“Mercy?”Alex laughed.“Like you had mercy on me when you planned to replace me with Jason?You bet on the wrong pony, and now it’s time to settle up.”
He pulled the heart from the bag.Olivia released Nickelova and backed from the circle.
“Ukta rho morbidae titan,” Alex read from the book.
The stones around Nickelova glowed purple.She rushed toward the periphery, her body slapping the invisible force that had walled her in.“No.No.Alex, please!Let me out.”
Alex approached her with the heart.“I think I’ve had this long enough.Goddess knows when you give a man your heart, it’s never for keeps.”
His hand cut through the purple magic containing Nickelova and violently shoved the heart against her chest.Silas grimaced as her flesh parted to accommodate the organ, her body writhing with obvious pain.When it was done, Nickelova gasped like a baby taking her first breath and clutched at her chest.
Taking pleasure in her pain, Alex paced around the stones, a wicked grin on his face.Once she’d recovered, she raged against the walls of her cage, pounding and clawing at the boundary.
“I warn you, shifting into your dragon form in that circle won’t help you escape, but it will be extremely painful,” Alex said, then turned toward Olivia.“One down, two to go.Let’s call our demon.”
ChapterTwenty-Seven
Silas paced the cage, an almost comical opposite to Jason, who had become unnaturally still in Alex’s presence.As much as he hated Nickelova, if there was a way to free her, he would.She was far less dangerous than Alex.
“Do you remember these?”Alex asked, pulling a bag of bones from the Suburban.Silas’s forehead tightened to the point of pain, a muscle in his jaw tensing and releasing in time with his heart.
“The girl’s bones from the human crime scene,” Silas said.
“You wondered why I’d taken them, why I’d stripped the girl’s flesh from them.”Alex gave him a smug look, and the presumptuousness of the statement wasn’t lost on Silas.“While there is no shortage of human-on-human crime, it seems the perpetrator of this particular murder had a secret.She was possessed by a demon.A new demon, birthed into this world by a young girl who played with the wrong Ouija board.”
“A demon’s human bones,” Silas said, remembering Julius’s theory.
“You’re familiar?I’d not heard of it as a werewolf, but one learns things in one’s travels.Shall we call this one?An interesting fact about demons is they can fold space and travel from one place to another in practically no time.This shouldn’t take long.”Alex dumped the bones into the second circle, eyeing the darkening sky.“Come out, come out, wherever you are.”He pulled a lighter from the pocket of his cargo shorts and squatted down to run the flickering flame beneath the end of the femur.
A cold wind manifested in the trees, darkness gathering between the branches in the woods across from the cage.Shadows danced and expanded, stretching and poking toward the ritual site.Silas could swear he heard whispers in the rustling leaves.And then a woman was there, a dark woman with large upturned eyes and tattoos that glowed beneath the long sleeves of her shirt.
“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 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—a woman with pale hair and an ankh tattoo on her neck, just below 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, and her eyes were dull.Drugged, Silas guessed, just like her mate, the vampire who’d staked himself at ZeroHour.She’d been fed sulfralite like her partner.
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.
