Page 82 of Property of Crypt Keeper
The words slid insidiously under my skin, yet I said nothing.
He glanced toward the glass wall on the far side of the room. I followed his gaze. There was another room beyond it. Dark. But not empty. Something moved inside. Large. Too large.
My wolf went still.
Rafael noticed that too.
“They were supposed to be extinct,” he said conversationally. “Did you know that?”
My eyes remained on the glass. “What?”
“Werewolves.”
The word sat between us like a live wire.
“You mean the things your kind tried to wipe out?”
Rafael’s gaze slid back to mine. “Not my kind. Not all of us.”
“No. Just the ambitious ones.”
That earned me another faint smile.
“Ambition is simply survival with vision. They didn’t do it out of ambition. They did it because they didn’t want to die.”
“You practice that line in the mirror every morning?”
A pause. Then Rafael quietly chuckled. Genuine.
That actually irritated me more than if he’d hit me.
“Thousands of years ago,” he explained, “demons believed the wolves were gone. Eradicated. Burned from history.”
He moved toward one of the tables, slowly dragging a finger over the edge of a metal tray.
“Then one nearly killed Séamus in Rome.”
The name meant something. I knew it because of the way the air changed when Rafael said it. Like even walls knew it was best to absorb it than to repeat it too loudly.
“The king survived,” Rafael continued. “Barely. Which created a very uncomfortable realization among certain circles.”
He turned back toward me.
“If one werewolf could almost kill the demon king, what could an army of them do?”
My stomach tightened. Beyond the glass, something hit the wall. Hard. The sound resonated through the room. My wolf snarled silently.
Rafael didn’t even flinch.
“Officially, the remaining wolves are being hunted down,” he said. “Unofficially…” He let the silence finish for him.
“They were caged,” I guessed.
“Preserved,” Rafael amended.
“Bred.”
“Eventually.” He shrugged as if it was no big deal.
