Page 110 of Devoured

Scarlet flecks everything now—the tablecloth, the napkins, the food—as werewolves up and down the hall begin to salivate, watching the violence unfold. One lurches to her feet to stab a knife between Garnet’s knuckles, right beside the bloody prongs of the fork. Another tackles Calix into the spilled wine. Though he rolls aside, he doesn’t retaliate, instead trying to subdue his attacker. Or pretending to try, at least. His scarlet eyes glint with satisfaction as they flick to Vanessa, who leaps aside when two other werewolves hurtle toward the dogpile around Jasper and Luca.

For a second, I think the two werewolves mean to separate Jasper and Luca, but—no. I stand to watch as they join the brawl instead. The latter launches his fist into the nearest throat. Luca falls to his knees before pitching forward. Then Jasper shifts into a werewolf and charges the wall—crashes into it. Breaking off stone. Breaking his own snout. He yelps and falls on his side, his paws moving, twitching, running though he goes nowhere at all. He howls.

And Cora transcends anger into full-blown fury. “I said stop it!” She charges toward them—snarling, claws lengthening—but seems to forget she still holds Jasmine and Liliana by the hair. And without eye contact, without compulsion, no one listens to her anyway.

“You whore,” Jasmine hisses at Liliana, bleeding profusely from the slashes across her chest. “I’m dying! She—she tried to kill me!”

Baron Ikenna and Countess Rikki aren’t smiling any longer. “Is it—er, always like this?” Rikki asks in an undertone, slowly backing away from the table. Ikenna follows as the women snap their teeth and struggle to free themselves from Cora’s too-sharp grip. Tufts of their brilliant hair flutter to the floor.

Lucky, I muse with a sick sense of pleasure, it isn’t their scalps.

“Of course not,” Cora snarls, wrenching the girls higher and forcing them to look in her blazing black eyes. “Cease.” They go instantly still. She drops them at her ambassadors’ feet before starting again toward Jasper and Luca, only to pivot on her heel at the last second when Brody leaps atop the table to crouch over the turkey, snarling at anyone who comes close.

Sinclair intervenes this time, seizing Brody by the nape and dragging him back to the floor. Compelling him to behave. It isn’t enough, however. Disaster spreads through the room like plague.

Werewolves fight. Werewolves kiss.

A few even begin to moan. And I relish each and every loathsome sound. They mean we’re finally winning.

“Just like Guatemala, isn’t it, Sin?” I flash him a mocking smile and cast an impassive glance at the chaos around us.

His burgundy eyes flare scarlet. “Not helpful, Evelyn.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.” I wrench the steak knife from the crying Delta’s hand, and he promptly passes out at the sight of his spurting blood. “Is this better?”

“ENOUGH!”

In unison, everyone in the Great Hall whirls toward Cora, who has reached Jasper and Luca at last. Her shriek echoes in the sudden silence. It isn’t a cool, collected sound—certainly not a command one would expect to hear from the Wolf Queen of North America.

Her voice splinters the room, shrill and piercing, and my hand tightens instinctively around the steak knife as she lifts Jasper and Luca from their feet by their throats. In this moment, she cannot control her mask from slipping. She cannot control the rage in her eyes from flaring bright. “What is wrong with all of you?”

They do not, cannot, answer her, and her lip curls in satisfaction as their eyes bulge. She squeezes harder. She doesn’t release them when Luca’s face turns blue, or when Jasper chokes, his hind legs scrabbling for purchase against her body. “Explain yourselves,” she says to Luca, to everyone present, turning those terrifyingly flat eyes on the others.

Scarlet drips from her claws, and still no one speaks.

The ambassadors watch from the wall as if frozen, stunned by the savagery of Castle Severi.

Good, I think. That was the plan.

And truthfully, I don’t care what happens to Jasper and Luca, or any of these wolves. A chill still skitters down my spine as I watch Cora, though. A sense of wrongness clings to her. Looking at her feels like sitting in the absolute silence of a sickroom, like waiting for someone to die. It feels like staring at their face and realizing they’re already dead, and their body is a corpse.

Cora is empty. Cold.

Beside me, the unconscious Delta rouses himself with a sniffle. Quick as an adder, Cora rounds on him, dropping Jasper and Luca to seize his bloody, broken hand. When she twists it, he cries out. A pitiful sound. It makes the werewolves around the room shift restlessly. They sense weakness, and so does Cora.

“Explain,” she says icily. “Now.”

His brown eyes sparkle with fresh tears. “I—I don’t know why I’m crying. I used to always cry when I drank, and the wine—I must’ve had too much tonight. I’m so sorry—”

Cora snarls. She knocks him out swiftly with a harsh crack to the back of his skull. One second, he is awake, alert, and the next, he simply—isn’t. His limp body crashes to the floor at her feet.

No one moves in that moment. No one breathes. No one wants to make her angrier. Then—

“Vanessa, darling,” Cora purrs. “Come here this instant.”

My pulse cuts off. My breath dies in my throat.

The rough scrape of a chair as Vanessa pushes from the table and rises to her feet. Eyes wide. Stricken with fear. We didn’t account for this. “Wh-what?” Vanessa asks, her voice too delicate a lilt in this awful place.