Then he loosed a roar that morphed from human to beast in a split second. I blinked: I’d never seen anyone shift that fast, and from the look on Laura’s face, she hadn’t either. She wasn’t feeling cocky about her six wolves anymore – now, she was wondering if she should have brought more.
“Don’t just stand there,” she shouted at the wolves surrounding her. “Attack!”
They raced forward as one, and I tore my eyes from Laura as she started to shift. Beside me, Draeven snarled, and I added my voice to the cacophony. I didn’t care that there were six, soon to be seven, wolves charging us – I was bloody glad he was on my side.
He surged forward, meeting the charge of a slate grey wolf, and slammed it to the floor. It screamed in pain and writhed under him and as he leapt back, I saw that its front leg was spasming in the air, hanging at a sickening angle where it met the joint. Dislocated, or maybe broken. Either way, the wolf was out of the fight until it healed.
A russet-coloured wolf raced past him, straight at me, and I crouched low, ready to spring into the air and go for the back of her neck. She saw my intentions when she was still two strides away, and rose up with me, her front legs crashing into mine. She was taller than me and bent her neck to snap at my face. I snarled again, feeling her weight crushing down on me, and ducked my head low to snap at her throat. Her thick fur blocked my grip, but I felt my fangs score the flesh and the wolf leapt back with a snarl of pain.
She circled me more warily and I turned with her, keeping my teeth between her and my flank. Behind me, I could hear Draeven giving the pack hell, but I didn’t dare take my eyes from the russet wolf. One mistake and she would be on me.
And that was my mistake.
The attack came from behind – the heavier wolf landed on my hindquarters, sinking his fangs into my withers. Pain screamed through me and I thrashed under him, trying to dislodge his grip, but he clung fast. The russet wolf threw herself forward, aiming low, going for my throat. I duck and twisted, taking the bite to my shoulder, then threw myself through her to the floor. Both sets of teeth ripped loose from my flesh and I yelped. Blood pumped freely from the wound in my withers, but it didn’t matter. He was off me. I forced myself to my feet, snarling my determination. The russet wolf lay twitching – I’d done her some damage when I rolled. She was out of the fight for now. The other was already getting to his feet, eyeing me with a new respect, but this time I didn’t let him draw me into a staring contest, instead forcing myself to remain aware of what was happening around me. I couldn’t afford another mistake like that. I was already weakened, and the red wolf could sense it. My blood dripped from his maw, staining his fur, and I tore my eyes from the macabre sight.
A yelp pierced that air somewhere behind me, and I realised just how far our fight had taken us from the other wolves. I risked a glance in Draeven’s direction, but he was still on his feet, surrounded by three wolves but holding his own. Still, I needed to finish this fight so I could back him up. Draeven was a bastard, but he was our bastard, and I didn’t like the future we’d face without him.
I threw myself over the downed russet wolf and thudded into the red. As I connected with him, I felt something snag my ankle, and then pain ripped through me as teeth sunk into the unprotected bone. I howled, and the injured wolf’s grip hauled me back. I went with it, then spun and snapped my teeth at her face, scoring a dark line of red that was lost in her russet fur. She yelped and flinched back, and I took advantage of her pain to tear my leg free. I lurched out of her reach, dragging my injured leg behind me. A snarl alerted me to the danger as the red threw himself at me, and I hit the ground hard. His fangs snapped at my face, my neck, all around me, and I kicked out at him with my uninjured leg, trying to gouge along his soft belly. He blocked me with his flank and my paw bounced off without penetrating the thick fur. I kicked out again, with both legs this time, ignoring the pain that screamed through it as I made contact. I felt my claws catch his underside and tear. He squealed in pain, and staggered back a step, then his legs gave out beneath him and he hit the ground with a thud and lay there, breathing heavily.
Another set of paws slammed into me, pinning me in place on my back. I squirmed beneath them, but I couldn’t find the strength to throw the wolf off. I twisted round to stare up at it and saw Laura’s sandy face staring down at me. She peeled her jowls back to reveal her yellow fangs in what was unmistakably a smirk. I snarled and thrashed with renewed determination, but pain stabbed through my withers with every movement.
She lowered her head, lips spread wide in a grin, and sunk her teeth into my exposed abdomen.
Agony tore through me as she ripped at the tender flesh and I howled until my lungs were empty of air, and I didn’t seem able to draw in more, no matter how I gasped and wheezed. She lifted her head, blood and skin hanging from her maw, and I could do nothing but watch through hazy eyes as she decided how to finish me.
And then she moved her paws from my body, and her limbs blurred. I stared at her, uncomprehending, as she shifted back to her human form.
“I’m not going to kill you,” she said. I blinked as she moved away, and kicked out with my legs, trying to fight my way to my feet, but even that seemed beyond me. My head was just too heavy. I gasped and let it sink back to the ground, rolling my gaze round my limited field of vision, trying to work out where Laura had gone.
I didn’t have to guess for long. In moments she was back, and I wondered if she’d changed her mind about killing me. She had something in her hand, but I couldn’t quite make my eyes focus on it.
She crouched down beside me.
“I’m not going to kill you,” she repeated. “I’m just going to do to you what you wanted to do to us.”
She lifted the object in her hand for me to see – a small glass vial – and plucked the stopper from it. Then she poured the contents over me.
“Brad sends his regards. Enjoy the cure, bitch,” she whispered in my ear.
I twisted, driven by fury, lunging up with the trickle of strength I had left, and clamped my jaws around her throat. She let out a strangled gasp of pain, and then blood washed over my face, and the bottle tumbled from her nerveless fingers.
My body sank back to the ground once more and I felt the anger that had been a part of me for the last three years seep out of my body, like an acrid breath leaving my lungs.
And then I felt the final sparks of my magic flicker, and go out.
Chapter Thirty
Footsteps pounded towards me, and I wondered which of Laura’s companions would be the one to take my life. My limbs shook and trembled, and I felt the white-hot flash of pain pulse through my body as it shifted from wolf to human. My stomach – what was left of it – tried to reject its contents, in the same way my body was rejecting its stolen magic. And then it passed, and I was lying on the ground, damp with my own blood, in my frail human body, wheezing and gasping. Dying. I was dying. As a shifter, I could heal from these wounds. As a mundane, I had minutes to live.
The footsteps pounded closer, though it was hard to hear them in the soft grass. I sniffed the air, but all I could make out was the faint scent of… trees, maybe. And damp. Nothing else. Without my shifter senses, I was blind, deaf, and anosmic. And none of it mattered, because soon I’d be dead.
“Jade!”
Draeven skidded to the ground beside me, human and drenched in someone else’s blood, a silver blade in one hand. He swept his gaze over me, taking in the extent of my injuries.
“You need to shift back. You can’t heal from this in your human form.”
“Can’t…” I choked on air.
“Can’t heal fast enough in this form. That’s right. Shift.”
“No,” I mumbled, shaking my head as much as I could. How the hell did my head weigh so much? “Can’t shift. No magic… Cure.”
His eyes flicked to the bottle beside me, then widened in comprehension.
“She used the cure on you. It stripped your shifter powers?”
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Had I not been bleeding out and in so much pain that I couldn’t move, I’d have applauded him for stating the obvious. As it was, I settled for groaning and staring at him through wide, unfocused eyes.
“Dammit!”
He pounded the ground with one fist, then backed up a few steps, tossing the blade aside. My eyes blinked closed and I couldn’t quite find the will to force them open again.
A loud sniff sounded in my ear, and then a cold, wet nose touched my wrist. My eyes fluttered open to see Draeven towering over me in his wolf form. His amber eyes searched my face, as if looking for something. Then he grunted, opened his mouth, and sank his teeth into my arm.
The bite was quick, and he pulled away almost before the pain registered. I whimpered and stared at him through frightened eyes, but he just lowered his head and turned away.
Pain was rushing through me, but it felt odd, somehow. Different. It pulsed through every muscle in my body, like they were trying to tear themselves apart. A scream ripped from my throat, and Draeven was back by my side, human again, and draping my clothing over me. I forced my eyes to focus on his face.
“You…” I broke off, swallowed my pain, and tried again. “You bit me.”
“It was the only way to save your life,” he grunted, not meeting my eye. “I’m sorry.”
“Thank you.”
He jerked his head back to me at that, then got to his feet. Right. The whole law thing.
“Are…” I swallowed again, and this time it had nothing to do with the pain. “Are you going to get into trouble?”
“Let’s worry about surviving tonight first.”
That seemed like a good idea. And it also seemed pretty unlikely. Sure, we’d beaten Laura and her pack, but there were still Bittens all over the academy, including Brad, and I was still bleeding out through a dozen wounds. They were healing, and with every second my senses were growing stronger, but right now I was defenceless.
A rustle in the trees interrupted before I could find the breath to say any of that, and I hoped to hell that Draeven was ready to fight, because I doubted I was going to be much use.
The foliage parted, and the breeze carried the scent to my flared nostrils. Shit. I tried to push myself up from the ground, but my arms were too weak, and my legs felt like they belonged to someone else.
“Jade, I’m so sorry!” Ryan pushed his way out of the treeline and made straight for us. Draeven blocked his path and shoved him in the chest, sending him staggering back.
“I didn’t know what Brad was planning, I swear!”
I tried again, and this time managed to lever myself into a sitting position, holding my clothing against my chest with one hand, and supporting myself on the other.
“It’s okay,” I said to Draeven. “Let him through.”
Draeven’s shoulders stiffened – he still wasn’t a fan of taking orders – but he stepped aside. Ryan eyed him as he edged past and stopped a few feet short of me.
“He said he was coming here for Draeven.” He cast a nervous glance of his shoulders at the alpha as he said it, and then back to the ground in front of his feet. “No-one else was supposed to get hurt. He promised we’d stop Draeven and steal the cure for the ones who wanted it. He never said anything about this, any of it. You’ve got to believe me.”
“I do.” I pushed my hair out of my face, wincing as the movement pulled at one of my healing wounds. “But you’ve got to choose, Ryan. You can’t keep trying to play both sides.”
“I know.” He scuffed his feet in the grass and sucked in a juddering breath. “I love Brad. But what he’s doing…”
He shook his head and jerked his eyes up to meet mine.
“He’s got to be stopped. I see that now.”
“Enough talk,” Draeven said. “I’m going to hunt him down before he kills anyone else.”
Ryan nodded. “I’m coming with you. I’ve got some of the vials. We can use it on him, and then he can face his punishment. As a mundane. Please.”
He pulled out three vials from his pocket, and held them out to Draeven, who eyed them with disgust.
“I make no promises. And we’re going wolf, so you’re going to have to carry one in your mouth. Leave the rest.”
“Wait,” I said. “I’m too weak, I can’t shift.”
“No, you can’t,” Draeven agreed. “You’re not coming.”
I opened my mouth to protest, and he held up a hand to silence me.
“Your shifter powers are coming back, and you’re healing faster than I expected, but you need more time. You can’t fight. Stay here until you recover. The enforcers will arrive soon, you’ll be safe.”
“But–”
“For once in your life, Jade, don’t argue.”
I opened my mouth to do exactly that, and he glared at me. I snapped it closed again.
“Good. Ryan, let’s go.”
It took Ryan a little longer to shift into his wolf form than Draeven, and when he finished, he carefully scooped one of the vials into his mouth, leaving the other two on the floor.
I watched them until they were out of sight, and then pulled my clothes back on, which was only hellishly painful as opposed to life-threatening, so I knew I was healing. Not fast enough that the clothes wouldn’t end up saturated in blood, but the temperature was dropping, and saturated clothes were better than no clothes. Plus, there was the whole being naked and vulnerable thing. So I battled through the pain until I was fully dressed, and the sounds of the two wolves had completely died away – or at least, to my ears. My shifter senses hadn’t fully returned yet, but I was healing faster than I had any right to expect, so on balance I wouldn’t be complaining. I wasn’t sure how I was healing so fast, given that the first time I’d been bitten my powers hadn’t kicked in until the next full moon, but I still wasn’t complaining. I was a fan of not being dead.
“Finally. I thought they’d never leave.”
I jumped, sending a knife of pain through my half-healed stomach, but that was the least of my concerns. I stared up at the tall, wiry figure, several years my senior, and my heart squeezed painfully in my chest.
“Brad.”
“Jade. I should have killed you when I had the chance.”
“Yeah, you should have.”
“Plenty of time to make up for old mistakes. I’d say you’re looking well, but…” He smirked down at me.
“I’d say it’s good to see you again, but…” I shot him a sarcastic look, and his smirk twisted into a scowl. He glanced down at Laura’s corpse.
“I should have known better than to send her. She always was useless.”
“And Ryan?” I said. If he wanted to stand there and talk rather than get straight to the killing, that was fine by me. The longer I had to heal, the better.
Brad’s scowl deepened.
“That coward? I knew it was only a matter of time until he betrayed me. He had no vision.”
“Too many morals, you mean?”
He ran his eyes over the unmoving bodies of his attack squad, some with their throats ripped out, others finished with Draeven’s blade. I groped in the long grass while he was distracted. Where had Draeven dropped that knife?
“Morals, yes. That’s always been your problem, Jade. Too caught up in worrying about what’s right and what’s wrong. There is no right and wrong. We’re strong, mundanes are weak. That’s all the matters.”
“What about them?” I nodded to his dead comrades. “They weren’t as strong as they thought.”
“Cannon fodder,” he said with a shrug. “They did their job.”
A shiver ran the length of my spine, drawing his attention like a mouse quivering in front of a snake.
“You’re not looking so strong yourself,” he said. “Shame. I’d hoped there’d be more sport in this, but taking your life will have to be enough.”
I tensed. I guess we’d run out of time for talk. Still, no harm in trying.
“I don’t suppose you’d come back next mon
th instead?”
He laughed, then his face hardened.
“Get up, Jade. I’d rather not kill you sitting in the mud.”
And I’d rather not be killed sitting in– Well, at all, actually. I planted one hand on the ground and forced myself to my feet with a grunt. Shit, that hurt. This was not going to be fun.
He bared his teeth at me, and I bared mine right back. If this bastard was going to take me out, I was going down with a smile on my face – just to spite him. I raised one hand, ignoring the pain that shot through my shoulder, and beckoned him forward.
“Old school?” he said, raising an eyebrow. “Alright, I’ll play along.”
That was good, because I wasn’t sure I could shift right now, and I didn’t much fancy being shredded into confetti. He rolled out his shoulders and put his hands up into a classic guard. Fletcher would have approved, not least because he was about to beat the crap out of his least favourite student on campus.
Of course, our combat classes stopped short of actually killing anyone, so there was that.
Brad ambled towards me, his legs in a wide boxing stance. The thing with a boxing stance was that it gave you a really stable base to swing a punch from, but it tended to leave you too unbalanced to throw a good kick. And, more importantly, it left you wide open for something they never face in the boxing ring: a swift knee between the legs.
I kept my attention higher, not giving away the fact I’d spotted his weakness. Potential weakness, I corrected myself. Weakness implied I’d actually get close enough to land a strike there, and I wasn’t exactly feeling at my most agile.
“Ladies first,” Brad said, smirking and making no move to approach. He was enjoying this entirely too much. “Or are you too–”
I rushed him, landing two quick strikes to his stomach that I was pretty sure hurt me as much as him, and danced back before he could retaliate. I cocked my head and grinned.
“Oh, I’m sorry, was I supposed to wait for you to finish?”
“Bitch!” he snarled, wheezing in a breath.
“Sticks and stones will break my bones…”
Feral Bitten (Fur 'n' Fang Academy Book 3): A Shifter Academy Novel Page 21