Maddox
For a single moment as I lowered myself into my chair, I felt the wound across my stomach pull. A shot of panic hit my chest. The skin had barely healed, just enough to keep my guts in place, and I needed my guts to stay right where they were.
I squelched the panic and the groan my pain engendered, and sat. Weakness wasn’t an option, even in front of my pack; both the animal and the commander inside me raged against revealing anything but the utmost strength. Yes, the five werewolves standing before my desk were weaker, beta, but that didn’t mean any one of them couldn’t take me in my current state, pack or not.
The animal hidden deep in my chest licked his lips, knowing why the pack was here, knowing soon he would have the female beneath his fangs again. The psych bitch would pay and pay deliciously—for a long, long time.
“Alpha.” Baer lowered his shaggy head to me, his four brothers following suit. I had claimed the five orphan werewolves in their infancy, raising them to serve me, to fear me, to belong to me with unswerving loyalty. That I had been the orchestrator of their parents’ deaths and their subsequent abandonment, they didn’t need to know and, after these hundreds of years, would no longer question. Not if they didn’t want to die as well.
They alone controlled the growing of my army—turning humans, training them, instilling the same loyalty to me in their recruits that they held themselves. Building my empire. I rarely let them loose, but no one could retrieve my prize faster than my pack.
“Time to hunt,” I growled, letting my pain and my animal add a savage edge to my voice. “One female, triggered, most likely in the hands of a griffin named Arik.” I threw my five-day-old bloody clothes onto the desk.
Baer retrieved them, lifting the bundle to his sensitive nose. His werewolf senses would untangle the scent not only of his alpha, but also the cloying musk of fear and psych energy that had coated the female that night. No mention was made of the dried evidence of my extensive injury before Baer passed the bundle to his left, allowing each of his brothers a chance to catch the scent.
Wise of him.
Baer tilted his head. “Her power… The smell is unique.”
“And strong,” one of the others threw in.
I nodded. “It is.”
“What is her gift?” Baer asked.
I examined my memories of the psych’s attack for the hundredth time. “I’m not sure how, but she cut Feral’s head off with nothing more than a scream.” Not to mention practically disemboweling me.
Baer’s sharp eyes met mine. “Any leads?”
Not with me flat on my back. “A fresh team reconnoitered the scene but found nothing. The griffin must have flown her out.”
“We’ll find something.”
They would. I had trained my pack to be the best. I didn’t tolerate failure.
I stared down the wolves. “Hit the streets.”
Each male nodded, then turned to leave, intimidating even the guards outside with their silent, menacing display. Baer turned back to me before reaching the door. “The griffin?”
I drew my mouth into a smile that would send shivers through the body of any who witnessed it. “Bring the griffin to me as well.”
Baer bowed his head, then followed his brothers into the warehouse. I listened to the sound of five werewolves, heavy bodies lockstepping their way through the building. The sound of power—my power. My will imposing itself on the world. Satisfaction overrode the pain in my body.
At least until Fink slid through the door.
I raised a brow, refusing to give the Anigma HQ bureaucratic—and not so secret snitch—the satisfaction of releasing the snarl that crouched in my throat. Too obvious and too little reward.
“Get me the lead sheets,” I growled instead.
Fink squeaked like the weasel he was and scrambled to gather the stack of papers secured on a clipboard hanging nearby. Baer would search for my female until I could join them, but in the meantime, Anigma HQ expected deliveries. My troops would test the other females they’d been ordered to acquire in the area. Not that all of them would make it to HQ; some died, and some…well, what HQ—and Fink—didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them.
Not until my secession began, anyway. My hidden stockpile of females grew daily.
Fink’s gaze slunk to the now-closed door. “You never said how you so easily identified the griffin that attacked your team,” he mused.
I kept my attention on the paperwork before me. “I ate his parents for dinner a long time ago.”
That shut the weasel up.
Damn, I wished Feral wasn’t dead. The male had served as my second for decades. Just one more reason to find the psych: revenge, for removing my second’s head from his shoulders, for spilling my guts on the ground, and for leaving me stuck with this weak-spined traitor as my new right hand. If I hadn’t been planning my exit from the Anigma in the very near future, the aptly nicknamed Fink would be wolf food already. Just like Arik’s parents. Unfortunately the fool couldn’t die just yet. Wouldn’t want to draw attention to ourselves.
I had served the Anigma for nine hundred years, since earning my entry with Rivalen’s death. I had clawed my way to the top, only to hit the glass ceiling of Bricriuu’s death and the subsequent takeover by shifters so mired in bureaucratic bullshit they couldn’t tell the difference between real power and their own flatulent emissions. That choke chain had run the course of my patience long ago. My plan for independence was set; all I needed was the last of the psychs in the area under my control.
“A little behind, aren’t you?” a quiet voice asked.
Fink startled. The clipboard clattered to the floor, and papers scattered across the expanse of concrete, muffling his steps as he rounded one side of the desk, scrambling to put it between him and the unexpected guest standing in front of the door. The closed door that I’d never heard open. I snarled, both at Fink’s proximity and the presence of a stranger who had bypassed every security measure and entered my office with no warning whatsoever.
“Guards!”
The stranger smiled. “They are incapacitated at the moment. But you won’t need them.”
“Who the fuck are you, and what are you doing in my office?” Quivering with the need to attack, I scented the air. What I found forced a growl through my tight throat: Fink stunk of surprise, but underneath I found a fine film of anticipation. That meant the stranger was Anigma, brought in because Fink the Weasel had done what he did best: tattled. My lip pulled back from my fangs as another growl escaped.
Ignoring my display, the stranger settled into parade rest, confirming my suspicions. Bigger than any shifter I had seen, the male’s breadth and width spoke to a deadly animal form, while his electric green eyes screamed not human to anyone who saw them. The scent of foreign power swirled into the room on a tardy breeze.
“Your deliveries are late,” the shifter informed me.
The voice slid along my mind like silk, at once taunting and mesmerizing. I realized I was shaking my head, refusing the lure of surrender. “I said, who the—”
“You walk a fine line, Maddox, not the least of which is the reckless nature of your…procedures.” The stranger blinked, a light going out, returning, tempting his audience, tempting me to submit. “If you didn’t want attention, wolf, you should’ve sent your deliveries to us on time. All of them.”
I turned my head to meet Fink’s eyes, promising death with a look. So, time was up. What was a handful of psychs, anyway? I’d win either way. At least I wouldn’t have to tolerate my new second’s presence beyond tonight.
My werewolf crawled up my throat, clawing, calculating. The faint red glow of my eyes cast shadows across the desk. “Delays are inevitable in our line of work. If that’s why they sent you, the Anigma chain of command can go fuck itself. As far as I’m concerned—”
The stranger stepped forward, the strong jut of his jawline and that scowling mouth clear in the red-tinted light. Just one step, that was all, but something about the action cut my thought in two and left me silent, my animal’s howls filling my mind with its need for retribution.
The sound of a boot meeting concrete resonated in my brain, drowning out my wolf, locking my breath in my lungs.
For one sizzling moment, the stranger was there, inside me, reading all that I was and all that I knew, sizing me up and finding me wanting. No movement, no indication of awareness, just that searing instant of a scouring presence inside me, and then it was gone and my breath rushed out in near-soundless fury.
What he’d done was impossible. No shifter, even the most powerful healers I’d encountered, wielded that kind of telepathic power. And yet my brain felt like it had been stripped bare with a bucketful of steel wool. My animal raged harder, working himself into a frenzy behind the iron bars of my control. My eyelids slid closed for the briefest second.
Wait. Watch, I told my wolf. Our chance will come.
I raised my eyelids. One corner of the stranger’s mouth lifted a hair, his gaze holding me hostage. In the stranger’s eyes, I saw knowledge no one, not even my brothers, had managed to attain. I gathered myself, waiting for the ax to fall.
Only silence came. Those eyes held no surprise at the discovery of my hidden cache. Was the shifter here to demand compliance, or for something else?
Staring into those eerie green eyes, I realized I was leaning toward the something else.
“What do you want?” I finally asked, my words dripping ice.
“Katherine.”
My hackles rose. Deep inside, my wolf growled his fury, the sound escaping my control. Hell, no. “She’s missing.”
“Explain.”
I held my tongue. Fink, seeming to figure out who we were talking about—I hadn’t shared the female’s name with anyone, including the team with me that night—piped up. “She…uh…disappeared from the scene after her…triggering.”
“Disappeared?” That smooth voice took on deadly splinters. “How could a team of shifters lose one incapacitated psych?”
Guess my memories were a bit fuzzy on all that, what with my entrails scattered across the alley floor.
Again Fink stepped in. “They were…dead, sir.”
“Dead?”
“Yes. Dead.”
“I see.” The two words were so cold my blood congealed. “All of them?”
“A-Almost all of th-them, s-sir.”
I resisted the urge to snatch Fink’s stuttering tongue from his mouth. “We’ll find her. It’s only been a couple of days.”
That gaze drilled into me. I refused to flinch.
The unnerving glow of his eyes grew brighter. “You’ve been careless, Maddox. You’ve drawn attention; the wrong attention.”
I cut my eyes toward Fink. “No kidding.”
“The Archai know about your boy Arik. His little prize.” The shifter leaned across the broad surface of the desk, closing the distance between us. “Like I said, the wrong attention.”
The Archai had never been a threat. “And?”
The male leaned even closer, dropping his voice to a whisper. “And you can’t succeed with that attention. A two-sided war? You’ll fail, and I don’t tolerate failure.”
I stared into those bright eyes as if I could find the answers to my complete confusion there. Why would a powerful Anigma want my rebellion to succeed?
“What war?” Fink was asking. “Why—”
The stranger raised a single arched eyebrow. I watched as time seemed to turn to sludge, the moments stretching out into what felt like hours as the male’s lashes slid closed, then opened. Green light flashed.
Time resumed. The stranger was still staring me down, still challenging me. Nothing had changed except a peculiar gasping to one side of the desk.
Wary, I turned my head, keeping my eyes fixed on the shifter before me until the muscles around my eye sockets strained and my mind screamed the necessity of discovering the source of the horrible sound filling my ears. The edge of my desk came into view, then bookshelves, a rickety chair—and Fink. I watched with fascinated horror as my second’s head slowly tipped back, the red line across his throat growing wider and wider, blood beginning to trickle down, until finally its own weight severed the rest of Fink’s half-cut spinal cord and tore the head from the male’s shoulders. It tumbled to the floor, rolling a few feet away to come to rest, terrified gaze fixed on me.
The body crumbled to the floor with a strange elegance the weasel could never have achieved while alive. As flesh began to fizzle into ash, I pivoted back to the stranger. Only one question filled my mind.
“Who. Are. You?”
The stranger blinked again, and I found myself flinching against my will, swallowing hard to check the intact status of my throat.
“I am the Source. And that”—he tipped a chin at the ashes swirling in a random air current—“is what happens when you get in my way.”
Violence and terror fought for supremacy inside my chest. The Source. The Anigma others only whispered about, the one weaker shifters—which was all of them, according to lore—feared. Executioner. Angel of death. Nexus of all evil, if fairy tales could be believed. Some even dared to hint that he was the ruler of the Anigma itself. And if you were planning to leave the Anigma, he was the last shifter you wanted to come face-to-face with.
So why was Fink’s body dissolving on the floor while I sat semi-comfortably behind my desk?
“Now.” The male’s voice had returned to its original quiet, silky-smooth state. “About your little Archai problem.”
“I’ll take care of it.”
“Good. Let’s talk about how.”