Sydney growled.
“You know it’s true. A vampire in the pack makes it impossible for us to leave during a full moon.”
“You’re right. This is too complicated,” Noah said. “I’ll just take my mate and leave.”
Milo looked panicked and a few of the other wolves ambled over. “NO! You can’t leave us.”
So they’d been listening the whole time. Great. Noah must not have moved them far enough away from the others.
The wolf that had spoken said, “Look, we’ll work it out. It’s not ideal, but we like Sydney. She’s pretty cool. If she’s part of the deal, okay, but we need you.”
It seemed that a few of the wolves weren’t entirely sold on Sydney’s coolness.
“Oh yeah?” Noah said. “Well, let me educate you about the truth of the pack alpha you need so badly. I was kidnapped by those people and separated from my pack when I was just a pup. I was their captive for two decades before I got out. The only reason I escaped was because they had flaws in their security system, it was my twenty-eighth birth moon, and Sydney got captured. So I am not an alpha by any definition of that word. I can’t lead you. I have only the slightest fucking clue how packs even work. I’ve been bullshitting my way through it this entire time. So there’s your alpha pair. A vampire, and a wolf that doesn’t know how to be a wolf. Come on Sydney, we’re leaving.”
He grabbed her arm and took her out of the bar.
“It’ll be safer to travel with a pack,” Sydney said as he dragged her through the lobby like some errant child.
He growled, and fur began to sprout out of his arms. She’d never seen him this angry before. They were halfway through the lobby when the revolving doors opened and in poured human magic users from the city. Their ringleader held a roughed-up looking guy who’d been beaten nearly to death.
“Oscar!” Livia shouted.
The missing pack wolf. But if he was a werewolf, why wasn’t he healing? The pack might not have had a strong enough wolf to lead them all, but they were still werewolves. Sydney suspected magic had been incorporated in the wolf’s torture to overcome any healing advantage.
The human threw the missing wolf to the ground.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I tried not to tell them. W-where’s Shira?”
Noah began barking orders to the others to shift. “Sydney, take this guy to the bar out of the way. I don’t want you in the middle of this.”
She wanted to argue, but it wasn’t as if they could get away now without a fight, and she didn’t want to risk her mate by distracting him. With her claim, it was unlikely he’d die. And she’d keep telling herself that over and over to get through this because every instinct inside her screamed not to leave his side.
Sydney helped the wounded werewolf up. The violence started all too fast, exploding in the lobby like a bomb that had just ticked down and detonated. There was no warning, just a flurry of fur and growling and magic sizzling the air. A stray ball of magical electricity hit her on the back as she took Oscar out of the lobby and into the bar.
Someone cranked the sound system way up. The metal pounding out was nearly deafening. It drowned out the jazz in the bar.
“Where’s Shira?” Oscar asked again over the din.
Sydney took him to the back lounge area as far away from the noise as she could get him, trying desperately not to think about Noah out there. She wanted to kill the wolf that had led the humans back to the den, but then she remembered the UV lasers.
It hadn’t taken long for her to break and kill Jacob, and these people had a pack member for over twenty-four hours. She doubted he’d slept in that time.
“What happened to Shira?” But from the look on his face, he knew.
“Shira is dead. My mate and I are the new alphas.” It seemed so cold to state so bluntly when Oscar’s people… when her mate could be dying out there, but if she thought too hard about the chaos happening in the lobby, she wouldn’t get through these next moments.
Oscar growled. Given his condition, it wasn’t a very menacing growl, but he made an effort. “You’re a vampire.”
Sydney smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “Great species identification. Now let’s move on to shapes and colors!” The sarcasm was inappropriate right now. She knew that, but the fear of her mate dying or of both of them being dragged back to the place they’d only just escaped, sat like a heavy weight trying to press her down beneath the earth and suffocate her.
“I’m a dead man. They should have just killed me. I might have had a chance if Shira was here.”
Livia rushed into the bar. She looked worse for wear. The bandage Sydney put on her earlier in the night had all but come off. So much for that.
“Oscar! I thought you were dead.” She crushed him in a hug, and he groaned.
“Not yet,” he said, giving Sydney a look as if she were going to order his execution.
That was Noah’s department, not hers. And given how a few minutes ago he’d been ready to abandon them, Sydney wasn’t sure it was right for him to order anybody’s head on a platter.
“Oh screw this,” Sydney said. She ripped into her wrist and held it out to Oscar.
“No, way.”
She growled. “Drink!”
He looked briefly at Livia who nodded quickly. So he drank. Oscar healed before her eyes, and then she turned her attention to the female wolf.
“But what about the punishment earlier?”
“I don’t care. There are bigger things to worry about. You both need to be able to fight. I’ll deal with Noah if he has a problem with it. Drink.”
It didn’t take much blood to help both wolves reclaim their healing abilities.
“Why is that music so fucking loud?” Sydney asked. It was so irritating, it made her teeth grind. Now seemed like a stupid time to turn the lobby into a rave.
“It’s a magical defense system,” Livia said. “It doesn’t stop those electricity balls they throw, but it keeps them from chanting and having more of an advantage. The louder it is, the better it works. Shira got it a few years ago from some witch who was passing through. What was her name? Frances? Fontaine?”
“Fiona,” Oscar offered.
“Right! Fiona. She was traveling with a panther therian and she gave us the music in exchange for shelter for a few days. There is no way we would have trusted she wasn’t working for the city. But she had a therian mate, so it seemed pretty unlikely.”
The music stopped suddenly. Sydney ran into the lobby, followed by Oscar and Livia. The humans were all dead, along with half a dozen of the pack. More were seriously wounded.
“We need to get out of here, now,” Noah said. “When the magic users don’t return by morning, they’ll send more. Everyone pack light and put your bags with your bikes. We’ll find somewhere nearby we can hole up in until the full moon passes. We can move the bikes there during the day while Sydney is resting.”
Several of the wolves who weren’t too badly injured moved to carry out the order, but a few stood defiantly in the middle of the lobby.
“You were right,” one of them said. “Just go. You’ve brought nothing but chaos with you since you got here. You don’t want us, anyway. We can’t go anywhere tonight. Some are too injured to be moved. So I guess we’re targets until they heal. Thanks.”