They leaped at her, claws out, mouths open and ready to chomp, but Halle turned her head, snapping her jaws around one feywarg’s neck and slashing at another with her claws. The feywarg fell to the ground, bloody and very dead. Halle continued chasing the horde of silver streaks that split up into the night. Wolves rushed past me, going in various directions after the feywarg.
I headed after Halle, weaving through the trees, gaining on the feywarg. Five, six, shit there were eight of them up ahead, and then they split into two groups. Halle headed left and I went right, hands tingling, ready to power up. The feywarg looked over their shoulders at me, spitting and snarling. I sent out a blast of lightning, taking out the straggler. Its body twisted and hit the ground. The others squealed and picked up speed, leaving me in the dust. Fuck, they were fast, and even my training with the guys hadn’t prepared me for how fast these fuckers were, but I had an ace up my sleeve. I jumped, materializing right behind the feywarg and blasting them with my mojo.
They hit the ground, stiff, charred, and still.
The amulet made long jumps hard. I needed to keep them infrequent, but training with Sloane had helped me learn that jumping was no longer off the table.
I looked down at the dead feywarg and then around the clearing we’d ended up in. A pile of furry bodies was shoved up against a tree. I wandered over to take a closer look.
Dead rabbits.
The feywarg had been hard at work.
Shit, I’d completely lost track of the pack, the hunt, and my sense of direction. I’d retrace my steps. I turned to head out when a shadow at the edge of the clearing shifted and a silver form clutching a dead rabbit in its mouth hurried toward the tree.
Shit. I raised my hand to blast it and it froze, noticing me for the first time. Its gaze flew past me to the dead feywarg. My hands fizzed and the rabbit fell from its jaws.
“Please, don’t.”
The power in my hands fizzed out. What the fuck?
“Please…” Its crazy silver eyes widened, and its mouth quivered. “Please don’t kill me.”
The crunch of bracken filled the clearing. The feywarg stiffened, then froze as the golden form of Halle padded toward me with a feywarg dangling from her jaws. The feywarg by the tree let out a sound that was a cross between a wail and a shriek.
Halle dropped her cargo, lips pulled back from her teeth in a snarl, and pounced. I acted on instinct, throwing myself between the feywarg and Halle.
“Stop!”
Three more wolves from our pack joined us in the clearing, carrying more feywarg bodies.
Halle jerked her nose up at me, her eyes clouded in confusion.
Did she know? “It can talk.”
Halle chuffed and then the air rippled as she shifted into human form. “What are you talking about?”
I looked down at the feywarg. “Say something, dammit.”
The creature fixed its silver eyes on Halle and hissed.
“Cora, get away from it,” Halle snapped.
This was crazy. “It spoke to me.”
“They can’t speak. They’re vicious predators. Nothing more.”
“You’re the vicious ones,” it squeaked.
Halle jerked back. “Fuck.”
“You kill us. You hunt us. All we want is food. We have a right to eat.”
The other wolves shifted back into human form, steam rising off their bodies and evaporating into the freezing night air. They joined us, faces pale with shock.
“This can’t be happening,” one of them said. “This must be a trick.”
Confusion rippled over us and then the feywarg bolted.
No one tried to stop it. Everyone’s attention was on the tree with rabbits piled next to it.
The elation in my chest from the hunt faded. The feywarg attacked livestock and wildlife, but if the stories of the fae realm’s demise were true, then these creatures were living in a dying realm. Starving. Maybe our world was the only place they could get food. The rabbits were their haul. To take home to feed their families? Oh, God.
The hunt didn’t feel like fun anymore. In fact, I felt kinda icky.
“They’ve never spoken,” a brunette wolf said.
“We’ve never given them a chance,” Halle added.
“It doesn’t matter,” another wolf said. “They kill livestock and cute bunnies.”
“And we don’t?” Halle ran a hand over her face. “They’re not mindless, vicious predators. We need to report this to Heather. Reassess the hunt. Maybe we can communicate with them and come to an arrangement.”
“How?” the brunette said. “They procreate too fast. The numbers will overwhelm us if we don’t cull them, and—”
Howls lit up the night in the distance. Halle’s head shot up. This must be a signal that more feywarg had been sighted.
“Fuck,” Halle said. “We’d better find Heather.”
I’d barely taken a step when the world went completely silent. The wolves tensed, and then a sharp crack of snapping twigs cut through the air. The women surrounded me, their naked bodies pale in the moonlight.
“What is it? What’s happening?”
Halle fell into a defensive stance, shoulders bunching. “Varga.”
I caught a flash of yellow eyes, the curve of a dark shaggy back. Oh shit.
I looked from Halle to the other two women in human form. “Why aren’t you shifting into wolf form?”
And then it hit me. Shifting required miasma, a kind of magic, and the varga nullified magic.
The wolves weren’t shifting because they couldn’t.
They were stuck in human form and we were surrounded by varga.
Fuck.
Chapter Nineteen Leif
I can’t believe I’m doing this. Sitting in the Land Rover half a mile away from the hunt with Tor and Rune, waiting. Just waiting.
I drum a staccato rhythm on the dash. “She’ll think we don’t trust her.”
“She won’t know,” Tor growls. “We stay.”
No harm in it, Rune says from the back seat.
“You two are ridiculous. Cora is perfectly capable of taking care of herself.”
“Except when original vampires are involved,” Tor points out.
“She’s with my pack and several members from yours.”
Our women are perfectly capable of watching out
