by Lucia Ashta
My breath stuttered in my chest as I processed that I couldn’t feel her anymore. The familiar buzz of her energy was absent, as if it had never been a part of me.
I opened my eyes, and right away Fury captured my full attention. He sat in the circle across from me, knees bent, his feet flat against the ground, his hands next to them. His head tilted back while his mouth hung open … sucking in a golden-coppery stream of light.
My lion.
A whimper escaped me around the gag, but no one looked my way. The scene engulfing Fury was mesmerizing. His short hair rustled in every direction beneath the forces of an invisible wind, the fabric of his t-shirt flapping too. The beam of light originated from me and traveled directly into him … until the golden tendrils of magic shifted, traversing the space between us, and entered him all the way.
The light ceased, and he swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing. When he snapped his mouth shut, he tilted his face forward, and I swallowed in abject fear. His eyes glowed with the same golden copper of my eyes—and Ky’s. Fury had my lion. He’d stolen her, and she was beyond my reach.
Emptiness raced through my insides, like a raging river carving out a canyon. I experienced the loss of my lion as truly as if both my legs had been amputated. Though I’d still been working to understand her and our connection, she’d been one of the most important things to ever happen to me.
Now she was gone, lost to me forever.
I didn’t bother trying to staunch the tears. These fuckers could stuff it.
I wrenched heavy, pained eyes toward my brother … and his eyes popped open and stared straight at me.
19
Unlike me, Ky didn’t waste precious time. I was trying to broadcast to him that I might have broken the spell that controlled his collar, but around a gag and with my hands tied, there was no good way to get my meaning across. He stared at me for only a few beats before snapping his gaze across the rocky ledge. It took him mere seconds to take in the scene, illuminated by the light of a nearly full moon. I couldn’t tell if he realized that Jevan had already succeeded in transferring my power to Fury, but either way, all that mattered was that he shift and get us out of there.
Entranced by Fury’s receipt of my power, none of the shifters had noticed that my brother was awake. Not even Jevan, who was positioned so that my brother was directly behind Fury, appeared to pay attention to his subtle movements.
When the edges of Ky’s body began to blur, relief flooded me. He’d understood my signals, or he’d realized on his own. Either way, once he shifted, at the very least he should be able to escape before the others in their human forms could catch him.
I’d never seen him shift so quickly. One moment he was a human, tied up with nothing on but his boxers, and the next he was a glorious mountain lion, an apex predator, all fine-tuned muscle and lethal instincts. The zip ties had simply disappeared along with his underwear, as if they were just another accessory.
I did my best to ignore the pang of loss that arrived with my admiration of his animal, but I didn’t succeed. I suspected I’d probably never stop mourning the loss of my shifter magic.
Ky took off the instant he landed on four strong paws. He raced past Fury, aiming for the sorcerer. Jevan squeaked, backpedaling across the rock as if he were a crab. He knocked into a couple of his precious pouches, breaking the circle of power. My brother lunged at him with open jaws, snapping them around his neck, piercing his jugular. Blood spurted across Ky’s golden fur while the life drained from Jevan’s eyes.
The entire process from shift to kill attack had probably lasted less than ten seconds. As Ky dropped the sorcerer’s throat, the shifters around us jumped into action, including Fury, who shot to his feet. Blood pooled around the rock beneath Jevan’s head, but no one paid him any mind.
Ky moved between me and the guys, lowering his head and growling, the fur around his mouth a bloody red. Rage and Fury squared off to face him, the other shifters lining up behind them. I was torn between wanting Ky to run away and save himself, and my terror at him abandoning me to a certain fate. Rage’s brow was lowered in menace, and his lips twitched, baring teeth. He’d kill me the first chance he got after Ky had messed up the rest of his plan.
The crackling and snapping of bones, cartilage, and flesh punctuated the night. I would have recoiled, assuming the sounds accompanied pain, but I found a dark part of myself enjoying whatever suffering they might be enduring. While their bodies began to distort, each in different ways and at different speeds, Ky pounced on Fury. His teeth tore through the jeans the shifter wore, leaving a gaping hole. He snapped at his exposed calf, slicing through muscle until he clamped down on the bone. Fury howled, a sound halfway between human and beast, before he clenched his jaw and quieted. His eyes blazed, and he kicked his leg out, trying to dislodge Ky.
But Ky was a step ahead of him. He released his hold on Fury’s leg and pierced his teeth into the shifter’s bare forearm, crunching and grinding his teeth until he snapped the bone into shards. This time the shifter whimpered and collapsed to the ground, his shift temporarily halted, leaving him deformed, half man, half beast. Fur rippled along his forearm, trying to reach the site of injury, to accelerate healing, I imagined; it failed, as if his magic—my magic—were unable to prevail through the severity of the pain. He crumpled in a moaning heap, creating a second pool of blood, which appeared black beneath the moonlight.
By then, Rage’s shift was complete, and a couple of the shifters behind him seemed as if they weren’t far behind. Instead of running to his brother’s aid, he sped toward me. I screamed against my gag. I would like to say it was because I was trying to alert Ky, but the reality was that the look in the eyes of Rage’s lion chilled my blood. They promised vengeance and destruction, and I had no doubt he’d kill me as swiftly as Ky had ended Jevan.
Ky leapt at Rage and intercepted him, knocking the lion to the ground. Rage landed with a snarl and a whoosh of air, but claimed his paws immediately, turning his ire on Ky. The two lions circled each other, Ky being careful not to turn his back to the five other uninjured shifters, while also keeping them away from me. It was a losing proposition. All he could do was hold them off. Eventually, they’d corner him. There was no avoiding it, not when Ky and Rage were so evenly matched. Three of Rage’s minions were large werewolves, and I couldn’t tell what the other two were yet, slower to transform than the rest.
“Get out of here, Ky!” I screamed. Around my gag, it sounded like an impersonation of the teachers in Charlie Brown’s Peanuts. Still, there was a good chance he’d get the gist. “Leave me!” I insisted.
He ignored me, continuing with his fruitless maneuvers.
A howl split the tension. A fresh wave of shivers raced across my skin.
The other shifters tensed, but not Ky. He bobbed his head forward and back, as if seeking an opening to attack Rage.
That’s when I knew. If Ky wasn’t worried, then that must mean he’d recognized the wolf howl. And if he’d recognized the wolf, it had to mean it was someone we knew.
My heart leapt in my chest as I indulged in a fresh wave of hope. Could it be that the troops had finally arrived to rescue us? The shivers began racking my body in earnest, the adrenaline, I assumed, catapulting the cold to another level. I scooted my body around the rock ledge, scraping myself along fragments of rock while trying to angle myself so I could see in the direction the howl had seemed to spring from.
A large shape flickered across the moon, blotting its silver light. I squeaked as I startled, blinking repeatedly as I tried to make sense of the image crystallizing in front of me, swooping closer.
A humongous bird, ten, maybe even twenty times the size of a regular bird of prey, flew directly at me. The moonlight glinted across its body, wings outstretched, casting it in a silver glow.
I squeaked again as the bird—no, not just any bird, an eagle—extended its monstrous talons toward me, even though by then I suspected who this might be. Still, I couldn’
t help it. The bird was ginormous, and those talons … well, they looked like they could slice right through me with as much efficiency as Ky’s jaws.
In no more time than it took me to admire the grace of his flight and the span of his wings, the eagle grazed across the ledge, gathering me in its talons. One wrapped around my bound legs, the other around my torso, their pointed ends slightly puncturing my flesh, though I didn’t think Leander could help this. His talons were sharp as razors.
I lost sight of Ky and the seven shifters who faced off with him—more like six and a half, since Fury was severely injured—while the giant eagle rose to the top of Thunder Mountain. Though the mountain was more than six-thousand feet tall, Leander covered the distance in less than a minute. He set me against the prickly, harsh surface of stone with extreme gentleness, and I resisted the fresh wave of emotion that threatened to spring loose. That he should treat me with infinite care when Rage and his accomplices had mistreated me so...
I writhed on the loose rock that coated the mountain until I noticed the eagle shifting. A burst of silver light flashed around the eagle … leaving the striking elfin prince in its stead.
“Rina,” Leander breathed, rushing toward me while slipping a pocket knife into his hand. With two fast swipes, he freed me of the zip ties. He helped me to sit and worked carefully at the knot on the gag, untangling the hair from it before slipping it off.
I rubbed gingerly at my tender wrists while I shook out my legs. “Oh my God, thank you.” I labored not to grimace against the fresh onslaught of discomfort as unhindered blood flow returned to my limbs, throbbing like a thumping bass beat along the length of my arm.
He sank to his knees by my side, his brows low with concern. “Are you all right?”
“Ky! We have to help Ky,” I said.
“It’s all right. I didn’t come alone. The others are helping him now.”
“Who? Who’s helping him?”
He bent over me, and his brow creased even further at the urgency in my voice. “Boone and Marcy June came as their animals. Two of the vamp professors, Damante and Vabu. Quickfoot and McGinty. A bunch of the trolls and a few Enforcers that were manning the perimeter. Oh, and Damon and Sadie of course, and Wendi.”
“Wendi,” I said on a sharp inhale. “She’s the one who betrayed us. Along with some vamp students.”
He straightened his back. “Wendi? You’re sure?”
“Totally sure.”
“Then we need to get back down there and warn them.” He stood, preparing to leave.
“Just leave me. I’ll slow you down. Get there as fast as you can and warn them.”
“Rina, I’m not leaving you ever again.”
I was in the midst of puzzling out what the heck that might mean when wings burst from his back in a flash of silver magic. My mouth dropped open and I didn’t even care. With his wings spread wide, moonlight illuminating his silver hair and coating his wings in the same tones, he was more beautiful than any man I’d ever seen—or supernatural creature, rather. His chest was bare, and he wore nothing beyond thin pajama pants, which revealed the contours of his body that would undoubtedly visit my dreams later. He was the most splendid elfin prince eagle man I’d ever seen.
“Come on,” he said, bringing my gawking to a swift end while he tucked my gag into a back pocket of his pajama pants.
I tried to stand, pushing up on my good arm, but fell back down. “Sorry, I was tied up for too long. My legs—oh!”
Leander swooped me up from the ground and cradled me in his arms, pressed against his bare, muscular chest. “Hold on,” he said, and I nodded, unwilling to complain about the nature of my rescue. He ran toward the edge of the mountain and leapt off the side of it. I couldn’t even manage a startled scream, my eyes were so wide, my heart thundering in my chest, as if bouncing against my aching ribcage. I wrapped my good arm around his neck, while cradling the injured one in my lap, and held on for dear life. We dropped into a dead fall for several hundred feet before he spread his wide wings and gentled our descent. I loosened the death grip I had on him, but only slightly.
“Don’t worry. I’ve got you,” he said. “I’ll always protect you now.”
Whatever that meant. He still had a king for a father, who wouldn’t allow us to be together.
He set down on a neighboring ledge with the gentleness of experience. But he didn’t release his grip on me as he moved across the rock, steps sure despite his bare feet.
“Are you going to put me down?” I asked.
“No, not any time soon.”
Ooo-kay then.
He set off toward the others, the grunts, snarls, and whimpers of a full-out brawl leading the way. I exhaled in relief, the shivers finally ceasing completely as I took in the scene. Not only was Ky safe, but he had a small platoon at his back attacking the five shifters, though half were already disabled from severe injuries.
Bloody hell. Five shifters! “Where are Rage and Fury?” I called out.
Sadie whipped her head toward me. “Took off when Leander grabbed you. Fucking cowards.” She smiled in that deranged way of hers as she sliced at a rust-colored wolf in front of her, or maybe it was all the blood making his coat seem that color. Her curved blade hacked through its side, and it fell, heaving against the cold rock.
Damon was at her side, his semi-automatic strapped to his back, but he wasn’t using it. Fighting another wolf with his bare hands, he was punishing the creature. There was no way any of Rage’s minions would walk away from here alive. The shifter world was merciless in more ways than one. The Enforcers were authorized to mete out appropriate punishment on the spot, though Sadie probably would have killed them all whether she had the authority or not.
Three trolls, with their bright fro-hawks pulled up into high knots atop their heads, were taking on a bear and a lion, like a king of the jungle kind of lion, with Quickfoot and McGinty getting their own punishment in alongside them. The two vamp professors stood over the incredibly still body of a wolf. Ky paced along the ledge, his muscles rippling with each taut movement while he peered into the night in search of unseen dangers.
“Where are Marcy June and Boone?” I asked.
“Off tracking Rage and Fury,” Damon said.
“Fury was super injured,” Sadie said. “They won’t get far with Rage carrying him. And MJ and Boone have some trolls with them too.”
“Good. And where’s Wendi?”
Sadie straddled the wolf she was fighting and sliced clean across its throat. Blood spurted from the gaping wound, painting more of the rock ledge in crimson. “I don’t know where she went,” Sadie said, as if she really couldn’t care less about Wendi.
“Well, we’d better find her. She betrayed all of us.”
Every defender there turned to level a narrow-eyed gaze on me. I squirmed in Leander’s strong arms, suddenly all too aware that I was practically naked. “Some vamp students too.” I leveled a meaningful look on the two vamp professors.
“If that’s the case, then we’ll deal with them,” Professor Damante said in an Arctic tone while Vabu gave an abrupt nod, his face a rigid mask of whoop-ass. Oh shit. The vamp professors were seriously pissed. “We’ll talk once this”—Damante gestured toward the bloody brawl that was winding down—“is finalized.”
I probably should have said something, but the cold stares of the two vamps had my tongue twisted in knots several times over. I gulped and nodded, then purposefully trained my gaze on Sadie.
If I thought the vamps were pissed, I hadn’t seen Sadie yet. She looked positively murderous, thoughts of her revenge glinting in her eyes. “That fucking...” She trailed off and growled like a shifter, her nostrils flaring. “I’m going to kill her. I don’t care that we’re supposed to take Enforcers to Thane. I’m gonna kill her myself.”
“Sadie...” Damon placed a calming hand on her shoulder, though his hand was covered in blood. “Think this through.”
“No need. I already know what I’m goi
ng to do. Come on. We have a bitch to find.”
Damon stared at her with a tight grimace, then finally nodded. Together, they stalked off in the opposite direction, then loped off in a run, Damon’s gun bouncing against his back, until the night swallowed them whole.
Ky edged toward Leander and me, sniffing at my feet. He was trailing his nose across my legs when a deep sorrow shadowed his coppery lion eyes.
He’d scented the loss of my shifter magic. Every fear and every loss of the night bubbled inside me like a rushing tsunami.
I couldn’t bear to meet the torment in my brother’s gaze. I allowed my head to fall limply against Leander’s chest. Every ounce of fight I had left evaporated all at once. “Please take me home.” Only after I said it did I realize that I was nowhere near Iowa, and I wasn’t really sure where home was anymore.
But Leander simply nodded, his eyes welling with understanding and compassion. He beat his gigantic wings as he leapt into the sky, leaving the bloody scene behind. If only I could have left the depth of my loss behind just as easily.
At least Ky and I had lived. I’d allow myself to focus on that amazing blessing. It was a small miracle that we’d survived the night.
Right away, my heart disobeyed my wishes; it gaped like a festering wound; silent tears trailed down my cheeks and onto Leander’s chest. I closed my eyes and allowed his warmth to calm me. The night was all encompassing as we merged with it.
20
Nearly two weeks passed, half of which I spent in the healing ward under Melinda’s care, recovering from a fractured arm and two cracked ribs. Sparring between shifters was a dangerous activity, and I’d witnessed the badger repairing physical injuries graver than mine in far less time. With the way Melinda fussed over me, I had the feeling she was more concerned about my non-physical trauma. The mother hen couldn’t bear to let me go when my heart was so obviously broken.