Chapter 5

The library at the top of the penthouse was Kozell’s private hell.

Floor-to-ceiling shelves ran along every wall, packed with leather-bound volumes in languages most people had forgotten. Some were handwritten, some were centuries old, and some smelled faintly of smoke. He had spent a year and a half in Nova Scotia collecting them, and every one of them promised the same thing: a cure.

He sat at the oak table with a single lamp burning and read a line aloud, in a voice flat with exhaustion.

“Abstain from human flesh, for humans are the idols of the wolf.”

He shut the book hard and dragged both hands through his hair.

“How?” he said to the empty room. “How, when I can’t even control the wanting?”

Every book said the same thing. Every one of them ended with the same impossible instruction, as though hunger were a habit you could simply decide to drop.

He wasn’t an ordinary wolf, either. He was an Alpha, second only to the Supreme Wolf, whom he had never met. His strength was a curse of its own, because the higher the blood, the louder the hunger.

Sometimes he envied old Tip Tap and the castol wolves with their fading blood. Then he remembered what happened to a castol the moment the wolf in them died. They were eaten alive. That wasn’t peace. It was only a slower way to be hunted.

He didn’t want to hide and he didn’t want to be hunted. He wanted to be a free man, walking down a street at noon with nothing inside him but his own heartbeat.

His phone buzzed across the table, and the screen read Mr. Casarine.

He sighed. “Here it comes.”

He thumbed the screen and lifted the phone to his ear. “Yes, Dad.”

“Kozell, what in the world is wrong with you?” His father’s voice came down the line like a slammed door. “Three days. Three days since you landed, and not a visit, not a call. Your mother is sick with worry, and your sister tells us you treated her like a stranger in your own house. Is that how we raised you?”

Kozell closed his eyes. He could imagine exactly what version of events Zelda had given them.

“I’m sorry, Dad. I do miss you both. It’s just that every time I try to come, work gets in the way.”

“Work.” His father snorted. “You own the company, Kozell. You own it. If your schedule controls you, you’ve set it up wrong. Put family first. Come tomorrow, no excuses. Your mother is furious, and she’s hurt, which is worse.”

“Right, Dad.”

“Good night.”

The line went dead.

Kozell stood and carried his books out to the balcony, though he knew he wouldn’t read any more. He dropped into a deck chair and let the night air wash over him.

The city sprawled beneath him in a river of light. People strolled along the street laughing, couples with their arms looped together, and starlings fluttered among the lamps, chattering in the dark. A club pulsed with bass a few blocks away, and girls spilled out of it in glittering dresses, tipsy and bright and alive.

He wanted that so badly that his chest ached.

But he couldn’t walk into a crowd. If the wolf woke in a room of people, he might not be able to stop it, and by morning the world would know his secret and there would be bodies to prove it.

“Isla? Are you in...”

Tricia stopped in the doorway of Remy’s bedroom.

For a second her mind refused to understand what it saw. The sheets were dark. The walls were dark. Something that had once been her friend lay on the bed in a shape no body should take.

“What the fuck?” The words came out of her as a breath, not a shout. “What is this? What is this?”

Isla stood in the hallway behind her, rigid and gray-faced, staring at nothing. Tricia seized her shoulders.

“Isla. Talk to me. Please. Isla.”

Isla’s mouth moved, but nothing came out. She knew that if she spoke a single word, everything behind it would break loose, and she wasn’t sure she would ever stop screaming. So she said nothing. She turned and walked down the stairs in silence, and Tricia followed her into the kitchen.

It was a quarter past one in the morning. The death in the house had burned away every trace of sleepiness. The fear had left them wide awake.

“It was him,” Isla finally whispered, in a voice that sounded like it belonged to someone else. “The boy from the restroom. He was here, Tricia. I saw him. He told me he was coming back for me.”

Tricia blinked. “What boy? What are you talking about?”

“The one from the restroom, the one I told you about.” Isla swallowed. “He sat in the front row. He smiled at me. He... did that to her.” Her voice cracked. “And he told me I was next.”

“Oh my gosh.” Tricia pressed her fist against her mouth, then slammed her foot on the floor. “How does he know where we live? Isla, we never told anyone. We were never followed.”

“I’m so scared.” Isla was shaking now. “I want to sleep, but if I close my eyes he’ll come back and do to me what he did to her.”

Tricia pulled her into a hug and held her the way she would hold a child. She was the eldest, and she had always been the strong one, even when she was the one who needed holding.

“We’ll be okay,” she whispered into Isla’s hair, though she didn’t believe it. “First, we have to bury Remy before the smell starts. We can’t call the police.”

“I know.” Isla’s voice was muffled. “But I feel so guilty. It’s wrong not to tell anyone.”

“Tell them what, Isla? That a werewolf did it?” Tricia drew back and looked at her. “The whole city already thinks you killed your parents. If a body turns up in your house, they’ll lock you away for life, and they won’t even have to try to convince themselves. Is that what you want?”

Isla didn’t answer. Her face said enough.

“Then we think,” Tricia said, wiping her own eyes roughly. “We find a way to take her out of here before dawn.”

At two in the morning Kozell was still awake.

He didn’t mind. Sleep had always been a stranger to him. When he did manage to close his eyes, a dizziness came, like anyone else’s, but most nights he simply lay there in the dark. He knew it meant something. He just didn’t know what.

Only one creature in the wolf nation could tell him: the old mivran wolf, the wisest of all of them. She was also Emma’s foster mother, and Emma treated her cruelly.

“What’s on your mind, my love?”

He knew the voice before he turned. Emma was leaning against the far end of the balcony rail, sleek and unhurried, with her back to the empty city, as if she had been standing there all night.

He closed his eyes. Of everyone in the world, she was the last person he wanted to see.

Emma was dangerous and beautiful and fully aware of both. Many wolves would have given anything for her attention. Kozell wanted none of it, not her closeness, not her touch, and certainly not a mate chosen from his own kind.

“You don’t need to know, Emma.”

“But I want to.” She drifted toward him, and her voice dropped soft and low. “I could help, Koz. I could make you feel so much better. You’re far too hot to still be a virgin.”

His jaw tightened. “I want to see Amora. That’s all. Now stop asking me questions.”

Emma stopped moving.

“Amora.” She pronounced the name as if it tasted bad. “Amora is being punished. You can’t see her.”

Something dark rose inside him, something that had nothing to do with hunger.

“In the Supreme’s name, what is wrong with you, you vicious thing?” His voice rose. “If you keep treating her like this, Emma, I swear I’ll put a permanent spell on you.”

“You won’t.” Her eyes glittered. “You wouldn’t dare. Not for a nobody like Amora.”

“Don’t test me.”

He vaulted the balcony rail.

He dropped from the penthouse and hit the ground running, and then he was gone, moving so fast that the starlings never even stirred in their branches. The streetlights blurred. The bush swallowed him.

Behind him, Emma smiled thinly in the dark.

He had done it to her once before. He had turned her into a baby wolf for an entire month, because she had crept into his bed and tried to force herself on him. He had woken just in time, before she could do something unforgivable, but not before he had seen the look in her eyes. The spell had been a punishment, and it had also been a warning. She had never forgotten it, but she had never stopped, either.

The cell was deep inside the old stone ruins at the edge of the forest, far from any road.

“Amora!”

Kozell shoved through the iron door, and what he saw stopped his heart.

She hung from the ceiling by chains, upside down, her wrists and ankles bound in iron. Her hair swept the cold floor. Her skin was pale as paper, and her lips had gone blue. When she heard his voice, she lifted her head a fraction, and it was the only part of her that still seemed alive.

The rage that took him was colder than anything he had felt in years.

His eyes went black, and then they clouded over, smoky and swirling like a storm. The chains shuddered. A moment later they snapped, one by one, with sounds like gunshots, and Amora dropped to the stone floor with a cry.

He was beside her before she finished falling.

“I’ve got you. I’ve got you.” He gathered her into his arms and lifted her, so light and so cold that it frightened him. He carried her across the cell to an old bed beside a crooked fireplace, and laid her down as gently as if she were made of glass.

She was shivering violently.

He turned to the fireplace and began to gather what dry wood he could find. His hands shook, not from effort but from the effort of holding himself back. He stacked the wood, struck a flame and blew gently until it caught.

Slowly, the little room began to warm.

Kozell knelt beside the bed and looked at Amora’s face in the firelight. Behind his calm expression, something terrible was taking shape.

Emma will pay for this.