“I’m sorry about your pack,” I said softly. “If you want me to beat the shit out of every single one of them for hurting you, just say the word. I’ll throw down for a friend.” Fuck her mate for taking her spark. I literally needed to start a support group for shifters like us, those who didn’t fit into pack life.

Sam’s chuckle was a welcome relief. “I’m really glad I met you, Alpha Mera Callahan. You were right to ditch ‘Wolfe.’ You don’t need it.”

Okay, so I literally loved this shifter babe. She knew what was up.

We stopped talking when we hit the near pitch-dark ground level, the unease in my body stronger than ever as a faint musky scent invaded my nostrils.

“Smells like fire,” I whispered. “And death. Someone tried to cover it up, but the undertones remain.”

Sam cleared her throat. “Yeah, I brought another teacher in here and she could smell nothing, but I picked it up too. My sense of smell is my strongest asset.”

It was mine as well—another common trait between us.

Sam led me through a small hall and out into the huge, open main room, and the farther we went, the more certain I was that I’d been down here before. I just couldn’t recall when or for what.

“Do you see it yet?” Sam asked.

I couldn’t see much, so I called on my wolf to rise up and assist me. For once, she responded immediately, adding her power to mine. The darkened room came into clearer focus so I could see exactly what I’d been missing before.

“What. The. Fuck?” I took a step forward. “What happened here?”

Sam was motionless beside me, as if to not disturb the spirits of this place. “I have no damn idea,” she whispered. “How is it possible for there to have been this much destruction without the rest of the school suffering from it as well?”

The basement had been burned, black scorch marks across the room, reaching as high as the far-off ceilings. My human eyes hadn’t seen the destruction, but my wolf ones saw it all. There was nothing left besides piles of char and blackened fixtures. “I read the pack meeting agendas, going back a few years,” I said softly. “No fire here was mentioned.”

I’d been trying to find some sort of evidence about what happened to me, but I would have remembered a fire in the school.

“I asked around too,” she admitted. “Hence why I knew this was odd. Judging by the damage, this would have been a raging inferno, unable to be hidden. But someone is hiding it, because no one I’ve spoken to knows a damn thing about a fire in the school.”