BOUND BY THE ALPHA’S SIN

Chapter 3

Ariana did not remember deciding to move. One moment she was pressed against the window glass, the next she was three steps back with the coffee pot in her fist.

The masked men tilted their heads in the same instant. Then they walked forward, all three, in perfect step.

“Hector!” Her voice cracked. “Hector, back door, now!”

The cook burst out of the kitchen with a cleaver in one hand and a dish towel still over his shoulder, took one look through the glass, and went the color of old paper. He said something in Spanish that sounded like a prayer. Then he dropped the cleaver, grabbed her by the sleeve, and ran.

He shoved her through the back door and into the alley, and then, God forgive him, he kept running, around the dumpster to his old Buick. She heard the engine catch and roar away. She felt one ugly flash of abandonment before the front window exploded behind her and there was no room left for anything but fear.

She ran. She had been running her whole life and was good at it, but nothing had prepared her for how fast they were. Footsteps struck the pavement behind her, soft and even, closing without hurry. When she cut left toward the lights of town, a masked shape stood at the corner as if it had grown there. When she cut right, another was waiting. Every direction slammed shut but one.

The highway lay empty and silver under a sky she could not look at. The moon had risen, enormous and swollen, the color of a wound, and it poured red light over the asphalt and the dead grass and the black wall of pines on the far side. Whatever calls you, he had said. Behind her breastbone the pendant pulled like a hook set deep, dragging her toward the trees, and she fought it and ran across the road anyway, because the only other choice was the three behind her.

The forest swallowed her. Branches whipped her face and tore at her sleeves. Roots caught her ankle and she went down hard, palms skidding over stone, and something warm ran down her wrist. She was up again before the pain arrived. Behind her the footsteps had stopped, and that was worse.

She turned. The three of them stood at the edge of a clearing in a loose triangle, masks pale as skulls in the red light. They had not run. They had not needed to.

One by one they dropped to their knees, and the night filled with the sound of bones breaking and remaking themselves. Fur rolled over their arms like smoke. Their hands curled into claws. When it was done, three wolves the size of ponies stood where the men had been, the bone masks still strapped to their long muzzles, open jaws grinning over real ones.

Ariana’s mind did the thing it always did and tried to slide away. But this time there was nowhere to slide. This was the dream. The dream had teeth.

The center wolf took a step. Ariana took one back, found a tree, and pressed her bleeding palms against the bark. The pendant was no longer warm. It was blazing, a white sun against her sternum, so bright it shone through her shirt and painted the wolves’ masks with silver. They stopped. All three flinched, ears flat.

Then the dark behind them moved.

It came out of the trees without a sound, a shape blacker than the night itself and nearly twice the size of the others, big as a horse, with shoulders that rolled like thunderheads. Its eyes burned gold. The first wolf never even turned around before the black one hit it. The second tried to flee and was caught by the spine. The third lunged for Ariana in a last, desperate rush, and the black wolf met it in midair, and then there was only red light and fur and the wet, terrible music of something ending.

Silence came down like snow. The black wolf stood over what was left, chest heaving, steam rising off its coat into the cold. Then it turned. It was close enough now that she could see blood dripping from its jaws, and it was looking at her. Not at her face. At her throat, at the light still bleeding out around the stone, with an expression no animal should have been able to wear. Grief. Hunger. Something like disbelief.

She should have screamed. Instead her knees gave out and she slid down the tree, and the light at her chest guttered and went dark, and the wolf took one step toward her, slowly, the way you approach something that might shatter.

Flashlight beams slashed through the trees. Voices. The crash of boots. A dozen men and women in dark clothing burst into the clearing, and the nearest hauled Ariana up by one arm before she could draw breath.

“Trespasser!” he barked. “Human, and bleeding.”

“Easy with her.”

The voice that said it was a gravelly one, and when Ariana twisted around, she knew it. The silent regular. Booth six. He wore a black jacket with a silver wolf pinned to the collar, and his scarred knuckles were bone white on the flashlight, and he was looking at her as if she were something he had spent years trying not to lose.

“Beta,” the warrior muttered, and loosened his grip a fraction.

“I’m sorry, miss. Anyone found on our land tonight answers to the Alpha. Don’t fight it. I won’t let anyone hurt you.”

She tried to ask what Alpha, what land, but her head had started to swim. She looked back once for the black wolf. The clearing was empty.

They marched her through the forest for what felt like an hour, one warrior hauling each arm, the Beta a silent shadow at her back. The trees thinned. Woodsmoke rolled over her, and roasting meat, and something wilder underneath, and then the ground fell away into a vast stone bowl lit by bonfires, and she saw the pack.

Hundreds of them. Men, women, children held tight against hips, elders on stone seats, all of them wearing the same pale, hungry stillness, all of them watching her. Above the bowl the Blood Moon hung enormous and low. Somewhere a drum began to beat, slow as a heart. She was dragged down the stone steps and pushed to her knees in the center, in the circle of firelight, and the whispering began.

“Human.” “A girl.” “She bleeds on Hollow stone.” “She will die at moonset.”

Ariana pressed her torn palms against the cold rock and understood, with perfect clarity, that she was going to die here, in front of a thousand strangers, for the crime of working a late shift.

The drum stopped. The whispers died as though a hand had closed over them. At the far side of the bowl the crowd split like water, and something huge padded through the gap, black and gold-eyed and steaming, and every head in the Hollow turned toward it.

The black wolf climbed the stone dais at the head of the bowl, turned to face the fire, and changed.

Bone and fur flowed like water poured backward, and it took her a moment to understand what she was seeing, because the thing that rose from the stone was a man. A black cloak sailed out of the crowd and he caught it without looking, swung it over his shoulders, and fastened it at the throat.

Gold eyes found hers across the fire. The man from the diner. The man who had told her to stay out of the woods.

A sound rolled through the Hollow, a thousand people moving as one: cloth rustling, knees striking stone. Every wolf in the bowl went down, heads bowed, even the warriors holding Ariana, who let her go and knelt with the rest.

“Alpha Kael Draven,” someone whispered, and the name ran around the stone bowl like a prayer.

Only Ariana stared back into the gold of his eyes, and she understood that the man who had warned her about monsters was the one they all feared.