Bonarata hadn’t lied. I was a better prisoner inside that circle than I was outside it. Because outside it, the bonds that tied me to Adam—and to the pack—were functioning again. Sort of, anyway.

I reached out with my soul, down the familiar path that had so recently been blocked by silence. I reached for Adam.

It didn’t quite work. Not the way it should have.

I could feel him at the edge of my awareness, but that was it. Maybe the wreck had done something—or the drugs or magic that had kept me quiet until they got me here. Maybe it was some kind of witchcraft or magic I wasn’t resistant to right now, or that the circle was still affecting me. Maybe there was another circle around the whole property.

But I could tell that Adam was alive. Hopefully he could do the same. I’d examine the bonds more carefully later. Right now, I had to work on survival, because I could smell the distinctively musky mint of the werewolf’s scent.

“You might as well come out,” I said to Lenka the werewolf. That way I’d know where she was, and I could head for the garden wall in a direction that gave me a head start. “I know you’re there.”

She’d meant for me to scent her. She wanted me afraid. A low growl filled the air—soft enough not to be heard in the house. I think it was supposed to be scary, too—which it was, but not because I was afraid of the sound of her voice.

I remembered her crazy eyes and was scared. Fear was good. Fear would make my feet faster.

“I live with werewolves,” I reminded her. “Hiding doesn’t make you more frightening.”

The wolf who rounded the corner of the walled side of the roofed area was too thin, and her fur coat was patchy. But her movement was easy, and the fangs she showed me as she snarled were plenty long.

I’d grown up hearing the old wolves talk about how much more satisfying it was to eat something while its heart pumped frantically from terror. Some of the old wolves who came to live out their last years in the Marrok’s pack were not kind.

“Hi, there,” I told her casually—and then I bolted for the wall surrounding the yard.

I smell mostly human to a werewolf’s nose, especially if I haven’t recently been running around on coyote feet. Human is a smell with enough variability that unless they know what I am, werewolves mostly chalk up the bit of odd in my smell to that. Vampires, I don’t know as well.

I was betting that the vampires here didn’t know what I was. That they thought I was human. I’d very carefully left it out of the mini biography I’d given Bonarata, and it wasn’t widely known. My best-case scenario was that she would think I was a human woman trying to run for her life, penned inside the yard because, outside of a few martial artists and acrobats, the walls were enough to keep most people in.