He nuzzled her and waited patiently while she inspected each of the pack. The strongest female, Ayame, named after the demon princess wolf, cuddled close to him, inspecting his wounds and passing her tongue over the other scratches he'd received. Their littermates formed the rest of the pack: Blaez, his second in command; Farkas, the last male; and Rikki and Gynger, the two smaller females. They crowded around Ivory, pressing close to her battered and bruised body in an effort to aid her.

The littermates, born of different parents, were very distinctive with their thick, silver-tipped coats, a shimmering fall of luxurious fur, all larger than normal, even the two smaller females. All had the blue eyes from their puppy days when Ivory had tracked blood and death back to the den, finding the mangled bodies of her natural wolf pack all those years ago. Even then, she'd become a scourge to the vampires, a whisper, the beginnings of legend and they'd sought to destroy her. Instead, they'd killed and mutilated the bodies of the wolf pack she'd befriended.

She had found the puppies dying, their torn bodies wriggling across the blood-soaked ground, trying to find their mothers. She couldn't bear to lose them, her only family, her only contact with warmth and affection, and she'd fed them her blood out of sheer desperation to keep them alive. Carpathian blood. Hot and healing. She'd stayed in the den with them, back away from the light of day, nearly starving herself. Forced, again out of desperation, to take small amounts of blood from them to stay alive. She hadn't realized she was giving blood exchanges, until the largest and most dominant of the pups underwent the change.

The pups had retained their blue eyes as they'd grown, the Carpathian blood giving them the ability to shift. Their ability to communicate with Ivory had saved them, giving them the necessary psychic brain function to live through the conversion. Like Ivory, they had been wounded a thousand times in battle, but over the past century they'd learned how to successfully bring down a vampire, the seven of them working as a team.