Page 52 of The Awakened Wolf

Chapter Twenty

I slouched at the gleaming conference table in the Bronx war room like an exhausted human female with no regard for proper wolf protocol, lolling my pounding head against the high-backed leather chair. The source of this migraine held court from an even bigger chair at the center of the table, sandwiched between our father and my fiancé—whose hand really should have been resting on my thigh, if you asked me, but sadly wasn’t because Sebastian was all Beta business at the moment, his lower lip pushed forward in a kissably concerned pout.

Evan was fidgeting in the chair on the far side of my father, his unexpected presence giving me hope that I had falsely accused Kiana of intending to take all the credit for his discovery. But an even more unexpected presence occupied the chair beside him—Jayla. Her scowling dismay over Cody’s disappearance had been replaced with a gape of amazement over this high-tech strategy center in the midst of a community whose members she’d spent the morning explaining vaccines to. But she wasn’t even getting the full effect because Kiana had cleared the room of all its usual workers, creating a void of noise almost as eerie as the one we’d left Jesmyn in downstairs.

Jayla’s wild, roving eyes met mine behind the row of chairs between us, and I offered her a weary smile that I hoped conveyed some small measure of reassurance. She was safe with my pack. Sure, we had plenty of ass-backward traditions that needed to be reconsidered, but we weren’t the bloodthirsty monsters that had stalked her childhood nightmares after that grisly scene she’d witnessed near the Blockhouse in the northernmost woods of Central Park.

My eyebrows scrunched, and Jayla’s lifted in response. I shook my head like nothing was wrong but made a mental note to have her share that story with Sebastian later. His Alpha training would have been well under way by then, so he would probably know if the Manhattan pack had ever been forced to deal with a maneater in their midst. Even if the killer had been a loner, it would’ve been very hard for him to escape Max’s notice, unless he was…

A Beta.

I pushed the thought away and the smile back onto my face. There was zero reason to believe Damian was Jayla’s bogey wolf, but there were infinite reasons to express my gratitude to my friend. I’d trusted Evan’s diagnosis, but he wasn’t a doctor, just a failed-actor-turned-computer-nerd who’d never bothered to mention in four years of friendship that he’d personally dispatched more than one diseased forest creature with a gun back home in Georgia. But Jayla’s agreement made me believe we might actually be able to beat this if the other pack’s got on board.

Though she’d never gotten the chance to examine any of them, I knew from our brief conversation earlier that Jayla had confirmed for Kiana that the physical symptoms being exhibited by those Kiana had gone on to… assist in their journey to the Yonder Field were consistent with rabies presentation in humans. That would have been enough for me, but when she’d added that Max’s aggressive behavior also tracked with rabies, but as it was expressed in animals, I was sold. Geri and Freki were carrying rabies, and while it apparently couldn’t harm either of them, it would happily kill any of us whether we were in human or wolf form.

Yet in spite of this overwhelming evidence, my sister was still insisting that the disease was actually something the government had made in a secret lab. An impressive feat of imagination for someone who’d never seen a single movie. But what had me grinding my teeth wasn’t that she had trouble overcoming her own deeply ingrained biases to believe my human friend was right, it was that she was willing to create the pretense—in her mind anyway—that the disease was definitely rabies, and the vaccines would definitely work, in order to garner the other packs’ support.

While I was certain we would need their help to defeat Odin given that he already had the NYPD and National Guard in his pocket, I was struggling with the idea of gaining allies through subterfuge. Worse, unnecessary subterfuge because the vaccines were the answer, and if Kiana could just admit that, then she wouldn’t be on the verge of doing something unspeakably unethical. Something I was tacitly going along with by not challenging her for the stupidly big chair she was sitting in.

“Kiana,” I broke the fraught silence. “Let’s assume you’re right, and the rabies vaccines don’t work. Then your plan is to send us all into battle and risk getting an incurable disease? Won’t that give Odin exactly what he wants?”

“And what happens if we don’t confront him, Elyse?” She raised a brow. “If we hide, he’ll hunt us down and infect us one by one anyway. Isn’t it better to do what we can to eliminate the threat entirely now?”

“Not if a battle isn’t even necessary,” I shot back. “Don’t the people of this city deserve to know their hero is releasing a disease that could infect all of them? How would Odin win if he had eight million raging New Yorkers on his hands?”

“And what happens if you’re wrong?” she demanded. “What happens if it’s not rabies and it doesn’t affect the public? How long would it take them to turn on us again if they believe we’ve lied and scared them for no reason?”

She has a point there.

She would if she weren’t wrong.

I dropped my head into my hands and rubbed my temples. Maybe my brain would just explode, and I would be excused from participating in this deception that was only a deception because Kiana was too damn stubborn to believe in rabies.

“You okay?” Sebastian prodded gently. His hand finally found my thigh under the table, but I was too worked up for even my wolf to get worked up over it now.

I reached down and squeezed his hand. “Yeah. I just don’t like the lying. Especially to our fellow shifters. It doesn’t feel right.”

“I understand how you feel, but Kiana’s in a difficult position.”

“You’re taking her side?” I pulled my hand away.

“Not exactly. I just know what it takes to be an Alpha even if I wasn’t meant to be one. Sometimes ends do justify means. And when pack safety is at risk, all bets may be off.” He grabbed my hand again. “As long as everyone who goes into the battle is protected from rabies, what does it matter if Kiana believes it or has other crazy ideas?”

“Doesn’t it matter if our Alpha will lie to get what she wants?”

“It happens all the time, Elyse. It’s part of the job.”

“Is it?” I folded both arms over my chest and stared at my wolf’s reflection on the giant black screen in front of us. “Or is that one more of the millions of things we accept because it’s always been that way?”

“Hey.” His foot tapped mine beneath the table, and I grudgingly met his eyes. “I’ll back you up, Elyse, if you want to challenge Kiana. You know that. But you also know how that has to end.”

I sucked my teeth, frustrated. The last thing I wanted to do after all the loss and suffering I and those around me had endured over the past weeks was kill my damned sister. My crazy-ass, lying bitch of a sister.

“Then we have to accept her decisions.”

I didn’t respond to Sebastian except to tap his foot in return.

While we’d been sorting out exactly whether to start a mutiny at our end of the table, Kiana had been dialing the ridiculous red phone. My reflection vanished as the massive wall screen flickered to life. Squares popped up one by one, all with matching grim faces. First was Julius, the Alpha of Brooklyn, his brown scalp gleaming and his pocket square—silky jade today—folded to a perfect point. Yeh, the Alpha of Queens, was next, wearing his usual simple linen tunic and placid expression.

---