Wolf Pact: A Wolf Pact Novel by Melissa de La Cruz Page A

heart beating too fast.
    Quick as a flash,she stabbed him in the thigh with the knife.
    He yelled in pain and she was able to push him off her and scramble away, but her freedom was short-lived, as she felt his hand wrap around her ankle and pull her back to him.
    She screamed and kicked, thrashing wildly to get away, but he was too strong. Before she knew what was happening, he had his hands wrapped around her throat again.
    He began to squeeze the breath out of her and she panicked, struggling and fighting to breathe; it was useless—he was so much stronger—but as she looked into the boy’s curiously yellow eyes, an image flashed in her mind.
    She saw Lucifer—her father—standing inside an elaborate palace, surrounded by magnificent columns of gold. A cast of thousands was gathered, and Lucifer stood at the top of a marble staircase, looking down at a creature of exquisite beauty. It was a man, but it was taller than a human male, with a certain otherworldly magnificence, wild-eyed and ferocious, with the same dazzling golden eyes.
    The image did not comefrom her memory but from Lucifer’s. When she had been captive to his spirit, when he had taken over her soul, fragments of his memories had drifted into her consciousness. Triggered by random events, memories she’d never had would suddenly pop into her mind. She closed her eyes to recall the scene once more. She could hear Lucifer speak. The language was unfamiliar, its words harsh and convoluted, but she knew she could speak them as if they were her own.
    “Release me!” she cried in that strange and foreign tongue. The room froze as the boy stared at her in surprise. He eased his grip and fell away, gaping at her in amazement and confusion, as if he could not quite understand why he had let her go.
    But it was too late—she’d lost too much oxygen; everything went black—and Bliss felt the life seep out of her.

F IFTEEN
     
    L awsonsteered the car away from the butcher shop, through the busy streets of town and out to the old gravel roads. The rumble of the tires against the rock was a comforting noise, like the soft roar of ocean waves, and if he wasn’t careful, it would lull him to sleep. The girl was still passed out on the backseat. Malcolm said she was fine, he’d felt her pulse, and she would wake soon enough. The youngest was sitting next to her, monitoring her progress. He’d learned her name from her identification card in her purse.
    The trap had worked. Malcolm had shifted, the markings of his wolf form the closest to Lawson’s, and led her inside the shop, where Lawson lay in wait. He’d sent Edon and Rafe ahead to protect Arthur, in case she came with a pack of hounds. But now Lawson hoped he hadn’t done much damage. He’d meant to kill her, but when she spoke to him in the ancient language of the wolves, the words that had been lost to them since Lucifer’s curse, he knew she was not an enemy. Speaking
Hroll
was punishable by death. So it meant that maybe, just maybe, Bliss Llewellyn was even a friend.
    His mind raced.If she was not one of Romulus’s trackers, what did she want? Why was she looking for them? Why had the oculus shown him her image? It slowly dawned on him—he had asked the oculus to show him Tala, but it had shown him Bliss instead. There had to be a connection between the girls. But what was it? Could Bliss lead him to Tala in some way? There had to be a reason for the oculus’s answer.
    It didn’t help that when he looked at Bliss, it was as if his insides had turned to jelly. The oculus had masked the full effect of her beauty, and now that he didn’t regard her as the enemy, he was unprepared for the reaction her presence stirred in him, and had even as he had meant to kill her in the butcher shop. Instant. Physical. Painful, even. He shook the feeling away; he had to ignore it. He wasn’t that kind of wolf anymore.
    “She is awake,” Malcolm called from the backseat.
    “Where are you taking me? Who are