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She’d once been told she had enough raw fae potential that she could one day serve on the Revel Board of Sages, the central fae governing institution of her territory. But she hadn’t lifted a finger to acquire a requisite mentor or anything.
Then Roche had abducted her. Fergus and Brannick had helped her escape Roche’s prison and now she was here.
One of her cats leaped up on her stomach. She petted him all the way down his back and up his fluffy tail. He was yellow-striped and had been brought to her by one of her pet owners. He’d somehow found his way into Revel Territory from the human part of Phoenix but had been emaciated to the point of death. She’d brought him back from the dead.
She loved animals.
It seemed somehow fitting that now she loved a wolf.
But how odd to think that she was part wolf herself. She might have left Fergus early this morning, for rational reasons. She’d even planned to pick up her life once more.
Yet even the fae part of her had grown in strength since she’d connected with Fergus. He’d awakened something in her that stimulated every other part of her life, not just her desire to be with him. She loved her sensual connection to the new, partial wolf she’d become. She loved that she’d worked beside him in a true partnership and that she’d served essentially, more than once, as his bodyguard.
When the cat jumped off her lap, she rose to a sitting position then glanced around her family room. Plans began to move through her mind. She’d give up her practice and hand it over to her capable assistant who had already passed her exams. She might even give her house away as well because her instincts told her that she’d soon be leaving Revel, maybe even by nightfall.
She gave full scope to her faeness and directed all her attention to Savage Territory and to Fergus. She faced south and as if a switch had been flipped, she felt the pull of the territory.
She belonged to Savage now. She felt it in her bones.
She’d never once thought something like this would happen to her. But from the time Fergus had entered her life, extraordinary forces had been at work. She’d crossed some mystical threshold into unknown terrain but which felt right, though scary as hell.
She believed now that her fate, no matter which direction her relationship with Fergus took, had become entwined with Savage Territory.
As she focused all her fae energy south, toward Savage, her former sensation of dread began to hum. The territory became fixed in her mind and in her heart, the land of wolves, of packs, of too many shifters crammed into a small human space and bound by barbed wire and searchlights, and of evil men like Sydon.
She closed her eyes. She could feel all the packs of the land, writhing in their constraint.
She felt Sydon’s energy as well, one that fed off so much prevalent discontent. She could feel him like a virus that had already spread thickly through the veins of the territory.
It all came back to Sydon.
And her fae senses told her that the fate of the territory rested on her ability to locate him right now.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
MARY FOCUSED HARD on Sydon. The sense that events would soon move at lightning speed had settled deeply within her. She knew in her bones she couldn’t wait.
The times had come.
She brought a strong past image of Sydon into her mind. She saw him sitting on the floor of the Gordion dungeon cell where he’d been put after Fergus shot him in the leg. She could see him as he’d been in that moment, facing away from the barred cell door, very still as though in a trance.
Holding the image steady, she entered her dreamglide. At the same moment, Sydon’s current location began to take shape.
She could feel him now, in the southern part of the territory, well underground and beneath one of the Savage Strip clubs, a place called the Naked Wolf. The name made her shudder. She was pretty sure this was the same club where the female Gordion wolves had ended up.
She put her dreamglide in motion. With another thought she moved within a few feet of him, off to the side of what looked like an expensive office.
As she turned the opposite direction, she could see that Sydon’s space was at the head of a long series of adjoining rooms, each with a wide entrance and pocket doors kept open. The work areas looked formal, even elegant with wood paneling. The style seemed like a strange choice for a killer like Sydon.
Within the series of rooms, dozens of wolves moved around or sat at desks. They were working hard, but at what?
Several rooms down, she could see a wall of monitors.
On instinct, she piloted her craft to the much larger space where fifteen screens were mounted on the wall, each showing live-feeds of the fronts of various properties. It took her a moment to recognize both Warren’s and Fergus’s, which in turn meant she was looking at the front view of all the pack compounds.
A terrible feeling of dread came over her. Sydon was surveilling all the major packs of Savage Territory and probably had been for a long time.
She moved her dreamglide down through several more rooms. Each one became increasingly war-like with more monitors, finally ending in a large open space. In the center was a huge, digital relief map of Savage Territory laid out on a massive table. She felt dizzy with alarm.
