“Yes.”
“Typical.”
“I never intended to use the ring unless I felt my life was in danger. I hope you can believe that, Rook.”
“Does it really matter what I believe about you?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
She had no answer. She didn’t know herself why she wanted his forgiveness so desperately. She didn’t understand why his simmering anger upset her so much, or why she’d felt his earlier touch in every corner of her body. Yes, her survival instincts were in high gear, and she knew better than to antagonize an already emotional loup garou. However, this felt personal in a way that made absolutely no sense.
Footsteps pounded up the stairs toward them, and seconds later Knight rushed through the door. He kicked it shut, then stalked toward Brynn with the black case in one hand.
“What the hell is this?” Knight asked. “Ketamine? Are you trying to dope him, or what?”
“Of course not,” Brynn replied, startled by his shaking rage—such a difference from the calm anger she saw in Rook—and she stammered for an explanation. “It will deactivate the drug that’s already in his system. Granted, the side effects might—”
“What drug is in his system?” Knight bristled, and the calm rush she’d felt from him only twenty minutes earlier was gone, replaced by a tingle of something she couldn’t explain. Something dark and unsettling.
“Can we argue about this after I get the antidote, please?” Rook asked.
Knight opened the case and produced a glass syringe filled with a clear liquid. “You trust her enough for me to poke you with this, little brother?”
Rook didn’t hesitate. “Yes.”
Brynn closed her eyes, and two hot tears left trails down her cheeks. She didn’t wipe them away when she opened her eyes again. “Inject it into the soft tissue at the top of the gluteus maximus,” she said softly.
Knight stared at her.
“She means the top of my ass,” Rook said.
“I know that. Someone’s eventually going to tell me what this is all about, yeah?”
“Yes.”
Rook moved to the other side of the desk, and as soon as he reached for his belt, Brynn looked away. She stared down over the auction floor, at all of the humans going about their day, oblivious to the events unfolding in the office. She watched Thomas McQueen say something to the woman on his right, to the music of Rook’s belt jangling and the whisper of cotton. The woman wrote something down, right as Rook grunted.
“Sorry,” Knight said.
Brynn thought of her father, of how angry he’d be knowing how badly she’d screwed up today. And the thought of it crushed her. She wiped away more stray tears, frustrated by their continued presence. Once she was turned over to the Alpha for poisoning his son, she would not beg for mercy. She wouldn’t cry again. She would accept her fate as a proper, stoic Magus and, even if he never knew, do her father proud in her final moments.
Her gaze swept over the tops of heads, only to be caught by someone waiting at the end of the line of runners. Bishop stared up at her, his expression difficult to discern at such a distance. She turned away from the window and was grateful to see Rook cinching his belt back up.
“You may want to sit down,” Brynn said.
“Yeah, that sounds like the perfect plan after being stuck in the ass with a needle,” Rook replied.
The fact that he could even be sarcastic with her gave Brynn a tiny flare of hope. Hope for what, though, she wasn’t certain. “The ketamine can cause disorientation and dizziness, Rook. Please.”
He sat gingerly in one of the wicker chairs.
Knight put the empty syringe back in the black case, shoved the case into his rear pocket, then turned the full force of himself onto Brynn. “Now are you going to tell me what the hell’s going on?”
Brynn explained everything from the moment she and Rook were left alone in the office, to the conversation they had while Knight was fetching the antidote from her car. She impressed herself with her steady voice and still hands, even though her insides were shaking uncontrollably. Nothing about this was okay, and yet it felt less hopeless than even a few minutes ago. Knight was still exuding contained fury, but Rook seemed downright calm. More than anything else, Rook’s composure fed her own emotional state—and she didn’t understand why.
Knight didn’t say a word during or after her explanation of events. He turned and walked to a small door she hadn’t noticed before, opposite the office entrance, and went inside. From her angle, she saw a small mirror on the wall above an edge of white porcelain, and she guessed it to be a private bathroom. Knight returned a moment later with a paper cup in his hand. He went straight over to Brynn and held out the cup.
“Put the ring inside,” he said in a tone that dared her to argue.
She did as he asked, grateful to have the dangerous object off her finger and away.
“Thank you.” He folded down the top of the cup, creating a neat little package for the ring, which he tucked into the front pocket of his jeans. “Now stay there for a minute.”
“Okay.” Brynn remained perfectly still while Knight helped Rook over to the bathroom. She heard the unmistakable sound of running water, which lasted for a solid minute of washing. She was desperate to do the same, to wash the offensive drug off her skin, even though it would have no effect on her own system. It only killed loup garou, not Magi.
When the brothers returned, Knight jacked his thumb over his shoulder. “Your turn,” he said. “Scrub it off good. Leave the door open.”
Brynn nodded her acquiescence, then gave them a wide berth on her path to the bathroom.
Knight helped Rook settle back into his chair, more than a little concerned by the glassy sheen in Rook’s eyes. The fear he’d sensed from Rook was disappearing behind the drugs in his system. Everything that had happened in the last few minutes, from the instant Knight had stepped into the office and heard the word “antidote,” had scared the holy hell out of him. Initial fear from both Brynn and Rook had battered his empathy, and he was only just starting to get out from under his own stifling sense of panic. Injecting Rook with the syringe had been one of the hardest things he’d ever had to do—trusting the word of a Magus that the contents would help Rook, rather than harm him.
He’d done it, and only because Rook had not hesitated to say he trusted the girl. Knight did
not
trust her. His beast was furious and wanted to punish her for hurting his kin, despite her explanations and tears. She was a Magus; she was their enemy.
She also had loup garou blood, which made her one of them, as well. She called to his White Wolf, who wanted to soothe her. It was all too confusing.
“How do you feel?” Knight asked.
Rook blinked up at him. “This must be what being stoned feels like.”
“Come on, rock star, I thought you knew that feeling.”
Stoned or not, Rook still had the coordination to flip Knight off.
Loup garou physiology made it nearly impossible to get drunk or high—either state required serious amounts of alcohol or recreational drugs, and the necessary quantity could be fatal before it was fun. Certain barbiturates and anesthetics were effective when dealing with serious wounds, as their town doctor knew all too well, and ketamine was definitely on that list. And Knight knew that Rook had done quite a bit of acting in order to present the kind of guy others thought a member of an alternative rock band should be. At home in Cornerstone, surrounded by loup and a handful of trusted humans, Rook didn’t have to pretend to be someone he wasn’t.
None of them did.
“They’re going to miss you downstairs,” Rook said.
“I know,” Knight replied. “We have to tell Father about this.”
Rook sank deeper into his chair. “Yeah. One more example of me fucking things up.”
“What? How is this you fucking anything up? It’s Brynn’s fault, not yours.”
“You heard her, Knight. I activated the ring, and then I grabbed her damn hand. I poisoned myself.”
The water shut off in the bathroom, but Knight ignored that. “Brynn Jones brought a deadly weapon into this building. A concealed deadly weapon that you had no way of recognizing. Setting it off was not your fault, you hear me?”
Rook shrugged.
“He’s right,” Brynn said from the bathroom doorway. “All of this is my fault, and I’ll accept full responsibility for it. I am so sorry.”
“Our Alpha will have to be told,” Knight replied. Ignoring her apology was rude, but accepting it meant he excused her nearly killing his brother. And he didn’t. She’d walked into their sanctuary town armed with a poison meant solely for loup garou. The fact that such a poison existed at all could be considered an act of aggression by the Congress of Magi.
“I understand.” She came closer, hands clasped behind her back, head angled down in a perfect imitation of submission. “I have something else I must confess to you both.”
Knight’s temper rose, even as his natural empathy told him to keep calm and listen. Rook tried to turn around in his chair and ended up slumped sideways with a confused look on his face.
“My family name isn’t Jones,” she said quickly, and visions of more dangerous jewelry quickly disappeared. “I apologize for lying about that.”
“Why did you?” Rook asked.
“I’m uncertain. It was a knee-jerk reaction to being brought up here.”
“And you didn’t want us connecting you to your father?” Knight added.
“I suppose so. My real name is Brynn Atwood.”
“Atwood.” Knight couldn’t place the name, but he’d heard it before in reference to the Congress. He’d even hazard a guess that her father was pretty highly placed in the Congress—which made their current situation even more complicated.
“My father is a Prime Magus.”
“Fuck,” Rook said. “Sorry, crap.”
It may have been old-fashioned, but their father had a personal rule about certain levels of swearing in front of ladies—even if they swore right back at you. Some habits were hard to shake, even while under the influence of drugs.
“That’s a fairly high position, right?” Knight asked.
“Four Prime Magi form the highest tier of the Congress, yes,” Brynn said.
Naturally. “So it stands to reason that he’d have a lot of enemies who might want him dead.”
“Of course. I’ve always known that, and until a few minutes ago, I had no reason to not think your family was among them. I hold no position in the Congress, so I have no access to their private information about the loup garou.”
Knight started to reply. A harsh beeping sound cut him off, echoed a few feet in front of him. He fished his cell phone out of his pocket, startled by the specific tone meant only for emergency text messages. Run business. Rook was trying to retrieve his own phone and not managing it well. Knight opened the message and was not surprised to find a single line from Father:
Office, ASAP, 911.
“What’s up?” Rook asked, having given up trying to manage his own phone.
“I’m not sure, but Father sent a message to gather here, 911 code.”
“Not good.”
“What does that mean?” Brynn asked.
“It means you should hang out over there”—Knight pointed at the rear corner of the office, near the bathroom—“because we’re about to have a meeting.”
Brynn did as told without question, all while maintaining that submissive position. Knight tried to arrange Rook in the chair so that he didn’t look quite as sloppily stoned, but their father would know something was wrong the moment he walked in. Three sets of footsteps beat their way upstairs. His Father entered first, with Bishop and Devlin right behind him. Devlin stumbled briefly when he spotted Brynn, but he was too smart to comment. No one spoke or asked questions while Father walked to the other side of his desk—he’d speak when he was ready.
Their Alpha closed his hands into fists and pressed his knuckles against the top of the desk—a sure sign to anyone who knew him of his rising tension. Tension already filling the room and prickling at Knight’s senses. “I just received a call from Joe Reynolds,” Father said, his voice deep and angry. Reynolds was Alpha of the loup garou run in Springwell, Delaware, and the nearest run to Cornerstone. “A few minutes ago, he received an anonymous phone call that our sanctuary town in Connecticut has been attacked.”
Chapter Five
“Attacked?” Bishop repeated.
“Joe didn’t have any details,” Father said. “He answered an anonymous call about an attack on Stonehill, Connecticut. The caller said the aggressors were fast, deadly, and that at least two dozen people had been killed already.”
Rook pressed his lips closed against a sudden wave of nausea, followed by rage that their people had been attacked. Father’s words had burst through the cotton wadding wrapped around his brain with devastating clarity. Loup garou did not shift into their beast forms often, because the change was extremely painful and it took up to a full minute to complete. A trick of their biology also required what they called a “cooling-down period”—for however many hours the loup spent as beast, twice as many were required in skin before they could shift again. If Rook took a half-hour beast run through the woods, he couldn’t shift again for at least an hour. His body simply wouldn’t allow it.
Most loup spent the majority of their lives in skin form, choosing to shift only during their quarterly. Every one hundred and one days, from sunset to sunrise, a loup was forced into his or her beast for eight to twelve hours, depending on the time of year. The quarterly had been a huge inconvenience while Rook was in college, and was responsible for the end of his musical career.
Because of the time it took to shift into beast, once an alarm was sounded, backup would take time to arrive. Even in skin, though, a loup garou was a formidable opponent and it took quite a lot of effort to kill one. For twenty-four people to have died before someone could call for outside assistance was unthinkable, unless—
“Guns?” Bishop asked.
“I don’t know,” Father replied. “Joe couldn’t tell me anything, because he only knew what the anonymous caller told him. That two dozen are dead, and that they’re under attack. After he got the anonymous call, Joe tried calling Andrew Butler, Springwell’s Alpha, but he didn’t answer, so Joe called me. Joe’s sending a squad of enforcers up to investigate, and I agreed to do the same.”