Words of Power (Alice Gray Book 3)

26

Wolfy's big brown eyes widened, mirroring my own. Crap. There was no way to pretend we were good little prisoners when we were trapped in the same cell.

"At least we can watch each other's backs when the goons come back to play," I said with a shrug of fake bravado.

"Yes, but only you can withstand the poison, and you really don't want to be around me when they dose me up again."

"Yeah, I remember," I said, the memory of his crazed eyes in the club superimposing onto his features as he stood in front of me.

Sane Wolfy had the chiselled cheekbones and radiant skin of an older teenager emerging safely from the hormonal hell of puberty. His warm brown skin and silky black hair looked completely different now he was clean. This boy was blessed with good genes, and had obviously been looked after well before the DPA got hold of him.

His clipped, Queen's English accent suggested he was a London wolf with a good education. How had a DPA / vamp tag-team got hold of a young wolf from the right side of the tracks to do their experiments on?

My eyes narrowed with suspicion as his own crinkled at the corners into a smile.

"There's no need to look at me like that. I won't attack you again. Not if you can keep the Mitchell brothers and their needles away from me."

"Why are you in here?" I asked, ignoring his joke. I like soaps as much as the next girl, but now was not the time for Eastenders references.

"What do you mean? You saw them bring me in. It wasn't exactly my own choice."

"But you'd already been drugged when I saw you in the club. Why'd they let you out? Surely they wouldn't let a group of drugged up wolves roam free on the off chance that they'd run into me on a night out?"

Wolfy's brown eyes shifted to the side as he thought it through. "You know there's no Alpha at the moment, right?"

"I have an Alpha."

"He wouldn't take the rest of us on," Wolfy said, a glimmer of envy flashing through his eyes.

I didn't blame him, Lucas ruled. "Ok, so what?" I asked.

"When there's no true Alpha, the rest of us become susceptible to suggestion from the strongest wolves that are left."

"You can't mean Kev? You must be stronger than that perverted slob."

"I'm only eighteen. My first shift was only six months ago. Even if I was Beta material, I wouldn't be strong enough to resist a fully-grown male wolf like Kev. Not yet, and not when there's no Alpha to guide us."

"What about Becca?"

"It's different with her. She rules through fear, not the pack bond. Her panther is strong, but the rest of the British pack are wolves, we need a wolf to take the helm, the bond isn't strong enough from shifters of different species."

I doubted that, considering that my own pack was far more diverse than shifters of different species. We felt the bond just fine. But now probably wasn't the time to question pack mechanics, and Wolfy wasn't the person to ask.
Far more interesting a question was why were they all so scared of Becca, but I let that one go too. I needed to know if I could trust my new wolf friend, and I needed to know right now.

"Ok, so what you're saying is, the DPA goons jacked you up on some unknown stimulant and then released you into the city under Kev's direction. And, what? You hung around on the off chance that I'd be there?"

"We went straight to that club. We'd been there about ten minutes before you came in with Lucas and the others."

A dark, uneasy cloud infiltrated my brain; a miasma of doubt and grief and pain.

Somebody else had been at the club.

Thomas.

The expression on my face must have mirrored the dismay that I felt at one more proof that my vampire lover had been working against me all this time.

Wolfy reached a hand out and gave my shoulder a comforting squeeze. I looked up into his clear brown eyes, and the concern in them almost made the deluge of emotion that was churning in my gut explode out of me in a torrent of tears and snot.

Somehow I didn't think Wolfy was quite ready to witness an emotional and psychological meltdown on that scale yet, so I called to my magic, and wrapped the tendrils of power that multiplied out round and round my pain and grief until the sensations had dulled to something close to bearable.

The warmth of his large hand on my shoulder helped me come back to the question that was really at issue here. Was I a prisoner of the DPA, or the vamps?

Or worse still, had the two become synonymous. Had the vamps somehow taken over the DPA with all their political machinations? It wasn't beyond the realms of possibility, not when vamps like Brother Jerome and my own ancestor James Device had hundreds of years on the rest of us.

We were so screwed.

Oh no! Has Alice just been a tiny cog in the vamps' big plan all this time?