“Don’t knock it,” Jessie says. “Maybe they’re not hungry.” Her smile is grim, trying to defuse the tension.
Poppy wipes at her eyes and shakes her head. “You’re a dick.”
They’ve both hit on a point, though. “There’s no reason to keep us alive…” But there’s more. Something that’s been needling at me since we were captured. “There’s also no evident reason to take dire wolf females. They have plenty of their own. You saw, the camp is filled with them.”
“I saw,” Jessie says. “Makes no sense.”
“Shit!” Poppy grips the bars on the window and leans forward, peering out. “I think…Oh shit, it’s Cora.”
“Keep it down!” Jessie orders as she joins her. “Do you want the furries to hear?”
I hurry and join them to see a flash of golden hair in the shadows. The figure moves quickly from hut to hut and my pulse quickens. Is it her? There’s a break in the clouds and a little moonlight lances through. Enough for me to make out the slender, petite form a little better.
It’s her. It’s fucking Cora, but she’s alone. Where the fuck is Jasper?
She’s scoping out the buildings. We need to signal her somehow. Shit. “Hey, Poppy, you got a mirror?”
She frowns at me. “Why would I have a mirror? Are you trying to insinuate that I’m vain?”
Jessie and I arch our brows at her.
She huffs and pulls a compact from her pocket. I take it, flip it open, and angle it out the window, trying to catch the light from the sliver of the moon. A circle of light bounces across the hut opposite ours and Cora freezes. She’s seen it. She turns her head, and her eye whites gleam as I bounce the light off her face.
She sees us.
Gruff voices drift toward us and Cora falls into a crouch, pressing herself into the shadows beside the hut opposite us. I back up, taking Poppy and Jessie with me as two figures pass close to the window. Both are bare-chested with shaggy golden hair.
Long seconds pass, the voices drift off, and I step back to the window, searching the shadows for Cora.
But she’s gone.
There’s a rattling, the sound of the lock being disengaged, and for a moment I think it’s her, that she’s found a way past the varga surrounding our hut, but then the door’s shoved open and a hulking man steps in. His hair is white-gold, eyes like an arctic ocean, and a scar cuts diagonally across his face, pulling his lip up into a perpetual sneer.
“Welcome to Grimsa.” His voice is gravel and glass, pain and torment. “My name is Vax. Answer my questions and you’ll receive a quick, painless death. Thwart me and I’ll feed you to my guards…alive.”
Shit.
CORA
Five varga in wolf form surrounded the hut where Sloane and The Elites were being held. I circled back to the barred window in time to see a huge guy enter. Shit, was this Vax?
There was only one way out of this.
A rift.
But there was no way to make one while The Elites were trapped in a null circle. I needed to break it, which meant taking out two of the varga.
Yeah, that probably wasn’t gonna happen.
No. Think, Cora. I needed to lure them away.
I needed a distraction, a threat.
I needed fire!
SLOANE
Vax circles us, his huge frame eating up space, his magnetic presence sucking the oxygen from the room. Furs drape his shoulders, making his large, broad frame seem even bigger. I’m a tall woman, powerfully built, and there aren’t many men who can make me feel small. Tor comes close, but this guy is a whole other breed. All the varga we’ve seen are inhumanly large, as if born in the time of gods and titans. These huts seem too small to occupy them.
“Why have you come?” he asks. “Who sent you?”
I see no harm in answering both those questions. “We came for the female dire wolves you kidnapped, and we came of our own accord.”
He stills. “Dire wolf females were taken?”
Okay, he sounds like this is news to him. I narrow my eyes. “You took them.”
“We tried,” he says. “But we failed.”
“And then you tried again and succeeded.”
“You killed Danny.” Poppy’s voice shakes with suppressed rage. “You tore him to shreds and took the shifters.”
Vax’s arctic gaze narrows. “You believe we took your females?”
I tip my head to the side. “Didn’t you?”
“No.” He meets my gaze levelly.
I’m so fucking confused.
“Liar!” Poppy lunges at him and Jessie grabs her around the waist, tugging her back. “You killed Danny, you killed him.” Her voice cracks on a sob.
Fuck it, the last thing we need is an emotionally distraught witch. Danny and Poppy may not have taken things to the next level, but there’d been real feelings there. Fuck, she may even have loved the shifter. I hate that she hasn’t had the chance to grieve, that she has to be here, face to face with the creature that may be responsible.
May be.
Because I’m starting to doubt myself now.
I need to get to the bottom of this. “You say you didn’t take the female dire wolves from town, but you tried to nab them from the forest. You can see why we’d suspect you.”
His lip curls as he leans in. “I don’t care what you witches think. But I see now that there is another player on the field.”
“What do you mean?” Jessie asks.
“Six weeks ago, a pack of our females went into your world for a hunt escorted by two of our beta wolves. They never returned. We went looking for them and found our betas torn to shreds by what we then assumed were dire wolves. The females were gone. We can sense they’re alive, but we can’t locate them.”
Poppy is calmer now. “You thought the dire wolves took your females?”
“We’ve been scouting ever since, trying to locate them. Getting close to the pack
