The wolf growled again.
She forced her body into the lines of a dominant animal. “Stop growling. If you like being able to shift, you have to let me talk to Mateo right now.”
“Nico! What on earth?”
Her eyes flew up the road, but nobody was in sight.
“I could hear your fury from the house!” Mateo walked into view around the cliff the road was carved into and froze when he saw her.
“Hi.”
“Hi.” He looked so good, but she couldn’t be distracted by that. She was stalling. She was panicking and stalling.
“What are you doing here?” he asked. The words were neutral, a simple question, but she read disapproval in them. What had she been thinking, marching into a werewolf den? Well, hadn’t he just marched into the heart of her coven?
The wolf finally put its paw down, and her gaze whipped back to it.
“Sorry,” Mateo said. “This is Nico, who can stop growling anytime.”
The gigantic beast sneezed and then melted away, silently disappearing between two bushes.
“I came to warn you,” she said.
“Okay.”
“I came to warn you, because they’re going to do something truly crazy. They’re gathering the coven.”
With her every word, he took a few steps closer until he could get his hands on her shoulders. He ran his hands down her triceps and slowly back up again. “Breathe. Whatever it is, we’ll deal with it.”
“I didn’t mean to come to your house. I mean, I obviously meant to come to your house because I came to your house, but I didn’t mean to make trouble with your wolves.”
“You haven’t. Nico was doing his job; he signaled to me, and now I’m here.”
Her babbling thoughts clicked to a stop at the bizarreness of that statement. “He signaled to you?”
He shrugged. “Close enough. Our wolves can talk. He’s guarding this half of the perimeter. There are a few more doing loops, but we’re all in contact.”
The wolves could talk to each other. She didn’t know why that freaked her out. Maybe it was more proof that they weren’t just an occasional animal. They had a kind of magic.
“Come on, you can meet the rest of them.”
She took one step, then froze like the wolf with one foot off the ground. “What?”
“I mean not the ones out on patrol, they’ll be so pissed about that, but?—”
“Meet the pack?”
“Well, most of the pack is still in New York.”
“Whatare you going to tell them I am?”
He froze and pivoted back to her, looking abashed.
“Didn’t think of that, did you?” she asked and crossed her arms.
“I could always tell them you’re a Bible salesman.”
She laughed. “No problem. We sell Bibles. I can talk all day about bindings and editions and translations. Wait, what Bible do Catholics use?”
