Page 22

So I got my hands around whatever it had instead of a neck, and I did not stop until it wasn't.

Then there was a boy on the gravel with his face in his arms. Blood down the back of his leg. And me on all fours over him with something gray on my hands to the wrist.

And a red wolf coming across that yard like the end of the world.

Amber didn't stop. She went over the top of us — I felt the wind of her — and landed in the middle of what was left and started taking them apart. I put myself flat over Jack, got a hand on the back of his head, and listened to it happen.

It didn't take long.

When I looked up, the lawn was full of standing wolves and lying imps. The last of Sissily's fire was going out in the grass in little blue runs. Somebody had smashed the floodlight over the barn and nobody had noticed.

The only light left came out of the windows of the house. It fell across all of it in long yellow stripes. Very warm. Very domestic. Completely wrong.

Jack was crying. The quiet kind, the kind that's mostly breathing.

"Hey." My voice came out in pieces. "Hey. It's a scratch. I've had worse from a pair of shoes."

"You're…" He hiccuped into my shoulder. "You're all…"

"Gross. Yeah. I'll wash."

"It smells like Dad's truck."

"That's the worst thing anyone's ever said to me and you're nine, so I'm letting it go."

Amber came back on two legs, naked and covered to the elbows, and did not care in the slightest. She took her son out of my arms and made a sound I hope never to hear again.

Then she looked at me over the top of his head.

I waited for it. I'd have taken it. I would have stood in that yard and let the Alpha's mate skin me in front of a hundred and six people, and I'd have agreed with every word, because my magic had walked out on me the exact second a child I love stepped into the open.

"Thank you," Amber said.

That was worse.

"Amber…"

"You were closest and you were unarmed." Her eyes were wet and furious and not at me. "You ran at them anyway. So, thank you. We'll talk about the other thing later. Right now I'm taking my baby inside."

She carried him up the steps.

Alex met her at the door and put one huge hand on Jack's back. He looked at that leg for a long moment. Then he came down into his own ruined yard and stopped in the middle of it, and his shoulders started to shake.

I'd love to tell you that was grief.

It wasn't. His hands were still human. His face wasn't, entirely. And there was a noise coming out of that male like a truck idling in a tunnel.

"They knew where the boy sleeps." His voice had gone somewhere I'd never heard it go. "Somebody told them where the boy sleeps."

Nobody answered him.

The wind came up off the lake, went through the cut tree line, and moved the burned smell around the yard. A hundred and six people stood in the dark and did not look at each other. I watched the same thought land on every one of them at once — that nothing gets onto that land without somebody knowing the ground.

And that for the first time in three hundred years, the ground might be the problem.

Which is when my grandmother appeared in the middle of the lawn.

She didn't come up the road. One blink there was empty air beside the barn. The next, Danika Byrne was standing in it.