Page 67 of The Awakened Wolf

Leto. She’d come in response to Kiana’s call. Her head was tilted as if she were confused.My eyelids fluttered as I fought the pain and tried to wake.

“Give her back her wolf,” Kiana demanded. “She’ll live if she has her wolf!”

“You took her wolf, Kiana,” Leto said gravely, “as you took her life.”

“I wasn’t trying to take her life. I was trying to save it.”

“Before that.”

My sister shook her head. “I know what you meant, but I was always trying to save her.”

Leto’s ears flattened to her skull. “You’ve told yourself a story to justify your actions, but no story can change the consequences. Elyse’s wolf is gone, and I am not the goddess of humans. What’s done is done.”

“You lie,” Kiana snarled. “We aren’t separate from our wolves. We might live without them, but how can they truly die without us? All I’m asking is that you return what I stole.”

“I am sorry, Kiana, but there are gods more powerful than I,” Leto said. “And even half a spirit counted as collected cannot be restored. Your sister will wait for you with your mother in Yonder Fields, once she and her wolf have been restored.”

“Then count mine collected instead,” Kiana whispered. “We are the same. The higher gods will never know the difference.”

“You are not dying.”

“Then let Sebastian avenge his mate,” Kiana begged. “Let him kill me. Give her back to him.”

“That will not work. You are whole. If you die before your sister, you will cross to Yonder Fields, from which no one returns.

“That’s not true,” Kiana said, her voice rising. “Odin returned.”

Leto’s voice softened. “Odin never made it to Yonder Fields because he refused to be reunited with the spirit of his wolf. He wandered the earth as an angry lost spirit until he found a member of his bloodline willing to resurrect him and bring about his vision for humanity. Though I’m not sure Damian ever truly understood the deal he had struck.”

The Goddess turned her head, pointing her muzzle to a patch of shadows in the distance where I could just make out the lines of a familiar silver wolf. Taken by Kiana’s bite right before her brutal toss into the water ended his human life. And moments later, a crack of thunder as Odin rose to take Damian’s place on earth.

“Then take my wolf,” Kiana said, desperate. “Take my wolf and return my sister’s.”

I moaned, wanting to stop her. To tell her the pack needed her more than anyone needed me, even Sebastian. But I couldn’t seem to fight my way back to full consciousness, my will ebbing with my life force.

“Do you understand what losing your wolf would mean?” Leta asked. “You would become human. You would no longer be Alpha.”

“I don’t care. Just do it, please.”Kiana was half-sobbing, half-rage-screaming.

“I do not have the power to take your wolf,” Leto said.

I wrestled with myself internally, trying to force my limbs into action, my lips to form words, so I could stop her. But before I could manage anything, Kiana’s fangs grew and she sank them into her own right shoulder, just beside my lolling head.

No.

The thought stayed within me, trapped by my useless dying human flesh. It was too late anyway. Kiana’s hot blood flowed over me, and like someone had hit me with a defibrillator, I seized and then gasped, my wolf flooding back into me.

The first thing I noticed was the warmth as my blood returned and the gaping wound on my ankle knitted itself closed.

The next thing I noticed was that I was lying half in Kiana’s lap and half in Sebastian’s. And I could move. I lurched free, rolling over and vomiting what felt like the entire East River onto the darkened shoreline. Leto, and the brilliance that came with her, were gone.

Sebastian let out a cry and crawled to me, pulling me to him and covering me in kisses. Truly. He wouldn’t stop kissing my face, my neck, my hands… It was almost too much, though my wolf disagreed in the extreme. She wanted more. She wanted everything he had to offer, and I wanted to give him everything I had.

Because my wolf was no longer a voice inside my head, an entity fidgeting inside my chest. Her spirit filled every human inch of me, no longer beaten down into a corner of my heart by a lifetime of being told we weren’t who we really were. What I wanted, she wanted. What she was made for, I was made for. At last.

But our joy was short-lived.

I whirled to face my twin, who was holding her bloody shoulder, her face twisted in a mask of warring relief and desolation.

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