by S. L. Morgan
As much as I hated fairies and let revenge drive my wolf, I couldn’t bring myself to end the life of a supernatural I knew didn’t ask to be possessed by the darkness. As my wolf lurched into fairies before they could shake out a magic spell, I used my legs to break their necks, hoping to knock them out until we could find the darkness, destroy it, and hope to get these students back to their innocent and purer selves before they fell permanently victim to the sinister evil of the school.
I wanted Melanie, though. Everything—except for my fairy and witch genes—begged me to end what I created. God only knew where Eileen was. Who knew, all I was confident of was that we had to find a way to spare lives to beat this without the guilt I knew we’d have once this school was defeated.
The bitter taste of death with the added scent of fairy sweetness was the strangest part of this entire fight. My wolf was out for blood after hearing shifters fall to the fairies who managed to spell them. A torrential downpour hit, and ice fell like daggers from the sky. The sprites had managed to start chanting and calling in their elements to fight us off. The attack was relentless, and nothing was stopping these guys from going down.
Break their neck? That would work if we were dealing with fairies, of all things, who weren’t possessed by the devil himself. We were defeated, and any supe who didn’t have the power of evil driving it was falling to the deathly force of the fairies who’d turned on us.
A loud shriek howled in anguish from the sky. Ethan! His owl cries were so loud and horrific that it stopped my wolf in her roll attack on an elf who was using some vine it’d formed out of the ground to wrap around my waist, crushing my insides where I was pinned. A guttural snarl ripped from deep within my wolf after I was flipped onto my back by the vine, squeezing me to death like I was a mouse in the grip of a boa constrictor.
Ethan was injured. His owl’s blood dripped from the sky like rain onto the ground, which seemed to send a beacon to more flying diabolical shadows to finish him off.
The shadows that surrounded and followed the dying and screeching owl disappeared into the forest, forcing even Dom’s wolf to howl with aggression and pain. The fight became gruesome at that point, and I watched Dominic shift out of the wolf and into his natural form—fully dressed, just like I’d spelled him to be able to do when I brought his shifting instincts back.
My magic woke in me the minute my wolf saw her mate use our powers, and I was released from the wolf controlling the fight so I could return to my natural form and go into battle routine, following Dominic, who was breaking necks of anything and everything near him.
Once I shifted back, I felt my magic bubbling up inside me. I easily vaporized the vine constricting me to death and went to work. Once I stood, a ball of fiery energy formed in my hand, and I sent it out like I was throwing a sphere of death toward the fairies who were using all of the elements they had access to against us.
I fell to the ground when the sound of a bomb exploding right at my ears prompted everything to stop, and all of the fairies froze in place. Dominic was pinned by some winged demon that exploded into black particles the minute the magic orb I’d thrown hit the crowd of fairies.
A black mist swirled around the trunks of the trees, creeping out and surrounding the students. I should have known we didn’t have this evil shit beat with one blast of my fairy magic, especially with the Frankenstein’d brain of the leprechaun I’d transformed.
My hair was gripped by powerful hands, and I was tossed like a ragdoll across where all the supernaturals stood, looking for their next attacker.
“Let her go.” Dominic stormed over to where I was, the animals of the master shifters flanking his sides.
“Or what?” Melanie cackled. “Do it,” I heard her order someone.
I twisted my head enough to see Eileen was standing at the side of Scott’s wolf. She waved her hand over the wolf, and he instantly dropped. I watched in horror as Eileen smirked and laughed.
“Your insides must be scorching, Scott,” she said, holding a hand out in a threatening way toward Dom. “If you so much as move to prevent my enjoyment of his insides melting like Samson’s did, you’ll be next, Dominic.”
I sucked in a breath, trying to get to Scott’s wolf and reverse the magic that was brutally killing him. As Eileen turned her focus on me, Dom distracted her by leaping out, allowing Finley’s beast to ambush her from behind and shred the evil fairy into a million rainbow dust particles.
“She was weak anyway,” Melanie said dismissively. “She wasn’t able to create what I could.”
Before anyone else could say a word, I saw Lusa, fully vamped out, leading an army of vampires with their teeth extended, and I could sense that the blood of supernaturals was dripping from their fangs.
“What the hell?” I snarled underneath Melanie’s grip.
“Lusa!” Dominic marched toward his demon-possessed, black-eyed sister. “Fight this,” he seethed.
“She’s my creation,” Melanie said, her strong hands now turning me to face the lifeless creature she’d become.
I reached for her throat and clawed my hands against her neck. She laughed as she swiped out and scratched her fingers across my face, peeling my flesh open. She slashed me again as she held me, frozen, and turned me into her personal punching bag. Little by little, the leprechaun made me drop to my knees, held there by some supernatural power.
The only thing I could hear over the ringing in my ears was thunder booming loudly, followed by the ground shaking so violently that I knew the fairies were hitting us with crippling storms and earthquakes. The ground beneath me felt like it was about to split in two as I watched the main building at IA crumble into a pile of rubble.
The black mist was denser than before, and the shattering sounds from the sky continued to alert us that the next wave of attacks was coming to kick our ass if I couldn’t pull my magic to the surface and do something with it.
No matter how much I tried, I felt a block on my magic, my wolf, and my ability to continue healing. I wasn’t giving up, but even if I did die in all of this, the joke would be on all these assholes. I needed to be alive for this diabolical invasion to take my powers, and if I was dead because of Melanie’s greed to kill me, then we won either way.
A haze blew up in the distance, and the ground shook harder. Then, like an illusion formed before my eyes, countless black horses thundered through the thick, black mist, stamping it into the ground like it was killing some dark spirit.
Oh, my God! These were the horses that we rode into Harrison’s world. The Guardians were here, and like Harrison said, if we didn’t finish this shit off before they got here, we were all dead. Every last one of us.
Melanie cowered at a horse that bit down hard on its mouthpiece as the other massive stallions thundered up and around, surrounding every supernatural that was at war with each other on the grounds of IA for as far as I could see.
“Don’t!” Melanie cried out.
I watched the stallion fight its master, its golden eyes like liquid fire while its feet stomped hard into the surface of the ground. Its master…the emperor. I wanted to smile in relief the minute I saw the dark expression on the emperor’s face, but I saw my impending death instead.
The man was not here to deliver mercy on this forsaken school, or any of us supernaturals. His war regalia spoke that, without him saying one word. His horse was fighting him violently, and it was easy to see that these horses did more than carrying people on their backs. They were killers and warriors themselves.
Now, it was time to see if the emperor would deliver quick deaths to the school he threatened to end, or if this shit was going to hurt like a mother when he signaled his men to finish what Dom and I had failed miserably at achieving on our own.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
I fought my way out of the leprechaun’s now frozen grips to face the next death sentence head-on…Emperor Levi. His horse was wild and fierce, and I could sense the beast was craving a fight. The horse
practically danced in place, lifting each massive hoof up one-by-one while stamping down hard enough to crack the hard dirt surface where the emperor had halted the horse. The angry stallion seemed to shut the leprechaun down the minute we both laid eyes on the emperor, commanding the attention of a once hostile environment filled with chaos and death.
“Areion, settle,” Emperor Levi said while his eyes roamed over the students who were somehow paralyzed by the Guardians who surrounded the madness that had been happening on the grounds. “My men have been commanded to destroy any individual that moves…”
Before the emperor could speak further, a fairy flung herself out in front of one of the warriors to my right. The Guardian drew his sword so quickly that I hadn’t blinked before the sprite’s head was removed. Brilliant green embers ignited her body into flames, and all that remained was ash and smoke.
No one dared to move after that—not shifters, not witches, and not even the demon-possessed fairies. It was almost as if the Guardians’ arrival had sucked the wind out of the place. We were standing in the middle of a war zone, surrounded by a much more dominant force. The Guardians were a force so intense that they managed to stop a crowd of supernaturals mid-battle and make us all stand at attention, terrified.
“What’s the meaning of this?” I heard Edgewater’s voice cut through the tension as he approached from who the hell knows where with IA’s president following closely behind. “Why are all of you here?”
This asshole isn’t bothered to show up when World War 3 is happening, but the Guardians show up, and now he makes an appearance!
“Darius,” the familiar voice of Harrison boomed in the area, his horse trotting up from behind the rows of horses that surrounded the area.
“What is going on out here?” Edgewater demanded.
Harrison and the emperor exchanged glowing-eyed glances before Emperor Levi nodded at the commander. It was evident that the emperor was here to destroy, but it seemed that he was oddly giving Harrison time to talk things out. All I knew was that if looks could combust a supernatural into flames, Edgewater would have turned into a pile of ash under the emperor’s gaze.
The commander slid off the back of his tall warhorse. “I love what you’ve done with the place,” Harrison said, pulling off his black gloves that matched the war regalia he wore as he looked around at the rubble.
“How did you get into this realm? We have this school locked down from any and all outside forces,” President Garrison said.
“Now, of all the things you could currently possibly be worried about—your school’s destruction, your demon-possessed students, this carnage I’m looking at…just to name a few obvious choices—your outrage comes from the fact that we were able to enter this school unbeknownst to you? I suppose that sounds about right,” Harrison said as he looked around and then locked eyes with me. “Well, there’s my angel. I bet you didn’t know it was Bring Your Parent to School Day, did you? You’re going to have to sell a lot of chocolate bars to fundraise for the reconstruction of that main building over there, am I right?”
“Commander, your jokes make me question why IA has entrusted you to re-staff this school, adopt a supernatural, and even set foot on our soil again,” Edgewater spat. I watched his eyes—black slits—the dude was possessed, but he didn’t need to give us the black-eye effect for any of us to know that.
“Jokes?” Harrison scoffed as he pivoted on his tall black boot, his black cloak blowing around by the abrupt movement. “I didn’t come here to tell jokes, Darius, and I think you of all people should know that.”
“Then why and how did you get here? Why have you come?”
Harrison rolled his eyes as he held his arms out and motioning them around at the chaos and destruction all around us. “Uh, duh. I think it’s pretty obvious why we’ve come. How we got here, through your impenetrable magic-spelled barriers, is hardly something to bother yourself about at the moment. Don’t force me to use the beast that I rode on to prove why he was used instead of our fashionable cars.”
“Why not? I demand to know exactly how you breached our barriers,” Edgewater seethed.
“Why n—You know,” he cut himself off with a look of astonishment that Edgewater was so insistent on a point that couldn’t have mattered less, “you’re really, genuinely not that smart, are you?”
“We’ve done nothing to harm the students. They’ve turned on each other,” Edgewater said, acknowledging the mayhem for the first time.
“You’ve done nothing to stop it either, and I believe you should remember my parting words to you, fairy,” Harrison’s voice lowered to match his dark expression.
“This conversation is over. The students caused this themselves. You have no business here with the supernaturals, and you’re wasting my time.”
“No, Darius, you’ve wasted my time.”
“Get to your point now, Commander,” Emperor Levi said. He turned his eyes on all of us while he leaned his head over and whispered to a slender figure who was sitting on the horse to his right, her face shielded by the hood of the cloak the Guardians wore.
“My point? Gladly.” Harrison nodded back to his emperor’s command. “Didn’t I say there would be a problem if my tween daughter over there so much as had a hair on her head touched?” He looked at Melanie after she giggled, prompting the emperor to dismount his horse and walk over to where the possessed leprechaun was frozen in place. “Especially if that little demented leprechaun was the one to provoke Jenna?” He watched Levi approach Melanie and me, “I believe I made it very clear that I wanted my daughter left alone, and it appears that you’ve sent the entire school to attack her.” He eyed the gray skies above head. “What is this, some barbaric way of finding out who the strongest supernatural is?”
“I believe you know exactly what this is, Commander,” President Garrison said in a low growl.
Melanie took that as her moment and lurched out to Levi, attacking where the emperor stood while his attention was on her father. Without hesitation, Levi dodged the attack, and Melanie went into ninja mode. The chick fought the emperor with skills that put even Dominic’s to shame, only to end up spun around with her hands locked behind her back and a sharp dagger to her throat.
“I sense this is your daughter,” Levi said, turning her and her wide eyes to face Garrison and Edgewater.
Garrison stormed out to where Levi was, and the horses all grunted while Levi’s stallion intercepted the president, sending the short leprechaun to the ground, stamping his foot onto his chest then bringing it up to the man’s throat.
“As I was saying,” Levi boldly continued. “This evil creature, is she yours?”
“Touch her, and it will be the end of your kind.”
Harrison remained quiet, backing toward the supes who were close to where I stood. The emperor glanced down at the leprechaun, who was under Aerion’s hoof. “All my stallion needs is one command, and that will be the end of you, you revolting creature. Tell us where the beast is who lurks in the forest. We’re here to finish this and not to make threats. This has already taken up too much of my time.”
“We have no idea where or what you’re talking about.”
“You’re in a pretty vulnerable position to speak fallacies to us,” the emperor answered Garrison. “Where is the beast?”
“Why don’t you ask the supernatural that your commander stole from her own kind?” Edgewater smarted off.
Levi sighed and looked over to the cloaked woman, nodding. As she dismounted her horse, I sighed in relief when I heard the flapping wings of Ethan’s owl, snapping through the post-apocalyptic-looking school. As the owl shifter landed, I watched in awe as Ethan appeared in that very second, walking at the woman’s side.
“Can it be done without detection?” Levi asked.
“Well, it must be the emperor’s wife. The one all realms, leaders, and all who seek power have been hunting for so many years,” Edgewater said with a glint of crazy envy in his eye. In a split se
cond, Levi flung Melanie to the ground where she stayed, dazed, and rushed to Edgewater, gripping his neck and nearly holding him off the ground. “You look upon her face, and I promise you it will be the last face you ever see,” he growled.
“I thought threats were not being made by your kind,” Edgewater choked out.
Levi smirked and threw the man out of his grasp, sending him stumbling backward and to the ground. “Areion.” That was all the emperor had to say before the horse released the hold he had Garrison pinned under and charged toward Edgewater, brutally attacking—just as a shifter would—the dean. I cringed at the cries that came from the supernatural who wouldn’t die. Then, soon after, a black swirl of smoke left the dean’s body, hovered over it, and shot out to the woods.
“Reece,” Levi said, approaching where she and Ethan were walking toward Harrison and me. “It can’t be detected, or this battle will only provoke the ones that will never end.”
“I know,” she said, pulling the cover from her head.
I turned, feeling Dom’s presence, and when I went to go to him, I was held by a slender hand that seemed to have more power in it than it should.
“Now’s not the time,” Reece said. “A darker enemy than what you’ve just dealt with awaits you. I sense you haven’t figured out a way to harness your powers and use them, is that right?”
I met her emerald eyes. “Everything was practically sucked out of me when this all went down,” I said. “Are you all here to kill us or not?”
“There’s hope for you all,” Reece smiled. “You’re that hope. The owl was smart to come to the emperor when he did, but we were almost too late.” She looked at Melanie, who was now being held again by Levi. “You put your magic in that leprechaun?” she questioned me.
“She was driven to,” Ethan responded. “Now, the darkness that summons the leprechaun. It will call to Melanie, and Melanie will be drawn to it. We will follow Melanie to find it.”
