Page 2 of The Awakened Wolf

My ears folded back as the truth of her words sunk into me. “But there’s something wrong here, can’t you see? Those wolves… their bite is wrong.”

Her lips parted in a wolfish grin, her fangs shiny with rain. “They haven’t seen a wrong bite yet, sister.”

Kiana tried to take off, but I bounded in front of her, fangs bared. “I won’t let you be reckless because your pride is wounded. Your pack needs you.”

“Get. Out. Of. My. Way.” Her haunches bent as she prepared to leap past me, so I put my head down and rammed her shoulder, knocking her onto her belly.I’d never had an advantage in a fight against her, but I wasn’t going to let her get everyone killed.

She’d have to kill me first.

A vicious snarl bubbled from her throat, and her next lunge caught me so hard in the shoulder that it popped. As I stumbled back, it occurred to me, perhaps too late, that she might actually kill me first.

I did my best to fend her off as she worked to pin me; her slavering jaws snapping at my paws and ears as I twisted away, relying on my speed. But it only took one slow move on my part to end the fight. I stared up at my bloodied sister, her blue eyes and fine muzzle copies of my own as she pressed her weight into me. It was like being held beneath the surface of a lake and seeing your reflection from below. If your reflection were trying to rip your throat out.

“Enough!” A massive gray wolf, keening with every step, javelined into Kiana.

Her ribs cracked as she tumbled off me with a yelp and slid to the ground. Max and Kiana stared at each other from their twin positions on the soaking ground, fur bristling, chests heaving.

“We will leave enough shifters dead as it is,” he growled, getting to his paws with obvious agony.

A high-pitched yowl from the fighting to our south caught everyone’s attention. I squinted against the rain, forcing the wavy shadows wrestling there to make sense, and my stomach dropped. The black wolf, Gary, crouched over a small gray Bronx wolf, who curled in the bloody grass like an unborn pup.

“Jesmyn!”

I raced toward Blaze’s teenage daughter with every bit of energy left in my aching heart and muscles. Behind me, Kiana ordered the retreat of her pack, and I peered through the driving rain, searching for Blaze in the faces suddenly swarming toward me. If Sebastian never came I would mate with that male just for the right to scream at him for bringing a half-trained pup into battle.

You brought Evan…

I started to tell my wolf to shut up, but then realized I was currently her, so that was just me pointing out my own hypocrisy. Not only had I dragged Evan into this life, but now I’d given him siblings, for lack of a better word. All around me the humans I’d bitten began to jerk and seize in the mud, twisting limbs waving goodbye to their humanity. I’d have to get them to safety before they erupted into full fur and fangs and died a second time of shock. Or before any shifters who didn’t understand what they were seeing murdered them. But first…

I put my head down, imagining myself as a battering ram and barreled into the black wolf standing atop Jesmyn, confident I could knock him off because, in spite of his immense size, I was still… immenser.

Lights flashed, brighter than the lightning cracking overhead, as I bounced off the hairy brick wall called Gary. Too stunned to wonder how any living creature could be that solid, I jumped to my paws as Gary spun to study me with eyes so glazed their color couldn’t be named. His jaw hung slack, blood and drool sliding off his fangs. His lips circled up in a snarling smile and he pounced.

I scrabbled backward, my thoughts gluey and reflexes misfiring, until one of my hind paws stepped and found only air. I fell flat on my belly, legs dangling off the edge of the tunnel over the 79th Street transverse that carried traffic between the Upper East and West Sides. Broken, sopping protest signs littered the asphalt twenty feet below, as if a giant piñata of hatred had exploded on the road.

Gary advanced, trailing strings of drool, and my paws scrambled for purchase on the tunnel’s rocky side while my mind scrambled for a sensible next move. I wouldn’t die if I dropped, but Jesmyn might, and the cops could easily hem me down there in that narrow canyon, so actually, yes, I might die. Or worse, get captured like E.T. and taken to a government lab for experimentation.

A charcoal blur flew into this frame of my own personal horror movie, nipping Gary on the flank and then bouncing off a tree to soar back in the direction it came from when the mindless beast whirled. The blur landed with a graceful roll and popped up in a play bow several yards from Jesmyn.

“Evan!” I cried, yelping on the outside. “Thank Leto!”

“Thank me later,” Evan said, wiggling his butt in the air.

With a shake of his ebony mane, Gary charged my best friend. His frothing muzzle snapped at the rain but found nothing as Evan sprang away, leaping over a bush and caroming off a boulder with a wolfish whoop. Snarling, Gary tried to replicate Evan’s moves, but parkour didn’t seem to be his strong suit. His paws slipped on the soaking bark of the tree and the deepening mud of the torn-up field.

“That’s right, psycho. Follow my fine ass this way.”

Evan feinted toward a tree to the left, and Gary committed all of his weight to beating Evan there, but when the charcoal wolf stopped on a dime, the black wolf couldn’t stop his momentum and crashed into the tree headfirst, bouncing off it as hard as I’d bounced off him. He fell back, stunned, and then disappeared.

As in vanished.

Into thin air.

Or in this case, thick, drenched, electric air.

Evan froze. “Whoa. I know I’m new here, but that’s not normal, is it?”

If he hadn’t been blinking in shock right along with me, I’d have thought I was hallucinating. Based on the drum squad pounding out a rhythm in my skull, I was sure I had a concussion, which would make way more sense than a disappearing wolf. But Evan did see it too.

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