didn’t think too much of it. I mean, you were a demon raised in the human realm, not pure blood as far as we knew at the time.”
“But then the scythe thing,” Mal said.
“And I saw the way you reacted around him,” Azazel said. “The way a Loup would act around an alpha.”
The penny dropped. “You think I’m a Loup?” I snorted. “Newsflash, I don’t sprout hair and howl at the moon.” My hairy legs did not count.
Azazel leveled his milky gaze on me. “We don’t know anything for certain. We won’t know until we get the results back.”
“I would know if I was Loup.”
“Just like you knew you were part demon?” Mal replied.
Fuck. Wait a second. My gaze flicked to Azazel. “You hid me. You hid my nature with an enchantment …”
Azazel nodded slowly. “My theory is that the same enchantment somehow rendered your Loup gene dormant.”
“But with the enchantment gone …” I was grasping his train of thought, and it was chilling.
“It’ll wake,” Conah said.
I shook my head. “No, this is bullshit.” I looked to Azazel. “You knew my parents. I mean, you spied on them, so you should know if one of them was a Loup.”
“It doesn’t work that way,” Azazel said. “Loup males impregnate human women all the time. The man that raised you may not have been your biological father. You know the female population is low for the Loups, so they use human women to carry their cubs. However, the cubs are usually male. It’s very rare for a female to be born of a human-Loup union.”
“If your father was a Loup, he would have come back for you when you reached maturity,” Mal said.
“If he did, he’d have heard of the fire and your death,” Azazel continued.
The fire my biological mother had been killed in. The one everyone thought I’d died in as a baby.
“But nothing is certain,” Conah added quickly. “The sample is marked anonymous. No one will know if you are a Loup. We can keep it a secret.”
A secret? Another fucking secret. I stared at them. I wasn’t a Loup, I couldn’t be, but if I was, then I’d accept it. I’d accept it as a part of me.
“No. If I’m a Loup, then I need to own it.”
They all three exchanged glances, but it was Azazel that responded.
“And what do you think will happen to you then?” he asked. “You’d be a Loup female in an outlier world filled with males desperate for miasma and a ready womb.”
My stomach clenched. “I’m a Dominus. They can’t touch me.”
Azazel shook his head. “You’d be an outlier, too. A Loup bound by their laws. A Loup first. A Dominus second.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying if you are Loup, and if the Loup packs find out, then they will claim you, and there’ll be nothing we can do about it.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Everything they’d just said, coupled with my body’s reactions to Grayson, indicated the worst because I’d seen Larson from the Rising Pack, heard what he wanted from the female Loups. I didn’t want to be a female in that world. I didn’t want to be an outlier. Panic squeezed my chest with an iron fist.
“Oh, God. They’ll smell me. They’ll know.”
Azazel gripped my shoulders. “No. I won’t let them have you. I will protect you, Fee.”
He almost sounded like he meant it, like he wanted to, not like he had to. I scanned his harsh features, trailing my gaze down his scar and then back up to meet his cloudy eyes.
Even if he wanted to protect me … “What if you can’t?”
Conah made a strangled sound and then shoved his chair back. “There has to be a loophole somewhere.”
“The results aren’t back yet,” Mal reminded us, and the sharp edge of panic ebbed a little.
Who knew he could be the voice of reason?
“I’m not waiting to find out,” Conah said. “I’m going to the archives.” He swept from the room in a move that was deserving of a cape.
“He’s right, though,” Mal said softly. “We need to prepare for the worst.”
And my gut told me the worst would be horrific.
Fuck sleep. Instead, I settled for killing the huge mountain wolves in the Oriel dimension of Chaos Dimensions. I had several shards to recover, and the quest would keep my mind busy. In this virtual world, I was powerful and safe and super kick-ass.
The sofa dipped to my right and then my left. Did I want company? I was torn, but then Mal’s character