Edge of Seventeen by Cristy Rey

CHAPTER
ONE
    The woman
spoke to the Alpha, Stephen, with her eyes steady, staring directly
into his. Her dark, silver-streaked hair was fixed tightly into a
bun at the nape of her neck. Dressed in black from the high
neckline of her shirt to the floor-length hem of her skirt,
Bernadette was a vision of puritanical severity. Her taut
expression and grave tone reflected her agitation over the matter
at hand, a matter for which Stephen’s pack had been summoned.
    Behind him, at the far wall of Bernadette’s
office, Cyrus and the pack’s two other Beta wolves, Angel and Neal,
stood squarely side by side. Meeting them on her own was a display
of Bernadette’s power. She wasn’t afraid of them though she had
cause to be. It was ballsy of her to assert an intimidating
position to such a well-regarded pack Alpha, as if he was a lesser
man. An eye-to-eye standoff with a werewolf was a game of chicken
that a lesser human would lose.
    A werewolf’s need for dominance was a genetic
carryover of their curse. Lycanthropy changed a man, and not just
on the full moon. It heightened his senses, slowed his aging to a
virtual standstill, made him nearly invincible, and amplified his
feral tendencies.
    Stephen’s arms crossed over his chest so his
generous biceps bulged from the sleeves of his polo. His shoulders
were broad for his small frame. For a werewolf to be less than five
and a half feet tall and still manage to project such an
unmistakable aura of leadership was unheard of. That he was so
widely deferred to among the preternatural population was a
testament to his innate respectability. Even without all the
weightlifting, he posed a threat to other werewolves regardless of
his diminutive stature. It was his nature. Stephen’s gift was his
mastery of the role of Alpha. Authority threaded through his
essence. Even mundanes, or humans with no preternatural skill or
ability, weren’t immune to it.
    But Bernadette was no ordinary witch. She was
a force all her own, human or not. In the last decade, she had
situated herself within Seattle’s liberal, youthful demographic.
She and her coven ran the country’s premier tele-psychic
foundation. The unassuming, matronly witch appeared in television
ads and in magazines as the grandmotherly sort, wise beyond her
years, and with ‘gifts of extrasensory ability’ that she offered as
services to the paying public.
    Despite the inauspicious, unlikely location
where Bernadette set up shop, she cornered the market on all things
preternatural. Less than an hour away from the heart of the city,
Bernadette and her coven occupied a two-acre estate. The humble
office space in Seattle was nothing more than a front for her real
business. The manor on the property in the rural outskirts of the
city was Bernadette’s true base of operations. While glorified
telemarketers took mundanes’ calls for psychic readings, all the
actual magic happened there.
    Unwitting people might have considered the
organization ‘hocus pocus’. The Seattle Post profile on
Mother Bernadette, as she was known, described her as ‘a totally
consuming and addictive fraudulent enterprise’. But it was
understood by a fair and secretive population to be a very real and
very powerful group of witches. Rumor had it that Bernadette was
unsatisfied with being the head of the regional organization,
however. She was making a play for the bigger picture. She wanted
it all. This meeting was just the first domino in a long line, the
ends of which were still unknown.
    “I have called you here on a very special
matter,” she said. “It concerns the Incarnate. I request your
assistance in retrieving her and bringing her to me.”
    Stephen’s brow had grown heavy as Bernadette
had started speaking. By the time she said her last word, it was
densely knotted. His expression matched the gravity of the witch’s
request. As soon as Bernadette had dropped the word ‘Incarnate’ on
the pack, a collective, subtle shudder rolled through