“You think your people would mutiny if they discovered you hadn’t followed your own rules? That you made someone against their will?” Alex’s lips curved. “That might be fun to watch.”
He rubbed his forehead. “Do not tell anyone you’re a hunter. Do not tell anyone you know Edward. Specifically do not tell anyone you murdered my wife.” He dropped his hand and looked into her face. “Werewolves can die, Alex, and mine will kill you.”
“They can’t. There’s a fail-safe in the lycanthropy virus that keeps werewolves from killing one another.”
“Not around here.”
Alex stilled. “What?”
“Because I’m different, my virus is different, and so are my wolves. No demon. Also no fail-safe.”
Her eyes widened. “Then how can there be any of you left at all? Why haven’t you torn one another to shreds? Why isn’t there only one wolf left standing?”
“Because we don’t kill for sport. We don’t enjoy it. And while we can kill one another, we don’t want to.”
“But sometimes,” she murmured, staring into his face as she heard what he’d left unsaid, “you have to.”
“It’s the only thing werewolves understand.”
Barlow offered to take her back to Ella’s, but Alex refused.
“Even if I didn’t know the way, I could follow my nose,” she said. An appendage that was becoming increasingly useful with each passing day.
During the return trip, which took her along one street, through the square, and halfway down the avenue on the opposite side of town, no less than a dozen villagers greeted Alex.
The place was a hodgepodge of accents and nationalities, races and ages. But one thing she didn’t see were any children.
“Guess that makes sense,” she murmured, considering the conversation she and Barlow’d had earlier.
They all seemed damn glad to see her. Ecstatic almost. Like she was the best thing to happen to Barlowsville in years.
But they wouldn’t be happy, or welcoming, or even civil if they discovered who she was, why she was here—be it Barlow’s reason…or Edward’s.
That knowledge, combined with the town’s excessive friendliness, made Alex feel like the lowest of lying scum. She had to remind herself that this was a town of werewolves, the lowest, lying scum on the planet.
And she was one, too.
Yet she still didn’t want to eviscerate small children. She wasn’t consumed by the urge to rip off the faces of everyone she met—except Barlow. She didn’t feel evil. She felt like…herself. Which went against everything she’d ever believed about werewolves. Sure, Cassandra had said she’d removed “the demon,” but maybe there hadn’t been one there to remove.
Alex reached Ella’s house, climbed the steps, then hesitated. Should she knock? She wasn’t sure. If the door was locked she’d have to.
It wasn’t. Did anyone lock their doors in Barlowsville? Knowing Barlow, the punishment for theft was the removal of a paw with a silver axe. Which should be enough to deter any werewolf with kleptomaniac tendencies.
“Hello?” she called, thrilled when no one answered. Alex had done all the talking she could stand for one day.
She searched through the armoire for pajamas, sweatpants, scrubs, anything to wear to bed that wasn’t the gorgeous cream silk peignoir she found.
No such luck. Since Alex would rather sleep in nothing than that, she did.
The bedroom came equipped with custom shades that blocked the sunlight, or what there was of it, no doubt very handy for tho
se mornings after an all-night run through the woods as a wolf.
Alex planned to sleep away what remained of the day and maybe even the night. What she hadn’t planned on was the dream.
She hadn’t had it for a very long time. She’d begun to hope it was gone. Then she’d begun to fear that it was.
Though the dream always ended badly—because it was a memory as well as a dream—it began with Alex and her father together as they could never be again. And for the short time before the werewolf came, Alex could exist in a world where he was still alive.