“Why have you summoned me, wolf,” she hissed.
“Step into the circle.”
“No.”
Alex thrust the lighter under the bones, and the demon twisted in discomfort, a high-pitched keening escaping her throat. With jerky, tortured movements, she stepped into the circle despite herself.
“Ukta rho morbidae titan.” Alex retracted the flame.
The demon turned into a dark mist, flying left then right, but the ring was sealed. She bounced off the walls of the cell, shrieking in a way that forced Silas to cover his ears.
Alex seemed unruffled by the sound. He turned his face toward the darkening sky and the full moon whose face was already visible in it. “We’re running out of time. Bring the vampire.”
A familiar tug rolled under Silas’s skin, and he understood the urgency in Alex’s voice. The shift was almost upon them. He winced as his spine elongated, pitching him forward, then eased off slightly. He’d be a wolf soon. So would Alex. But the coming lunar eclipse meant they wouldn’t stay that way. He’d shift back at some point, and so would Alex. The perfect conditions for him to complete his ritual.
“Silas,” Jason whispered. “We’re both starving. What if our wolves—”
“Try to eat each other? They won’t. We’re pack. Just try to remember to dig.” In fact, Silas wasn’t sure how their intense hunger and thirst would manifest itself after the shift, but it was his job to remain positive for his brother. A leader never admitted defeat.
Alex groaned, fighting the shift, his hands pawing at the ends of his shirt. He pulled it over his head. Meanwhile, Olivia dragged the vampire from the truck, the ankh tattoo Julius had mentioned clearly visible beneath her ear. Normally a vampire could easily outmuscle and outmaneuver a shifter, but this female vamp looked like she hadn’t fed in weeks. Her cheeks were sunken in, and her eyes were dull. Drugged, Silas guessed. She’d been fed sulfralite like her partner, who had staked himself in the chest.
Beside him, Jason began madly stripping out of his suit, a red flush coloring his cheeks above his thickening beard. Silas’s pulse pounded in his ears, his breath coming in huffs. He unbuttoned his jeans and lifted his T-shirt over his head.
Alex sealed the vampire within the third circle, then stumbled to the place where the circles of the triquetra overlapped. Directly outside their purple boundary, he started a bonfire, igniting the kindling beneath a teepee of firewood.
Silas groaned in chorus with Alex and Jason as the moon tugged at the wolf within. This was the ultimate betrayal. Despite hating Alex with every molecule of his being, this shift, this reaction to the moon, was a reminder that they were made from the same stuff, cut from the same primordial cloth. How he would have loved to think he was fundamentally different from Alex, that the man was a monster the likes of which had never been seen before, nor would be seen again. But that wasn’t the case. Alex was a werewolf, same as him. A werewolf who had turned himself into a monster by choice. Which meant, there was a potential monster in everyone. The thought made Silas want to come out of his skin.
The wave of pain ebbed. As the teepee of branches blazed to life, Alex backed to the altar at the front of the formation and braced himself on the stone table. “Almost time.” He madly flipped pages in the grotesque book.
Olivia strode machinelike to his side, the fine wrinkles around her mouth and eyes deepening in the light of the fire. Alex wrapped a length of chain around his torso and padlocked it to the base of the table. “Keep me in this spot,” he said to Olivia.” Do you understand?” Olivia nodded robotically.
Alex pitched forward in time with the same wave of pain that sliced through Silas. Older wolves shifted faster. Because Alex and Silas were the same age, the shift was upon him. Jason, on the other hand, might have a few minutes more.
There was a soft rustle in the bushes behind Silas.
“What is that?” Jason asked, squinting into the dark foliage.
Silas couldn’t answer. He finished removing his clothes as his stomach hollowed out and his jaw jutted forward.
Two reflective amber eyes blinked at him from the darkness, low to the ground.
“A raccoon?” Jason whispered, creeping toward the back of the cage.
Silas didn’t care what it was. His hands hit the dirt, his fingers bending under as claws sprouted from his first knuckle. Jet black hair budded from his forearms and climbed toward his shoulders, bubbling under and bursting through his skin. He squatted on his haunches, his throat elongating with his ears.
In his altered state, he could hear the small animal breathing in the bushes outside the cage, smell the wild, musky scent of its coat. With sharp eyes, he blinked up at the full moon above and howled. Jason joined in, his throaty human moan morphing into a proper wolf call. Alex picked up on the song, instinct overriding animosity as he raised his nose to the moon.
The last thing Silas registered before the wolf completely took over was the steady sound of digging near the back of the cage. Whatever was in that bush was scratching at the dirt as if its life depended on it.
The alpha’spaws were in the dirt. No, it was his hands, and they weren’t working as they had a minute ago. The wolf beside him was faring better, throwing dirt with fully functional front claws. Silas came into his head in a rush, his human body bent over a hole. His wolf had been digging, trying to get at something on the other side of the bars.
Jason’s wolf stuck his head into the hole, snapping at the animal in the bushes behind them. He was still too big to fit through the hole and he retreated to dig again. Silas turned his face toward the full moon, now totally eclipsed, blackened out by the shadow of the earth. He’d shifted back faster because he was older. Jason would likely follow in a few minutes.
Jason’s wolf whined as the creature from the bushes emerged, a dainty red fox with upturned ears and a long bushy tail. “Meredith?” Silas whispered. The fox’s eyes blinked knowingly.
A sound behind him made her scamper into the bushes. He looked over his shoulder. The altar. Alex. The rogue wolf was shifting back, almost human again in the light of the fire. Olivia was still there, hovering over him like some kind of prison warden.
Silas looked back down at his hands, at the place where Jason was still digging. Two magical jujus, similar to the one Grateful had used on Laina, lay twitching on either side of the hole. Did Meredith break whatever spell Alex had used to stop them from burrowing under? Was she trying to help them?
