Free Pure Magic (Black Dog Book 3) by Rachel Neumeier Page A

mention to Grayson that we might give the road crews a little nudge one of these days.”
    Justin made a noncommittal sound.
    “Nearly there,” said Ezekiel, and added lightly, “Relax. You’ll be fine. Dimilioc protects the Pure.”
    He’d said it before, of course. He said it now like a motto, or a mantra. Justin glanced at him sidelong, but said nothing. Anticipation was starting to wear out nervousness. He had to admit he really wanted to know about this Pure thing. And it was harder to be nervous, when everyone kept promising he was safe. Why should they lie, after all, when they had him anyway?
    Though ‘safe’ was a long way from ‘free.’ A prisoner in a dungeon could be pretty safe .
    Ahead of them, the forest opened up at last. A long curving driveway led away toward a great blankness that was probably a sweeping lawn, and beyond that, a mansion that looked, in the dark, huge enough to house a hundred people. Lamps glowed on either side of the door and some of the windows were lit; enough light, along with the car’s headlights, to see that the mansion was mostly red brick lower down, with lots of white stone above and a sharply sloped red-tiled roof. A wide porch wrapped around most of the near side of the mansion.
    “Welcome to Dimilioc!” Ezekiel said, his tone amused. And got out of the car, and opened Justin’s door for him, and stood there looking at him, waiting.
    Justin unsnapped his seat belt, but then he just sat there for a long moment, breathing. And he’d thought he wasn’t nervous. That he wanted answers too much to be scared. How stupid. But he couldn’t help it.
    “Don’t freeze up now, kid,” Ethan said. He patted Justin on the shoulder. He got out of the SUV and looked at Justin expectantly.
    Justin took a deep breath and got out of the car.
     
    Grayson Lanning, a man with heavy features and a hard, humorless face, reminded Justin very strongly of his high school principal. The man had once been a gunnery sergeant in the marines and retained a snap to his voice that could bring even the most obnoxious kid to a full stop in a fraction of a second. Grayson Lanning even looked a little like that principal: only middling tall but broad, the sort of man who could clearly punch a troublemaker right through a wall. A brick wall. Without bruising a knuckle. Justin reminded himself sternly that he’d always gotten along just fine with Principal Dupuy and that there was no reason to expect Grayson Lanning to be worse. Except, of course, that he was a werewolf. Justin was certain of it. That strange kind of sharp-edged spiky darkness surrounded him, just as it did Ezekiel and Ethan.
    Ethan looked a lot like Grayson Lanning, in fact. Justin surreptitiously looked back and forth between the older man and the younger. Father and son? Uncle and nephew, maybe? Ethan didn’t have the . . . the depth of the older man. That sense of barely contained power. But Justin thought he might, someday, when he was older.
    At the moment, despite the hour, Grayson Lanning was sitting behind a wide desk in an office that looked a lot like a principal’s office, only larger. More like an office crossed with a conference room, because though this end of the room held a desk and file cabinets, a long table stretched off to the right. Paperwork littered the desk, and behind Grayson a file cabinet had one of its four drawers partially pulled out. A television sat on the desk, too, to one side as though it had been hurriedly carried in and wasn’t part of the room’s normal furnishings. The television was turned so that Justin couldn’t see its screen. Its volume was off, but the light from the screen shone on the polished surface of the desk.
    A broad-shouldered young man who might have been about Ezekiel’s age, and who looked Hispanic or Indian or something, stood behind Grayson Lanning. He was scowling at Justin—no, at Ezekiel. One of his hands rested possessively on the shoulder of a pretty Hispanic