. New York had never lacked for weird characters. But it wasn’t my native cynicism that stopped me from laughing along with Kiana, or even my superior humility.

No, what stopped me from laughing was the gaping hole in the man’s face where his right eye used to be. That, and the massive wolves standing to either side of him, one gray and one black. They smelled only of animal, not shifter, but they easily had three hundred pounds on the timber wolves I’d seen at the Bronx Zoo, and height-wise they were only a whisker smaller than our Alphas. But that wasn’t stopping my sister from laughing any more than mating with Sebastian had stopped him from leaving.

“Your servant, Damian?” Kiana snorted, tossing her white mane toward the Turtle Pond. “You’re going to need to find better help, I’m afraid. He’s dead.”

Black-hole-faced guy let fly with a cackle that made my sister’s mirth look downright sane. He turned his head to the heavens, glee stretching the dark sinkhole in his face. I fought back the bile rising in my throat as my mind glitched, thinking of all the water that must be pouring into his skull. Terror coursed through my body as the man turned, water dripping from his aquiline nose, and nodded to his furry flankers.

“Too bad the biggest threat is just a female, my pets. I know you were hoping for worthy opponents. Now go, Gary and Frecky. Kill these mutts. I’ll find the failure.”

Though he’d spoken softly, the sound reverberated over us, crisp against the near constant thrum of thunder. I didn’t ask myself how he’d been able to hear Kiana’s wolf speak. Nor how his own weirdo wolves understood him. I stood, transfixed, as the two beasts snarled and then bounded toward us. Their master leaped over the wall at the back of the Belvedere Castle, the one over which Kiana had just tossed Damien’s dead body. Better not pop up again like some slasher movie serial killer.

“No! We can’t let this freak get away.” Kiana sprinted forward, putting herself on a collision course with the two strange wolves.

The closer they got, the more I sensed a foreign bitterness in their scent that twisted my already nauseated stomach like a wet towel. The thought of what would happen if Kiana fought them broke my trance, and I raced after her, hurtling with every ounce of my strength into her flank. She fell, rolling over me and under me and over me again until we slid to a halt in a grassy mud puddle.

I got up, shaking, just as the wolf assassins flew past us. My breath came in heaving gasps that ignited the bouquet of bruises I’d given myself with that move. My sister’s body was rock hard.

The wolf called Gary disappeared into the ranks of remaining shifters still fighting the last of Damien’s pack. Though the human followers had been released when Kiana ended his life, the mangy beasts he’d brought to the rally were relentless, still trying to kill any living thing they could find.

“Why did you do that?” Kiana popped up, snapping her jaws at me.

“There’s something not right about them, Kiana!” I gasped, dodging her fangs.

The rain lashed our faces as we squared off in the small lake that had become the castle lawn. An enraged howl went up to our right, and Kiana stopped, ears pricked, tail high, and then sped that way. My feet were still determined to carry the rest of my protesting body wherever she went, so I followed her—right into a battle between Sebastian’s father, Max, and the giant gray wolf called Frecky.

Max stood a shoulder taller and broader than Frecky, who shrieked as Max tore him off his front leg, where the smaller wolf had sunk his fangs. Frecky rolled away in a flurry of kicking feet and ran off, following the howl of Gary luring him deeper into the maw of the fight. Max started to put weight on the bitten leg and then yelped, a panicky high pup-yip that turned into a deep growl and flattened ears.

“Max!” I cried, running over to him, one eye still glued to Kiana.

I’d expected her to keep chasing the twin hit-wolves, but she must have lost sight of them. She was peering through the rain and sniffing. As if anyone could distance scent in this deluge. The strange wolves’ weird poison-metal smell hadn’t hit me until they were almost on top of us. Hopefully she’d come to her senses now and stop pursuing those…well, we didn’t know what they were. That was the biggest reason to stop, as far as I was concerned.

I turned back to Max, who was muttering some very un-shifter-like things as he repeatedly pressed his paw to the ground and then snarled. I narrowed my eyes at his wound. It ran clean with fresh blood and rain, and though deep, it hadn’t severed a major blood vessel or tendon that I could see. By an Alpha’s standards, this was a borderline mosquito bite. But every time Max tried to step, he’d wheeze and huff, the muscles in his shoulders rippling with pain. He couldn’t run. We’d be lucky if he could walk.

“Please, Alpha Max. Don’t you think we should get out of here?” I hoped the honorific would distract him from the anathema of a female suggesting battle strategy.

“What I’ve got to do…is lead my pack.” Max grunted as he attempted and failed to put weight on the leg once more.

I stomped my paw, too scared to kiss his furry rear again. “You’re the one that told me great Alphas know when to change strategy. We did what we came here to do. Stop Damien and save Yara—and as many humans as possible. But now we’re under attack, and we don’t even know who’s attacking us or why.”

His lips pulled back from his fangs in a low snarl. Acquiescence to pain wasn’t something Alphas did willingly.

“What if these new wolves bite others in the pack, Max?”

He dropped his head, and I blew out a breath, relieved. No matter how much he wanted to stay and show strength, he wasn’t reckless with his packmates’ lives.

“Mateo!” he called, and a brown wolf came racing our way out of the rain. “Lead Manhattan to retreat. With the new threat, we must regroup.”

Mateo’s wolf nodded and ran off, mentally calling to others in the Manhattan pack as he went. Anyone who didn’t obey on their own would be subject to some not-so-gentle prodding from his Beta powers.

I whirled, remembering Kiana. “You should do the same for the Bronx.”

My sister’s hackles rose in spiky, wet ridges. “You don’t tell me what to do with my pack. If there’s a new threat, it’s my job to take care of it. That’s what Alphas do. You shouldn’t have pushed me out of the way. Max would be fine if it weren’t for you.”

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