Page 22 of Silver Claw

Shapeshifters who could shift into animals were stronger than shapeshifters who could only shift into people, like Sam.

One-on-one, a shapeshifter could overpower and outrun a wolf, and disguise made him hard to find and harder to kill. But wolves had their own advantages. Endurance, tracking, pack-bonds, territory magic, moon power, claws, teeth, and the kind of animal instinct no stolen face could fake.

And I would always feel more pride in my wolf than in my shapeshifter, whether it was gone or not.

I ran through the woods, thrilled to be free to run. Winter was slinking off to hide, washed away by the joyful spring rains. I looked forward to the last of the piles of snow melting away, replaced by sunshine, warmth, and bright colors.

My wolf wanted to run through the deep woods of my land and not see barren trees and dull brown. She wanted fresh green grass, wildflowers, and small, scurrying animals. She wanted sunshine.

I wanted to run with my alpha.

Even before I reached my land, I could feel the fight. I could smell the strange wolves, and blood, and fury. I worried about Zach. He was an amazing fighter. He was a hunter, and he was magnificent in a fight.

But he was human.

Facing off against a bunch of wolves alone, he would be slaughtered.

Fear made me even faster, and when I burst into the clearing at the front of my house, I’d worked my wolf into a frenzy of rage. Sam had made it there before me, but not by much.

There were around a dozen wolves still fighting. Sam was tearing into them and also attempting to protect Zach, whocurrently didn’t appear in need of protection. He seemed to get more powerful with each battle.

And there were times, because of his enslavement to the now-dead former master vampire of the county, that I wondered if I was right in believing him fully human.

He obviously wasn’t a vampire, but there was something magical about him that was likely not present before he’d been taken. If it had been, he wouldn’t have been taken. Not alive, anyway.

I was upon the trespassing wolves before they realized I was there, and just like that, I remembered something I’d forgotten when I’d lost the fight with the siphoner.

I was not just a wolf.

I wasAlpha.

And it didn’t matter that my magic was gone. I went into that fight like the alpha I was, and every wolf there felt it. Even though I wasn’t their alpha, they hesitated, and their fight became just a little more tentative.

Still, their abrupt desperation lent them an extra something, and they weren’t going to go easy. They also weren’t going to run. Their alpha had given them an order, and they would carry it out.

Remy roared up in his car, eager to get in on the fight. He’d have been upset if we’d killed them all before he had a chance to lend a hand.

Some days it seemed like my life was one fight after another, and if I hadn’t liked to fight, I imagined that would have been a pretty depressing life.

I regretted that I’d lost the magic, but I had what mattered. And there wasn’t going to be a better time to see if my shapeshifter was still with me.

If I’d been slow at shifting, I would never have tried it while the battle was hot. But I was not slow, and with a roar, I called my shapeshifter.

But my shapeshifter didn’t come.

There was no time to acknowledge the disappointment.

I could have fought the rest of the battle with my demon blade, but I fought as my wolf. No matter what, my wolf was always going to be the biggest and best part of me. And I would almost always choose her to fight other wolves.

When the fight was over, Voss’s wolves were spread across the ground, some of them unconscious, and some of them too injured to hold onto their shifts. A couple of them were dead.

Both Remy and Zach were wounded. Sam and I were the only two whose injuries didn’t matter, because they weren’t anything we couldn’t heal from quickly.

I wiped blood from my face with the back of my hand. “Do you need Doc Hayes?”

Remy cleaned his blade on his shirt before shoving it into the sheath at his hip. “I’m going to need some more stitches,” he growled, glaring at the wolves littering the yard. “Motherfuckers.”

He’d already been injured by the Pocket thugs. But that was Remy’s life.