Page 10 of Nightshade

That didn’t matter. It didn’t mean he hadn’t been out there searching for me in the first place. “Did you come here looking for me?”

He frowned, and I didn’t like the way he was looking at me. I couldn’t make sense of that sheen in his eyes or the full pout of his lip. Was he trying to draw me in? Tricking me?

“No. This is my pack’s territory, and I was . . . ” Only when he took his eyes off me did I follow his gaze to his flattened basket. His shoulders rose and fell hard when he sighed. “I was looking for something. A plant. Not a person. Certainly not a vampire.”

His smile returned, and I narrowed my eyes tightly. “Your pack?”

“The Wildwood pack, up on the bluffs.”

The wolves of Wildwood. The witches had mentioned them before. Ermengarde and her predecessors had hoped that a vampire could magnify their power, but I was⁠—

Well, I was dead, and it turned out that vampires, while magical, were something of a blank spot compared to other supernatural creatures.

For months, Ermengarde had been hissing about a witchwolf, and the pack nearby, the Wildwood wolves, had come by the coven house often, offering services to the witches that I’d provided for over a century—to no avail, where witchwolves were concerned, as far as I knew.

If Ermengarde had suddenly achieved her goals, I suspected even I would’ve noticed the celebratory shift in the house.

The wolf balanced easily on the balls of his feet, his elbows on his knees. He extended a hand to me with a wide grin. “I’m Leo.”

He had a large, square hand, the same pale shade on the back as his palm. His fingers looked rough, with a light brown dust worked into the calluses as if he’d been hard at work earlier in the day.

I crossed my arms, tucking them behind my bent legs. Heavens only knew when he’d try and grab me and take me off to⁠—

To—

“If you’re from here, why did you speak like that? In Russian.”

His smile faded. “My family came from there, but I’ve been in the Wildwood pack for over a decade now. It’s my home.”

The openness in his expression was disarming, and I’d attacked him, invalidated his place here, where I certainly didn’t belong, and refused his outstretched hand. I supposed I could throw him a bone.

A proverbial one.

“I’m Altair.”

His smile returned, and my stomach twisted. Why was he so unsettling?

Well, maybe just because he was the first person I’d talked to with any degree of freedom in years, and he sounded far too much like Ivan when he spoke in their common mother tongue.

“Here.” He shrugged off his red jacket and held it out my way. “You’re still kind of . . . flaking?”

Wonderful.

I snatched it out of his hand and tucked every inch of myself that I could fit beneath it. I wasn’t short by any stretch of the imagination, but the werewolf was broad and tall. It left his jacket to envelop me completely. Yes, I even tucked my face beneath it. The sun was still out, but it was more than that. The jacket was warm from his skin, and I’d honestly forgotten how it felt to be warm.

“You’re not from around here, are you?” he asked.

“Clearly not, as I’d have made a better effort at avoiding wolf packs if I knew their locales.”

He snorted. “And miss any passing snacks? Surprising.”

Admittedly, when I’d sprung at him, I hadn’t cared what he was. I was starving, and if I could eat a rat, I could certainly come around to snacking on a werewolf. I doubted I could make much of a dent in one.

My plan, such as I’d had any, was to drink him unconscious and flee before he could heal himself. Werewolves were good trackers, but surely he wouldn’t bother chasing after me once I’d drained him to unconsciousness, and I’d be more than sated drinking that much.

It wasn’t that I’d never killed before, or even that I hesitated to. Only, it was very hard to kill a werewolf, and I wasn’t sure that I could drain him fast enough.

That, and killing one of their kind was, in fact, a surefire way to send a pack of werewolves on my trail.