Page 66 of Bound to the Wolf
Delainey was a fighter. She wasn’t Elise, who was a very skilled healer but quite weak when it came to aggressive magic. Delainey had fought beside Reece before and knew how skilled he was, how well they worked together.
If they ran into Iron Runners, they could handle it.
The warehouse looked a little pathetic in the harsh light of day. It was a long, low building with a flat roof, the kind of place that could have stored anything from auto parts to stolen goods, set back from the road behind a cracked asphalt parking lot where weeds had pushed up through the seams.
The area was run down, with broken windows on the side of the building and cracks in the foundation that the night had hidden when they all came to rescue Nico and Elise. There were no cars in the parking lot, which Delainey took as a good sign, but she parked a block away just in case there were werewolves doing patrol.
No reason to make it easy for them.
She and Reece headed that way. They walked close enough that their arms nearly brushed. Delainey cast out her magical senses, trying to pick up on the resonance Reece had mentioned, but it was just a warehouse with nothing out of the ordinary.
They found a door. Unsurprisingly, it was locked. Reece tried to force it, but even his werewolf strength wasn’t enough to get them inside. The metal door sat in a steel frame bolted into the concrete, and it didn’t budge more than a quarter-inch when he put his shoulder into it.
“We’ll have to go around and look for an entrance somewhere,” he said.
Delainey shook her head and waved her hand at him. “Let’s see if I can handle this.”
She put her hand on the doorknob and sent a burst of magic into it. With a bit more finesse, she would have used a lock-picking spell, but hers was more of the lock-breaking variety. A bluish-gold glow flared around her fingers for a half-second. She felt the mechanism shatter, and the door swung open.
She and Reece stepped inside. Delainey braced, waiting to hear an alarm go off somewhere, but there was none. It was pretty dim inside the warehouse, with only light coming in from the broken windows.
The windows were set high along the walls, just under the roofline, and the light they let in fell in dusty shafts that didn’t reach the floor; most of the space sat in a gray half-dark. There were just as many boxes lining the concrete floor as there had been all those months ago, though someone had cleaned up the mess where they had slammed into boxes and fought Austin’s wolves. Clearly the place hadn’t been standing empty for four and a half months.
“Do you hear anybody? Or smell them?” Delainey asked.
“People have been here,” Reece confirmed. His head was tilted at that canine angle she’d gotten used to, nostrils flaring as he worked through whatever catalogue of scents his wolf was sorting. “But I don’t know if any are here right now. Stay alert.”
That she would do.
Flashes of that night crossed her memory as they walked deeper into the warehouse. She remembered the waves of fire and fighting the wolves who had taken her friend like they had any right over her life. But that was months ago. Elise was safe now. Delainey had to push it out of her mind.
They found the spot where Nico and Elise had been tied up. There was still a stain of blood on the floor that hadn’t been properly cleaned, but that was the only evidence. The stain was dark and irregular, about the size of a dinner plate, seeped into the concrete in a way that no mop would ever fully lift.
Delainey knelt down and summoned her magic, trusting Reece to have her back as she sent a pulse of energy out and waited to see if she got anything back.
The blood was Austin LaSalle’s. It didn’t tell her anything she couldn’t have learned with her own eyes and a DNA testing kit.
It was his. He had bled here. That was all.
She didn’t have the gift of clairvoyance, where she could have read the incident in the ether. But she reached down and scraped a bit of the blood off the ground and put it into the plastic bag she’d tucked in her pocket for this reason. She could give it to Aya, and Aya could test the resonance against the manacles and see if he had any sort of relationship to them. It would be a long shot.
Most likely, if he had anything to do with the cuffs at all, he had hired someone to make them. But even if he had touched them, there was a possibility his resonance was still there.
“Hey, what are you doing?” a voice called from behind them.
Reece hadn’t warned her, but he would have had to run away to go fight, and she knew he wasn’t planning to leave her uncovered. Delainey stood and put the evidence in her pocket.
Two wolves were approaching them in human form, probably from the Iron Runner pack, seeing as they were deep in their territory and the pack owned this building. A woman inblack pants and a polo shirt, and a man in black pants and a t-shirt. The woman was about Delainey’s height, broad through the shoulders and thick-armed in the way that meant muscle, not softness, her dark hair pulled into a tight bun at the base of her skull. The man was taller, lean and long-limbed, with a shaved head and a neck like a tree trunk.
They looked like regular warehouse workers, but Delainey could sense the wolfish energy coming off of them.
Reece shifted his stance until he was ready to fight. Delainey summoned her magic, but her mind flashed back to that moment in the woods where the wolf had come at her, the way it had taken barely a flick of her wrist to send him flying and break his neck. Bile rose in her throat, and her magic skittered away.
Or maybe she rejected it; she couldn’t quite tell. Her fingers went cold, the glow of magic dying before it had even fully formed.
The hesitation cost her.
The wolves were on her in a second. The man went for Reece and the woman went for her. The man closed the distance in three long strides, faster than any person had a right to move, and threw a haymaker at Reece’s jaw that Reece caught on his forearm with a crack of bone on bone.
