stilled him. At least for the time being he wasn’t going anywhere.
Since we couldn’t hear what Timothy was saying, I was forced to watch his gestures and try to get a read on his audience’s reaction. The number of pews in the church could have held a thousand people, yet only twenty were there. That, combined with the early hour, told me these folks must be important to Timothy’s cause. Either he trusted them, or he needed them, but there was a reason they were all there.
None of them looked even remotely special. They were the kind of people who defined the word nondescript. I wondered what it was about them that made them so important to Timothy and his cause.
Something moved next to Timothy, and everyone’s attention shifted at once. My hand involuntarily tightened on Wilder’s arm, so forcefully he flinched. Even knowing I was hurting him I couldn’t let go.
Two men I hadn’t seen before joined Timothy at the front of the church. They stood apart from the audience in appearance, both wearing dark suits. I recognized one of them immediately as the guy who had tried to run me off the road. Now it was my turn to keep my rage in check. Between the men was something that looked, at first glance, to be a big duffel bag. Until it moved on its own and I realized what it actually was.
Hank.
Wilder growled, his whole body drawing taut like the string on a bow before the arrow is loosed. I held firm to him, although I wanted to run at them myself. We didn’t know what was happening, but I was sure it wasn’t good. We were outnumbered and out of our element, and if we barged in now, we might both end up dead, giving Deerling precisely what he wanted.
The two men shoved Hank down onto his knees in front of Timothy. The older Shaw brother looked terrible. Since we’d seen him in the video earlier, his treatment must have gotten significantly worse. His eyes were swollen purple balloons, and he had bloody cuts on both his cheeks. His bottom lip was split and red. His greasy mop of hair looked darker than usual, and though I didn’t want to dwell on it, I realized it must be because his hair was soaked with blood.
Worse, still, in order for him to look this bad they must have been beating him constantly. Werewolves could heal superficial wounds. They must have let him recuperate only to continue the beatings anew.
Nausea churned in my gut, tickling the back of my throat with the threat of vomit.
A woman in the front row clapped her hand over her mouth in disgust, but instead of leaving the room she only moved back two rows.
She wasn’t repulsed by what they’d done to Hank, I realized. She was disgusted to be sitting so close to a werewolf.
I clenched my jaw. In that moment I hated everyone in the church as much as they must hate me. I loathed them for their opinions and their prejudice. I hated everything that building stood for. My anger was a real, tangible thing, and for one sliver of time I wanted nothing more than to raze the Church of Morning to the ground, taking everyone inside with it.
“Genie?”
I barely heard Wilder’s voice. Everything was white noise, except a faint crackling in the back of my mind.
“Genie? Hey. Princess. Snap the fuck out of it.” He grabbed me and shook me, and I wheeled around on him ready to smack him.
“What?” We were both still whispering, but my annoyance was evident.
He pointed at my raised hand.
Red flame licked all the way up from my fingertips to my elbow. My fingernails and the skin around them glowed white-blue, the way super-hot fire might.
I tried to shake the flame off, but it stayed in place, stubborn and unyielding. It didn’t hurt, but the longer it remained, the wider the blue color spread, and I didn’t think it looked particularly good for my skin to be turning blue.
In my previous experiences, I had willed the flame forward, like when I used it against the truck back on the highway. This was different. I hadn’t consciously called my power up. And this flame was more intense than anything I’d managed to conjure up in the past.
Since I hadn’t created the magic intentionally, that meant it had fed off my emotion. It had responded to the intensity of the hatred I’d felt towards those