Page 3 of The Night Calling

RAIKA

I pushedthoughts of Conri out of my mind as I jerked out of Phell’s grip and disappeared into my room, shoving the door closed behind me. I rested my back against the solid wood, taking a deep breath to calm my racing heart. When the adrenaline subsided, I finished getting ready for the day because I wouldn’t let the devil ruin my day so early in the morning.

Phell and Dixon stood guard from the ends of the hallway—they never came inside our bedrooms. I stopped at Minsi’s bedroom and knocked on the door. When she didn’t answer, I opened it and spied inside.

Minsi’s bedroom was fit for a princess: a white twin bed with four posters and pink gossamer, a white dresser and silver-framed mirror with swirls and details, a large desk piled with books, a swinging chair in a corner, and a huge dollhouse. She had a walk-in closet in addition to the en suite bathroom.

Minsi was the youngest child of Franc and Petra, the previous alpha and his mate, and she had been adored and cared for like a porcelain doll. Her bedroom, her pink and princess-like clothing, her expensive toys reflected that. But they had never helped her make friends. That was the reason she had turned to books when she was younger.

I smiled at seeing her lounging on her bed, legs crossed, and a thick book in her hands.

“Ready to go?” I asked her.

As if just realizing I was there, Minsi lifted her eyes from the book. She nodded, dropping the book onto the comforter.

Without a word, she grabbed her backpack from the desk and walked out of her bedroom.

Ignoring Phell and Dixon as they followed us, Minsi and I descended the back stairs and exited the house through the mudroom door. Minsi didn’t question it, because she probably knew we were going the long way to avoid running into Conri.

We reached the long stone path that cut through the front lawn and led us to the main road, from where we could see the rest of the town in the distance. This house, the alpha’s house, was located at the southern edge of town. We could have taken a car, but the weather was so nice today—it was May and despite us being in northern Canada, we lived in our own bubble—I wanted to enjoy the warm sun and smell the flowers lining the stone sidewalks.

The Nightshade pack was nestled in two valleys deep into Canada’s frozen landscape, but magic kept the pack lands warm and green as if it was always spring. The town had been designed in a perfect grid with the main square at the center where pack events were held. Shops and restaurants and other services surrounded it, and houses branched out from there. Everything was in the same farmhouse style with white or beige or soft yellow walls, several shades of brown for roofs and porches with swings or rocking chairs.

Around the main square were also the town tall, the infirmary, the school, and the library.

On the other side of the main square was the burnt part of town. I always tried to keep Minsi away from there. She didn’t need to see that.

I stopped with her at the library’s entrance.

“I’ll be back later, okay?” I said the same thing every day, and Minsi only nodded. “You’ll know where I’ll be if you need me.”

Again, she nodded and went in and locked the door from the inside. Dixon stayed by the entrance. This was the one sacred place for Minsi and me, and no damn demon or wolf who followed Conri was allowed inside. I had fought Conri for it, and since I had amused him, he relented.

I entered the building across the main square—the school—and Phell didn’t stop at the entrance. I could do nothing to keep the demons away. In fact, this was the place with the greatest number of demons in town. In the entire pack lands.

I walked past two demon patrols in the wide corridors and headed to the kitchen. The demons stared at me, snickers stamping their faces—their human faces. These bastards wore human flesh, but I knew these weren’t their true form.

I called them demons in my head even though I knew most of them weren’t just demons. Most were half-demons, half-wolf shifters like Conri. Somehow, they had found each other and banded together.

I didn’t consider them true shifters, though, not like the rest of the pack. Our wolf and our human forms made up two halves of a whole. As for the demons, I didn’t want to know about what they were made of.

Rue was already in the kitchen, cutting vegetables with a sharp knife. Two demons stood at the other two entrances, watching her closely.

A small smile adorned my lips as I approached her. Rue was one of the oldest wolf shifters in the pack, and despite wolves being known for their short temper, she was kind and calm. In all the years I had known her (twenty years, aka all of my life.), I had never seen or heard her lose her cool.

She was also my favorite person in the pack, aside from Minsi.

“Raika, dear.” Rue handed me the knife and the chopping board. “You’re early,” she said, her voice thin and frail.

“So are you.” I took over the vegetable cutting duties while she went to the stove and checked the pots and pans. “What are you making today?”

“Something simple.” She added some of the chopped potatoes to the big pot with boiling water. “A creamy chicken soup and some homemade bread.” She opened the oven and checked on the big loaf of bread in there.

There was nothing simple about her cooking. Anything Rue made turned out delicious. I was glad she was the one helping me with these tasks.

I glanced at her over my shoulder. At almost two hundred years old, Rue was agile and energetic for her age, but sometimes I saw her catching her breath, or putting a hand over her heart, when she thought I wasn’t looking.

Before everything changed, Rue had been my English teacher from the time I was a pup to the day I graduated at seventeen. She had been the only kind face in school, the only one who considered me another wolf in the pack, and not a cockroach.