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Kye sniffed the air. “You’re lying. I smell it.” He held out his hand. “Give it to me now, and I’ll make sure your death is painless.”
“My death? What fresh delusion is this, Kye?” I snarled.
“No delusion. Pack justice. For Peta.”
I sniffed, listened, and cast my seeking sense, and found them. The pack was out there, maybe half the pack. Mostly the males. The females would be busy preparing Peta for her burial.
“Oh, is that how you packaged this to the pack?”
“Marvin testified against you.”
I scoffed. “Look, I’m sorry for his loss, but Marvin couldn’t testify about the amount of ham in a sandwich.”
“Liar!” Kye growled. He launched at me, and I stumbled over a piece of the church’s fallen stone, falling backward while reaching for the obsidian knife. He reached for my hand while I reached for the knife and I kicked him in the chin. He fell back and his hands slid back though he held onto the boot, tearing it off my foot.
The heart flew out, and the silk tore away, revealing the glinting stone in the fading sunlight tumbling in the air.
“Ah, hah!” said Kye as he flew toward it.
With a dexterity I didn’t know I possessed, I got to my haunches and pushed toward the stone. I outstretched my hand, heedless of anything but the danger presented by Kye possessing a cursed stone of power.
We collided in midair, but I caught the glint of turning stone and snatched it from flight.
Immediately pain exploded in my hand, and I tumbled, turned, and fell face-first into the gravel and weeds with the stone clutched under me.
But the artifact wasn’t satisfied with my hand as a resting place, and it burned through it and sunk into my chest as I screamed.
24
“Sir.”
“I told you I would be busy this evening, can it wait?”
“Um, sir, I don’t think so.”
The stone eye is inside me, and I see Thorn as though I’m him, staring at a mirror. He/we glanced at Casey while he/we stood at his desk.
“The wolves are causing a disturbance out by Mary of the Sacred Heart Church, sir.”
Thorn paused in packing the satchel on his desk, and I felt him notice me for the first time. He knows I’m with him, and physically, I’m at the ruins.
Inside the church, all around me, the walls shook, and the columns groaned as the wolves got louder and louder, daring me to come out. After I absorbed the heart, I crawled inside the church, hoping Thorn would arrive soon. I attempted to relay it all to him in impressions and maybe words, unsure if I could. Am I just a passive passenger on this ride?
“How are you coming through so clearly?” he asks me silently as he talks to his assistant aloud.
“I took in two more of the stones. I don’t know what else to do. Please, help me. The entire pack is here, and I hear murder in their song.”
The eye doesn’t seem to have done much, but the hand whispered it needed the moonlight to activate. The sun barely reached the horizon as dusk gathered around it.
A wolf stepped through the doorway, scenting the air, his body taut and ready to spring. But it’s not Kye. I’d know that ginger coat anywhere.
Marvin.
A ginger in human and wolf form. He stalked closer, a lust for revenge seeping from every pore and his amber eyes glinting with the desire to murder me. Kye sent him in, I’m sure, because Marvin was impulsive and vengeful—the perfect weapon to pit against a former pack member you wanted to kill.
I scented the other wolves, my former family, my ex-pack, filled with bloodlust, waiting outside for him to drag me out.
The heart stone pulsed against my thigh through my pocket, and I didn’t know what that meant.
