The angry woman I recognized from the hotel hallway in Wink, the widow who had jumped Harlow, stepped into a beam of moonlight. I had been wrong. She wasn’t just angry. She was so far beyond pissed there wasn’t a word for her volatile state. Violent energy radiated from her, and my pulse galloped once she got near enough for the tendrils of her insidious powers to caress me.

“She’s not an igel.” I had no idea if the wolf understood me, but I had to warn him. “She’s a Fury.”

Her nearness suffocated. Foam slid past my lips, down my chin. I vibrated with so much rage, my eyes rolled back in my head. Dragging myself out from under that torrent left me sweating.

“You came to find the mermaid.” Her black gaze burned through me. Her big toes dragged twin trails through the sand, but her feet no longer touched the ground. “You’re the one who left the messages on her phone.”

Well that explained why Harlow had been out of contact. “Where is she?”

“You should leave,” she told the slavering wolf. “I have no quarrel with you or yours.”

“She…is…mine.”

The sound of Graeson’s rasping voice snapped my head toward him. Suspended inside the shadow’s gut, he had managed a partial shift without drawing our attention. Sweat beaded his skin, and his bones glided under his muscles, distorting his proportions from that of a wolf into a man.

“Is that true?” The shadow holding me squeezed as Letitia considered me. “Do you belong to the wolf?”

Accepting his claim stamped my ticket out of danger, but Harlow wouldn’t be as lucky. She had screwed up in Wink, and if found guilty, she would be punished for her actions, but it wasn’t up to the grief-ravaged Fury to decide her fate. That’s what magistrates were for. We had a justice system for a reason.

“What happened in Wink was my doing.” I lifted my chin. “Harlow was struggling, and I rushed in to help. The others followed my lead. Your husband’s death was my fault. Not hers.”

“Ellis,” Graeson snarled through his contorted jaw. “Don’t be…a hero.”

Ignoring the warg was easy with a pissed-off Fury breathing hatred in my face. “You.” It was the only word she managed to get past her trembling lips. She made it sound like the worst insult imaginable. “Bring her.” The shadow holding me bobbed in her wake, riding the heat waves streaming from her skin like a hawk soaring on a thermal updraft.

“Ellis.”

“Kill the wolf. I can’t risk him or his pack coming after her.” The Fury appreciated the glistening water. “Drown him in the lake and leave him there. Let the creature finish him off.”

The shadow rippled then stuffed a smoky hand down the wolf’s throat to quiet him.

“The kelpie?” I struggled against my captor. “You saw it?”