Page 76 of Triumph of the Wolf
“Do me a favor, and don’t attack me when I let you go,” I said.
A deepbongsounded elsewhere in the building, echoing from the walls and reminding me that we weren’t alone. A nearby vat gurgled and bubbled.
The chains kept Izzy from rising to her feet. Fortunately, the cage wasn’t locked from the outside, and all it took were human fingers to unlatch the door. Again, I wondered what power was keeping Izzy stuck in her lupine form. Had she shifted, she might easily have escaped.
Izzy stared at me as I swung the door open. She seemed… surprised? It was hard to tell with a wolf, but she cocked her head, a pointed ear flickering.
Glad I still had the sword—the magicallysharpsword—I sliced through the chains securing her. I debated whether to cut the IV tube as well, but who knew what that would do?
Izzy rose to her feet, snarled, and lunged to the side. Her jaws snapped down on the tubing and she ripped it from her vein.
“Ouch,” I murmured as a needle fell, blood flowing out and dampening her fur.
She padded out of the cage, then startled me by collapsing.
“Shit. Iknewremoving that wasn’t a good idea.” I glanced at the needle, as if I might stick it back in her leg to save her life.
But her aura rippled, and she shifted back into her human form. Blood continued to dribble down her limb—herarm—but she soon stirred.
“Thirsty,” she rasped, looking at me.
Yeah, there was no sign of a water or food bowl. What if Abrams hadn’t given her anything in the days since his thugs had caught her? I hurried to remove my pack and offer her a bottled water I’d brought.
She clawed it out of my hands, tore off the lid, and guzzled.
“He didn’t give you anything to drink?” I asked. “What a bastard. How’d he expect to get good blood samples from your veins if you were dehydrated?”
“He got enough.” Her hoarse voice made it sound like she hadn’t spoken for days. If those bindings had magically kept her as a wolf, that might very well be the case. “That machine had no trouble pumping it out of me.”
She drank more as she lifted a hand to look at it. Her fingers were shaking.
“Do you know where my friend Jasmine went?” I pointed to the other cage. “And was there a young man here too?” Remembering that Izzy had met Bolin at her brother’s networking event, I added, “Bolin. Your daughter wanted him to turn into a bear.”
“Is Olivia safe?” Izzy lunged forward and gripped my arm. “Nothing has happened to her, has it?”
“Nothing that I’ve heard about. Your brother is keeping an eye on her and searching for you.”
“Thank the moon.”
Izzy released me and dragged her bare arm over her face. As much sweat glistened on her skin as on mine, and her eyes remained glassy, showing the vestiges of whatever drug remained in her system.
“Bolin?” I prompted, though she might have been too out of it to notice if he’d come by. “And Jasmine?”
“I didn’t see a man, but the other wolf—we were stuck in our lupine forms and never able to speak and share names. She escaped just a little bit ago. She was desperate. Drugged. We both were. When we heard gunfire, she must have thought the mad scientist was going to fulfill his promise.”
“What promise?” I asked grimly.
“He kept saying…” Izzy groped in the air with her hand. “In my wolf form, I didn’t grasp it all, but he kept saying he hadn’t meant to take us but that he could use our magical blood, and he was keeping us alive instead of just… exsanguinating us becausetheywere coming. That was what he said again and again. Hewantedthemto come, to be lured by his bait, and had a plan all worked out. But I wasn’t the bait.” Her mouth twisted. “I was an accident.”
“You shouldn’t have been hanging out at Sylvan Serenity, peeing on my bushes.”
Izzy surprised me by looking ashamed by that. “I thought… I wanted you to know…”
“You were irked with me and planned to kill me?”
“I felt obligated to avenge Raoul.”
A howl came from a far corner of the building. From up on one of the catwalks? The echoes in the vast space made it hard to tell, but I thought the voice sounded young, that it belonged to Lykos.
