“What is this place?” I struggle to understand how it came to be when I asked for warmth. “This isn’t what we need.”
I lean through the opening while the keeper’s unconscious form floats on my left.
Halle’s voice sounds at my shoulder. “Are you sure? This room only opens in response to touch, and you?—”
“Oh.” My gasp is strangled. “What if it wasn’t me?”
I consider Emil as he floats beside me.
A chill settles at the base of my spine when I focus on the way the strands of his dark hair are floating outward and brushing up against the door.
My heart is in my throat as I whisper, “This place belongs to the keeper.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Now I have a decision to make.
Do I take him inside? Or carry him away?
I shake my head in uncertainty. “How can this be what he needs?”
As I speak, my senses prickle.
The scent of a predator reaches me.
Distant growls waft across the air.
I take a defensive step back. “There’s something else in here with us and it isn’t a bunny rabbit.”
My pack stiffens behind me. I hear their quick inhales and their shuffles. I don’t want to take my eye off the environment in front of me, but I know they’ll be taking up attack positions outside the door at my back.
Just then, a large, gray wolf burst from the trees that circle the clearing on the right, racing directly toward me.
Its fur is dark gray, its eyes are amber, and I’m struck with a startling clarity: it isn’t a wolf shifter.
It’s a natural wolf.
Which only makes it more dangerous. A shifter could at least be reasoned with.
I brace, ready to grab the keeper and push him behind me, my left hand reaching for the doorframe as I prepare to shove him back into the corridor and slam the door shut.
At the last moment, the wolf comes to a halt, leaps to the side, and turns in the other direction. Its hind legs bunch, as if it’s about to pounce on something behind it, a confusing change of focus.
A heartbeat later, another wolf sprints into the clearing, this one pure white with bright, blue eyes.
It leaps at the gray wolf, but its claws aren’t extended. It’s a playful lunge, and they both tumble through the snow before tussling again.
Then they return to their feet, briefly nudging each other in an act the wolf in me recognizes as an expression of family bonds. At that, they pad away together toward the trees they first ran from.
Their heads are raised, their eyes bright and focused on the same point ahead of them. Focused on something I can’t see, but they don’t seem alarmed by it. They hurry eagerly toward it and then?—
They’re gone.
Vanished into thin air.
I can’t stop my whisper. “What the fuck?”
I’m preparing to turn to Halle for an explanation when sudden movement makes me jolt back to the clearing.
