Mark of the Wolf: Part I: Mark of the Wolf Trilogy, #1 by Jayne Blue

Author:Jayne Blue [Kimber White]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Nokay Press, LLC
Published: 2022-10-20T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

The world became a spinning kaleidoscope. My feet never left the ground, but the ground shifted beneath me. One second, I was standing on the plush, red carpet in Anson’s office. The next, it was broken pavement. I took a breath, then lurched forward, certain I was about to throw up my lungs.

“Open your eyes!” Lissa said to me. She stood right beside me. “Look straight ahead. The spins will only last for a moment. It’s better if you focus on a fixed point.”

I clenched my fists. My claws had popped out. A second more and I would have fully shifted. Slowly, I stood up.

A fixed point. We were surrounded by a tall chain link fence with barbed wire at the top. Old, rusted-out cars and scrap metal lay scattered everywhere.

“The Scrap Yard,” I said. “It’s an actual scrap yard?”

“What’d you expect?” Lissa asked.

“I thought the shifters were the scrap,” I answered.

“They are. Come on. We don’t have a lot of time.” Lissa hiked up her skirt and walked toward the tallest heap of metal. The place was like a maze. Row upon row of twisted metal, motorcycles in pieces, a burned-out school bus resting on its side.

There was magic here, too. Another of Lissa’s wards. When I tried to use my keener wolf senses, my nose, my ears, her magic settled over me, making me drowsy. For now, I’d take that as a blessing. It might make it easier for me not to shift. Because I couldn’t. Not here.

We went deeper into the maze of junk. Lissa rounded the corner. She took me to a cleared out, flat area with two giant Quonset huts sitting side by side.

“That one’s the hospital,” she said, pointing to the one on the right. “The other one’s the morgue. You can look for your brother in both of them.”

“Hospital?” I asked. “You have doctors here?”

She smiled. “Not exactly. I suggest you try the morgue first. Might as well not get your hopes up.”

My heart twisted. I could sense other, weaker shifters all around me. Two emaciated tiger shifters sat propped up against an old telephone pole. Their eyes were dead, no flash to them at all.

“They’re starving,” I said. “Do you bring food in? They can’t hunt here.”

“You’ve got about twenty minutes,” she said. “Then I can’t guarantee safe passage back out of here. They usually put the wolf shifters to the left as you go through that door.”

“But…” Before I could finish my question, the wind changed. A black cloud spun around Lissa, forming a small tornado. The force of it knocked me backward. When the cyclone vanished, so had Lissa.

“Great,” I muttered. “Just great.”

One of the tigers started to wail. On instinct, I went to him. He held the other tiger across his lap. The smaller one had died. Just like that.

“Did she do that?” I asked. The surviving tiger just moaned. It was as if he no longer had the strength to form human words.

I knew what had done this.

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