Drake Sisters 07 - Hidden Currents

thick, silver-tipped coats and a shimmering fal of luxurious fur. Al were larger than normal, even the two smal er females. Each had the blue eyes from their puppy days when Ivory had tracked blood and death back to the den, finding the mangled bodies of her natural wolf pack al those years ago. Even then, she’d become a scourge to the vampires, a whisper, the beginnings of a legend, and they’d sought to destroy her. Instead, they’d kil ed and mutilated the bodies of the wolf pack she’d befriended.
    She’d found the puppies dying, their torn bodies wriggling across the blood-soaked ground, trying to find their mother. She couldn’t bear to lose them, her only family, her only contact with warmth and affection, and she’d fed them her blood out of sheer desperation to keep them alive.
    Carpathian blood. Hot and healing. She’d stayed in the den with them, back away from the light of day, nearly starving herself and, again out desperation, having to take smal amounts of blood from them to stay alive. She hadn’t realized she was giving blood exchanges until the largest and most dominant of the pups underwent the change.
    The pups had retained their blue eyes as they’d grown, the Carpathian blood giving them the ability to shift. Their ability to communicate with Ivory had saved them, giving them the necessary psychic brain function to live through the conversion. They had been wounded a thousand times in battle, but over the last century they’d learned how to successful y bring down a vampire, the seven of them working as a team.
    She lay back in the snow, catching her breath, letting her body absorb the pain of her wounds. The one in her neck throbbed and burned and she knew she had to clean it immediately. She was impervious to the cold, as al Carpathians were. Her race was as old as time, nearly immortal, as she had discovered, to her horror, when the prince’s son had betrayed her to the vampires for his own gain. She’d never known such agony, an endless battle deep in the earth as years went by and her body refused to die.
    She must have made a sound, although she didn’t hear herself. She thought her cry was silent, but the wolves pressed closer, trying to comfort her.
    Behind the shield, the natural pack took up the cry. Looking up at the night sky, she let her wolves soothe her, the love and devotion a balm to her whenever she thought too much about her former life. Time was creeping forward. This time of day was as much an enemy as the vampire. She had to hurry to get to her lair; there was stil much to be done before dawn.
    Ivory pressed her fingers to her burning eyes and forced her body to move. First, she removed the poison from the lesions in her flesh, where the vampire’s poison-tipped claws had torn her open. The vampires who banned together used tiny, wormlike parasites to identify one another, and those parasites infected any open wound. She had to push them through her pores fast, before they could take hold and require a much more in-depth healing. Again she brought down the lightning to kil them before mixing soil and saliva to pack her own wounds.
    â€œReady?†she asked her family, picking up her weapons and shoving the used arrows back into her pack. She never left a weapon or arrow behind, careful that her formula didn’t fal into the hands of the vampires, or worse, Xavier, her mortal enemy.
    Ivory stretched out her arms and the pack leapt together, forming the ful length coat in the air as they shifted, covering her body, the hood over her head and flowing pelt surrounding her with warmth and affection. She was never alone when she traveled with her pack. No matter where she went, no matter how many days or weeks she traveled, they traveled with her, keeping her from going insane. She’d learned to be alone and had the wolf’s natural wariness of strangers. She had no friends, only enemies, and she was comfortable that way.
    Striding through the snow, she waved her hand and al owed the shield to disintegrate. The wolf pack mil ed around her, weaving in and out between her legs and sniffing at her coat and boots, greeting her as a member of the pack. The alpha marked every bush and tree in the vicinity to cover Raja’s scent marks. Ivory rol ed her eyes at the display of dominance.
    â€œMales are the same the world over, no matter what the species,†she said