If I didn’t do something, the fool would throw himself away. In my head I saw Raphael buried under a pile of snakes. It was like a dagger straight in the heart.
No. No-no-no. Not happening.
I cleared my throat. “Girls, girls, you’re both lovely. I appreciate the sentiment, I do. But I will make my own decisions and the two of you will kindly get the hell out of my way.”
Raphael looked like he wanted to bite something. A self-satisfied smirk played on Anapa’s lips. I didn’t like it. Not one little bit.
“Counteroffer,” I said. “You take me, let Raphael go.” No need for both of us to get killed.
“Denied,” the god said. “This is getting tiresome.”
Arghhh. “What is it you want from us, exactly?”
“The priests have my fang, the staff, and the descendants of the Saii. They lack the scale. It was made into a shield. I need you to get it before the priests do.”
“Why don’t you just get it yourself?” Raphael asked.
“Because I am a god. I don’t run my own errands.”
“Did you know he’s a god?” Raphael asked me.
“I had no idea. He hasn’t mentioned it,” I said.
“So modest and unassuming,” Raphael said.
“I will kill you both and make pretty rugs out of your pelts,” Anapa said. “Stop being tiresome and get the scale for me.”
Simple enough. “Where is it?”
“Ask your friend,” Anapa said. “Ask the Beast Lord’s Consort.”
“Kate?” How the hell was Kate involved in this?
“Yes. Tell her to bring another deer. She will know.”
“I’m not going to move a finger unless you give me clear and simple instructions without mystical bullshit.”
“That’s not my way,” Anapa said. “You will take your instructions in whatever form I choose.”
“Then I’m out.” Chew on that, why don’t you.
“Is that your final word?” Anapa said.
“Yes.”
“Fine. We’ll do it the hard way.”
A girl walked out of the back room. She couldn’t have been more than seven or eight. She moved slowly, as if unsure where her feet were. Her eyes, dark and opened wide, were blank. Her dark skin had an ashen tint.
I tensed. Next to me Raphael bent his knees slightly, preparing for a leap.
“This is Brandy.”
Brandy looked at us with her empty eyes.
“Brandy is a shapeshifter like you. From Clan Jackal. The jackals and I share a certain bond.” Anapa studied his nails, looking bored. “I plucked her out at random. Her parents are frantically looking for her by now, I’d imagine. Why don’t you tell them how you feel, Brandy?”
The child opened her mouth. “Help,” a weak tiny voice said. “Help…me.”
I yanked the bow off my shoulder and aimed an arrow at Anapa’s left eye. Raphael exploded in a riot of fur and muscle, snarling as the monster that was a bouda in a warrior form spilled into existence.
“Let the child go.” I sank the promise of death into my voice.
“Every day you do not do as you are told, I’ll take another Jackal child at sunset,” Anapa said. “If the lion gets involved, the children die. If any of your other Pack friends help you fight, the children die.”
I fired. My arrow pierced the wood of the chair a fraction of a second before Raphael’s claws scoured it. The child and the god were gone.
CHAPTER 13
The office phone was dead.
Roman took off “to gather supplies.”
Anapa said the shapeshifters couldn’t help us fight. He said nothing about us telling the Pack what was going on. The Jackals had to be warned. I shifted shape, and Raphael and I ran into the night.
We cut through the decrepit industrial district, moving at the shapeshifter equivalent of a canter. Ruins streamed by us, dark, inky black, like haunted wrecks of ancient ships. Gutted warehouses with steel beams thrusting out, vehicle shells, treacherous caves of concrete hiding hungry things with glowing eyes, born of magic and hungry for a burst of hot blood on their tongues. The beasts looked but didn’t venture close. They recognized us for what we were—predators, built to hunt, kill, and devour—and right now neither of us was in the mood to be merciful.
The city ended and we ran along the crumbling highway. Here nature revolted, fueled by magic, and trees had grown with shocking speed, crowding the old road. We kept going, tireless, eating the miles like they were delicious bites. Wolves didn’t have a monopoly on marathon chases. We were hyenas. We could run forever.
Raphael moved next to me, so graceful, so lethal, full of fierce beauty. It felt so right, running like this, guarding each other’s flank. Together we were a tiny pack…a mated couple. Should any threat cross our path, we’d rip into it together. I had forgotten what it felt like.
The road brought us to a group of three oaks. Here a narrow trail branched from the main highway, barely wide enough for a single vehicle to pass. Blink and you would miss it. We turned onto it in unison.
The path curled and twisted, veering through the woods.
A wolf howl rose in the distance—a pure, beautiful note soaring to the clear skies. Another answered. The Keep sentries announcing our approach. A deep-voiced whoop followed, a warning and a declaration of ownership in one—a bouda must’ve been on duty tonight.
We burst out of the woods into a clearing. A massive structure towered before us, the solid, impenetrable mass of stone shaped into a semblance of a fortified castle or castlelike fort. It was the ultimate den, wrapped into a wall of gray stone, with towers, defenses, a vast underground, and a myriad of hidden passageways and escape routes. A testament to Curran’s paranoia. Even if the Keep were besieged, even if the siege was lost, the Pack would melt into the woods to reunite and fight another day.
We cleared the courtyard and kept running, through the door, through the narrow hallway, up a dozen of stair flights all the way to the top of the tower, to the floor just below Curran’s private quarters. The guard recognized us and stepped out of the way. Raphael was the male bouda alpha. He sat on the Council with Aunt B. Nobody would stop him.
We rushed into the spacious room Curran called his office. The Beast Lord was sitting behind his desk, looking at some papers. Kate sat on the couch with a tortured look on her face, holding a copy of the book of Pack law and making notes in a notebook.
They looked up in unison.
“Clan Jackal is in danger,” I said.
We sat in a conference room, both still in our fur, with the Beast Lord, Kate, Jim, and Colin and Geraldine Mather, the Jackal alphas. Colin, a muscular, beefy man with a wrestler’s build and pale hair, leaned on the table, his face flat and unreadable. His mate and wife sat next to him. Where Colin was fair, Geraldine was dark, her skin a deep brown, her hair black, her body honed to muscular efficiency by constant training.
“Her name is Brandy Kerry,” Geraldine said. “She is seven years old. Her parents are on a business trip to Charlotte. They left her here in the Keep in the boarding school in the south wing. She took a nap at five o’clock with the rest of the children in her class. The room is on the seventh floor. The windows are barred. Ruth, the teaching aide, sat by the door, reading a book. At the end of the hour, she came in to wake the children and found Brandy’s bed empty. Ruth searched the room. None of the other seven kids saw anything. Brandy just evaporated from her bed and nobody had noticed.”
“The rest of the staff searched the floor,” Colin continued. “Every room was checked, and to get to the staircase, she would’ve had to go past the school receptionist and a guard, and Connie swore she did not see a child leave. When it became evident that Brandy wasn’t anywhere on the school floor, we were alerted to the situation.”
Of all the clans, Jackals were the most paranoid when it came to their children. Where boudas spoiled their kids with too much freedom and cats encouraged offspring to go on solitary wanderings, the jackals always stressed family. In the wild, unlike wolves who formed packs or rats who swarmed, jackals mated for life and lived in pairs, raising their children on their own little slices of territory.
“I yelled at Ruth.” Geraldine clenched her hand into a fist. “I thought she walked off or fell asleep, and Brandy had snuck out.”
“We checked the bars on the window and did a complete sweep of the wing and the outside,” Colin said. “No sign of her.”
“He took that baby.” A snarl slipped into Geraldine’s voice. “He plucked her right out of her bed, that fucking bastard. I will tear his guts out.”
“If you confront him, he’ll kill you and her,” Kate said.
Geraldine whirled to her.
“It’s not an insult,” Curran said. “She’s stating a fact. He has power over jackals.”
“So what do we do?” Geraldine raised her hands.
“We do nothing,” Curran said.
“But—”
“We do nothing,” he repeated. “We don’t know where he’s keeping the child, but he won’t hesitate to kill her. We will meet his demands. For now.”
“He wants Andrea and I to help him,” Raphael said. “We will do it.”
“We’ve discussed it,” I said. “As long as we play ball, no more children will be taken.”
Colin’s voice turned into a rough growl. “So you want us to sit on our hands, then?”
“No,” Kate said. “Find out everything you can on him. Go to the books, visit experts, get as much information as you can on him. Find out his weaknesses, if he has any. As soon as the moment presents itself, we will hit him with everything we have.”
“We’ve killed wannabe gods before,” Curran said. “Hell, we could probably kill him now. But I will not do it at the cost of a child’s life. We must be patient and smart. Bring your people into the Keep. The fewer isolated targets the better. Raise the alert. Nobody goes anywhere except in groups of three. Sleep in shifts, with the guards watching over the children.”