Page 23 of Throwing Shade
Why the fuck was the sick bloody ghost thing still going like the Energizer Bunny? And why did Alex have to die?
I didn’t mourn the piece of shit, but this wasn’t right. He should have faced justice, except that thought warred with my desire to push the wolf aside and rid the world of the phantom thing myself.
The pulsing entity whipped close to my face, anger roiling off it, and I flung my hands up. Never mind, let the wolf handle it, because unless I could vanquish this thing with the power of sarcasm, I had no clue how to fight it.
As the dying sunlight slipped away, the angry ghost mass attacked the wolf faster and faster, but the Ohrist shifter fought it off in a blur of motion.
A car alarm in the distance beeped insistently.
The wolf sank his front claws into the crimson and gray specter that had burst out of Alex’s corpse, holding it aloft like meat on a spit.
Rays of golden light sprouted up from the wolf’s back paws, blooming across his legs and torso with a hypnotic fluidity. It turned his white fur into a blinding snowscape that forced me to shield my eyes.
His emerald eyes turned black, and a pained howl burst out of the animal, a desolate sound that shivered up my spine.
Keeping the crimson mass speared on one front paw, the wolf flexed his other one, slashing his glowing claws through the air and opening a portal into a yawning chasm.
I clasped my hands over my ears, the half-humming half-vibrating noise emanating from it hitting me at a painful frequency. And yet, I crept closer, awed at the maelstrom of storm clouds on the other side. A plume of fog rolled in with jagged movements that reminded me of teeth. Goosebumps prickled my skin, but I was unable to turn away. Even the stench of rotting onions that belched from the gap did little to dissuade me.
Had the wolf really torn a hole to another dimension or was this an illusion?
The wolf flung the writhing mass into the chasm, and the wind on that side picked up with a furious howl. Cars, people, cell phones, all sound on my side narrowed down like it was far away, reality suspended until the light drained from the wolf, and with a quiet whoosh, he was released from his torment.
The portal winked shut, the crimson mass gone.
The world snapped back into a cacophony of sound and motion and I released the breath I’d been holding.
The animal’s claws returned to their normal color, and he bowed his head, his flanks heaving.
I sagged against the railing on the walkway in horrified fascination. My relief that the blight from Alex’s shadow was no longer around froze into icy spears stabbing into me with the certainty that the wolf would turn his focus to me now. I tried to grab his shadow as I’d done with Alex’s but I couldn’t. It remained on the ground like all the others.
The wolf’s fur rippled.
“Oh,” I whispered, having never seen a werewolf change before. A stripe of skin appeared over the ridges of his spine and his claws morphed into fingers. It was almost like watching a sunrise on a foreign moon, an alien light cascading through darkness in little peeks, and then a more steady glow, illuminating a rugged, foreign landscape. Unfamiliar, but beautiful in its own way.
But maybe I made a noise or something, or my “oh” was too loud because the wolf growled and shifted fully back into his animal form with a crazed glint in his once-more emerald eyes.
I jumped backwards, smacking my tailbone on the railing. Beautiful? Was I crazy? He was a wolf shifter with lethal instincts, a canny intelligence, and if that failed, claws and teeth made for snacking on me.
He lunged, his jaws barely missing my side.
I bolted, a scream caught in my throat, running blindly across the smaller plaza until I stopped, winded and gulping down air with my arms over my head to get rid of the stitch in my side.
I blew a strand of hair off my flushed face. Who did that wolf think he was, anyway? My magic was out of the bag and I wasn’t leaving without answers, even if it was nothing more than Alex’s driver’s license with a last name and address to follow up.
I stormed back to the stairs, making no effort to hide my approach.
A man kneeled next to Alex’s body. He seemed a few years younger than me, probably in his late thirties, and was about six inches taller, putting the shifter at about six-foot-two. His hair was a riot of dark curls.
The man’s jaw was firm, his lips full, but right now, they were set in a severe line. Moonlight kissed the olive skin of his broad shoulders and leanly muscled torso, a trail of hair leading down to—
Jeans. I gusted out a breath.
The man huffed softly. “You came back,” he said dryly, with a slight accent I couldn’t place. “You’ve got balls, I’ll give you that.”
I gave a weak laugh and he locked his brilliant emerald gaze onto mine. Thickly lashed, his eyes were what I would have called beautiful in his human form, but there was a hardness to them—like he’d seen too much and all innocence was long gone.
Eli had looked that way after his first year in homicide. Fuuuuck! This guy had to be a Lonestar. Okay, looking on the bright side, he could help me find Jude—if he didn’t destroy me. I’d been so bent on getting answers from Alex that I’d thrown away every single safety procedure that I’d lived by and shown a stranger my magic. I could have left when the shifter took off with Alex but no, I had to play detective.
