There, we looked down into the exact opposite of the joyful wonder we’d run through up until this point. A ring of flickering, sand-anchored torches beat back the darkness, revealing a seething mass of dozens of wolves. There were so many that it took me a moment to understand what was happening. Then the hook in my gut drew my attention to the only person in human form—a man who might once have been as broad as Orion but who now appeared hollowed out by pain. Even from a distance, I could smell both fresh and dried blood.
The prisoner was tied to a ten-foot cactus, bound-together hands stretched above his head and dark streaks mottling his naked skin. He must have suffered while I was napping through my most recent siesta, ignoring the tug I’d thought was the outpack’s impatience rather than its effort to save a life. All that time, this man’s throat would have been parched, his naked skin growing more and more sunburned. He would have struggled until he couldn’t struggle any longer, then he would have given up and sagged back against the cactus’s thorns.
The method of torture was horrifying, so I wasn’t surprised Ari and Hailey had dove in to save him. Or, perhaps, knowing what I knew about each of their personalities, Ari had dove in without thinking about his own safety then Hailey had followed to make sure the teenager wasn’t ripped apart. This wasn’t keeping our noses clean, but there was no way I was turning my back on the prisoner even if I could have gotten Ari and Hailey out without saving his life.
Not that rescuing our younger pack mates looked very feasible at the moment. Because in the time it had taken for us to respond to their howls, the pair had made it midway to the prisoner. One solid line of wolves stood between them and their destination while another had closed in behind, leaving Ari and Hailey trapped in the middle of a sea of fur and fangs.
I glanced in Orion’s direction, half expecting him to dive in without thinking. After all, the other wolves weren’t just fending off our pack mates’ advance; they were tearing into the two young shifters. Without help, our friends wouldn’t make it out alive.
“Wolves don’t think.” The words bubbled up in my head in my ex-mentor Gabi’s sneer. “They react.”
But Orion didn’t succumb to impulse. Instead, he planted his feet and turned his head as he assessed one section of the mass of wolves after another. His ruff bristled with aggression, but he was holding himself in check, searching for something…
The alpha. Of course.
I wasn’t sure how Orion deciphered the other leader’s identity, but I knew when he did. This pack’s alpha was leading from the rear. A coward’s move but lucky for us.
I understood all of this from Orion’s body language, without any need for our absent mate bond connection. So when he cocked his head at me, I nodded. Left him there and angled myself back down the back side of the hill we’d recently come up, leaving Orion to go his own way alone.
The electricity that met each of my footsteps was stronger now. As if whatever had been calling me north all this time was either glad I’d finally reached my destination or annoyed that I was sidetracking away from the prisoner. I wanted to grind my teeth together in frustration—hadn’t I prevented the matebrand from re-forming for the exact purpose of no longer having my actions second-guessed by an outside force?
But wolf teeth were too sharp to grind. So I merely padded around the back side of the hill, well hidden from the other wolves by the rise of land between us. Then I circled through flat desert to come up on the alpha from behind, slinking from cactus to cactus while hoping for incompetence. A clever alpha would have allotted shifters to guard his flank…
This one hadn’t, which wasn’t entirely surprising. The area we were in must have seemed completely devoid of life before Ari and Hailey rushed in to save the prisoner. And who would expect a second set of strangers to stumble upon this exact same location late at night and far from civilization?
Whatever the reason, the alpha appeared oblivious to my existence and a light breeze carried his scent toward me rather than vice versa. Still, I stopped behind one last cactus as soon as I was close enough to make out the alpha’s shadowy shape before me. There, I forced myself to wait for an opening, a mandatory procedure to counteract the disadvantage presented by my smaller size.
Orion and I hadn’t been able to discuss a plan, but he knew how I worked. Surely he’d be preparing a distraction…
When the distraction came, I was as caught up in the pageantry as anyone. Orion strode two-legged and naked down the hill we’d both stood atop moments earlier. And for a moment I thought he’d rekindled our matebrand. Because light sparked out of his tattoo, light like what had swirled around us when we met weeks ago in a similar patch of desert. He was glorious and I couldn’t remember in that moment why I’d insisted upon keeping distance between us. My breathing hitched and I almost missed Orion’s demand.
“Chief Bellwether, call off your wolves.”
A more mundane jolt of electricity struck my face, the sort of electricity that coincided with every werewolf’s shift. Then the alpha in front of me was human and laughing. And why not? Now that they were both two-legged, it was clear Chief Bellwether matched Orion muscle for muscle. Up close, I could tell that his scent was darkly furry, redolent with the alpha musk that proved him a worthy opponent. One on one, Orion and Chief Bellwether would have been evenly matched.
But the man in front of me had dozens of wolves to call upon while Orion ostensibly only had two, both of whom were trapped and unable to reach him. Naked, it was clear Orion had brought along no weapons to turn the tide.
Well, that wasn’t quite true. He’d brought me.
And this was the moment I’d been waiting for. So as soon as Chief Bellwether’s attention became fully fixated upon Orion, I pounced.
Like everyone else here, I lacked pockets to pull weapons out of. I also lacked bulk and dominance. But even a smaller wolf can pin a larger man when he doesn’t see her coming, especially when she doesn’t pull her bite.
Thinking of the torture the prisoner had endured and of Ari and Hailey’s current dilemma, I had no regrets as I darted around in front of the alpha then leapt upward, my teeth clenching together around his throat. I wasn’t gentle, either, as my hind legs clawed into a very intimate portion of his anatomy.
In response, Chief Bellwether struggled, attempting to drag me off him. But his efforts just made my teeth dig in deeper and my claws scratch what he very much didn’t want scratched.
“I repeat,” Orion said as the alpha’s blood oozed into my mouth, sweet and salty. “Call off your wolves.”
It didn’t take long for Chief Bellwether to gasp out agreement. To open a path for Ari and Hailey to pass through on their way to Orion.
The whole time, I clung to the alpha’s throat hard enough to threaten but not hard enough to cause permanent damage. And, face to chin with the pack leader, I tried to figure out why this man who should have looked familiar was a complete stranger to me.
Because I’d met all of the alphas whose territories surrounded the outpack, first when I captured them at the behest of the Council then again when I helped free them from their oil-rig prison. So I must have seen Chief Bellwether at that time, did recall the almost-too-ripe peach scent invading my nostrils, a scent that I suspected was more of a pack signature than a personal one.
Despite all that, I was certain I’d never met this alpha before my teeth made contact with his flesh.
The one who was familiar, I eventually realized, was the prisoner. The aisle of empty desert that Hailey and Ari retreated down on their way to Orion gave me a better view than I’d had previously. And through it, I recognized the prisoner’s hawk nose despite the way pain twisted his features. I recognized his high cheekbones and thin lips despite the way torch shadows combined with blood streaks to break up his skin into blotches of dark and light.
The prisoner was Blade Bellwether, the one I’d thought was the alpha of this pack. Which made no sense…until I realized what I’d forgotten while letting that hook in my gut drag me north.
The werewolves imprisoned on the oil rig a month ago hadn’t been able to shift when we found them. Not for the reason Celeste and Finnegan couldn’t shift—laboratory manipulation of their genome when they were mere embryos—but instead due to recent chemical injections also perpetrated by the Council.
A month ago, Orion had worked with some of those shiftless werewolves, using his alpha dominance to drag them into their fur forms. But as best I could recall, Vega’s pack mates were the only ones who’d submitted to that indignity. The alphas who were on the oil rig without their packs had kept their distance from any forced shifts.
Still, I’d assumed the pharmaceutical inability to don fur had worn off after those alphas were released. Apparently not. Because a werewolf prisoner would have been able to free himself from the awful predicament Blade Bellwether found himself in. All he’d have to do was shift and his thinner lupine wrists would slide out of the knotted rope.
My conclusion—Blade couldn’t turn into a wolf or he wouldn’t be a prisoner. Which meant that his pain and suffering, in the end, could be traced back to me.
Guilt tightened my throat even as Hailey and Ari reached Orion. “Thank you,” Orion said, focusing on the alpha who must have used the previous pack leader’s weakness as an opening to assume command. “Now, cut down Blade.”
“No.” The new pack leader’s throat rippled beneath my fangs as he refused Orion’s order. “Blade failed the test.”
Test? Was this really how wolves evaluated each other? My house mates pouncing on Finnegan had seemed mostly harmless, but what was their hazing other than a mild example of the same brutal lupine instinct on display tonight?
Even though I didn’t want to fall back into old ways of thinking, I couldn’t help agreeing with something Gabi had told me years ago. “Wolves never show mercy,” she’d warned. “Don’t expect it and you won’t be disappointed.”
Here and now, Orion remained calm. “Perhaps Blade did fail the test. But you have what you want. Release him to me and he’ll be…”
