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Kougar grabbed the ritual blade, then pulled the bowl—the top of the skull of a long-dead shape-shifter—from its shelf. He handed the blade to Lyon. The Chief of the Ferals made a small slice in his left palm, squeezed his fist, letting the blood run into the bowl, then handed the blade to Paenther, who did the same. One by one, each Feral added his blood to the bowl.
When it was Wulfe’s turn, he made the requisite cut across his palm, the sting of the blade sharp. Squeezing his fist over Kougar’s bowl, he handed the blade to Fox, beside him.
Kougar was the last to add his blood, and when he’d done so, he began to chant in the language of the ancient shifters. Slowly, the rest of them took up the chant, their voices low, then building, as Kougar dipped two fingers into the blood and streaked them across the heart of each male, one after the other.
Their voices grew, the chant turning into a pulsing beat in Wulfe’s blood. Magic rode the air, melding with the growing excitement.
And yet something was wrong, dammit. Something was off. He felt it deep inside.
“Radiance,” the Shaman called out. “You need radiance. ”
Lyon’s face turned to stone. He’d been trying to save the last of Kara’s strength to bring a new Feral into his animal, hoping one would be marked that they were sure enough about. But that had yet to happen.
Finally, Lyon nodded, and Delaney and Olivia rose from where they watched against one wall and helped Kara into the circle, setting her on the ground at her mate’s feet.
“Continue the chant!” Ariana ordered, and the males did so.
As Lyon stroked the hair back from Kara’s face, she closed her eyes. But when she should have lit up like a sunbeam, she instead struggled, her face turning red, perspiration dampening her brow as she tried to pull the radiance. Wulfe felt his own muscles bunching as he willed her to succeed, hating that she was so weak, that this was so hard on her.
Finally, after long, gut-wrenching minutes, Kara went radiant. Relief flowed through the room as her soft glow slowly grew brighter and brighter.
“Touch her,” Lyon commanded.
Though Wulfe had felt the life-giving energy slide through his body the moment Kara lit up, when his hand slid around her upper arm, the pure energy of her radiance barreled through him. He threw his head back, drinking in the strength that came directly from the Earth. The chant resumed, the tight knot of Ferals lifting their voices until the words pounded against the walls, hammering in his veins.
“Stand back,” Kougar told them and, one by one, they released Kara to reclaim their places around the circle. As they continued to chant, Kougar poured the remaining blood into the central fire, making the flame flare and spit.
Tossing the bowl aside, Kougar raised both hands high above his head. “Reclaim your animals!”
Deep inside, Wulfe’s animal suddenly howled in pain, a pain Wulfe shared as fire exploded in his head. His animal snarled and growled, howling with agony, with fury. A terrible grief raked at Wulfe’s mind, wrenching a cry from his throat.
“No!”
Then all went silent. His wolf was gone. Gone. Wulfe roared, the cry of fury echoing back on him, suddenly the only sound in the room.
Belatedly, he realized that Kara’s glow was out. The chant had gone silent.
“It didn’t work,” Lyon said, his voice like gravel as he knelt to gather Kara into his arms. His gaze swung to Wulfe, devastation in his eyes. “You lost your animal. ”
Wulfe nodded through the ice forming in his veins. His mind had turned all but numb like it often did during those first seconds of disbelief after one of his limbs was torn off, before the shock set in and the pain exploded. Gone. A shifter no more.
The ritual had failed.
Ariana stared at him, a hint of accusation in her eyes. “That was the ritual you told me to find, Wulfe. ”
Every pair of eyes in the room turned on him. Wary eyes, hard eyes filled with devastation.
“I could feel the magic trying to rise,” the Shaman said. “I don’t know why it didn’t work. ”
“The words were right,” Wulfe said tonelessly. “They were right. ” They’d fucked up in some other way. And suddenly he knew how. “We used the wrong blood. ”
“What blood should we have used?” Paenther asked, a thread of barely leashed fury in his words.
“I don’t know. ”
Jag let loose a string of invectives. “It was a fucking Daemon ritual! It probably calls for the blood of virgins or firstborn children or baby bunnies or something. ”
“Or the blood of Daemons,” Kougar said thoughtfully.
Wulfe’s head pounded. “We could try it again using my blood alone. ” But as he turned to Lyon, he saw that Kara was asleep in his arms. Pulling the radiance had taken everything she had.
Lyon shook his head, his jaw rigid, his eyes bleak.
“Maybe it was all wrong. ” Wulfe shook his head back and forth, frustration and fury building inside of him. “What if Satanan’s fucking with my head, making me think I know things? He could have told me about that ritual specifically to destroy any chance that we might succeed. Fuck!”
Fury barreled up and out of him on a ferocious yell of anger, grief, and pain. When he’d quieted, as his gaze slowly roamed the circle, he saw despair in his brothers’ eyes, a despair he knew must darken his own.
Their last chance had failed.
Natalie stood in front of the window of her bedroom, Jane Austen’s Emma clutched against her chest. She’d tried to read, but her mind simply refused to quiet long enough for the words in front of her eyes to register. It didn’t matter that she’d already read the book three times in years past and practically knew it by heart. For a short while, she’d worked on her computer, but that had been even less productive.
She couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that she’d shattered an empty wine bottle against the edge of Kara’s dresser. Had she really intended to attack shape-shifters? Maybe she had. Or maybe she’d been out of her mind and would have turned on anyone within reach.
The thought scared her. Twice now, she’d lost time, though the first time her memory had been intentionally taken from her, presumably for her own good. This time she found far more disturbing because she hadn’t been in her right mind. She hadn’t been conscious of her actions at all. And there was a chance Satanan had been controlling her in some way.
Turning away from the window, Natalie set the book on the nightstand, then sank onto the edge of the bed and stared at nothing. She felt as if she’d awakened in an alternate universe where nothing she knew or believed was true anymore. Shape-shifters, Daemons, magic all existed in this world. Xavier lived. And she, herself, was somehow being used to empower a Daemon, perhaps the most evil creature ever to walk the Earth.
For the first time, she thought she understood what it felt like for some of her patients, when, after years of seeing one way, of their brains processing the words on the page in a way that sometimes made the words all but impossible to read, their eyes were opened. What was once invisible or distorted finally became clear. Just last week, she’d gotten a call from the mom of one of the kids she’d taken through a full course of vision therapy. The woman was in tears because her daughter was now reading at grade level, a thing they’d feared would never happen. Words that had appeared to her seven-year-old’s eyes, to leap and bounce across the page, now lined up straight and still as they were meant to.
Seeing clearly in the child’s case was a blessing. Natalie wasn’t so sure she could say the same. Not when her eyes had been opened to a truth she was beginning to fear she wouldn’t survive.
Pushing to her feet, she walked back to the window, turning her gaze northwest, toward Frederick, toward home and the life she needed to return to. She had work to do there, still. There were too many kids at risk and too few doctors available to help them. How many times had she heard ot
herwise excellent eye doctors disparage vision therapy as voodoo? Many viewed it with the same skepticism she suspected medical doctors viewed acupuncture, unwilling to explore a specialty they knew little about, thereby leaving at-risk patients without the options that could profoundly change their lives.
Yet, returning to that life meant leaving this one and never seeing Wulfe again. Or Xavier. And the thought felt like a fist to the solar plexis.
Cut yourself.
Natalie stilled, her pulse leaping erratically at the strange thought that blazed suddenly in her mind.
Draw your blood.
To her disbelieving horror, she lifted one hand and began to claw at her opposite wrist, raking the tender flesh with her fingernails.
“No. ” The word was a bare whisper, uttered between clenched teeth. Pain tore along her wrist, ice filling her veins, because she couldn’t move of her own free will. She couldn’t call out. She could do nothing but what the voice in her head told her to do.
Satanan. This was his doing!
Suddenly, pain sliced across her cheek. Oh, God, no. Not now. Not this, too.
She opened her mouth to call for help, but she could force no sound between her lips. He was controlling her completely. Eyes filling with tears, heart pounding with terror, she tore at her wrist until her fingertips were slick with blood.
Finally, the words came, but they weren’t her own. They fell from her lips in a whispered, frantic torrent, in a language she’d never heard. If only she could make some kind of sound, even just bang against the wall. But her body refused to cooperate. It was no longer her own.
She’d been caught fast in the web of a Daemon.
Chapter Nineteen
“I need to get out of this fucking house!” Wulfe shouted, slamming his fist into the wall of the ritual room so hard that plaster rained down on him from above. He was trapped within a body that could no longer shift, within a four-story prison from which Satanan just waited for a chance to come after him again.
Worst of all, he feared Satanan might be fucking with his mind.
If only he could take a run in his wolf, but his other half was lost to him, now. He couldn’t even walk out to the goddess stone to listen to the rumbling falls of the Potomac River and feel the wind in his face.
He was so fucking angry! So frustrated. So . . . terrified . . . that this nightmare would never end.
Hawke clapped him on the back. “Come on, buddy. Get Natalie. It’s almost time for dinner. You’ll feel better after you’ve eaten. ” Hawke grunted, the shadows from the loss of his own animal clouding his eyes. “No, you won’t. But your stomach will feel better, and that’s something, at least. ”
Wulfe nodded. But as he turned for the door, he felt an odd tug at his mind as if his subconscious was trying to get his attention. Had he forgotten something?
He shook his head. No, this tug felt external. Satanan? The thought chilled.
“Wulfe?” Kougar asked. “What’s happening?”
“I’m not sure. ” He felt the tug again, hard and insistent. Was his animal trying to reach him? The thought lifted his heart until he realized that it was coming from another place, his heart and that gossamer thread that he’d recognized as the beginnings of a mating bond.
Down that finest of threads, he heard something, as faint as a whisper in a gale.
A scream.
“Natalie. ” He shoved forward, pushing his brothers aside. “Natalie’s in trouble. ”
The others parted for him, and he ran, up the stairs, through the foyer, up two more flights. But as he neared the third-floor hallway, wisps of red smoke began to seep into the edges of his field of vision.
“Roar!” He couldn’t lose it. Not now, not when Natalie needed him.
“We’re right behind you,” Lyon said.
Wulfe ran down the hall, hearing the reassuring footfalls of his brothers following close. “She’s in pain, and the darkness is gunning for me. If I don’t reach her before it gets me, knock her out. ”
“We will. ”
But as he neared her door, he heard nothing. No scream, no sound of pain or shout for help. Just a perfect, terrible silence. Either the Ilina had already whisked Natalie away, or Natalie had never called out. Wulfe burst through the door, then came to a sudden halt at the horrible sight that met his eyes.
Natalie stood in the middle of the room, facing him, blood dripping from her fingertips onto the carpet, her head thrown back in agony, tears running into her hair as she whispered words he didn’t understand. No, words he did understand. Daemon words.
“Satanan has her. ” Wulfe lunged forward, gathering her close, and watching as terrified gray eyes swung toward him with relief. Placing a kiss on her brow, he jammed his thumb beneath her ear, then swung her into his arms as she fell unconscious.
Shaking badly, he turned to where Lyon, Hawke, and Kougar stood just inside the door. “The words were Daemon words designed to open the channel to the primal energies. ”
“Maybe you should put her down, Wulfe,” Lyon said evenly. All three males watched him as if they thought they were going to have to tackle him to the ground again at any moment.
“I’m okay. The shadows have subsided. ” For now.
“Is the channel open?” Kougar asked.
“Yes. ” He could feel a slight buzz of energy he hadn’t before. Goddess, what if that darkness started to build in him? What if he lost it and never came back? But even as the worry flew through his head, knowledge followed. He wouldn’t lose control to such a small amount of primal energy.
With a shake of his head, he met Lyon’s gaze. “The channel has only been opened a crack. I’m the one who needs to say the words to open it, not Natalie. But Satanan has managed to get himself a steady, if small, flow of power. It’s going to strengthen him. ”
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