Blood Heir (Aurelia Ryder, #1)(76)

Seals like this came in several varieties. Some blocked sound, others blocked sight, a third type did both. This one was a trap. It had sealed us inside the room, blocking all sight, sound, and magic, and I would have to break it to get out.

Nick Feldman was going to kill me.

I didn’t want to hurt him. He was always kind to me. Once Nick started, he wouldn’t stop. I would have to cripple him.

He looked at Stella’s war banner. I put it on his desk and sat back.

“Ms. Ryder, do you know what happens when a foreign shapeshifter enters Pack territory?”

He wasn’t just calm. He’d turned into an icicle.

“They must present themselves to the Beast Lord in twenty-four hours.”

Nick fixed me with his stare. His eyes were filled with lead. “Do you know what happens if the visitor fails to observe the proprieties?”

“The Pack finds them and brings them in?”

“Yes. They are not always gentle about it.”

I waited. He was going somewhere with this.

“An average shapeshifter is at least three times stronger than the average human and twice as fast. Throw in the claws, the fangs, the accelerated healing, the hunting instinct, and what you have is an overpowered apex predator, armed with the intelligence of a human and the strength of a monster.”

None of this seemed to require a response on my part. If this was anyone else, I’d ask if I should be taking notes or if this was going to be on the final. But the main objective here was to keep him calm.

“Shapeshifters are insular, distrustful of outsiders, and deeply paranoid.”

Pot, kettle.

“Their humanity is often hanging by a thread,” Nick continued. “It takes very little prompting for that thread to snap. When they encounter a foreign shapeshifter in their territory and are met with resistance, they assume that that shapeshifter is up to no good. They will attempt to apprehend this invader. They may get excited and even kill them. When that happens, the pack this visitor belongs to retaliates. This is the point where rational thought and logic goes out the window and we have a shapeshifter war.”

He was working up to something. There was an explosion coming, I could feel it.

Nick crossed his arms. “What we have here, right now, is a foreign shapeshifter who happens to be the beta of the largest shapeshifter pack in North America. His mere presence in the Pack’s territory is an insult. If they find out he’s here and he escapes, the Pack loses face, and they will retaliate. If they apprehend him and he’s injured, Ice Fury will retaliate. Either way, this is a declaration of war. We are watching the beginning of a massacre. And that massacre won’t be fought in Alaska; it will be fought here, in this city.”

He pointed to the window.

“On those streets. Right out there.”

I sat very still. This conversation was like crossing an iced-over lake. One wrong step and I’d plunge into frigid water.

“Hundreds of shapeshifters will die. Thousands of innocent bystanders will be murdered. These are not some hypothetical statistics. This country has seen shapeshifter wars before. We know in gruesome detail what kind of casualties result from it. And those were small packs. Can you even imagine the scale of the slaughter when the two largest packs rip into each other?”

I opened my mouth to answer.

“I think you can,” he said.

The ice under my feet just cracked.

“I think you’re counting on it. To the people you serve, humans have no more value than mosquitoes.”

He picked up a folder from the corner of his desk and dropped it in front of me. It fell open. Pictures fanned out over the desk. A photograph of Erra on a horse, my uncle on her left and me on her right. Another image, me in a royal gown of Shinar, receiving a group of businesspeople, half of them glaring, the other half awkwardly trying to bow, on the sunlit terrace of Dosari, Erra’s California palace. The pale green gown hugged my body. My hair, caught by a golden circlet, cascaded down in a waterfall of golden waves. Gold bracelets, identifying me as the Heir, glinted on my wrists. A third image, a painting, so lifelike it was almost a photograph—me in blood armor and on a horse, splattered with gore and screaming.

Great. Fantastic. He’d given me the case way too easily. I knew he would dig into my background, but I’d hoped all the roadblocks I had set up in the last few months would delay him long enough for me to stop the ma’avirim.

Damn this fucking face.

“I have a theory.” Nick’s voice cut like a knife. “Would you like to hear it, Dananu?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“No. There are four and a half thousand miles separating Atlanta’s Pack and Ice Fury. So, I asked myself, what would the beta of Ice Fury, the guy who runs things on a day-to-day basis, be doing in Atlanta? They call him the wolf who rules in all but name. The Silver Wolf, the guy who managed to wrangle over five thousand separatists and misfits, half of whom have gone wild, into an actual working society, everything they had rejected, and they love him for it. Why would he come here? Why now?”

Oh dear gods. Here we go.

“He has to realize raiding the Pack is a logistical nightmare. They can’t possibly sustain a prolonged conflict. The Pack has the Keep and it’s a fucking fortress. They would know Ice Fury was coming, because Argent would have to move thousands of shapeshifters all the way through Canada and the Midwest to here. He must want something. The Pack has exclusive rights to panacea, which helps prevent loupism. They have a vault full of magical artifacts. Maybe he wants one of those. Or he wants to crush the Pack and take over. Maybe his people are tired of the north and the cold.”