Page 17 of The Awakened Wolf

I sighed. Maybe I did need to think of them as my shifters. I didn’t know where Kiana had stashed them, or if they were okay, but I knew they were alive and nearby.

“Know what about you, Elyse?” My father’s voice grew taut with annoyance, and he sat upright in his chair.

“Relax,” Kiana said to me. “The new shifters are all settled in for now. But we’re going to have to figure out a better long-term solution than keeping them here. I don’t want their human ways rubbing off on my pack.”

“Ugh, you are still so gross, Kiana. Just like Dam—”

“ENOUGH.” My father struggled to his feet, waving off Kiana as she leaped to assist him. Though he was a bit wobbly, he made it on his own and stuck out his chin. In the past I’d have been terrified to see him this mad, but now I was relieved. It was a spark of my impressive Alpha father. He raised an eyebrow, his gaze swinging between the two of us in expectation.

Kiana mirrored his look, glaring at me with no intention of speaking first.

Coward.

I took a deep breath and did my best to explain Evan first, which wasn’t easy because the story involved a great deal of willful disobedience that led us all to that subway car, and because it wasn’t generally accepted for females to have close friendships with males they weren’t trying to attract as a mate. Honestly, the part where I bit him and turned him into a wolf was the easiest to confess.

“So, then, in today’s battle,” I continued, “Kiana protected me while I bit a bunch more humans who were also dying to try to save them too, but now they’re all shifters and they’re somewhere here in the building. I can tell because I have this like weird bond with them and…” I drifted off as my father sank back into his chair, his face drained of color.

“My Gods, Dinah.” He murmured. “You were right.”

I fell back onto the couch as my knees gummified, but my sister stood like a statue over us both. Only her eyes, dancing with her own thoughts, showed life. I turned, mouth open, to unleash this torrent of questions upon my father, when another coughing fit bent him over in his recliner. The wracking spasms shook him for a full minute and when they’d passed, his handkerchief was spattered with blood.

“Father.” I slid off the sofa and kneeled at his feet, grabbing one of his hands with my own. “Let me bite you. Maybe I can restore your wolf.”

He was silent for a moment. Then he nodded. “I’m willing to try.”

“No,” Kiana said, tugging his other hand.

I fixed her with a death glare. “Really? You’d watch him die like this rather than face a challenge for your authority?”

Her jaw twitched, her cheeks flaming an angry red. “That’s not why I think it’s a bad idea. He’s very frail. What if the transformation process kills him? Or, what if it doesn’t work, and he has another terrible bite that can’t heal? I think we must be sure it’s going to work first, that your theory is correct.”

“Well, how are we supposed to do that? Have you killed any other wolves I could bring back from the dead?”

“No, but I suppose I could always bite you.” Kiana stepped toward me, and I instinctively threw up my hands. She laughed. I fought the urge to bite her just for fun.

“Why doesn’t Kiana test her gift instead?” Father suggested.

This stopped us both.

“You said you had new shifters here with our pack, yes?” He said slowly, continuing as we nodded. “She could offer to bite them to get rid of the wolf. Turn them back into humans. Then we will know if the effects can be reversed.”

“Yeah, right,” I said. “Who’s going to volunteer for agonizing pain with no guarantee of it working?”

But even as I said it, my mind wandered to Evan. I’d never meant to drag him into this life, into my world. He’d fought so hard to leave a world where he was oppressed by his own damn family, never free to be himself, and with one thoughtless impulse, I’d plunged him right into a new one. Of course, I’d been trying to save his life, which I did, and I was proud, but… would he want a chance to go back to being human?

I looked at Kiana. “Now that I think about it…”

Chapter Seven

The elevator doors opened on the third level of our building, and I flinched. It had been years since I’d visited the servants’ quarters, which were two flights up, as a pup. Of course, visited might have been overly generous terminology. Escaped to was more like it. Kiana had been especially despotic that day, and I’d sobbed in the arms of my tutor, Liana, begging her not to leave me. When she’d done so anyway—feeding and caring for her own pups being of actual importance—I’d followed her into the service elevator and down to her apartment.

The experience was burned into my brain, not just because of the skin-peeling chastisement I’d received from Kiana first, then Damien, and finally my father later that day. It was also my first lesson in class disparity and had cemented my discomfort with having servants, thenceforward. Liana and her family lived with three other families in an apartment of the same square footage as the one I had to myself. Fifteen shifters shared two bathrooms and one kitchen. When I’d finally been returned to my own monstrously large bed, exhausted by the excoriation of my family, I’d found no peace in its embrace. Instead, I’d lain awake calculating how many servants could live in their own apartments if the rest of us gave up half of ours.

Those quarters were paradise compared with the dungeon my sister had set aside for my unfortunate new children. The third floor had never been built for residency. It was converted to recreation space for the servants’ families. There were no beds. And there was just one full bathroom for my twenty-three shifters.

As I entered the large gaming room, my stomach fluttered into my chest. Knots of nervous shifters perched on a scattering of stained and dusty furnishings, staring blankly at the forty-year-old board games piled in the corner and half-denuded pool table. They’d been issued shiftskins. I assumed that was necessary since they had zero control over their shifts and would prefer not to find themselves naked in a crowd of strangers. Some sat on the blankets they’d been given, unmoving, looking more like strays trapped at the pound than fearsome beasts.

There was no television or internet. No one was tapping on phones or bopping their head with white buds jammed in their ears. Given that most apartments upstairs had limited access to internet and no television, that wasn’t a surprise to me. But for a bunch of former humans, being stripped of their electronics had to be almost as torturous as moving to a new branch of the evolutionary ladder.

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