by Lori Drake
Joey couldn’t help but gape a little. Cathy had mentioned a cat shifter too, but they were so rare. Joey had never seen one in the flesh, only heard about them in stories.
An explosion several feet away pelted Joey and Adelaide with dry earth and grass. The flames were closer now, licking at the edge of the circle, its heat radiating toward them. Joey eyed it nervously. She could step aside and summon another circle, but the bracelet only had so many charges. What she really needed to do was get it around Dean. He was defenseless, but there was a rather large wall of fire between herself and him. She couldn’t even make him out through the dancing flames; all she could do was hope that the others were looking out for him.
A wolf ran past—she wasn’t even sure who it was—and pounced on one of Madrigal’s witches. The woman screamed as she went down, the glow of magic around her winking out. The wolf burst into flames and sprang away to roll in the dirt, desperate to put itself out. A chorus of growls and snarls echoed in the still night air as the wolves harried their prey, and every now and then a yelp rose as someone took a wound. Joey hoped like hell that there weren’t any more silver blades around. She’d spotted Tina among the reinforcements that spilled out of the house behind Madrigal, but the woman had shifted forms, so she wouldn’t be stabbing anyone. Madrigal had a knife on his belt. Joey made a mental note to stay away from it.
Beside Joey, Adelaide pulled off her shirt and tried to smother the flames at the edge of the circle, but the shirt quickly caught fire. She tossed it away.
“You should shift and help the others,” Joey said, scanning the surrounding chaos for an opening.
Adelaide ignored her. “We need to move. Now.”
Joey nodded, finally spotting a path through the fire they could dart through if they were quick. “Follow me!” She bolted from the circle with her mother on her heels, weaving between friend and foe and dodging deadly spells until an all-too-familiar figure stepped in her path. It was the bitchy witch that’d tried to kick her stomach into her sinuses the last time they’d crossed paths. Shawna.
Joey skidded to a halt and shoved her mother behind her by reflex. Never mind that she was the one with stitches in her gut who couldn’t shift without risking serious internal injury. Her eyes flicked to Shawna’s feet. At least she wasn’t wearing her shit-kickers. Like all of the cultists that’d spilled out of the house, she was barefoot.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Shawna asked, cracking her knuckles.
Joey touched her bracelet and summoned another circle. The magic might be borrowed, but the bravado was all hers. “Sorry, have we met?”
Shawna sneered. “You don’t remember me?”
“Must not have made a big impression.”
“I did kick you in the head pretty hard.”
Joey tapped her temple. “Oh, right! You! Sheena, Sheeva, something like that?”
Adelaide touched her back. “Josephine…”
“I’m sorry, where are my manners? Mom, this is one of the bitches that Madrigal sent to grab Emma last year. Shawna! That’s it.”
“Josephine, this is hardly a time for—”
Joey glanced over her shoulder and smiled. “It’s okay. I was just distracting her so Sam and Jon could get behind her.”
Shawna spun, a hand glittering with rings lifting in defense. There was no one there, but Joey took advantage of the distraction. She rushed forward, jumped onto Shawna’s back, and locked an arm around her neck. The witch snarled and grabbed Joey’s arm.
“Made ya look,” Joey growled, and hung on, her feet dangling as the taller woman struggled in a vain effort to free herself.
Shawna freed one hand and punched over her shoulder. She didn’t make contact, but a golden pulse shot from her fist as one of the spells in her rings was unleashed. It hit Joey full in the face. Pain exploded in her nose, and she lost her grip. Shawna shook her off, and Joey’s feet hit the ground just as the witch’s elbow came flying back. Joey managed to dodge aside enough to take the elbow to the side rather than the stomach, but Shawna was able to break away and put some distance between them.
Joey retreated into the circle as Shawna spun and fired off two more pulses of kinetic energy, both of which impacted the shield and dispersed harmlessly.
Joey sniffed and wiped blood from her nose with the back of her hand, eyeing Shawna with a smirk. “Haven’t learned any new tricks, have we?” It took her a hot second to realize that Adelaide wasn’t in the circle with her. She looked around, but found only the rest of her mother’s clothes on the ground. Adelaide had shifted, and was out there somewhere in the darkness. Waiting for her opportunity to strike, Joey hoped.
“What’s wrong, little wolf? Not feeling furry?” Shawna taunted her, lowering her hand and taking a step forward. She knew that the circle would protect Joey from magical threats, but not physical ones.
Joey smirked. “I don’t need tooth and claw to kick your ass.” She settled into a fighting stance, fists raised. “Bring it, bitch.”
Shawna sauntered across the boundary, stepping through the curtain of golden light. She threw a punch. Joey knocked Shawna’s fist aside, then grabbed her arm and yanked. Shawna stumbled forward, and Joey swept her legs out from under her. Shawna went down with a yelp, her wrist still caught in Joey’s hand. Joey jerked Shawna’s arm back and stomped on her shoulder, popping her arm out of the socket. Shawna screamed.
Joey stepped back to survey her handiwork as objectively as possible, given that her heart was racing and adrenaline surged in her veins. Her foe writhed on the ground, her arm at an impossible angle. It was her spell arm, too. But now what? Leave her there? Finish her off?
The decision was taken from her when a large red wolf lunged out of the darkness and pounced on the downed witch. Adelaide. Joey watched, wide-eyed, as her mother ripped Shawna’s throat out. It silenced the screams, at least.
“Well, that’s something I can’t un-see,” Joey said, mostly to herself.
Adelaide left the corpse behind and turned toward Joey. The air shimmered around her, and in the blink of an eye, Adelaide was in human form once more. Blood ringed her mouth and stained her chin, neck, and chest.
“We all have our crosses to bear,” Adelaide murmured, not giving the corpse a second glance. A feral glint lingered in her eyes. In that moment, Joey felt like she understood her mother better than she ever had before, seeing her for what she was at heart: a ruthless alpha female who’d do anything to protect her pack.
Pride and gratitude swelled Joey’s chest. She motioned for Adelaide to follow and took off once more. They managed to work their way around the rest of their enemies into a textbook flanking position, stopping when they reached the corner of the house. Joey peered around the edge of the house, estimating she was about twenty-five feet from where Madrigal, Chris, and the brunette stood with their backs to her. But what would she do when she got there? Joey glanced around, then grabbed a brick from the edge of a flower bed. She glanced back at her mother and motioned for her to wait, then crept forward.
One brick to the back of the head. That was all it’d take to bring Madrigal down. If she played her cards right, it might even cave his skull and they’d never have to deal with him again. Maybe killing him would break the spell that held Chris in his thrall. Only once before in her life had she been driven to murder. This guy more than had it coming.
Twenty feet. Fifteen feet. Ten. Joey adjusted her grip on the brick but froze when Chris lifted his chin and sniffed the air, then turned. Their eyes met, and everything after that seemed to happen in slow motion.
“Master!” Chris cried, and stepped between her and Madrigal.
Madrigal glanced behind him and flicked his fingers, forming a spell in the air with a thought and sending it hurtling toward Joey. It was a tiny ball of golden light, but it shot toward her like a bullet.
Something knocked her to the ground. The pain stole her breath, but she rolled onto her back and looked up to see her mother standing
there with a black mark on her forehead. A drop of blood dripped down between Adelaide’s eyes. Joey realized with dawning horror that the mark on her forehead wasn’t a mark at all. It was a hole.
“No, no, no!” Joey scrambled to her feet and lunged for her mother, but Adelaide was already falling. She slumped bonelessly to the ground, and Joey caught up with her there, grasping her shoulders and shaking her. “Mom. Mom!”
Adelaide’s head lolled, her eyes glassy and vacant.
Alarm bells had started going off in Chris’s head the instant he saw that magic bullet speed toward Joey. Instinct drove him forward a step, but there was nothing he could do. Relief washed through him when Adelaide pushed Joey out of the way, but it only put her in the line of fire. She met his eyes a fraction of a second before the magic projectile found its mark. When it did, her eyes widened and the spark behind them went out.
She was gone before she hit the ground.
Chris watched Joey scramble to reach her, knowing it was too late. Memories flashed through his mind, too rapidly for him to process any one of them for any length of time. Adelaide, bringing him home for the first time. Adelaide, tending his childhood scrapes. Adelaide, applauding at his first dance recital. Adelaide, Adelaide, Adelaide. Mother.
Chris reeled, pressing the heels of his hands to his forehead.
Karina put a hand on his arm. “Chris?”
Chris opened his eyes, and he was on the beach again, bare-chested in the sun. He turned to face her, disoriented and confused.
“He killed my mother.”
Karina tilted her head and took his hand. “She was trying to take you away from us. You don’t want that, do you?”
Chris recoiled, jerking his hand away and stepping back.
“It’s okay, Chris. You’re going to be okay. We’re your family now. The master will take care of you, as he does us.”
He shook his head in dismay. The anger and grief were still there, swirling beneath the surface, but he was distanced from them now. Detached. Somehow, he knew it was her doing. “This isn’t real. It’s just an illusion.”
Karina stepped forward again and placed her hand on his chest. “It’s as real as you want it to be.”
Chris grabbed her shoulders and pushed her away, holding her at arm’s length. “Not just this. Everything about the… your master. It’s all a lie.”
“You don’t mean that,” she said, meeting his eyes. “It’s just the grief talking. We all go through this, as we let our past go. It will pass.”
Anger welled in his chest, his rising fury finding a way to reach him despite her efforts. He embraced it, tightened his grip on her shoulders, and shook her. “This isn’t letting the past go. This is murder. He murdered my mother!”
She whimpered softly. “Chris, you’re hurting me.”
With a growl, he shoved her away from him. She stumbled and fell. The idyllic scene dissolved around him, replaced by cold, hard reality. The smell of singed flesh and fur, of blood and earth. Karina was on the ground there, too, gazing up at him in narrow-eyed consternation. A few feet away, Joey was performing CPR on Adelaide, screaming for Ben.
In a daze, Chris turned toward Marc and grabbed the hilt of the dagger riding the witch’s hip, jerking it from its sheath. Moonlight glinted off the sinuous blade’s curves. It was ornately wrought, a ritual blade, but it’d do the trick. Marc started to turn, but before he could complete the movement—or lash out with magic—Chris shoved the blade into his lower back.
Karina screamed. Marc’s eyes flew wide in surprise and pain. Chris yanked the blade free and shoved it in again. This time, Marc cried out and the glow of magic around him winked out. He stumbled to his knees. Chris went with him. He pushed Marc the rest of the way down and rolled him onto his back. He brought the blade down again and again, sinking it into Marc’s body. An anguished howl escaped him, not only for the loss of his mother, but for the loss of what this man had offered him. The peace, the freedom from heartache and responsibility. The cost was simply too high.
He brought the blade down again and left it protruding from Marc’s chest, where it quivered with each shuddering rise of his chest as he clung to life. Chris looked into his eyes, less hypnotic now that the life was fading from them. Marc’s lips parted, but whatever final words he wanted to utter were stolen by the blood choking its way up his throat. He coughed and sputtered. His chest gave a final heave, and then the man, the legend—the monster—was no more.
It wasn’t enough. Chris grabbed the blade and stabbed the corpse a few more times, then tipped his head back and howled.
Tears flowed freely from Joey’s eyes as she rocked over her mother’s body, performing chest compressions to keep her heart beating. If she could just keep the blood flowing, maybe that would buy enough time for Adelaide’s body to heal the damage the spell had done.
“Ben!”
She wasn’t sure if she was doing this right. She’d never actually taken a class in CPR. How many compressions was she supposed to give before giving a breath? She stopped at twenty, tipped Adelaide’s head back, bent down, and gave her two deep breaths before going back to compressions.
An anguished howl drew her attention over her shoulder, and she blinked at the sight of a blood-spattered Chris kneeling over Madrigal. The hilt of a blade protruded from the witch’s chest. It wasn’t moving. Joey turned her focus forward again and kept counting compressions.
Three, four, five, six…
A large gray wolf loped over. The air around it shimmered, and Ben knelt in its place. His mouth was bloodied and he had a set of deep claw marks in one side, streaming blood. Adelaide wasn’t the only one that needed a medic, but he assessed the situation quickly and took over for Joey. She sat back on her haunches and looked around her. The tide of battle had turned in their favor with Madrigal’s death. The cultists that weren’t unconscious, dead, or pinned down by wolves were either staring at their dead master in disbelief or crowded around his body, wailing and clutching at it.
Joey knew the feeling. She was barely holding it together herself. She wanted to believe that Adelaide would recover, but deep down, she knew the odds were bad. There was too much to do, and too many people that needed her, for her to shut down now. So she locked it all away—she was getting a little too good at that—and got to her feet. She knew where she was needed most.
Chris stood over the body, staring down at it with an unreadable expression. Joey approached him cautiously.
“Chris?”
He turned his head and met her eyes. The anguish she saw there made her chest ache. She held out a hand, but he looked down at his bloody hands and shook his head, then stumbled away a few feet and threw up. Joey ran to him. She sank to her knees beside him and put a hand on his back, rubbing soothingly while he heaved again and again.
“It’s okay,” she murmured. “It’s over, baby. It’s finally over.”
He heaved a few more times, then drew a few big gulps of air and hung his head. His body trembled and shook under her hand, which began to tingle as familiar energy passed through it.
Joey lifted her hand. “Are you sure you—”
She got no further. Chris shifted forms in the blink of an eye and shook off the tatters of his clothing. He glanced over his shoulder at her, then ran off into the night.
Left behind, Joey sighed and got to her feet. When she turned, Jessica and Lucy were standing behind her.
“Is he going to be okay?” Lucy asked.
“Yeah,” Joey said, keeping her misgivings on the subject to herself. “Just give him a minute. How’d we do?”
Jessica dragged her eyes away from the direction Chris had gone and met Joey’s gaze. “Cathy and Naomi kept the worst of the spells away, but Colt got burned pretty bad. I think I, uh, killed the fire guy.” She lowered her eyes. “Sorry.”
The submissive act startled Joey, but she tried not to let it show. She’d instructed everyone to try and avoid killing, but at this point she found it hard to car
e. “Can’t say he didn’t have it coming. Round everyone up so we can get out of here. The lookouts, too.”
They nodded and headed off. Joey walked back to where she’d left her mother and Ben, giving Madrigal’s weeping widows a wide berth. One of them, the woman they’d encountered in the hallway upstairs, had turned the blade that had killed Madrigal on herself. She lay curled beside him with her head on his bloody chest, glassy eyes staring at nothing.
The rest of Joey’s pack had joined Ben by then, their furry forms crowded around where Adelaide lay. Cathy knelt, wreathed in golden light as she held Adelaide’s head in her hands. Shortly after Joey arrived, the magical light faded from around Cathy and she shook her head, sadness in her eyes. A mournful howl split the air, followed by another. Sam and Jon. Reginald shifted back to human form and gathered his wife’s body in his arms, weeping openly.
Twenty-six years of life, and Joey had never seen her father cry. She sank to her knees beside him, looped her arm around his back, and joined him.
25
Chris didn’t know where he was going when he ran off. Away. That was all he thought of as he sprinted into the darkness, but his demons nipped at his heels the whole time. His wolf form was a refuge from the tangled snarl of emotions that had choked him, but he couldn’t escape them entirely. Grief, like anger, was primal.
So he ran, the night air blowing through his fur, until he couldn’t smell the charred fur and flesh anymore. The blood he carried with him, but there was a small retaining pond on the east side of the compound. He splashed into it, washing the blood from his fur, and emerged wet and cold but smelling of nothing but himself. He shook as much water from his fur as he could, then flopped in the grass and lay there in the moonlight, watching the half-moon gradually sink in the sky.
When he heard footsteps approaching, he rolled onto his stomach and sniffed the air, catching a whiff of a familiar scent. Pack. He sighed and put his muzzle on his paws.
Itsuo crouched in front of him. “What are you doing, Christopher-san?”
Chris whined softly and closed his eyes. When he opened them again, Itsuo had seated himself lotus style in front of him.