So after breakfast he went out on the front stoop, ignoring Colette’s raised-brow look that said,Is that wise?It was fine. He just needed to breathe some air that wasn’t tainted with vampires.
But then he scented the two wolves who’d killed that family, and the wolf that lived inside him had raised its hackles and pressed right up against his skin, growling and snapping his teeth.
When Nikita hung up on him, Sasha slipped his phone in his pocket, and went down the porch steps, following the trail.
It was a bright and warm morning, the sunlight angled, now, as summer slowly gave way to fall. In another month his breath would be a vaporous cloud, and scented with the first iron-filing notes of frost. Now the sidewalk boasted pedestrians in good measure, people out shopping on their lunch breaks, the proprietors of all the Boho-chic storefronts that neighbored Colette’s building.
Sasha knew that he didn’t look casual, the rolling, prowling gait he’d settled into, the set of his shoulders, his hands poised at his sides. He didn’t much care. These feral wolves smelledwrong. And now that he knew what they’d done…that they’d killed an innocent family…
To be a werewolf was to be an actual wolf: patient, cunning, territorial, and pack-oriented. It was nothing like the movies said: being overtaken by a creature that drove you to blindly attack and kill, rabid and unreasonable.Sasha had never killed anyone who didn’t deserve it, and these twodeservedit.
They’d passed Colette’s building without lingering, so her wards must have worked; they’d tailed their little band and then, when they reached the steps, were sent off on a wild goose chase in the wrong direction. Their scents were fresh, though, only minutes old. They’d turned right at the red light, and so did Sasha, lengthening his stride as the scents grew closer, warmer. He started growling, and didn’t seem able to stop. A woman gave him a sharp look and side-stepped out of the way. He was too focused on the hunt to apologize.
The trail led him another block, and then veered down into an alley, the kind that was the perfect place to hide. Crammed with dumpsters and smaller trash cans, stacks of pallets and shipping boxes. The unwashed, dirt and urine stink of them was strongest here, burning in his nostrils, drawing a deep, rumbling growl out of his chest.
Sasha made it about three paces into the alley, had reached the first dumpster, when he felt a sharp pinch at his neck, like a bee sting. He slapped at it, and his fingers brushed the feathering of a dart.
Oh no.
Oh, Nik was going tokillhim.
He spun. Tried to. His movements were already unsteady, his heart lurching and slowing. His vision swam and he had just a moment to make out the silhouettes of several men blocking the mouth of the alley before the drug swept over him like a tide, and everything went black.
