[Isolde]
Somehow it still felt surreal. Like I'd blinked and missed several crucial steps, then fast-forwarded to now:
Two nights later, sitting in a rented car outside the shaman's gates in the darkness, watching three hunters approach the property with the kind of confidence that came from doing this sort of thing regularly.
I'd been genuinely startled when Nikolai first said he'd be calling hunters. My immediate reaction had been alarm, because hunters primarily hunted werewolves. And we were werewolves. It seemed like inviting a fox into the henhouse, like handing our enemies the keys to our cage.
"Are you insane?" I'd asked him. "They'll kill us."
But Nikolai had explained, patiently and with just as much intensity that there were rogue hunters who operated outside the traditiona
