Page 75 of Throwing Shade
The wolf looked at us, his nostrils flaring. He pulled his lips back, baring his incisors, then he dropped his toy and jumped over the dead vamp.
Emmett tried to spin himself around, but the wolf nosed up to the chair and backed us into the wall.
“Quit it, you bully.” My black mesh swam up from the ground to knee height and flickered out.
I swear the wolf smirked.
“Wow, nice gratitude when I came here to save you.” I pulled out the lighter and jabbed it at the shifter, but shockingly it wasn’t as effective a deterrent as a flaming branch. “Back up.”
Laurent head-butted me towards a door marked “boiler room,” growling when I stopped. Questions and arguments were poised on the tip of my tongue, but one look at the untamed light in his eyes and I sighed, continuing to our destination.
“Is he going to cook you before he eats you?” Emmett said. “Aren’t wolves supposed to like raw meat?”
I tilted the chair and dumped Emmett on his ass.
“Kidding.” He hoisted himself back into the chair.
Laurent pawed at me until I opened the door.
I clung to the doorframe with all my strength, but he nipped me in the ass, and then knocked Emmett and me into the room, growling some more.
“I don’t know what you want. Shift and talk to me.” Unless he couldn’t. Unless he was stuck in wolf mode? Was this why Laurent hadn’t wanted to come here on the night of a full moon? Was its hold on him still too powerful, even now in the waxing gibbous phase? Holding the top of the chair, I ducked under pipes, the wolf steadily herding us backward until I tripped over a heavy metal ring.
“A trapdoor?” I hoisted it up, peering into the darkness. Delilah’s vision might have had the same green tinge as night vision goggles, but I couldn’t actually see in the dark, even with that magic. “I’m not going down into God knows whaaaaaaa—”
He’d pushed me, sending Emmett and the chair over the edge as well.
Emmett hit something with a grunt, while I cracked my funny bone on the metal arm of the chair. “Fuuuck!” I waved my arm, trying to shake off the pain.
It wasn’t much of a fall and I wasn’t injured, but it was very, very dark. Something ran over my back and I screamed.
“A little help,” Emmett said.
I groped around until I found him and assisted him back into his makeshift wheelchair.
Green eyes glowed from next to me in the darkness and the wolf huffed.
“Now what, asshole?” I said. “I can’t see anything.”
Laurent had yet to hurt me in wolf form and I was so tired that it was easier to assume that if he hadn’t torn out my throat yet, it wasn’t going to happen and I could trust him.
“Where to?” I said.
His tail brushed my hand. I flinched and it flicked my skin once more.
“This better not be the wolf equivalent of pull my finger,” I muttered, and gently caught hold of the tail.
The wolf led us through what I presumed was a tunnel, hewn from rough rock, that scraped my fingers when I accidentally bumped into it. The path sloped downward for quite some time, but the universe cut us a break, and we didn’t encounter anyone—or anything else.
We hit a dead end and the wolf rammed against it until something gave way and moonlight streamed in. We exited through a hole in a wall into in a boarded-up storefront. Dirt, used condoms, and cigarette butts littered the floor.
Emmett had his leg draped over the arm of the chair, and was snoring away.
The wolf shoved the decrepit wall paneling back against the tunnel’s entrance.
“Wait here and I’ll get my car,” I said. It was only a couple blocks away.
He tossed his head and snarled.
“Have whatever pissy fit you want. You aren’t walking home like that, and I assume if you were capable of shifting, you’d have done so already.”
He roared his fearsome roar and gnashed his fearsome teeth. And then his legs buckled from exhaustion and he crashed onto his belly.
“Uh-huh,” I said, and left.
