Page 90 of The Wolfing Hour

“Granddaughter, I did not go into mytrance state, as you refer to it, for the wolf. I located your wolf, yes, but I went into the meditative state foryou.”

I had no idea how to respond to that. “Oh. Thanks.”

He drummed his fingers against the table. The now-cold tea in my mug shivered. “Before I take my leave, I must again stress how important it is that you reach out to your demon side. You cannot continue to suppress her. She will grow restless.”

“I’m trying my best.”

He sighed, frosting my eyelashes with ice. “If you do not allow her to manifest, she will eventually cease to regard you as an ally.” He bent closer, and the rest of my face went numb. “You do not want her to treat you as an enemy, granddaughter. You must trust me on this.”

I shakily thanked him for his help and escorted him to the door. He walked so slowly I was tempted to give him my arm to lean on. He seemed to be in real pain.

“Are you okay?” I asked, surprising myself. I didn’t like the idea of him hurting, and it was more than my normal feeling of not wanting to see others in pain. It was him—I didn’t want to seehimin pain.

“Fatigued and weighted with powerlessness is all. I have been on this plane for too long. I require a cup of my special tea. Goodbye.”

He exited through the front door and disappeared.

Not walked off into the distance—disappeared. As in, now you see him, now you don’t.

The protection spellwoke me up at half past eleven.

I’d drifted off at the kitchen table with Cecil’s runes clutched in my hand. Like the meeting with Sexton, they’d netted me nothing new.

After the attack on Gladys, Fennel and I had added a component to the park’s protection spell, an annoying alarm that only he and I felt. The alert was a brief, low-intensity electrical current that passed harmlessly through the body. The sensation was annoying, similar to the pain of banging your elbow. It was incredibly sensitive and responded to anything larger than a mouse entering the property unauthorized.

Not something we could maintain for long if we wanted to retain our sanity, but a necessary evil for now.

I yawned, stretched, and shoved my feet into my sneakers. It was probably another rat—not the shifter kind—and nothing to worry about, but I had to check it out.

Fennel met me on the porch, and we headed to the source of the alarm—Ida's trailer. We'd just passed Violet when my cell rang. It was Ida.

I tapped the screen. "You okay over there? I got an alert from?—"

"Come quickly. Back porch," she said, her voice shaking. "Bring the boys."

I sent Fennel to the garden room to fetch Cecil and ran to meet Ida. Her porch was shaded and closed off, accessible through a back gate and a narrow front entrance from the street. No one could get to it without setting off the alarm, but more than that, no one could get to it without experiencing severe pain from the protection spell.

Margaux was a powerful witch—she'd only managed to get ten feet past the mailboxes,andit had made her violently ill. It had sent both Floyd and Mason screeching out of the parking lot once, and I hadn't had the severity cranked up to what it was now.

"Ida?" I called out in a whisper.

"Betty, stay back." She emerged from the darkened corner beside her back steps. The porch light was out.

I turned on my cell flashlight. It wasn't the strongest, but it allowed me to see where Ida was— “Oh gods.”

"Don't look. You don't want to look," she said.

But looking was all I could do.

Sprawled over the steps was a body—or what had been one. The person had been flayed open, chest to pelvis, and things that should’ve been on the inside were on the outside. They’d also been drenched in silver—someone had poured it like paint into the abdominal area.

The silver told me the victim was a wolf. From the height and shoes, I guessed it was male.

I moved close and shone my flashlight on the face.

The cell dropped out of my hands and skittered across the cement. My head swam and my breath jammed in my lungs before releasing in short, groaning pants. The world narrowed to a pinpoint, the edges closing like the shutter of an old camera.

“Ronan.”