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My eyes closed as I concentrated and tried to ignore that a werewolf as tall as I was when he was kneeling wanted to tear my throat out.
Focus on the positive.
Like the fact that I had backup.
Backup who betrayed you.
I shoved that all away, the questions, the worries, the things that wouldn’t stop circling in my brain as I tried to sort it out and make sense of it all.
That shadow was there, inside Paul, swirling around. It retreated from me as it had that last time, as if it didn’t know what or who I was.
That made me frown. Shouldn’t it? We’d done this before, with Olin.
Maybe the shadow isn’t connected to the person anymore. Maybe this is a piece it breaks off and leaves in the person.Like the stinger of a bee.
I tried to push forward, to force the presence backward.
“Where am I?” A rough voice asked the question, and as much as I wanted to answer, I could only focus on one thing—keeping that shadow back.
Thankfully Kase stepped up. “What is the last thing you remember?”
Paul’s eyebrows moved, but the expression seemed all wrong on his monstrous face. “I was sleeping, under the moon, out in the desert.”
“And?” Kase pressed.
“Something was there, a being. It walked toward me.”
“What was it?”
The shadow surged forward, but I pushed it backward.
Paul cried out, as if the battle pained him as well. “I don’t know. It reached out and burned me, from the inside. It woke my wolf, removed any control I had of it.” Paul arched forward as if something inside him were chewing to get out.
No matter what I did, the shadow gained ground. I tried to push out of the room, the thoughts of what Paul said, what it meant, and focus only on doingwhateverI had done before, on trying to force back that shadow.
It kept winning, though.
“What does the shadow want? What does it have to do with the missing spirits?”
Paul howled, a terrifying sound of pain that no human could manage. “I don’t know. What it did to me, it wasn’t controlling me. It just took away all my control, that of my wolf, so that everything I saw I wanted to kill and eat and bathe in its blood.”
The shadow surged forward so powerfully that it knocked me backward, throwing my hand off Paul as surely as if it had been there. I fell to the ground, the air knocked from my lungs, and Paul had reverted to before, back to snarling and twisted and rage.
I stared at him, at the flames I saw in his eyes, the ones that matched those in the shadow, in the thing that was too powerful.
“Try again,” Kase said.
I stood and reached out, but this time the moment I set my hand against his chest, as soon as contact was made, that shadow lashed out and knocked me backward. This time my head struck the ground, disorienting me for a moment.
Fear crept in, doubt.What am I thinking? I’ve been the one to turn my back on this all my life. This isn’t my place.
Hunter was there to help me up—Troy stared at me with the sort of intensity that said he was fighting with himself to stay where he was. Then again, a tiny bump was a lot less dangerous than a raging werewolf.
“Again,” Kase said. “Concentrate this time.”
“That’s enough,” Hunter snapped, facing Kase. “She’s had enough.”
“We need answers, and this is our only method to get them. This is bigger than all of us.”
