by May Dawson
He grinned. “Never thought I’d get a hug from my cadre.”
I was pretty sure I wasn’t cadre anymore, but that didn’t matter.
“How did you guys find us?” I demanded.
“It turns out that mating-bond sixth sense travels across all the bonds,” Ty said. “We found you the same way I helped you track Maddie.”
“Did you hear from Rafe and Jensen?” Clearborn demanded.
Penn nodded. “Jensen is stable, for once. Rafe is very grouchy.”
“There’s a surprise,” I muttered.
“Good work,” Clearborn said, clapping me on the shoulder. Before I could say anything else, he added, “Don’t ask me if that means you’re off the hook when we get back to the academy.”
“I assumed I was expelled and figured I’d be pleasantly surprised if anything else happened,” I told him.
“Expelled?” His brows arched. “I’m not letting you off that easily, Mr. Alexander.”
“Did you all break the curse?” I asked the guys.
“More or less,” Penn said. “Either way, we need her. Rafe asked us to stop by the hospital and pick him up. Will’s driving down to stay with Jensen.”
“He asked?” That didn’t sound like Rafe.
Penn pulled a face. “Figure of speech.”
“Let’s go get our girl,” Chase said.
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Maddie
We managed to lose the witches, although I wasn’t sure for how long.
“If we can just make it back to the academy, we’ll be able to hold them back,” Silas said.
Alice’s lips parted in alarm.
“It’s going to be all right,” I promised her. “Silas and I will protect you.”
She frowned. “Silas?”
He raised his hand from the steering wheel, just for a second, in a flippant wave. “Hi. I’m Silas. Echo is actually the name of the cat.”
“You stole the name of the cat?” I demanded.
“I’m not very creative.” He shrugged. “I was kind of in a pinch.”
The cat meowed, a long, insistent sound.
“Silas,” I asked, “is there anything weird about the cat?”
“Cats are always weird.”
“I mean like… does it talk to you? Is it really a person?”
The cat meowed again, and Silas cocked his head, as if he was listening, then said, “She is quite confident she’s better than a person.”
I stared at him suspiciously. I was pretty sure he was fucking with me, but I wasn’t entirely sure.
“Your name is really Silas,” Alice muttered.
“He’s being modest for once,” I said.
Silas groaned. “Don’t….”
“This is the incredible Silas Zip.” I finished.
Silas rolled his eyes.
“I’ve heard about you!” Alice said excitedly.
No matter what he said, Silas preened a little at that. The cat meowed, then began to lick her coat, sprawling across Alice’s lap as if she felt comfortable.
I would’ve laughed at all of them. But the ground rippled in front of us.
We were on the highway, surrounded by other cars going seventy miles an hour. There was no easy escape.
“Here we go again,” Silas said.
“No exit in sight,” I said.
He cut across traffic, as cars honked at him desperately, and took us off-roading across the embankment between lanes.
“I thought we agreed we were keeping humans from discovering our existence!” he swore. “There’s so many people here.”
“Exit up ahead,” I said. “At least we can get off the highway.”
We took the exit fast, the car careening around the corners. Silas’ knuckles were white on the steering wheel.
Then we were on a long, quieter road. There was a gas station to one side, a McDonald’s, but little else. Silas gunned the engine, trying to get away from the witches.
The sky cracked open in front of us, a rip through the fabric of our universe itself. The golden arches tore in two, then slammed into the road, spraying plastic shards over the windshield. We ran into what was left of the arch, crashing into it, but Silas was already putting the car into reverse.
“Guys,” Alice said urgently.
The world ripped open in front of us.
Silas brought the car to a stop. “We’ve got to abandon the car. I can’t take it through a portal.”
Alice’s eyes widened, despite everything. “You’re taking us through a portal!”
“At least someone is seeing the upsides today,” Silas muttered.
He took the car off-roading, as near the woods as we could get. Then we grabbed the bags out of the trunk and ran into the forest together.
Silas muttered the words of his spell as he drew a rectangle in the air, magic sparks following his finger. The golden shape of a door shimmered in the air, then Silas said another word and the door turned into solid wood.
Silas reached out and took my hand in his. The ground heaved beneath us as Winter came toward us, and Silas threw the door open, pulling me with him. Alice gaped at Winter, and Silas reached back and yanked her along.
“Fingers crossed this isn’t a grave mistake,” Silas said as we stumbled through.
“What?” I demanded in alarm, but it was too late. We were already passing through the rip.
The air around me turned cold and tingly, and the world went black for a second, as if I’d closed my eyes. I strained to see around me in the darkness, then the next thing I knew, I was stumbling on Silas’ heels across a hardwood floor.
Alice came right behind me, and Silas turned to slam the door shut before anyone could follow us through.
We were in a cold room that had a strange, old-fashioned feeling. There was an empty fireplace in one corner, and the walls ringed with old fashioned blackboards and holes in the white paint, as if posters had been torn away.
“Is this a classroom?” I asked.
Silas shook his head. “No.”
He moved quickly to the window to peer out, and I followed him, curious to get a glimpse of Silas’ world.
Outside, barren trees shook faintly in the early dawn light. Whatever was beyond the trees and the yard outside was obscured by mist.
“We’re alone,” he muttered. “For now.”
“You’ve got ‘friends’ who’ll be looking for you,” I filled in.
“So many friends,” Silas said, his lips quirking faintly. He headed back to the door, but stopped to brush his lips across my forehead in a quick kiss. “There’s a rip in the woods behind the campus. That’s where I’m going to take us now.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“What about me?” Alice asked. She chewed her lower lip. “I can’t go to the shifter academy. They’ll kill me.”
“They’re the good guys,” I promised her, ignoring how Silas’ lips knitted as if he didn’t quite believe it.
The cat started to jump from Silas’ shoulders, but he stopped her with a hand on her chest. “No, Echo. We aren’t home for good, not yet.”
Those words tore at my heart, reminding me that I might not keep Silas for long.
But right now, all that mattered was protecting our friends and family from the apocalypse.
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Chase
“Did anyone else feel that?” Lex demanded, rubbing his hand across his chest, as if his heart literally hurt.
“Maddie’s gone.” Ty said quietly, his eyes widening.
“Fuck.” My hands tightened on the steering wheel. I could feel it too, a pain in my chest as if there had been an invisible cord tying Maddie to me—and as if that cord that had just snapped. It burned so bad that I could barely focus on keeping the car on the road.
I fought to keep the car under control as pain surged through my body and my vision blurred. Clearborn side-eyed me silently from the passenger seat as the car drifted.
And then, suddenly,
the pain swelled, burst, disappeared. If she had been gone, maybe now she had somehow returned.
“What the hell just happened?” I demanded.
“Maybe she died and came back,” Ty said, his hand on my shoulder. “It happens sometimes around here.”
“No one comes back from the dead,” Clearborn interrupted. “Magic can heal the wounded, even from the brink of death, but there are some things magic can’t do.”
“Maybe she went to another world,” Ty said. “Through a rip. Then came back to ours.”
“Regardless, she’s not where we left her. Fuck.”
“Get back to the academy,” Clearborn ordered. “If the Day know she’s not working for them, they might be moving their plans forward faster. If they are headed for the academy, I’m sure Ms. Northsea is as well.”
Of course she was. Maddie would never abandon us. Not really. How the hell had we ever thought otherwise?
I quickly turned the car around and sped toward the academy.
“How come the curse never did the same kind of job on you that it did on the rest of us?” Penn demanded of me.
My lips pursed to one side. “I don’t know.”
“You’ve got a theory, I can tell,” he pressed.
I did have a theory. I just didn’t want to hurt any of the guys’ feelings. But Penn wasn’t going to give up, so I heaved a sigh.
“Maddie and I were friends first,” I said. “I guess you guys are right that she poisoned the mating bond somehow. But I loved her first. Before the bond.”
Penn stared at me blankly. “I know you’re trying, but I don’t have a fucking clue what you’re talking about.”
“He’s saying that he has a bond of friendship with Maddie that wasn’t poisoned by the magic,” Clearborn cut in. “Because he was friends with her before he fell in love with her as a mate. Right, Chase?”
“Right.” Some of the other stuff that had happened between us had turned dark and shadowed when she left the academy, but other memories had stayed bright and certain: the playful arguments the two of us had, the dangerous way her eyes narrowed when she overheard someone call me a science experiment, the sound of her heels thumping against the bathroom cabinet while she talked a mile a minute as I showered.
Maddie had filled the room with light every time she walked in because she was my friend, and then I’d fallen in love with her. The thought that she was alone out there made me ache.
Just as we neared the academy gates, I glimpsed someone running down the road coming the opposite way. Maddie. Her blond hair blew back from her pink-flushed face. Relief filled my chest with shaky laughter.
She wasn’t alone after all. A dark-haired man was behind her and so was a girl with long hair.
I came to a stop outside the gate, and we all clambered out of the car. I barely remembered to put the car into park before I ran to her.
“Maddie!”
She hesitated until I opened my arms, and then she bounded across the distance and threw her arms around my neck. “Chase!”
I hugged her tightly. Her body felt so right against mine, and I buried my face in her hair, breathing her in. “God, I missed you,” I murmured. “Don’t ever leave me again.”
She looked up at me, her eyes widening in surprise. “You don’t hate me?”
“You can’t make me hate you,” I promised her. Then I added, “Even though you’re a terrible roommate who doesn’t know how to put anything back on the hanger.”
She was grinning when I kissed her, and her arms twined around my neck tighter as she leaned into my kiss. My lips caressed hers open, and her tongue slipped into my mouth, her fingers sliding across the back of my neck and into my hair.
It was a deep, soulful kiss. Someone coughed in the distance. Finally, I raised my head from hers, reluctantly.
Then I looked past her, at the girl and most of all, the black-haired guy who was with her. “Who the fuck is this?”
She tilted her head back, laughing. “You know this guy.”
He pulled a face, and something about his expression looked familiar, even though his features weren’t. Then he muttered something in Latin.
Our blond-haired Silas stood in front of us again, a wry smile across his lips and a wariness in his gaze.
“Silas!” I abandoned Maddie to hug him. Silas’ uncertain smile turned into a grin, and Maddie’s bubbly laugh rose behind us. I pulled back to grab his shoulders, torn between wanting to shake him and wanting to hug him again. “I thought you were dead.”
“It’s not that easy to get rid of your weird friend,” he said, hugging me back tightly.
“Lovely family reunion,” Clearborn said. “Very happy for you all. What the fuck is that?”
The ground shook beneath my feet, and I frowned, thinking that it was an earthquake at first.
Maddie’s lips pressed together tightly. “The Day’s coming for us.”
My heart raced. It felt like the witches were tearing apart the ground beneath our feet.
“Why the hell is she here?” Ty demanded, looking at the girl who stood behind Silas.
She glanced away, discomfort written across her face.
“Alice helped us escape the Day with the Dark Collar,” Maddie told him. “They’ll kill her if they catch her.”
“She’s not coming on campus,” Clearborn warned. He glanced around. “But then, none of us are. It’s too late to risk opening the gates. We’ll make our stand here.”
“Get the barricades,” Rafe ordered. He and Lex were already moving to one side of the gates and dragging out reinforced barricades we could hide behind.
Inside the academy walls, the alarm tolled steadily as our fellow students fell out. The shifter guards inside the gate passed weapons through the bars to us.
“Some reunion,” I told Maddie as I passed a sword in harness to her, which she threw over her shoulders. She began to adjust the straps, and since it was awkward to do it yourself quickly, I unbuckled the strap and began to adjust it for her.
She pulled a face, glancing at the other guys, then moved to the gate to take the two rifles that the guard handed through. She passed one to me as she admitted, “It might be easier to face the Day than to face them after what I did.”
“Knowing you, Maddie, I’m sure you did what you had to do.” I wanted to tell her that they couldn’t be angry at her for that, but I knew them too well to make that kind of promise. They’d get over it, though.
Eventually.
Suddenly the sky tore open. Something dark swept above us, a shadow with sweeping wings that reminded me of a dragon, and I ducked despite myself.
The rip in the sky stretched all the way to the road, cracking the pavement open. Then the sudden chasm in the road raced toward us as we scattered, trying to avoid falling into the widening gap.
“Get behind the barricades!” Lex shouted. Maddie and I raced across the heaving ground and threw ourselves behind one of the makeshift wood-and-steel structures.
A tall witch strode out of the rip, his cloak fluttering behind him.
“What the hell—” I began, barely able to process what was happening in front of us.
“That’s my dad,” Maddie said shortly. “I’ve got some daddy issues.”
“Don’t we all,” I returned.
“But today, I get to kill him.” Maddie’s voice was matter-of-fact, and I did a double-take at the beautiful, murderous blond I’d missed so much.
Just then, witches rushed at us from out of the woods. Their hands were raised, magic crackling between their fingers.
“Reunited again,” Maddie said, clapping me on the shoulder. “Here we go.”
“And you brought trouble with you. Here’s my surprised face.”
She laughed out loud, raising her gun to her shoulder. “You love me, Chase.”
The first shots rang out, and magic sizzled through the air. I set the rifle into my shoulder, searching for my first target.
The gunfire and the magic and
the chaos might’ve been too loud for her to hear me answer, “Always.”
I loved her in a way that she couldn’t even dent, no matter how hard she tried.
Chapter Sixty
Maddie
Witches kept streaming out of the woods and coming toward us. There were so many of them. These witches weren’t just the remnants of the Day—it looked like every damn coven in the northeast had united to kill us today.
I tried not to look for Kairn or Victor or Josephine amongst our attackers.
I felt Chase move restlessly next to me. It was always a struggle not to shift with so much adrenaline coursing through a shifter’s body.
I didn’t feel it. I didn’t feel the pull of the wolf anymore.
“Don’t shift,” Clearborn called. “There’s too many of them. Keep shooting.”
There were just too many of them, period. Suddenly the barricade in front of Chase and me started to shake.
Chase tackled me abruptly, the two of us falling to the ground in a tangle of limbs as the barricade suddenly lifted off the ground. A blast of deadly magic raced through the air where we’d been just seconds before.
When the blast of magic burnt out, an electric scent hung in the air, as if we’d narrowly avoided being electrocuted with magic. My heart was racing as the two of us unwound, already scrambling for our weapons again.
“Get back here,” Lex shouted. “We’re covering you.”
Lex and Rafe fired at the witches who had just attacked us.
Chase rose to his feet, then turned back as he realized I wasn’t running with him. “Are you hurt?” he shouted at me.
I threw the bag with the Dark Collar over my shoulder, then shook my head. I couldn’t leave the Dark Collar. The Day didn’t have the chance to scatter the pieces far, but still, if they got their hands on it, they could lay the pieces out at the perimeter of the academy. They could destroy our ability to shift, and then we’d lose this battle. It was all too easy to imagine the bodies of our fellow wolves strewn across the academy grounds where we used to play football and run late to class.