Trail of Dead (Scarlett Bernard #2)(70)

That made sense, but she was shaking like a leaf. I crouched, very carefully touching her wrist. “Ana?”

Her gaze met mine for an instant, and then she looked away. “Will ordered me to stay out,” she said, her low voice clouded with shock and grief. “My girlfriend’s in there, but he said I had to leave, and I couldn’t…I couldn’t stay.”

Ouch. I understood that she was being literal. She couldn’t go in. As the alpha, Will can control the wolf half of his pack members, but he’s a good guy and doesn’t usually push them. This was probably the first time he’d flexed his power over her, and she wasn’t taking it well.

“Who’s in there, Ana?”

She swallowed. “Some customers. Will. And Lydia.”

“Which wolves?” I said, trying to keep the impatience out of my voice. “Who took the wolfberry?”

“Eli,” she said. “And Caroline.”

I didn’t wait for further explanation, just rose carefully—the Advil was already helping, but my back was still stiff and tender—and stepped past Anastasia, into the bar.

The door opened into a tiny alcove, a few feet away from the main bar area. As soon as I stepped all the way into the alcove, I froze and looked down. I was standing on a human hand.

I managed not to yelp but lurched backward, almost slipping in a long smear of blood. When I was steady I pressed my back against the door, which had closed behind me, straining to see in the dim bar lighting. There was a body taking up most of the alcove, a woman lying on her stomach, pointed toward the door as though she were trying to leave. I recognized the short, dark hair, the sweeping, tilted nose. Caroline. A strangled sob escaping my throat, I bent at the waist, spotting at least two bullet holes in her back. Silver bullets.

“Scarlett?” Will’s voice whispered.

Later, Scarlett. Mourn for her later. I held my breath and stepped around Caroline’s corpse into the main room of the bar. Hair of the Dog was in shambles. There was broken glass everywhere, from dozens of framed pictures that had exploded off the walls. It looked like someone had swept an arm around the room, knocking everything violently to the floor, and then rolled around in the broken glass and shaken like a dog. Which was probably more or less what had happened. The smell of blood was overwhelming, and I saw that the dark-colored floor was shining in places. A lot of places. I counted four other bodies on the floor, that I could see.

Against my usual instincts, I ignored them. They were either dead or in need of help, and that wasn’t coming while there was a crazed werewolf running around. I looked at Will, who was holding a huge revolver in his right hand, his left hand flat and out in a “calm down” gesture. They were both pointed toward the back corner of the bar, which I couldn’t see yet. I stepped up next to him, trying to keep as quiet as I could, and rounded the bar to see an enormous wolf—Eli—growling in the back corner of the room. The wolf’s fur was raised all along his back, and his huge teeth were locked around the neck of a young woman in her midtwenties. She was pale, drenched in blood and tears and wolf slobber, breathing in a rapid pant with little whimpering noises. My own breath caught in my throat.

I had seen pictures of Eli’s wolf, but they didn’t do him justice: he was gorgeous, colored in blurred shades of silver and black, with white tips on the bottom of each paw. I couldn’t get over the size of him, either—wild wolves are big, but werewolves weigh as much in wolf form as they do in human form. Eli had to be around two hundred pounds, most of it muscle, and the wolf was the same. His eyes, though…there was unmistakable madness in them. I’d seen werewolves from this distance before, and I’d once seen a rabid dog in our neighborhood when I was growing up. But I’d never seen the two combined.

The woman was scrambling to hold her own weight upright on the slippery blood-and-glass floor so she wouldn’t just be dangling from the wolf’s enormous jaws, while simultaneously trying not to jar the wolf. It was obvious that she was tiring, and with nothing to gain purchase on, she was beginning to slip downward. I tried to swallow, my mouth suddenly bone-dry.

Will must have seen me in his peripheral vision, but he gave a tiny head shake. Don’t move yet. I stayed a step behind him, keeping the wolf’s attention on the bigger man. “Eli,” Will crooned softly, “let go of her, okay? She’s a friend.” The wolf didn’t move, just continued to growl. “He’s shifting about every two minutes,” Will said in the same soothing voice, and I realized he was talking to me. “He’s got maybe a minute and a half. If he starts to change, he’ll bite down. I will shoot him before that happens.”

Will’s voice was firm and calm, but when I chanced a sideways look I saw tears rolling down his cheeks. “Silver?” I asked briefly, though I knew the answer. Will was the one who had shot Caroline. Later, Scarlett.

“Yes.”

“Let me try,” I whispered, as calmly as I could.

For the first time, Will took his eyes off Eli’s wolf to glance at me. “He can snap her neck before you can get a single step forward—”

“No time to argue,” I said. Moving very slowly, I pulled Molly’s sweater over my head, keeping my eyes away from the wolf’s. I spotted a tattered gray bar rag hanging out of Will’s back pocket and reached forward to tug it out at the same speed. “You have to let me try, Will. It’s Eli.” I tried to keep my voice as calm as Will’s, but when I got to Eli’s name I couldn’t keep the desperation out of it. The wolf heard it and snarled in his throat, ears flicking in my direction.