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His wolf recognized another dominant male with a snarl, while Tom thought that the man was too young to have a grown daughter. But there was no one else this could be than Lin Keller—that predator was not a man who followed anyone or allowed anyone around him who might challenge him. He’d seen an Alpha or two like that.
Tom watched them until they disappeared into the barn.
It hurt to imagine she might have betrayed him—as if there were some bond between them, though he hadn’t known her a full day. Part of him would not believe it. He remembered her indignation when she thought he believed she was part of Samhain and it comforted him.
It didn’t matter, couldn’t matter. Not yet. Saving Jon mattered and the rest would wait. His witch was captured or had betrayed him. Either way it was time to let the wolf free.
The Change hurt, but experience meant he made no sound as his bones rearranged themselves and his muscles stretched and slithered to adjust to his new shape. It took fifteen minutes of agony before he rose on four paws, a snarl fixed on his muzzle—ready to kill someone. Anyone.
Instead he stalked like a ghost to the barn where his witch waited. He rejected the door they’d used, but prowled around the side where four stall doors awaited. Two of them were broken with missing boards, one of the openings was big enough for him to slide through.
The interior of the barn was dark and the stall’s half-walls blocked his view of the main section where his quarry waited. Jon was still going strong, a wild ranting conversation with no one about the Old Testament, complete with quotes. Tom knew a lot of them himself.
“Killing things again, Father?” said Moira’s cool disapproving voice, cutting through Jon’s soliloquy.
And suddenly Tom could breathe again. They’d found her somehow, Samhain’s Coven had, but she wasn’t one of them.
“So judgmental.” Tom had expected something…bigger from the man’s voice. His own Alpha, for instance, could have made a living as a televangelist with his raw fire-and-brimstone voice. This man sounded like an accountant.
“Kill her. You have to kill her before she destroys us—I have seen it.” It was the girl from Jon’s message, Molly.
“You couldn’t see your way out of a paper bag, Molly,” said Moira. “Not that you’re wrong, of course.”
There were other people in the barn, Tom could smell them, but they stayed quiet.
“You aren’t going to kill me,” said Kouros. “If you could have done that you’d have done it before now. Which brings me to my point, why are you here?”
“To stop you from killing this man,” Moira told him.
“I’ve killed men before—and you haven’t stopped me. What is so special about this one?”
Moira felt the burden of all those deaths upon her shoulders. He was right. She could have killed him before—before he’d killed anyone else.
“This one has a brother,” she said.
She felt Tom’s presence in the barn, but her look-past-me spell must have still been working because no one seemed to notice. And any witch with a modicum of sensitivity to auras would have felt him. His brother was a faint trace to her left—which his constant stream of words made far more clear than her magic was able to.
Her father she could only follow from his voice.
There were other people in the structure—she hadn’t quite decided what the cavernous building was: probably a barn, given the dirt floor and faint odor of cow—but she couldn’t pinpoint them either. She knew where Molly was, though. And Molly was the important one, Kouros’s right hand.
“Someone paid you to go up against me?” Her father’s voice was faintly incredulous. “Against us?”
Then he did something, made some gesture. She wouldn’t have known except for Molly’s sigh of relief. So she didn’t feel too badly when she tied Molly’s essence, through the gum she still he
ld, into her shield.
When the coven’s magic hit the shield, it was Molly who took the damage. Who died. Molly, her little sister whose presence she could no longer feel.
Someone, a young man, screamed Molly’s coven name—Mentha. And there was a flurry of movement where Moira had last sensed her.
Moira dropped the now-useless bit of gum on the ground.
“Oh you’ll pay for that,” breathed her father. “Pay in pain and power until there is nothing left of you.”
Someone sent power her way, but it wasn’t a concerted spell from the coven and it slid off her protections without harm. Unlike the fist that struck her in the face, driving her glasses into her nose and knocking her to the ground—her father’s fist. She’d recognize the weight of it anywhere.
Unsure of where her enemies were, she stayed where she was, listening. But she didn’t hear Tom, he was just suddenly there. And the circle of growing terror that spread around him—of all the emotions possible, it was fear that she could sense most often—told her he was in his lupine form. It must have been impressive.
