Page 107 of Roguefinder

“I spent hundreds of years hunting your kind. I had to be careful. Discreet. Your Council would have noticed if too many of its wolves went missing.” His lip curled, showing the tips of his fangs. “I took my revenge in flesh and blood.”

Ice slid through my veins. How many werewolves had he killed? The man who stood before me was the same man who’d ordered his servants to whip him in his final years as a human, penance squeezed from his pores. He’d taken what he’d learned about pain and turned it outward. Every wolf in his dungeon had paid the debt he thought the world owed him.

“And you took magic,” I said.

Pride spread over his features, the expression as jarring as the candelabras crowding the surgical equipment. “I stumbled upon it by accident. A wolf I’d kept for several years turned rogue as I fed from him. Something happened to the blood.” He touched his chest, his fingertips pressed over his heart. “It changed me for a time. I couldn’t take a beast form, but for one hour I was alive, my heart beating as it hadn’t for centuries.”

My own heart thumped painfully. I hung on the wall, and I hung on his words, willing him to continue.

“It gave me an idea,” he said. “If a dead man could taste life through the blood, what would it do to a living one? So I tried it with one of my pets. He drank, and he transformed, his human bones sliding into those of a wolf. Alchemy. I knew my clientele would pay anything for the privilege of experiencing the supernatural firsthand.”

“Reckless beyond belief,” I said, scarcely able to make myself say it. “Any one of them could have talked. One story, and they would have exposed us to the humans.”

Carlo smiled, and for once he looked genuinely amused. “Powerful people protect their own secrets. Have you never heard of this, wolfseeker? Humans with so much money they grow tired of ruling the world and seek other entertainment. Anything to feel alive. They build rockets and fly themselves to space. Purchase islands where they can indulge their vices in the middle of the ocean. This is not the stuff of fiction, wolf. Their lives are so short. They seek meaning, and they’ll pay anything for a scrap of it.” His smile widened a fraction. “Anything to reassure them their miserable lives will continue in some form.”

I said nothing.

Because he wasn’t wrong about the humans, and we both knew it. I’d watched a century of them scramble for the meaning he spoke of. They grasped for reassurance in churches, banks, and bunkers.

Carlo had simply found a new thing to sell them.

“You took your revenge on Ulfrik Haraldsson,” I said. “But you didn’t kill him. I did.” The pieces were assembling faster now, and I took a guess. “He escaped.”

Anger flashed across Carlo’s face. “He was easy to obtain. It was almost like he wanted to be taken. But he was difficult to control.”

My stomach turned over. Ulfrik had been in mourning, his mate dead and his will to live dead with her. He’d survived a thousand years and didn’t want to endure another sunrise. He’d deserved a peaceful death, not a brutal kidnapping and torture. Of course he’d fought.

But a mystery remained. Ulfrik had turned rogue in Carlo’s dungeon…and then somehow ended up in New York. It didn’t add up. Rogues were incoherent. Mindless and stripped of speech and reason. They didn’t board flights or ships and cross the Atlantic.

Caleb lifted his head from the table. His voice came out ragged, but his eyes were sharp. “You couldn’t have been doing this for very long. Jesse and the other wolfseekers would have tracked down every human who bought from you.”

Carlo looked at him. Silence stretched as he studied Caleb, an odd emotion on his face. Assessment, maybe. Or interest, as if he found Caleb fascinating.

“They can’t track what they can’t smell, boy,” he said finally. “My product leaves no trace.”

“Jesse tracked Pyotr,” Caleb said.

More silence. Alonzo and the other pet watched Carlo.

Carlo watched Caleb. Around the operating room, the candles danced and flickered.

Questions still spun in my head, but one certainty rose above them: Carlo didn’t want to answer.

“What was different about Pyotr? Was it Ulfrik’s blood?”

Carlo opened his mouth.

Then his face changed. He coughed—once, sharp, as if something had caught in his throat. Frowning, he touched his fingers to his lips and stared down at them.

A dead man, coughing. He didn’t have air in his lungs to produce a cough.

I leaned forward as much as my restraints would allow. “What was different about Ulfrik’s blood?”

Alonzo stepped toward Carlo. “Signore⁠—”

“Why was I able to track it?” I asked.

Carlo opened his mouth. “The boy—” He gagged, coughing harder. He pressed a fist to his mouth.