Page 28 of The Awakened Wolf

The studio cut to commercial, and I took a deep breath, sighing out the tension that had clenched in my gut. “From myths to pariahs in twenty-four hours,” I said. “That has to be a record.”

“Okay. What do we know so far?” Kiana said mostly to herself. “How can we take this guy out without making things worse?”

“You know,” Evan said to me, “she might be a terrorist, but at least she’s good at it.”

Ignoring him, I searched my mental notes and ticked off the items on my fingers. “We know Godwin called Damien his servant.”

“We know Damien had that painting made four years ago, but it was of today,” Kiana added.

“What?” Evan said, his head flipping between us. “You had a painting of what happened today from four years ago and didn’t mention this before?”

“We didn’t know what it meant until today,” I said. “It looked like a painting of an old battle, or a fictional one. I passed it so many times over the years that it didn’t hit me until I came back here and saw it…”

“Yes, we figured that out today,” Kiana interrupted. “Let’s add that awful hippie Ayla’s warnings about the foe. We all thought that was Damien but…” She trailed off.

“Did he look like Odin in the painting? Because he looks like Odin to me,” Evan said.

“Now is not the time, Evan,” I said. “This isn’t a Marvel movie. This is real.”

“But—”

“Enough. Let us think.”

It looked like he was going to persist but the commercials ended.

“Breaking News,” the male anchor said, his face grave. “Along with the recovery of the multiple shifter bodies already reported, we’ve now learned that a live specimen was captured by the NYPD this morning.”

“No,” I said, my heart sinking.

“Parents, please be warned,” he added. “This video may be disturbing.”

A grainy security camera clip rolled off a massive frosted black wolf pacing in frenzied loops in a human-sized jail cell.

I closed my eyes, tears pricking at the backs of my eyes.

It was Blaze.

Chapter Eleven

“Alright,” I said, watching the loop of Blaze doggedly pacing as though his plan for escape was slipping through the groove he was wearing on the floor. “How do we rescue him?”

“Shush, I have to think.” Kiana rose, doing her best imitation of Blaze as she shook her head, muttering. Her brow cinched like a taut drawstring, tugging the rest of her features into sharp edges. Though I didn’t catch every word, I caught some very unladylike terms peppered between “Mantel” and “double-crossing,” that started a wisp of an idea in the back of my head.

But that couldn’t be. There was no way…

The thought defied belief, but then so did a 21st Century war room in the middle of a building with no Wi-Fi, and I’d exited one of those not half an hour ago. What else did I—or maybe most of my kind—not know?

I tuned back to Kiana’s roiling cloud of consciousness just as she said, “… they must have made it in a lab,” and I grabbed her arm, the impossible thought growing from ember to flame.

“Care to share whatever you’re freaking out about?” I locked my gaze with hers. “Because it sounds like there are bigger secrets in this room than how anyone let your sorry interior decorator live.”

Evan swallowed a delighted whoop while my sister yanked her arm from my grasp. Though I’d enjoyed delivering the silly burn, it had mostly been to keep me from killing her. I knew I was right from the look in her eye. She pretended not to rub her arm where I’d nearly clawed it off at.

“They knew?” This came out as more of an explosion than a question. Every hair in my body stood furiously on end. “All this time we’ve been tiptoeing around, telling our pack members they had to be careful about being out in society and the government knew?”

Evan’s head swiveled from Kiana to me and back to Kiana. “You’ve got to be shitting me.”

“What?” Kiana threw up her hands, guilt evaporating from her skin like the rare sheen it was on her. She didn’t guilt. She glistened. “It wasn’t my doing. This was the way since our grandparents’ time, apparently.” Then her chin tucked a tad. “I admit, I was unhappy to learn this myself.”

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