Unstoppable (Their Shifter Academy #6) - May Dawson Page 0,36
wanted to believe her. Even though I’d wondered for years what she thought happened after the alpha’s men dragged me out of the house, as I fought them desperately. She must have known they hadn’t taken me out for ice cream. Had our parents convinced her that happened was right? Had she needed to believe that to survive? She hadn’t even been in her teens yet.
If she was lying, she was still my little sister. I’d heard Rosemary apologize desperately plenty of times growing up, but I didn’t think she knew how to apologize honestly. But maybe this was as close as she could come.
“It’s okay,” I told her. Her fingers brushed mine again, and I grabbed her hand. She looked up at me in surprise. We hadn’t held hands since we were little kids. “Even if you did, I still would have come back for you, Rosemary.”
Her eyes welled with tears. “I shouldn’t have…”
Shouldn’t have called me? Shouldn’t have put us both in danger?
“It’s going to be okay,” I promised her with confidence I couldn’t feel.
Penn pulled his shirt over his head, revealing sinewy muscle and colorful tattoos; he had sleeve tattoos on both arms and more tattoos across his shoulders and pecs. White bandages still stood out on the tanned skin that rippled over his chiseled abs. He looked confident and dangerous, but the grizzled man across from him was stripping too so that he could shift—which Penn couldn’t do.
He squared off with the pack alpha.
The alpha looked away from Penn, holding his arms out to shrug at the crowd of fighters, who laughed and hooted.
Penn just grinned in response. I knew he was used to being underestimated.
The alpha suddenly whirled and charged at him. Penn flashed out of his way, though, and the alpha stumbled on air. Penn might not be a wolf anymore, but he was fast as one.
The alpha was already whirling as Penn kicked him, and the alpha’s shoulders slammed into the dirt. He rolled up, growling, his mouth already beginning to transform.
“Well, that stopped being a joke real fast, didn’t it?” Penn demanded.
There was a moment where the alpha would be weakest and most vulnerable during the transformation, and Penn dove into the fray as the alpha’s muscles snapped, as his mouth suddenly filled with extra teeth. He got his hand on the alpha’s neck and drove his knee into his face, over and over. The blood of the transformation splattered over them both, and for a moment, the alpha’s face stayed misshapen and bleeding, as if he were trapped between being a human and a wolf.
Then suddenly, the alpha finished the change with a roar, and whirled to snap at Penn. He had suddenly transformed into the enormous gray wolf that had haunted my dreams for years.
But Penn was already jumping over his back. The wolf whirled to fight him, but Penn managed to grab his muzzle with one hand, holding his mouth closed while he punched him in the eye. The next moment, the alpha threw him halfway across the yard, and Penn landed hard, seeming to bounce across the lawn.
The alpha didn’t go after him right away, though. He shook his head; his eye looked swollen and hurt. He was blinded on one side.
Or he wanted us to think he was.
Penn, weaponless and facing a wolf, had already bounced to his feet. He shook out his shoulders and whistled a tune as he moved back toward the wolf.
The wolf lunged at him, just as I realized that Penn’s whistling didn’t sound quite right. He was throwing his voice subtly to one side. He’d realized the wolf was blind in one eye too, and he was trying anything that might work to his advantage.
But if Penn was using magic to alter sounds—and I wondered if he was changing where his scent seemed to come from too—in the midst of a fight, he was far more powerful than he’d been three months before, when we lost our wolves.
The wolf lunged at him. Penn waited until the last second, then rolled underneath him. My breath caught in my chest; that was a dangerous position, one where the wolf could easily pin him. Penn punched the wolf in the throat, slammed his knees up into it, then rolled to one side and up to his feet.
The movement left him open for a moment, though, and the wolf’s snapping teeth ripped into Penn’s side, tearing open the bandages over his burn.