by LeAnn Mason
CHAPTER 31
I felt the blade sink in, my fingers dragging along warm, solid mass, though nothing was visible. I’d found him. I’d wounded him. A visage flickered before me. A lean man. An unassuming foe. A façade.
“Well done,” Seth cooed, his form solidifying before me. He held a hand to his chest where, I assumed, the blade had caught him. The coppery tang of fresh blood had Ebony roaring to the fore, and Hunter, now assured of his foe’s position, attacked. He thought his opponent weak because he was injured.
I had a feeling that only made Seth more dangerous. Without taking his eyes from me, he thrust a hand toward where Hunter had left the ground in his leap and froze the snarling wolf mid-air. “Now, now. This is between my heir and me. You stay out of it.” With a toss of what looked like… leaves… Hunter fell to the floor unmoving, and I watched in horror as the gash I'd opened on Seth’s body knitted itself closed beneath his fingertips.
“No!” I screamed, lunging for my sadistic parent. Losing my composure, I felt Ebony writhe and surge under my skin as Hunter lay still on the forest floor. I lost everyone, anyone I’d ever cared for, in one night. The fire surged through me as my loss consumed my thoughts. This man had taken everything from me.
“Now, will you come with me, or do I need to continue the lesson?” the Warlock asked mildly. The man couldn’t fathom a rejection. Never thought he wouldn’t get his way. “We need to rebuild. You have taken much from me, so much of my power gone. But I will get it back. I have much to teach you.”
My skin tightened and felt like it would split, but I lurched behind him as if on a tether. A spell, no doubt. My feet were not under my control. A puppet on a string, and getting further from where Jason lay discarded in the dirt. There was no blood, no carnage, no indication of his struggle. Just stillness.
That loss was too much. The final straw to my control. The burn of the shift became overwhelming, but I didn’t let a sound escape. I took the pain and used it to fuel my change. I doubled over, letting Ebony surge, and felt the strings pulling my limbs snap. The black magic forcing my body to move severed with Ebony’s emergence. Seth’s control waned as paws found the dead leaves strewn beneath them.
“What are you doing back there?” he finally inquired when he felt the magic fail. I couldn’t let him get his bearings. I needed to catch him off guard.
We need to try and take him out, Ebony. This is our only chance. He’s too powerful, and we’re all that’s left.
She pounced, launching from powerful hind legs to land against the Warlock’s back. The moment she connected, her powerful jaws locked at the juncture where his neck met his shoulder. Don’t let go! Thick, tarry-tasting blood filled her mouth, but Ebony didn’t release, though she really, really wanted to. The force of the impact brought Seth to his knees, the perfect height for Ebony to retain her hold, shaking her head to tear at his throat and do the most damage.
“Abi!” Seth shouted in what I’d come to realize, in former years, was Latin.
Ebony was ripped away by an invisible force and flung, our flight ending with a violent crash into the thick trunk of a tree. Pain radiated from Ebony's ribs. I’d heard a crack, but we couldn’t stop. Ignoring the discomfort—it wasn’t any more than I felt during a shift—she bolted toward him again.
“You are a quick study. That’s good.” He smiled and contorted. Bones cracked and rearranged just as my own had. Then, the wolf of my nightmares stood before me, braced for the charge.
We need to kill him, Ebony. We need to find a way.
She crashed into the larger wolf with as much force as we could muster, lifting him onto rear legs as she steered her teeth for his unprotected throat. But the witchy-wolf twisted just enough that we barely caught skin between snapping teeth. A sharp pain answered as he returned the bite, his teeth hitting the back of our neck. Neither animal had a good hold, each twisting away only to crash together again, hoping to find purchase. Snarls and barks overtook the night song of the forest, able to outdo the cicadas.
Another strike landed much the same as the first, and Ebony abandoned the hold in favor of an extremity, choosing to move her head to the grey wolf's front leg instead. Biting down, the appendage firmly in her mouth, Ebony jerked her head away from the animal. He tried pulling the opposite way, and the bone snapped between Ebony's powerful jaws.
With a whimpering growl, Seth's head swung around, aiming for one of Ebony's legs, but she danced away in the nick of time, leaving only the foul taste of tainted blood on our tongue. The sensation was distracting, and Ebony tried to rid herself of the vile fluid, giving him an opening to retaliate.
Too late, we saw him, and he dove in and latched on to the skin at Ebony's throat, twisting and tossing his head violently. I felt skin rip, an aching burn fueled by air caressing the wound. Our lifeblood flowed from the laceration to leave a warm trail of fluid indistinguishable in color within her black coat. Seth's teeth bit further into flesh as Ebony reared onto her back legs again, using her newly-freed front paws to scrabble at the wolf's face.
Aim for his eyes, I hinted. She couldn’t bite him while he was at the underside of our throat. We needed to do some serious ninja moves to get a leg into maiming position. But the leg was still injured from the bite I’d taken in human form, and it didn’t work well enough.
I wasn’t sure about Ebony, but I lost steam. My injuries were finally catching up to us, my adrenaline no longer enough to keep us going. Time seemed to slow, our reactions just a moment behind the strike. My head felt heavy, too heavy to hold up, and we stumbled.
Seth, smelling blood in the water, snarled and lunged. This was it. He went for the submission, but we wouldn't—couldn't—submit.
So, we would die.
In the too-long moment it took to blink an eye, he was on us. Those bloodied fangs dripped with saliva in anticipation as they neared our exposed and already mangled throat, the heavy bursts of hot air washing us in a choking stench as the animal panted, the metallic smell of Ebony's blood thick on his breath. Standing over us in victory, Seth again went for the throat. The animal, lost to its bloodlust, no longer cared if his human didn’t want us dead. He knew better than his master.
We would not be taken.
On our back, Seth’s wolf clamped his jaws around Ebony’s throat, cutting off the air supply, strangling us in the wolf way. But we weren’t done yet. Ebony writhed and kicked until he had no choice but to straddle her. Then, she went to work, all four of her legs raking into any exposed surface of the beast’s body she could manage. The pressure increased at our throat as he bit harder, looking to kill us even quicker now that there was a fight.
We felt wetness coat the upturned pads of Ebony’s back paws where her seeking nails had dug deep furrows into Seth’s belly. A small victory, but one I’d be proud of as our strength continued to bleed from us. Too many injuries and too much blood had been lost to sustain the fight. Black spots danced at the corner of our vision, dizziness threatening to make us vomit whatever was left in our stomach.
A warbling cry wiggled into my eardrums as the struggle continued, neither giving up, a faint sound resembling the war cry I’d wanted to shout when I was naïve about my abilities, when I thought I could be the one to take Seth Morgan out of this world. The cry grew louder, closer, more insistent. The wolf seemed to hear it, too, because he suddenly released us, ears twitching in every direction like radar trying to pinpoint where the sounds were coming from.
We were surrounded by… something. The pressure of the clearing we’d once again found ourselves in had increased about a hundred-fold in the last few moments. Seth’s wolf snarled and lunged at thin air, again and again. A gentle tug pulled Ebony’s spent carcass further from the rabid animal. A soothing energy cradled us in invisible arms.
“We’re here for you, Bug,” a voice soothed, one I hadn’t heard for ten long years.
Grams?
I wanted to cry at the thought. I didn’t want her to see me like this. An
y of this. Sure I was delirious, seeking a loving hand in my dying moments, conjuring the voice of the one person I had loved most in this world.
“Stay, Allya. We have so much to catch up on. And finally, a conduit to do it.”
The warrior-chanting hit a crescendo, distracting me from the delusion. The grey wolf’s snarling grew frantic in response. He lunged in agitated lurches wherever he twisted. He couldn’t see anything, either, but I watched as his grey body jerked with pain, yelps escaping between snapping teeth. Bursts of red bloomed across his mottled fur. Something definitely happened… it just wasn’t something I could fathom.
Spirit Warriors.
I’d heard of them. Of course, I had. They were big in Native lore, but I’d never believed I’d be in the midst of a mystical spirit war.
“I had hoped that I would be able to look into the dead eyes of the man who ripped my family apart,” Elsie’s weathered voice barked venomously as she emerged smoothly from a copse of trees. Moonlight seemed to halo her as she strode toward where the downed animal lay in the clearing. He was too injured to move much. Finally. Laying on his bloodied belly in the dirt, his eyes couldn’t focus on Elsie where she crouched before him without fear. “This will have to do.”
Ebony receded, letting me have my skin. My voice. The burning and snapping which accompanied the change barely noticeable over the pain I already endured. Lying in the dirt, bleeding and naked, I breathed in panted bursts as a means of pain management. Pushing to my side and onto an elbow with a groan, I watched as a figure I hadn’t noticed before slid up behind the dying wolf-man as he painstakingly rose again to his feet. I should have known he’d never concede to death.
I’d thought the owner of the shadow dead. Seth had done some sort of evil magic that had hit him head on, but no. Somehow, Jason stood in all his naked Shifter glory, a tomahawk glinting in the silvered moonlight. The cicadas' song again swelled like a dramatic soundtrack queued up for the death scene.
But whose death was yet to be seen…
Without a word, my mercurial mentor brought the axeblade down across the back of Seth’s wolfie neck. The force of the blow was like watching wood split. His spinal cord severed, the wolf finally stopped struggling for the upper hand, slumping to the dirt in a heap. The air released from his lungs, the body seeming to deflate like a spent balloon. The overwhelming smell, probably resembling a slaughterhouse, began to fill the small area. I definitely added to that stench. I reeked.
“That is for all of your victims,” Elsie sneered, inches from the dead snout of my former captor, watching as the defiant light bled from his eyes before rising fluidly to her feet, the movement that of a much younger woman, before she migrated toward where I hunched. “Allya, let me see you, dear,” she cooed worriedly, hands hovering over my body. She didn’t know where to touch me. I must have been a mess. I was too scared to know.
I felt like I’d been hit by a truck and my guts were around somewhere on the floor. Who knew, maybe that last part was true.
“Allya!” Jason skidded to my side, opposite my great aunt. His face was a mask of worry—for me. He appeared to hold no trace of notice for his own injuries, but I saw them. His chest now sported a gaping gash across one glorious pectoral, a mirror of the wound I’d delivered to Seth’s body. He must have healed himself by transferring the wound to Jason.
“You… I saw… you fall…” Talking was nearly impossible. I moved my unmangled arm toward my throat, remembering that Seth had ravaged it in his play for dominance.
“You should know I won’t go down that easily, Love,” he soothed, grabbing my hand and holding it tight within his. His free hand smoothed my tangled shoulder-length strands away from my eyes. Those bright hazel orbs I adored burned into me, Hunter’s visage clearly overlapping his human counterpart where he knelt in the leaves at my side.
“I like… seeing him… with you.” I pet the air around the hologram. “Hunter. It scared me at first…” My vision tunneled again. I didn’t have long before I’d pass out… or die, and I needed to know. “Mae…”
“She’ll be fine. Sleeping for the time being,” a new sultry voice answered. Gloria’s perfectly quaffed countenance loomed at the edge of my vision, blurring in and out. As I lost the battle for consciousness, it sounded like she might actually have been impressed. “Looks like I owe you a healing, little Shaman.”
CHAPTER 32
W hispers reached my ears, though I couldn’t quite make out the words or the speaker. Keeping my eyes closed, I snuggled further into the cloud I lay upon. Maybe this was the Spirit Realm, and I really floated on a cloud. The voices could be other spirits waiting for me to come around, to realize the reality of my state. That I died. Was Ebony here with me? Seth better not be. I’d have to work to kill him all over again.
Good news, I wasn’t in pain any longer. I continued testing my body in little segments. Curling toes, bending knees, squirreling even deeper into the softness at my back…
“Gloria, she’s wiggling around a bit. Is she awake?”
Gloria? Was she dead, too? I hadn’t seen her at all while I’d made my way to destroy daddy dearest. Maybe she’d been taken out early on. We went to the same place? Did that mean that I was worse than I thought or that she was better? Hmmm…
“I can see those wheels turning. She’s awake, or at least, she is waking.”
Jason.
“Was that a jab? I feel like that was a jab,” I croaked, my voice hoarse and throat scratchy as if I hadn’t spoken in a while. Or, I’d had a major injury to the area. Memories flooded back. The fire. Hunting the coven. Killing. Dying. “I’m gonna hurl.” A bucket was shoved under my nose just in time to receive whatever I still had in my stomach. Not a meal, thankfully.
“Feel better?”
I nodded weakly. “Mae? Is she all right?” I sat up too quickly and set the room to spinning before Jason gently pushed me back against the mountain of pillows that were keeping me in a reclined position.
“She hasn’t left your side,” he answered while pushing a glass of water into my hand. Then, he pointed to the far side of the room where a figure steeped in shadow as dying light streamed through the window behind where the chair was positioned. I couldn’t see her features, but by the angle of her head and the fact that she hadn’t said anything or gotten up, I assumed she slept.
Jason replaced the glass on the nightstand when I’d had my fill. Looming over where I lay in my bed—a quick glance confirmed it was my bed—he grabbed my hand. “Don’t ever scare me like that again, Red.” He bent over the last few inches, making the air stall in my lungs, causing me to forget to breathe when his lips brushed against mine as he whispered, “Ever.” Then, he pushed his pillowed pucker onto mine.
Recovering from my stupor, I pulled away, wiping my lips and looking toward the window, toward Mae’s sleeping form.
Jason cleared his throat, standing abruptly. “Well, yeah, okay. Uh, I’ll leave you alone. Let me know if you want a new trainer.” He spun on his heel to leave like the room was on fire.
“What? Why? Why are you leaving?” I was so confused. More than normal.
“You didn’t want to kiss me. I crossed a line. I’m sorry. I underst—”
Oh, no! He’d totally misunderstood. “I’ve wanted to kiss you for weeks! Well, when you weren’t being a total asshat,” I amended.
“Then, why?”
“Well… mainly because, not five minutes ago, I vomited. Didn’t really want you to taste that. I mean, I didn’t want to taste it…”
“I think she’s got a good reason, Wolf.”
My eyes shot to where Mae had positioned herself, but I still couldn’t make her out. “You’re awake,” I exclaimed, throwing off my covers and scrambling to move closer, to see my best friend. “Omigod, Mae… what are you doing here?” We were at Elsie’s house, in Grimm Hollow. She should have been at home with her family.
Finally, my friend moved to the bed and out of the shadow. So beautiful,
but she looked tired, those luminous brownish-green eyes filling with tears behind her black-framed glasses. “They’re gone. When the guy, your dad—”
“Not my dad,” I growled. The sounds loosened something in my throat, and I had to clear it to continue. “Just the sperm donor.”
“You’re right. That's not fair. They came to my house while I was at work. There… there was nothing I could do...” Tears swelled to overtake her eyes, her pert little chin wobbling with the restraint of holding in her grief. My own guilt bubbled to the surface in response to her words, her pain.
“I’ll go tell the others you’re awake,” Jason murmured. Excusing himself, he closed the door with a quiet snick.
"I am so sorry, Mae. I… I didn't mean to drag you into this. I didn't think he even knew about you. How could I have been so stupid?" I scolded myself, turning away from my friend. How could she even look at me, knowing I was the reason her family was gone? I knew her pain.
My friend moved to reassure me, scooting to squish onto the narrow mattress next to me. “No. It wasn't your fault." She paused to bridle her tears before continuing, wiping a stray tear from her cheek with a flick. "I had no idea that these things existed in the world. I thought they were just fiction from my favorite stories. Not real. Not my best friend.”
I winced. Another reason for her to look at me differently. I was a freak. A monster. Something that shouldn't exist.
“I'm sure you can go back to Winchester? What about your sisters? You don’t need to stay here. I understand.”
“You understand nothing, Al. You did nothing. He did. But he’s gone now. You saved me. Let me repay you. And my sisters know that I am all right. I’m old enough to be emancipated, and they are in no position to take me. They’re both in college, no better off than me. We’ll meet for the funeral and go our separate ways.” I noted a little quirk of her lips, an attempt to rise above her heartache over losing her parents and being swept away to a land of literal monsters. “You need a friend, and I need my best friend. I can’t imagine dealing with… all of this… without you. Please don’t make me.”
