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Scarlett and Zoe both grabbed me and yanked me back. “That’s not Owen.”
The expression on his face was wild, unhinged. The same kind of smile I’d recently seen on my father. “The monster…”
Owen held out one arm, then the other, as if inspecting himself. “This body is a serious upgrade from the last.”
Luke jumped to the road, back in his human form. “What is your purpose here? Why are harming my pack?”
“You have something I want,” Owen, who was not Owen, said.
“And you are preventing me from getting it,” his voice had a slightly different quality to it and I wondered how I’d missed the change with my father.
“You won’t get through our wards again,” Luke said.
“I will soon enough. Then I’ll have the bloodstone, and your world will cease to exist as you know it. My brothers are coming. And you’re no match.”
Luke raced forward, but another cloud of black appeared, and when it vanished, Owen was gone.
ChapterTwenty-Seven
Morgan
Luke hadseveral deep wounds and was bleeding, but he was walking and breathing. I ran to him. “Are you okay? Tell me how I can help.”
“It’s fine. It’s not so bad,” he said.
“You know what happens when you use your shadow wolf,” Zoe said. “That was so irresponsible.”
The twisting, curling shadows came back to my mind, and I stilled. “You’re a shadow wolf?” The words brought back a long-lost childhood memory. Stories of creatures who could travel in shadows, summon them at will.
The magic seemed mysterious and wonderful until you found out the cost of such power. You could only create a shadow wolf if you took the essence of another wolf. Basically, it was dark magic that allowed you to steal the inner wolf from another shifter.
Losing your wolf left the shifter as a hollow shell of themselves.
No wonder they’d been so fast to tell me to shift, to prevent the loss of my wolf. I’d never thought about how the two might be related, but if he’d stolen another’s wolf, he’d have seen the way a shifter would react to not having that animal anymore.
“Nobody knows,” Luke said. “Except Zoe.”
“And me,” Scarlett said. “Now, at least.”
“What else did you hide?” I took a step back, away from the people I thought were my friends. I closed my fingers over the cut in my palm. “What was that thing that came from my father? And why did you cut my hand?”
“It was a demon,” Luke said. “We needed your blood to make it leave your father’s body.”
“You set me up,” I accused.
He nodded.
“You knew he was harboring a demon and didn’t tell me?” I felt like the air had been knocked from my lungs. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because there was a good chance the demon would kill you as soon as we got it out of its host,” Zoe replied. “You were always the bait, but it was never about your life bond or your dad.”
I watched Luke, waiting for him to deny it, but he was silent.
“I would have helped. I would have helped you if you told me the truth.” I had let them in, seen them as my friends, and they’d offered me up as a distraction for a demon.
“Maybe,” Zoe said. “But we weren’t sure, and we needed you to get your dad to show. He had some control over his actions. The demon is weaker inside a host’s body.”
Luke took a step closer to me and I noticed the remains of wispy shadows circling his wrists and ankles. A reminder of what he was and what he’d done for power.
