Run, Wolf
Nightfall Wolf Clans, Book 1
Genre: Urban Fantasy/Paranormal Romance
ISBN: 978-1-60504-653-2
Length: Novella
Price: 3.50
One choice means heartbreak.
The other, death.
Leah Kendrick is guilty of only one crime: loving her human mate, Tom, enough to give him the gift of The Bite. The Pack council is merciless, and the punishment swift. In an instant everything she’s ever known is ripped away, and they’re turned out into the long winter with nothing. No money, no car, and no protection from a variety of creatures who’d like nothing more than to take down a lone wolf.
Friendless and broke, they form a daring plan to take back what’s theirs and chase safety north. But the Pack has other ideas. And with time running out it’s about to call their bluff…
Excerpt - Chapter One
Lady Justice has never been a friend of mine.
That charade about her and the blindfold and scales was utter bull. I knew it. Every pair of those yellow gold wolf eyes staring down at me knew it too. It would’ve been better to have run. Too late now. The she-bitch in me had wanted to fight, wanted to force my pack to see how wrong they were. Now I was discovering how weighted those scales were against me.
I stood barefoot in the center of a circular pit of white sand in the middle of an amphitheater. My skin felt warm, almost hot, despite my nakedness beneath a loose satin robe the color of dried blood—the raiment for those facing the Blackstone Wolf Clan’s judgment. Tom was with me, standing by my side. His mouth cut across his face in a grim line, and I could smell his anger. It seemed to evaporate off his skin like sweat. Tom was the reason I stood here on trial before my clan. They made him keep his street clothes—a sign of utter contempt hurled in the teeth of a werewolf without a pack. I knew he didn’t fully understand the insult, though I could tell from the look on his face he could sense the gist of it. As for me, their disdain for my mate burned in my mind like acid.
It made the hate come easy.
A ring of small forest stones surrounded the circle of white sand, each jagged surface covered with pale green lichen. The amphitheater had been built as a hexagon, and benches and ramps ascended on three sides. Some members of my clan had stayed in human form, dressed in the loose robes they could easily shrug out of if they needed to change to wolf or wolfbreed. The satin robes were different colors according to their rank in the pack, from the brown of the omega slouching in the top back row to gray or blue and up to the alpha pair in silver. Others of the pack had changed to full wolf form, sitting on the benches or lying on the ramps, heads up, ears turning side to side. A few, that bastard Gris among them, kept themselves in wolfbreed form—the two-legged upright shape halfway between human and wolf. This shape was closest to the myths of werewolves, and was used when fighting other weres or when hunting human prey, before clan law had forbidden human meat. Despite the law, a couple of my clan mates sometimes whispered that Gris and his little pack of puppies had indulged more than once.
Gris seemed to sense my attention. His wolfbreed mouth dropped into a grin that showed too many teeth. His white fur lifted and his yellow eyes almost burned. My poker face was perfect. He wasn’t going to scare me.
And yet… I felt very small standing there next to Tom in this massive place, beneath the long dark beams of wood radiating outward high above me, carved with symbols and pictures of wolves and ravens and trees. I felt like an outsider, as if I’d already lost the pack, even before the trial.
“You okay?” Tom asked me in a low voice.
“Yes.” The lie came easy and quick. I could see he didn’t believe me for an instant.
Martin Giroux stood from his seat, more of a throne, really. In one hand he held a carved white staff with raven feathers dangling from the tip, and he leveled it at us. “Be silent.”
Tom turned his head to where Martin stood on a dais built near the bottom tier of seats. His eyes narrowed as he locked gazes with Martin, the male of the clan’s alpha pair, and the second worst person to piss off right at this moment. Tom opened his mouth to say something else, but I touched his shoulder. He glanced back at me and shut his mouth. I gave him a grateful smile.
“Leah Kendrick,” Martin said. He appeared almost as furious as Tom did, clipping his words as if hacking off any lingering tail of sound. “You may not touch him while you stand in a sacred circle. Is that clear?”
I laughed. Couldn’t help it. It just blasted out of me like an unintentional fart. The whole thing suddenly struck me as completely kindergarten—hands to yourselves, children!—or, hell, so junior-high-dance that I had to laugh.
A low rumble of growls filled the amphitheater. I could feel the anger of my clan through the Bond I shared with them, the mental connection that allowed me to communicate with pack mates, regardless of their form. The anger buzzed like a furious hornet in my head.
“Are you finished?” Carolyn Giroux asked me, her eyes like shards of broken amber. She was Martin’s mate, and in the amphitheater she was the most powerful wolf, the master of ceremonies and mouthpiece for the Blackstone Clan’s judgment.
I lifted my chin, stared right back and didn’t answer.
The air was winter cool, even here inside, and I wished I could change and fight the chill with my thick gray fur. That was forbidden, though—a member of the clan on trial had to maintain human form until a verdict was given. I almost changed anyway, but managed to hold myself in check. Best not to burn bridges before even attempting to cross them. Things were going badly enough as it was.
Carolyn nodded and stood up next to Martin, who still held the ceremonial staff like some imperial guard at a palace. “Good. Then let the inquiry begin.”
As one, all the wolves, wolfbreeds and humans threw back their heads and howled, filling the air with a mournful music that echoed off the heavy roof timbers. I kept quiet, having to clamp my teeth shut against the urge to join the music.
The howling trailed off, and for a moment there was complete silence. Tom threw another glance at me. His hands had clenched into fists and he stood there, muscles tense, smelling of aggression and protectiveness, and beneath it, the barely discernable green-wood smell of fear. I tried a reassuring smile, but it was probably a weak and sickly thing, because it didn’t change his smell, only made it stronger. I wanted him to touch me, hold me in his arms and make me feel safe, but I didn’t quite dare flaunt the Alphas again in an amphitheater full of outraged werewolves.
Goddamn it.
“Leah Kendrick,” Carolyn said. “You’ve been summoned here to face the clan’s judgment for your actions.”
“Let Tom go, and I’ll face whatever you want to call judgment. He isn’t bound by our law.”
Carolyn swept back her silver robes and sat down again. Martin remained standing, like some hangman trying to break us with his presence. I ignored him as best I could. Alpha pairings at a wolf trial had the female rendering judgment and the male carrying it out, symbolized by that stupid stick Martin had in his hand. For now, Carolyn was by far the bigger of the two threats. Her face was pretty in a severe way, deeply lined around her mouth and eyes, and her hair was a silver that nearly matched the robes draping her spare frame. I didn’t know her well. As a new werewolf, I ranked near the bottom of the pack hierarchy, but Carolyn was rumored to be scary smart, and from what I’d heard, far more ruthless than her mate. All the betas down to the omega respected her, some with clear resentment, and yet her ruling coalition and clan dominance had never been broken.
Still, as we locked gazes, her eyes almost seemed to hold a bit of sympathy. Or was I imagining that? A little bit of wishful thinking before the pack hamstrung me?
“Let us both go.” Tom’s voice was sharp with threat. I could tell he was fighting the Change. Rage always made it harder to keep human form, always drove a werewolf toward the wolfbreed.
The fifty or so members of the Blackstone Wolf Clan bared their fangs. A low growling again filled the amphitheater, rumbling like idling stock-car engines. Their flare of anger was like a red haze in my mind, a glow of fire over my thoughts.
“Don’t talk to them.” The words nearly lodged in my throat as if I’d swallowed a razorblade. “It’ll make this worse.”
“God d*** it.” He spat on the sand and showed his teeth to the wolves around us. “I won’t cower.”
But I could still smell that thread-like scent of fear coming off him, though it was ever so slight and almost completely hidden beneath the waves of anger and outrage. Who wouldn’t be afraid, facing down fifty werewolves? The hatred and scorn hung so thick in the air I knew he could feel it, even if he wasn’t Bonded to the clan. Yet Tom never once dropped his gaze in submission.
“The outcast cub will stay silent.” There was no sympathy on Carolyn’s face now. “If he can’t contain his yipping, I’ll have him gagged.”
A blaze of white-hot pain burst at my fingertips as my claws cut out of my nail beds, white ivory and wickedly curved. This just kept going from bad to worse. “Anyone who touches him answers to me.”
Gris barked laughter, a sound that was only strange the first hundred times you heard it. I could sense his thoughts in my mind, black with insult and red with lust and rage. “Puppy, you make sad threats. I’ll tear out your throat and leave your carcass for the crows.”
“Screw you, Gris,” I sent back to him.
His lips peeled away from his massive canines in a grin. Now his yellow gold eyes seemed to glow with anticipation. “Just wait.”