chapter SEVENTY-TWO
• GRACE •
The pack was completely disoriented. At first, my wolf had sent me images, and strangely enough, so had the boy who ran with us. Now, we had neither, and I had to regroup them as best as I could, but I wasn’t him. I had only just learned to be a wolf myself. He needed to be the one to pull them together. But his own misery was humming too loudly in my head to allow room for anything else. Beck, Beck, Beck, which now, somehow, I understood was the name of the first wolf to fall. My wolf wanted to go back to Beck’s body, but I had already seen the images passed to me. His body destroyed, little to support that he was ever a living creature. He was gone.
The thundering vehicle, black against the sky, was approaching again, deafening. It was a leisurely predator, taking its time to cover us.
I frantically passed my wolf an image of the pack stabilizing under our guidance, escaping into the cover of the trees. All the while I darted around the wolves closest to me, goading them into moving again, pushing them toward the trees. As my wolf loped to meet me, his images were a wall of sights and sounds that I couldn’t interpret. I caught one in a hundred. None of them made sense, strung together. And still, here came the monster from over the trees.
My wolf sent me an urgent, scattered thought.
Cole. Shelby.
And maybe because of the force of the thought, or maybe because the sun was warming me and I felt some shadow of someone else I used to be inside me, I knew who he meant.
I looked back over my shoulder, still half running sideways to keep from losing momentum. There, sure enough, were Cole and Shelby, locked in a fight breathtaking in its savagery. They were almost too far away for me to see clearly, way down on the flat slope we were on. But there wasn’t anything to block my view when the black creature roared through the air behind them.
There was a series of pops, barely distinguishable from the rumbling above, and then Shelby released Cole.
He scrambled back from her as she lashed out, directionless. Right before she crumpled, she turned toward me. Her face was a red mess, or perhaps it was a red mess where her face used to be.
The helicopter roared low.
A second later, Cole fell, too.