Kelly Meade - Black Rook

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.”

“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—