Page 122 of The Wolfing Hour

Floyd lifted his gaze from his daughter, cruel yellow eyes latching onto mine. A quick pivot, and he was facing me. Rory banked left, putting herself between us. Floyd pushed back on his haunches, flattened his ears, and snapped his teeth.

He leapt.

OverRory’s head and straight at me.

Time slowed.

Ida’s scream mingled with Cecil’s screech. Fennel’sreeoowmixed with Rory’s anguished bark. None of them would be strong enough or fast enough to stop him.

He landed chest-first, all four legs braced—not to minimize the collision, but to maximize it. As his full weight bore down on me, I shoved my hands against his chest and shot the magic I’d been revving up into his body with a crack so loud it made Cecil’s SUV explosion sound like the strike of a match.

I hit the asphalt on my back.

The gods must’ve decided to be cruel tonight, because I didn’t lose consciousness. I had the wind knocked out of me, my head slammed against the hard ground, and the claw injuries on my sides splintered across my abdomen and lower back like cracks in glass. My diaphragm wasn’t working, and I couldn’t cry out, but no one told my mouth, because it fell open in a frozen scream.

Fur filled my mouth as Floyd’s massive body crushed mine. Bones were broken. Blood gushed from my sides. I couldn’t feel my hands or feet.

And then, he was gone.

Snarling howls unfurled in the parking lot. They echoed against the motel walls like aftershocks following a massive earthquake and coincided with Ronan Mack-Trucking Floyd’s wolf into the wall outside the room where I’d killed Gnath.

In hybrid form, yet as wolf as he could be while standing on two legs, Ronan stalked over to his father’s body.

Floyd wasn’t moving.

Ronan howled, a song of fury and sorrow, with a little thwarted vengeance in the mix. In the distance, a chorus of wolves returned the song. The song grew louder as they drew closer. They were headed our way preternaturally fast, and I had no idea if they were friend or foe.

A purple hat poked into my vision to my right, blocking my view. A furred black tail. The hot breath of a wolf on my arm. Rory. I tried to turn my head, but I couldn’t seem to move.

“Here, let me put it on her,” Ida said.

I shivered at the cold kiss of metal on my neck. Magic spread through me like a drug, chasing away the worst of the agony and giving me my breath back. Thank the goddesses forhealcharms—and well-placed demon apathy.

Ronan backed away from his father’s body and stood over me.

A trenchlike claw mark down his right arm was weeping blood, and I wondered who he'd been fighting before he got here. But looking at him then, it was as if every battle he’d ever fought lived on his face—carved into the creases around his eyes, etched into the jut of his jaw, hollowed into his cheeks. A lifetime of being broken by the people he loved.

“Is he…?” I rasped.

Ronan snapped a nod. “Dead.”

“Did you…” I didn’t want to say the words, because I already knew the answer. Ronan had already answered it with his expression.

“Not me.”

Aurora drew in a sharp breath. Ida made a sympathetic sound, Cecil snuggled close to the nook between my ear and shoulder, and Fennel sat still, not a hair on his body stirring.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

Epilogue

Ronan

Well, fuck.

“Don’t be sorry for doing what you had to do.” I bent down by Betty’s head, stroked her hair out of her beautiful face. Seeing her so beat up like this again was riling up my wolf—and the human was right there with him.

“He was going to kill Rory,” she croaked. “I wouldn’t have?—”