Page 85 of Quest of the Wolf

I bowled into the man who’d fired, snapping at the rifle and tearing it from his grasp. He rolled away, trying to crawl toward the device in the snow. I halted him with a powerful bite to his shoulder. As he screamed in pain, I sprang upon the device and crunched down. Tiny pieces flew into the snow as magic sparked painfully in my mouth.

Not caring, I endured the pain and destroyed the device completely. Never again would it be used to control my mate.

After being knocked off the armored vehicle, he’d landed on his feet, but the vehicle had reached the street. It raced off at a reckless speed, one even a werewolf would struggle to match.

For a moment, the bipedfuris gazed after our fleeing enemies, as if he might try to catch them, but then he turned toward thedriveway and strode toward me. The orange glow on his forehead had disappeared. He eyed the pieces of the control device in the snow, then tilted his head back and howled.

I almost joined in, but movement and muttering on the porch drew my attention.

My offspring, his friends, and my niece and druid ally had come outside, witnessing the end of the battle.

The man I’d bitten stirred and crawled toward the woods. I considered ending the threat he represented, but a vestige of my human self crept into my thoughts and suggested that killing a man in front of my offspring could be a bad idea. The savageness that had earlier made me care nothing of ramifications faded, and I did not chase down my enemy.

He and the other thugs capable of doing so slunk off into the woods. The bipedfuris gazed after them. Also thinking of chasing them down?

He did not. Instead, he looked toward the street, in the direction the vehicle had gone.Thosewere the enemies he regretted letting escape, I knew. The old man. The one who’d presumed to control him.

I padded over to stand beside him, to support him. If the old man continued to be a problem, we would deal with him. Together.

He patted my back, claws raised so they did no damage. There was something familiar about the medallion that hung around his neck. Its glow had lessened, allowing me to see a wolf head engraved into the front, the jaws parted to show fangs. When I returned to my human form, I would ask him about it.

“Definitely not dogs,” one of the young men muttered from the porch, eyeing us.

“No,” my offspring murmured, looking stunned.

EPILOGUE

Back in his human form,Duncan drove when we left the cabin. With snow still falling, I was happy to let him have the wheel. Bolin rode in the back with Jasmine, who’d also returned to her human form. Soon after the battle, I’d changed back and spoken to my son. He hadn’t said much, mostly that he planned to return to Shoreline with his friends in the morning. I’d been tempted to grab his ear, throw him in the van, and say he would ride back with his mother.Now.

But his eyes had been haunted, and I had the feeling he wanted some time before dealing with what he’d seen—with deciding if his brain would accept what his eyes had witnessed. And maybe I needed a night’s sleep too before having to face questions I didn’t know if I was ready to answer. For now, he was safe. Tomorrow would be soon enough to deal with the rest.

Tonight, I would ask Duncan how the hell he’d found the male version of the Medallion of Memory and Power, the match to my mother’s artifact.

But before I could bring it up, and only scant minutes into our journey, Duncan turned left. The van headed into a snow-blanketed park, evergreens rising up on either side of the road and hiding the sky.

“This is where you were before, isn’t it?” I asked.

“Yes. I need to pick something up.” He winked, tapped the medallion, then removed it from around his neck and placed it in the cupholder. Not explaining further, he parked and hopped out.

Soon, he returned with a large black case over his shoulder, snow dusting the lid. It was the same one I’d watched the bipedfuris take out of his van at Mom’s cabin. After storing it in the back, Bolin and Jasmine raising eyebrows but not asking anything, Duncan returned to the driver’s seat.

“My SCUBA gear,” he explained.

“I did wonder what was in there—and how you, in your bipedfuris form, thought to grab that. Did Radomir compel you to do so?”

“No. You did.”

“Me?”

“Technically, it was your mother’s medallion, I think. Though the message seemed to be conveyed through the talisman. It was hard to tell.”

“The, uhm, message?” I remembered all the weird glowing magic and magnetism between the talisman, medallion, and artifact, but how could amessagehave been conveyed? By inanimate jewelry? Or had the mushroom artifact somehow been responsible? I remembered the brief notion I’d had of it being pleased.

“Kind of a vision.”

Okay, I’d had a couple of visions of my own, so that made more sense.

“It conveyed to me that I would find the matching medallion at the bottom of a lake.Thislake.” Duncan waved toward the shoreline, though the water wasn’t visible through the woods from our position. “But it also seemed to suggest I’d need to hold my breath for a long time to reach it. It was deep in the water, inthe mud under a rocky shelf that I barely squeezed past. All these years, the rock and mud have been muffling its magic so nobody sensed it. I didn’t detect it until I was almost on top of it.”

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