“Did you take any injury?” Oleg asked Ethan even as he continued to work on Selenka. “I can’t smell blood on you, but not all wounds cause blood loss.”
“I am uninjured.” Flat, toneless, with no attempt to ingratiate or appear friendly.
Oleg, however, had wrangled too many snarly dominants to be that easily shut down. “One of our pack who’s helping out with security came in muttering about lights that had him seeing stars. Apparently that was you?”
Selenka wondered what her mate would or would not reveal.
“I am a telekinetic who can’t move objects. My power lies with photons—light particles.” Ethan’s eyes were on Selenka, not Oleg, the force of concentration in the paleness a sensual challenge that said her mate didn’t appreciate her reserve. “As far as anyone knows, I either manipulate or focus those particles. Akin to how a pane of glass focuses light.”
“Hmm,” Oleg said. “I’ve never thought of light as deadly, but of course what’s a laser but a blade of light?”
Selenka stilled at the realization of why Ethan was so many jagged shards inside her. She’d thought she’d understood but hadn’t grasped the full scope of it. He saw himself as a weapon. One who’d been forced by his trainers to kill and kill again. What did that do to a child already traumatized by a self-defensive strike that had left him an orphan?
Her mate had shattered into broken shards long ago, each shard edged with blood.
“I don’t have an official subdesignation.” Ethan continued to look at Selenka, his compulsion toward her unhidden. “I’m listed as an atypical Tk on the squad’s roll, though Aden has told me that I appear to work on the same microlevels as Tks who can move the cells in a body.”
Selenka’s phone chimed with an alert as she went to reply. Recognizing that pattern as the one she’d assigned Gregori, she pulled the phone out of her pocket and read the message. “Graffiti on Nat’s shop.” Her eyes narrowed. “Gregori caught the scent of one of Blaise’s wolves in the same spot.”
Oleg tut-tutted, his hands warm and gentle against her. “Those young wolves are too strong and dangerous to be outside of a pack—and Blaise might be a dominant wolf himself, but he’s no alpha. Neither is that lieutenant of his. What’s her name? Nomani, that’s it. Neither one of them dominant enough to lead.”
“Hmm.” The problematic and potentially risky setup was part of the reason why Selenka had agreed to her lieutenant Emanuel’s passionate plea that Haven’s Disciples be allowed to set up shop at the edge of her territory.
Emanuel had once been a wayward youth, but: “I had a pack that cared behind me. These youths don’t have that if they’ve hooked up with a charismatic charlatan. We have to help them before it’s too late and they’re forever twisted by their association with that mudak.”
To say that her lieutenant had strong feelings about Blaise was a vast understatement. Selenka agreed the Disciples’ “spiritual leader” was a slimy bastard who’d charmed the four nineteen- to twenty-one-year-old wolves into leaving their packs to become part of his congregation.
The four were strong and getting stronger. At that level of dominance, they only had two options: become loners or be part of a pack. To roam together in a group without a hierarchical pack structure would lead only to bloodshed. Both among themselves and against others unfortunate enough to cross their path.
As Oleg had pointed out, Blaise wasn’t strong enough to control them for much longer. Of course, they weren’t BlackEdge wolves and Selenka was within her rights to have denied Emanuel’s request, but that would’ve just dumped the problem on another pack—likely one not as strong as BlackEdge, and therefore not as capable of ensuring those four wolves didn’t cause mayhem. Because without the correct oversight, they could do irreparable damage to changeling relationships with humans and Psy.
A single vicious attack by an out-of-control wolf was all it would take.
Blaise also had a cohort of humans, nonpredatory changelings, and Psy in his fold. As with the wolves, they were in thrall to him. Which was why Selenka hadn’t invited the four wolves to join BlackEdge—she had no desire to invite resentful spies into their midst. If one of the four wished to defect, he or she would have to run a gauntlet more difficult than those navigated by loners who wished to reintegrate into a pack.
Blaise had promised to ensure his “flock” behaved with “utmost care” in Selenka’s territory. That promise was falling short even faster than Selenka had expected. “Poor Emanuel,” she muttered. “He’ll be so disappoin—” A howling pain, the wrench inside her so vicious that she couldn’t form words. But she was already moving, though the agony reverberated through every cell in her body.
Oleg, connected to her by a blood bond, staggered at the same time.
“What is the threat?” Ethan’s eyes obsidian, the ice inside her a frigid inferno.
Selenka hauled on her ruined jacket over nothing but her damaged sports bra as she ran out the door. “One of my people is hurt.” The alpha-lieutenant bond with Emanuel had severed with bloody ferocity, but she couldn’t accept the finality of the loss until she’d seen his body.
Oleg was the last person to make it to the vehicle, but she waited for him because they’d need a healer. Ethan’s dog jumped into the back a second before the healer. Not saying another word, Selenka hit the accelerator, going at speeds no human could ever match. She didn’t know the exact location where Emanuel had gone down, but she’d felt enough in that shocking moment of loss to point her vehicle toward the pack’s intensely guarded green heart.
Her phone rang minutes into the drive, the tone the one she’d assigned her father. She had no time for his drama today, but something made her answer using the car’s system. “What?” It was a growl, her wolf so close to her skin she could barely form words.
“Emanuel, he’s hurt.” Her father’s voice was frantic. “There’s so much blood.”
Selenka leaned into Ethan’s ice. “Coordinates.” It took Kiev Durev two attempts to convey the exact location.
Even though Selenka knew it was too late, she still drove with unalloyed fury. Skidding the vehicle to a stop as far into the thick green of the pack’s forest home as she could, she then got out and ran. An alpha could often hold on to even a very badly wounded member of the pack if she got to him fast enough.
Oleg would track her by scent.
As for Ethan, she was abandoning him in unfamiliar territory, but the man was an Arrow and bonded to her deeper than her lieutenants.
He’d find her.
Her alpha heart drove her on as pain echoed through her veins, the anguish of a lost limb throbbing in her psyche. But though she ran with a speed that turned the world into a blur, Emanuel was gone by the time she reached him. He lay slumped on the ground in the lap of another member of her pack who had blood all over his tailored shirt and pants.
“I ran as fast as I could when I smelled blood,” her father said, the pointed vee of his goatee quivering with the extent of his trembling. “I tried to help.” His Adam’s apple bobbed. “But I couldn’t hold him.”
Selenka knew he’d had no hope of doing that; Emanuel had died in an instant, likely a heartbeat after taking what looked to be a point-blank shot to the heart. Else she would’ve felt some warning through her link with her lieutenant. Dropping to her knees beside his bloody body regardless, she gathered him to her and tried to will life back into him. But even an alpha’s power couldn’t bring the dead back to life.
Anguish ripped her in two.
With sandy blond hair and playful green eyes, Emanuel had been only forty-four, a wolf in the prime of his life. He hadn’t yet found a mate but had been courting a sweet, submissive wolf who blushed shyly each time he approached her. A gentler kind of dominant, one who’d laugh as easily as growl, he was beloved by his packmates—and deeply valued by his alpha.
Selenka had expected to have his calm, amused presence with her as she aged and settled into her role in the pack. Emanuel—never Manny or any other shortening of a name that honored his adored grand-père—was meant to be an honorary uncle to her future children, a friend to her till they were both “grumpy old graybeards.” But she didn’t cry. An alpha couldn’t. Not until her work was done.
“Did you see or scent anything?” she asked her father; right now, all she could scent was Emanuel’s blood, her every breath filled with cold iron.
“I think I heard a vehicle—maybe a jetcycle.” He shoved a trembling hand through the neatly cut strands of his light brown hair. “To be honest, I didn’t pay much attention. I was more worried about Emanuel. I thought he might still be alive.”
As that had been Selenka’s first reaction regardless of the way the bond had broken, she just cradled her friend and lieutenant’s body closer to her and nodded.
“I found a weapon, too.” Kiev held up that weapon before putting it on the blood-soaked ground. “I know I shouldn’t have picked it up, that I’ll have contaminated the evidence, but I wasn’t thinking straight.” Sitting back on the forest floor, he stared at the dried blood on his palms. “I thought maybe someone would be coming back.”
Selenka wasn’t worried about evidence while she held Emanuel’s already cooling body in her arms. Her wolf anguished, she threw back her head on a howl that reverberated throughout their territory. Wolf after wolf took up the mourning cry, and the sadness spread. Soon, the entire pack would know that they’d lost one of their own.
Oleg arrived on the heels of that howl, in his wolf form, his medical kit strapped to his body.
Ethan, she thought. Ethan must’ve done up the straps.
The healer keened with her.
Soon came another sound in the trees, her mate having tracked her. Her father’s head jerked up at the same time, his eyes wolf gold and rimmed with red. Kiev Durev might bemoan the changeling way of life as “primitive” and “uncivilized,” but he was a wolf, too, and not exactly a weak one.