by SM Reine
“Summer probably already told her,” Seth said, but Nash was already backing away from the car, shedding his shirt to bare a muscular chest. The guy was always shirtless. Seth didn’t know why Nash ever bothered getting dressed.
Abram obviously felt the same, because he snorted.
Katja wasn’t quite as used to Mr. Look-at-Me. She gave a wistful sigh at the sight of him. Apparently even crazy people thought he was gorgeous.
But when Nash’s wings unfurled, the sigh turned to a gasp of shock.
He had an impressive wingspan—Seth had to give him that. Each one was eight feet long fully extended. When they caught the sunlight, they glimmered with captive flame, as if dipped in liquid gold.
Whipping his wings wide, Nash caught the wind and soared into the air, leaving a torrent of feathers in his wake.
“Showoff,” Abram muttered.
Seth leaned out the door to reach the gate’s access panel. He punched in a four-digit code. The motor whirred.
“Where are we?” Katja whispered. She had crammed herself into a tiny ball against the door of the car, knees hugged to her chest, skin prickled with goosebumps.
The gate swung open, and he eased the Chevelle through.
“This is the werewolf sanctuary,” Seth said. “Welcome home.”
Rylie was already at the carport by the lake when Seth and Abram pulled up. A cool breeze rolled through the car, carrying the distant sounds of laughter and splashing along with it.
A lot of people had been enjoying the last of the summer-warm days by swimming in the river, and Rylie was one of them. Three small triangles of cloth protected her modesty: a yellow bikini two shades brighter than her tan. It was knotted at the hips and the back of her neck. Seth didn’t have to imagine untying those knots and kissing the flesh her swimsuit barely concealed. He only needed to remember.
Seth had become inured to frequent nudity among the werewolves. A couple of them never bothered getting dressed unless they were leaving the sanctuary, which often meant being surrounded by fit, beautiful women with no modesty. It had become easy to ignore them after the first few weeks.
He couldn’t ignore Rylie. Even in a swimsuit, she was more beautiful than anyone else in the pack. Probably the entire world.
And she started smiling the instant she saw him, hanging near the edge of the carport, fingers resting on the leg of the awning. Rylie was the sunshine after weeks of rain, the kiss of the first breeze of spring. Seeing her made Seth struggle to breathe.
“Want me to grab Katja?” Abram asked.
Seth coughed into his hand, forcing himself to look away from the woman waiting for him. No, not waiting for him—for Abram, her son. She hadn’t rushed out of the lake to see him. Rylie wouldn’t do that; she had been careful around Seth lately. Almost too careful. Like she thought it would hurt him if they were alone for even five minutes.
“Wait here for a second,” Seth said, turning off the car. He twisted in the seat to check on their werewolf captive. She was curled into the fetal position, head resting on her folded arms, seemingly asleep. She had passed out between the gate and their arrival. “Watch her.”
Abram accepted the orders with a nod. He was holding a handgun in his lap—just holding it, forefinger flat against the barrel and away from the trigger. It wasn’t a threatening position. But Seth knew he was holding it like that because it would only take a twist of the wrist and a squeeze to blast a bullet through the seat and into Katja’s skull.
Seth got out of the car, slamming the door behind him.
Rylie had found a towel somewhere. She pulled it around her body, hugged it under her arms, gripped it like armor. “What’s going on?” she asked.
“Didn’t Summer tell you?”
“All she said was that you were bringing someone back with you. Is it the werewolf?”
“Yeah. She’s sick,” he said. “Silver poisoning, I think.” Her eyes widened. The bridge of Rylie’s nose wrinkled as she sniffed. Whatever she smelled, it wasn’t good—her entire face screwed up with revulsion. Seth rubbed the back of his neck, hanging his head. “I should have shot her. We had the chance. But I thought—”
“You did the right thing,” Rylie said, maybe a little too forcefully.
“Can you heal her?”
The moment of hesitation was telling. “Yeah,” she said.
Rylie wasn’t sure. Seth could tell. Worse, she looked afraid. She had survived silver poisoning a few years back, months before becoming Alpha, and that wasn’t the kind of thing a werewolf could forget. She used to wake up sweating and sobbing with nightmares of it. Seth had rubbed her back for hours until she had fallen asleep again on more than one night.
He didn’t know if she still had those dreams. They hadn’t shared a bed in a long time.
Seth found himself taking her hand, squeezing it tight. “We can lock her up until the silver’s out of her system,” he said. “You don’t have to get involved.”
Her fingers tightened on his. “You know I can’t do that.”
“Yeah,” Seth said. “I know.”
Sometimes, the way that she looked at him… It was almost like she still loved Seth. Like he was coming home from college on summer break again to be with her, and she was waiting at the front door with her breath caught in her chest, glowing cheeks, and sparkling eyes.
He could never regret choosing to go to college instead of staying with Rylie to run the pack. Going to medical school had been Seth’s lifelong dream—a way to use his strength for healing instead of killing. He’d already used that knowledge to save lives within the pack, since the average werewolf couldn’t go to a doctor to have silver shrapnel removed. And Seth was immune to the werewolf curse, so Abel had been better suited to staying behind and acting as Rylie’s right hand.
But Seth often wondered what would have happened if he had chosen to stay with Rylie instead of going to college. Would she have been lonely enough to seek out companionship with Abel? Could Seth have somehow kept Rylie for himself?
He thought that alternate future would have looked a lot like this: Rylie standing in front of the waterfall, sun-kissed and sparkling with moisture, waiting for him to arrive at the home they had built together. She would take care of the pack. Their family. And he would be the one to guard her from her enemies, kill the wolves that needed to be killed.
But then a tall, shadowy figure appeared behind Rylie, and she turned away from Seth. Her smile changed whenever she saw Abel—Seth’s brother and her mate. It was bigger, more genuine, like she forgot to keep her shields up.
She didn’t drop Seth’s hand when she saw Abel. Rylie didn’t feel guilty about showing affection toward Seth, even though they weren’t together anymore. Why should she? Her decision had been made.
Seth drew away from her before Abel reached their sides.
He was one of the werewolves that had completely lost his sense of modesty now that they lived at the sanctuary. He was soaking wet and naked, baring every inch of his stupid hairy body.
Abel looped an arm around Rylie’s shoulders. “What’s going on?” he asked. Abel’s voice was a painfully deep bass that rumbled in his chest, almost like the wolf’s growl. Rylie looked so tiny against his side.
She beamed up at him, melting under his arm. “We have new family. Seth and Abram brought the werewolf they were hunting home.”
Abel’s eyes sharpened. His irises were the same shade of gold as most werewolves’ eyes, maybe a fraction darker. They were shockingly bright against his dark, scarred face. “You brought her home? The murderer? Are you fucking stupid?”
“Hey,” Rylie said sharply. “Stop it. Okay?” She beckoned to Abram, who got out of the car.
“Yes?” Abram asked, holstering his pistol. Guess having two werewolves on standby was about as good a weapon as a silver bullet.
“Can you please help me carry our guest to the new cabin?” Rylie asked. “The one where we’re doing transitions for new wolves.” Abram nodded and o
pened the rear door of the car. Seth moved to help, but Rylie stopped him. “I’ll take care of her. Don’t worry about it.”
Abram scooped Katja into his arms. She was limp against his chest, gray-skinned and sweating. Whatever had sickened her seemed to be getting worse—and fast. Rylie hurried ahead of them.
Seth watched them walk toward the cottages with apprehension coiled in his heart.
This was going to put Rylie in danger somehow. He wasn’t sure how he knew it, but he did. He could feel it with absolute certainty.
It was all his fault.
Abel seemed to have the same feeling. “You’re an idiot, Seth. You should have put a bullet in her heart.”
At any other time, Seth would have argued with him. Didn’t matter whether Abel was right or not. Arguing was just what they did. But he couldn’t shake that feeling of dread, and it sucked all of the combative urges out of him. “Go talk to her,” Seth said. “Tell her that we need to kill Katja before the moon rises. It’s not too late.”
“You tell her. She doesn’t listen to me like she listens to you.”
Was that jealousy in Abel’s voice? Seth shaded his eyes against the sun to stare up at his brother’s twisted features. Abel had been blessed with all the height in the family, and stood a couple inches over six feet—almost a full half a foot taller than Seth. He’d been blessed with the better looks, too. Then fate had cursed him with a werewolf attack, and he’d carried the scars from the mauling on his face ever since. They started healing after Abel became Alpha, but it was a slow process. He was still ugly as sin.
It was also impossible to read his expression when half of his face didn’t move right. The left side of his mouth always looked kind of limp. Seth thought that he was grimacing.
“You’re her mate,” Seth said. He tried not to sound jealous. “She listens to you.”
“It’s not the same and you know it.” Abel was jealous. He had seen them holding hands. Maybe Rylie didn’t think much of it, but Abel did. “Maybe if you’d take a hint and find something else to do, I’d actually have some authority around here.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“I’m trying to say that I don’t know why you keep coming back,” Abel said. His jaw was tense, brow drawn low over his eyes.
Those words struck Seth hard—mostly because he had been starting to wonder the same thing himself.
Why did he keep coming back? Seeing Rylie and Abel together was like having his heart sliced out atom by atom with a razor blade. He wasn’t a werewolf. He didn’t have to be there through every full moon and new moon, hiding with the beasts.
His place wasn’t at Rylie’s side. Not anymore.
“I’m not going to talk to her,” Seth said, lifting his hands in a gesture of surrender. “It’s not my business.”
He might as well have been trying to argue with Abel. His eyes filled with fierce, burning anger. “That’s right. It’s not.”
Abel strode after Rylie and Abram. Seth hung by the carport, half-watching the pack making cannonball dives off of the rocks and swimming under the frigid waterfall. They looked happy. Comfortable. Like they were all family, just as Rylie said.
Was Seth really part of that family?
Seth took his time unpacking. A half hour of solitude wasn’t enough to improve his mood, and it only got worse when Rylie met him outside the cottage where Abram had taken Katja. Rylie was pacing along the front path and wringing her hands.
“She’s sick,” Rylie said without preamble, “but it’s not silver poisoning.”
Seth blinked. He had been waiting to hear that Katja had a silver belly button ring, or that she’d accidentally nicked herself with antique flatware and was spiraling into insanity for her clumsiness. “But the symptoms,” he said.
“It’s not silver,” Rylie repeated, more forcefully this time.
Something heavy thudded against the inner wall of the cottage, loud enough to make Seth take a step back. The shutters rattled.
She sighed. “Katja woke up.”
This cottage had been built specifically for transitioning new—sometimes unwilling—werewolves to the pack. From the outside, it looked like every other cottage in the sanctuary: a five-hundred-square-foot stick-built home with yellow trim and flowers outside the front door. Brass pentacles marked the top of every window and doorway. The only visible difference on this one was that the windows were shuttered with silver-laced steel rather than having curtains on the inside.
Inside, it was sparse—an empty space with a bathroom and a small mattress that was cheap to replace. By the sounds of it, Katja was in the process of shredding that mattress, and maybe herself in the process. A crazed werewolf was a deadly werewolf, both to her surroundings and herself.
“It’s almost like she has rabies,” Rylie said. “But you told me that werewolves can’t get rabies.”
They couldn’t. There was no disease on this Earth that could make them sick—nothing but silver poisoning.
Seth’s father had written the book on hunting werewolves. Literally. It was a detailed manual on everything that humans knew about werewolves, from how they were made to how they could be killed. There was an entire section on diseases and infections. His dad had held a couple of werewolves captive for a few weeks to test on them, and hadn’t been able to get anything to take.
The idea of it was horrifying to Seth, but the information gained from it was clear. It was impossible for a werewolf to get rabies.
“Are you sure there’s no silver in her system?” Seth asked.
She rubbed the bridge of her nose. “Positive. I’d be able to smell it.”
What if there was some disease his father had never heard of? Something special that only hurt preternatural creatures?
“Can we heal her?” Seth asked.
“Abel’s changing her in there,” Rylie said. “He’s trying to get her going back and forth, like partial shifts. We tested it as a way to heal silver burns faster after Trevin hurt himself.”
A few weeks earlier, their sanctuary’s defenses had been breached by a local deputy, Lincoln Marshall, who had been possessed by a demon. He had come with silver bullets. Nash had taken one of them to the chest. It was painful, but mostly harmless to an angel. So harmless, in fact, that another bullet had passed straight through his body and buried itself in the wall of a cottage.
Trevin had noticed the flattened disc of silver among the wreckage. He was a brave guy—sometimes a little too brave. He had immediately dug the bullet out rather than letting the next rainfall wash silver residue into their water supply.
He had also given himself third degree burns in the process. He might have lost his hand if Rylie and Abel hadn’t intervened.
Seth hadn’t known exactly how Rylie had gone about healing Trevin without surgical intervention. Now that he did, it filled him with a sense of unease. Silver was the only thing that could hurt werewolves. If the werewolves could heal silver damage without Seth’s help, then what was the point in the human with medical experience sticking around?
His heart was aching. An actual physical ache. He rubbed a hand over his chest and took two steps back. “Katja was probably turned into a werewolf recently,” Seth said. “If we can figure out who changed her, then we can figure out where this new disease came from.”
Rylie’s eyes sparked with hope. “You’ll look into it?”
He wanted to say that Abel, her Alpha mate, could look into it on his own, and that they didn’t need Seth’s help. But he had never been able to refuse Rylie. “I’ll look into it,” he said.
Before Seth could head back to his cottage, Rylie put a hand on his arm. “The full moon is tomorrow night. Katja’s going to have a harder time tomorrow. We’ll need your help.”
“Yeah, of course,” Seth said, mostly to make her stop looking at him like that.
Rylie smiled at him. God, that smile.
Seth needed to leave. Not just the path in front of the cottage, but the sanctua
ry. He’d only been back an hour, and he was already claustrophobic.
Three
A woman was waiting for Seth outside his door, sitting on the steps with a cat toy in hand and no cat in sight. She was tall—about an inch taller than Seth in bare feet, and she never wore shoes—with mounds of messy black curls. This woman resembled Abram superficially, but where he had made stoic silence his trademark, there was nothing serious or quiet about Summer Gresham.
“Did you hear what they said on the news?” she asked the instant Seth was within hearing range.
“No. I just got back.”
Summer bolted to her feet, excitement turning her cheeks red. The feathers bounced on the end of her cat toy, jingling with the merry chime of bells. “There’s finally been an arrest in Senator Peterson’s murder.”
Seth raked a hand over his hair. “Christ.”
“I know, right?”
It had been months since Senator Peterson was killed and the Office of Preternatural Affairs brought all the non-human citizens of the country out of the closet. They had blamed the death on a demon in the early days, but never caught the perpetrator.
Seth had been hoping that they never would catch who did it, demon or otherwise. If they caught the murderer, that would give an all-too-public face to the preternatural community, which wasn’t a community at all. Werewolves had nothing to do with incubi and succubi; angels had nothing to do with nightmares. But humans would see that one murderer as the representative for all of them.
“What killed him?” he asked.
Summer shrugged. “Don’t know. There hasn’t been an official statement yet.”
When that happened, it was going to be bad, real bad. Seth wasn’t looking forward to it. He didn’t want to think about it, either. He gestured at the cat toy. “Looking for Sir Lumpy?”
“No, I don’t have to look for him. I know he’s under your stairs.” Summer smiled sheepishly. “He hasn’t been speaking to me ever since Abel and I returned from visiting Gran’s.” She jingled the toy at the stairs again. “Isn’t that right, handsome?” She might as well have been talking to the rose bush under Seth’s window for all the reaction that got.