She laughed and blew out the match before setting the glowing lamp on the dirt floor.
“The Quinns are plotting to attack Dante, so I think I’d do well to stay inside this body.”
“They’ll find you,” he warned. “There’s no escaping your fate.”
“My only fate,” she yelled, her ordinarily melodic voice deepening with the kind of evil that only Dante Alighieri could possess, “is to inherit the throne and I welcome the day.”
“So what are you going to do? Kill me?” he challenged as he jerked, rattling the chains that held him.
“Yes,” Dante said frankly through Elizabeth’s crippled voice. “I think I will. I’ll get you out of the way first, then go after Lucy Cooper, who no one can seem to kill on my behalf,” he complained, sneering at the fact he was served by cowards and traitors. “With her dead, your brothers won’t have a shot in hell of surviving what I’ve got in store for them.”
“You won’t get away with this,” he threatened.
“Won’t I though?” she countered. “Haven’t I?” She let that hang but Dean refused to indulge her. “I have. At every turn, I’ve escaped you and your brothers, all the while I’ve grown stronger, my pack has become larger, and what have you all done? Fallen in love and become distracted, that’s what.”
He couldn’t stand to hear Dante speaking through Elizabeth and he refused to engage the dark lord.
“She tried to talk me out of it, you know,” she mentioned offhandedly as she inspected the handgun that had fired at Dean’s shoulder. Dean couldn’t even feel the wound, he was so flooded with adrenaline and rage, the pounding migraine in his head distracting him from any other sources of physical pain. “Elizabeth is the only person in this entire town who had a shred of decency to try to appeal to me.”
“And this is what you do to her?” he shot back. “You take over her mind and body, use her, and what will you do next? Kill her like you will me and my brothers?”
“No,” she told him as if offended he would think such a thing. “Never. Elizabeth will become my queen. She’s the one. The one I’ve been searching for all summer. The one who I thought I’d find in Reece Gladstone or Whitney Abernathy.”
Dean grimaced in horror then pointed out, “You’re related to one another.”
“Barely,” she scoffed. “I’m sure our children will be unaffected by the shared bloodline.”
“You’re disgusting.”
“And you’re chained in a cave where no one will hear your screams!”
There was no sense arguing with Dante. His hatred ran so deep that even Elizabeth in all her sweetness hadn’t been able to get through to him. But Dean knew that the woman he loved was still somewhere deep inside of that body that was now angling menacingly over him and sneering down, the barrel of the gun pressing hard against his forehead.
If he could reach her…
If he could draw her to the surface…
Then he might be able to save them both.
“Elizabeth,” he stated as loudly as he could, as he pressed his loving, connected energy out of himself, doing everything within his power to pour himself into her. He stared deeply into her eyes, past the dark lord who was clouding them over, and declared, “I know you’re in there. You can beat him.”
“Shut up.”
“Elizabeth, come to the surface,” he commanded, locking his penetrating stare as deeply into her eyes as he could until he felt like he was looking at her soul. “You’re stronger than him.”
“She isn’t,” he laughed. “She wasn’t even strong enough to become your one true mate, was she? She wasn’t smart or brave, Dean. That’s why she’s so easy to control.”
Ignoring the onslaught of insults, he addressed the woman he’d fallen in love with.
“You can force him out, Elizabeth. You have the power. Dante is darkness and hatred. You are light and love. Push him out, Elizabeth!”
“Shut up!” she screamed, pushing the barrel of the gun so hard into his forehead that the back of his head scraped against the cave wall, drawing blood.
“Darkness cannot exist in the presence of bright light!”
“Say one more word and I’ll pull the trigger!”
“Do it, Elizabeth! Rid Dante out of your mind and body with the bright light of your soul!”
She screamed, her gun hand trembling, and he growled out a wolf cry, bracing himself for the end if that’s what destiny had in store.
“I love you, Elizabeth!” he yelled as loudly as he could. “Come back to me!!!”
She collapsed. Her head slammed against the earthen ground, the gun tumbling out of her hand.
Dean stared at her in wide-eyed disbelief then breathed, “Elizabeth?”
But there was no rise and fall in her chest, no signs she was breathing…
…and Dean was tethered in chains, unable to reach her.
***
It took a wave of darkness and an evil boom that only his pack could feel, and soon his army of the damned was gathered in the western-most field of the old Halsey land.
Hundreds of werewolves stood before Dante Alighieri, but their numbers didn’t matter as much as the execution of their attack would.
Time was running out.
He looked up at the dark, dome sky. The moon wasn’t full, but it was still bright and glowing white high above their heads.
Eddie Friendly grinned wickedly up at him from the frontlines of the army.
“Tonight, we strike!” he announced and the crowd of werewolves fell into a frightened hush. “We know how to take down Lucy Cooper. Killing her is the first phase of the mission,” he reminded them as Eddie glanced over the printed Latin chants he’d collected from the forest when Rick had shifted and sprinting off in his wolf form. “They won’t be expecting us. The Quinns are still waiting for the full moon. We’ll ambush Kaleb’s cabin first, handle Lucy, and move on from there,” he declared as he levitated high in the sky above their heads. “I won’t lie to you, my dark soldiers. Not all of you will make it, but not one of you will die in vain.”
A look of collective terror washed over their staring faces, but it pleased Dante. Fear and hatred would be their ammunition. This had been centuries in the making. By this time tomorrow, Dante Alighieri would be the sole werewolf king lording over all of Devil’s Fist. Excitement quaked through his bones. He deserved this. His time had finally come.
“You know your positions,” he told them. “You know what to do. Do not disappoint me.”
He raised his arms up, spreading his fingers towards the ominous night sky, and as he thrust his hands down, he cast a wall of dark light over the army and they shifted in the blink of an eye and took off, howling and sprinting through the field, charging headlong towards battle.
***
Rick had spent the day with Nikita Quinn in her little stone house as his shoulder healed. She was an angel. She hadn’t pressured him to talk to Troy or to leave her home. In so many ways, she had shown him her incredible strength and support. She had given him her trust, and now that he had it, he knew what he had to do.
Tell Troy the truth.
Troy might hate him, he might resent Rick or punish him by going back on his promise to free him from Dante’s dark hold, but Rick had never been a coward a day in his life, and he wasn’t going to let fear rule him now.
He had missed the meeting at Quinn Security last night, having taken a silver-plated arrow to the shoulder. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t call a second meeting. Time was of the essence, and in terms of what Eddie Friendly had divulged to him freely—Eddie having thought that Rick would be out of the picture by now—time was also very much running out.
Rick called Troy and the brothers agreed to meet him at Kaleb Quinn’s cabin, where four out of five Quinn men had gathered anyway, concerned that Dean had been unreachable all day.
Nikita had offered to come with him, but Rick assured her that he needed to go alone. Whatever Dante was planning, he wanted th
e new, shining hope in his life—Nikita herself—to be as far away from this thing as possible.
When he arrived at Kaleb’s cabin, having galloped through the wilderness in his wolf form, though his gait was slow and limping thanks to the freshly healed wound in his shoulder, he knocked on the door and mentally composed how he would confess his betrayal.
But when Troy answered the door and urged him inside, Rick sensed that a far greater issue had slammed into the brothers.
“Have you seen Dean?” Troy demanded when Rick entered the living room where Kaleb was seated beside Lucy on the couch, his other brothers Shane and Conor standing in front of the fireplace.
“No, you still haven’t gotten ahold of him?”
“No,” Conor said darkly as he slid his worried eyes to Troy. “We can’t find Elizabeth either.”
“Dante is going to strike tomorrow night,” Rick blurted and suddenly all eyes were on him. He sucked in a deep, fortifying breath, remembered the hope of what he might have with Nikita, and told them, “Eddie escaped, but before he did, he told me that Dante has ordered his army to attack two nights before the full moon.”
Shane barked, “Eddie escaped?”
“It was my fault,” Rick admitted as he turned his apologetic attention back to Troy. “I made a mistake. A huge mistake and I don’t expect you to forgive me.”
“What mistake?” Troy demanded.
Mustering every shred of courage that he possessed, Rick came out with it. “I thought I could take on Dante myself. I thought Eddie wanted to be free of the dark lord just as badly as I did. I was wrong.”
Lucy stood and asserted, “If he’s going to attack tomorrow night, then we must go after him. Now. We’ll take him by surprise. This ends tonight.”
But the second she declared the order, a blast of dark light slammed through the cabin, and the next thing Rick knew, he was airborne. As he crashed against the wall, his shoulder searing with white-hot pain on impact, he realized that Conor and Kaleb had also flown clear across the room, as windows shattered from the evil force that could only be Dante in their midst.
Dozens of wolves dove through the shattered windows, leaping in droves of five in an endless onslaught of hell-born soldiers. They attacked. The Quinn brothers shifted, but were clobbered, twenty wolves against one.
Lucy rose up in the air, igniting with a blindingly bright light, but hers was met with the ice-cold blackness of Dante’s dark energy.
The battle had begun.
Chapter Twenty
ELIZABETH
She groaned, coming back into conscious awareness, yet feeling profoundly empty. Her mind was blank. Her heart, empty. And every muscle and bone in her body felt like it had frozen over with black ice.
“Elizabeth!”
“Dean?” she groaned, testing her vision as she blinked. The light was low, the cave illuminated only by a single lantern, but she could still make out that the love of her life was chained to the wall.
“Are you hurt?”
She pushed with all her might, her raw palms pressing into damp earth, as she forced herself up. For a moment, the room spun terribly and she thought she might be sick, but she swallowed hard, steadying her roiling nerves.
“I feel ill, but I think I’m okay.”
Then it hit her. Dean’s proposal. Her horrible response. How could she?
“Yes,” she breathed in radically delayed reaction.
“Yes?” he questioned.
She fought to hold his gaze, her mind was reeling so badly. “I was trapped inside myself when you got down on one knee.”
A sad smile tugged at the corner of his bruised mouth. “I don’t care about that.”
“I do,” she insisted as she crawled to him and cupped both of her hands around his chilly face. “The look in your eyes… I can’t stand it that I couldn’t respond.”
“You would’ve responded yes?” he breathed, and she saw a wash of elation rise through him.
“Of course,” she told him before she kissed his cold lips. “Yes, I’ll marry you!”
“I would hug you, but my hands are tied behind my back.”
“Oh, God!” she exclaimed, as she immediately began looking him over, assessing the chains for any way to free him. “How are we going to get you out of here?”
He was still floating in a cloud of bliss that she’d agreed to marry him.
“I want to be with you, too,” she promised. “Forever, but right now—”
“I know,” he agreed, sobering up. “Is there a key around?”
She searched for one, taking hold of the lantern and sweeping it across the ground, but there was nothing but damp earth and puddles.
“I might have to do this the old-fashioned way,” he suggested.
She had no idea what that meant until he shifted into his wolf form in the blink of an eye.
With his paws and forearms thin and covered with fur, the shackles slipped right off and he bounded away from the cave wall, untethered.
“I should have listened to you,” she apologized the second he shifted back into his human form. “You were right about Dante. I wanted to see the humanity in him, but I’m afraid he’s pure evil. I wish that wasn’t the case.”
Dean pulled her into his arms and said, “I do, too.”
“If I hadn’t gone off to try to talk to him—”
“We can’t dwell on that now,” he insisted as he took her by the shoulders and searched her eyes by the light of the amber glowing lantern. “When Dante was inside of you, could you see what he was planning?”
“Yes!” she exclaimed, then a dark wave crashed through her heart. She could feel it. And she knew. “He’s attacking.”
“Right now?”
“Yes,” she breathed, horrified. “Your brother’s cabin!”
“Conor?”
“No, Kaleb’s,” she told him.
“Come on,” he ordered as he rushed to the opening of the cave and spilled out into the dark night.
She caught up and took hold of his arm, whipping him around to face her.
“Turn me,” she begged.
“Elizabeth,” he responded in a soft, yet warning tone.
“I should have let you before. I want to be there and I want to help, but I don’t see how I can do that if I’m only human.”
“I do,” he assured her. “You come from a long time of werewolf hunters and it may be exactly what we need to take Dante down once and for all.”
With that he took hold of her arm and they ran through the woods.
She hoped he was right. The alternative was too terrible to bear.
Chapter Twenty-One
DEAN
When they reached Kaleb’s cabin, hanging back in the shadows after pulling their pickup truck onto the grassy shoulder, it looked like Armageddon. Wolves were in snarling, fang-bared fights that spilled out through the shattered windows. Flashes of bright white light exploded from within the house, but they were met with icy bursts of dark energy that boomed out through the quiet night.
“Oh my God,” Elizabeth breathed from the passenger’s seat.
The bursts of white light were a good sign, it meant Lucy Cooper was fighting hard, but that wasn’t enough to quell the knots of terror that were twisting through Dean’s tight stomach.
“Stay here,” he ordered.
“What? I’m coming with you,” she insisted as she jumped out of the truck and cocked the hand gun she’d brought with her from the cave.
“I didn’t expect it would be this bad,” he told her. “It’s not safe.”
“It’s not safe for you either,” she reasoned. “We’ll go in together, or we won’t go in at all.”
“Have you ever even used one of those things?” he asked, referring to the gun.
“Only once,” she grinned, and he didn’t exactly appreciate her timing. This was no laughing matter and just because she’d fired off a shot that had clipped Dean’s shoulder—the same damn one that Dante had hit months ag
o—didn’t mean she knew how to handle a gun.
But before he could convince her otherwise, she took off at a jogging clip towards the house.
“Elizabeth!” he hissed, racing after her.
As he caught up, he told her, “If you get Dante in your sights, aim for his heart.”
“Okay,” she breathed, looking deathly serious.
They crossed the side yard at a jog, but a cluster of salivating wolves locked their dark eyes on them. Thinking fast, as the mini pack charged at Elizabeth, Dean shifted into his wolf form, dove in front of her, and fought them off, as she sprinting for the cabin and came to one of the shattered windows.
It was impossible to keep his eye on her as wolf after wolf dove at him. Dean twisted and turned, snapping his jaw and biting hard whenever he gripped the scruff of an attacking wolf between his fangs.
But there were too many of them and the next thing he knew, Elizabeth was nowhere in sight.
Suddenly, another blindingly bright burst of white light exploded from within the cabin and what happened next seemed like the product of some kind of divine intervention that Dean would spend the rest of his life trying to figure out.
The pack of wolves that had been attacking him backed off. As he caught his breath, poised to fend them off if they turned on him once again, he watched as they turned towards the glowing cabin and began sneering and stalking slowly towards it.
He cut his wolf eyes to the far side of the yard where Shane had been fighting his own mini pack in his wolf form. The wolves that had been attacking him had also turned for the cabin, and that’s when Dean realized what had happened.
Whether it was by Lucy’s Astral magic or by their own volition, Dante’s army of the damned had just turned against their dark lord.
The wolves dove, one after the next, through the shattered windows and into the cabin.
Dean and Shane touched eyes then raced in themselves to find Lucy glowing bright and levitating in the air across from Dante and his dark walls of evil energy.
As Dean leaped over the jagged windowsill, he saw Elizabeth crouched on her knee and aiming her gun, eye squinting, at Dante’s broad back as he floated high above her head.
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