Chapter 19
Chapter nineteen
Blades slashed through the air. Blood splattered the walls. Bodies crashed together in a frenzy of claws, teeth, and fur, and yet, Dominic was no closer to reaching his mate.
His breath came in ragged bursts as he ducked beneath a wild swipe, muscles burning as he twisted away from snapping jaws. A hulking guard barreled toward him. He sidestepped at the last instant, driving his elbow into the male’s ribs, feeling bone give way with a sickening crunch.
Sweat burned his eyes as the floor pitched beneath him, but he didn’t pause.
Another figure lunged from the shadows, claws glinting, and Dominic spun, catching its arm and yanking it forward, sending it crashing into the nearest wall.
The corridor lurched sideways, walls groaning as the mansion rearranged itself yet again. He caught himself on one hand, shoved upright, and ran, reaching the end of the hallway, only to end up in another on the opposite side of the house.
He slammed through a heavy oak door…into a greenhouse choked with damp heat and the scent of overturned soil. Glass crunched beneath his boots. Moonlight spilled through the shattered ceiling.
And footsteps thundered behind him.
Dominic spun just as the first guard reached him. He raked his claws across the man’s chest and sent him flying into a trellis of tangled vines. Another lunged from the doorway. Dominic ducked, drove a shoulder into its sternum, then barreled past him into the next room.
Which was no room at all.
The greenhouse vanished behind him, replaced by a narrow passage made of bare stone. No windows. No exits. Just hostile magic that crawled over the walls in faint black veins.
“Fuck,” he snarled, frustration gnawing at him.
The mansion was a living trap. Every time he found a route forward, it twisted into something else. Doors sealed shut. Hallways doubled back. Staircases led nowhere. The harder he pushed, the harder it resisted.
Closing his eyes, he gathered his magic and jumped, aiming for the solarium. Instead, the house spat him out right back where he’d started in the corridor lined with the souvenirs of conquest.
He braced a hand against the wall, chest heaving, senses straining. Now that he had broken through the last of the wards, his connection with Sammy had been reestablished. He could hear him. Feel him. Hell, he could even sense his presence somewhere inside the mansion.
But he couldn’t reach him through the thick, taunting magic that hummed through every brick and beam like laughter.
Suddenly, the wall beside him bulged, and he sprang back as three figures stepped right out of the solid stone.
Guards…but not. They advanced, faces blank, movements jerky and wrong, like someone had heard of fighting but never witnessed it.
One staggered forward, sword swung too wide. Dominic caught the wrist, snapped the arm backward, and buried his claws in the creature’s throat. Instead of a spray of blood, it burst apart in a plume of black smoke that curled through his fingers.
Another charged. Dominic seized a decorative vase from a pedestal and smashed it across the thing’s head. Porcelain exploded. The figure staggered two steps, eyes flickering, then collapsed into shadow that seeped between the floor tiles.
“Effigies,” he spat.
Conjured muscle. Made to delay, not defeat, and they kept coming.
Claws flashed. Wood splintered. Smoke filled the corridor in choking waves as one after another dissolved beneath his hands. But for every effigy he destroyed, two more emerged.
What they lacked in skill, they made up for in endless numbers.
His own blood slicked his knuckles. His breath tore from his lungs. Fury pounded through him hotter than exhaustion. Still, they crowded him from every side, sluggish but relentless, buying time while the house shifted and hid his mate deeper inside.
“Dominic?”
As if conjured by thought alone, Sammy’s voice rang inside his head, his tone strained, concern sharpened by fear.
“On my way,” he assured him, dropping his head and charging through the advancing swarm. “Just hit a bit of a roadblock.”
There was a pause, a moment of hesitation, then Sammy asked, “What kind of roadblock?”
Magic exploded from him, charged and jagged like bolts of lightning, dusting half the guards in the corridor. “Hold tight, colibrí. I’m coming.”
Then he muted the connection, leaving it open but controlled, not wanting Sammy to accidentally glimpse the true extent of what they faced.
Nearing the end of the hall, Dominic sidestepped abruptly, barely avoiding a collision when Saint materialized directly in front of him. His brother grunted, grabbed one of the effigies by the throat, and buried a dagger in its temple.
“I hate this fucking house,” he growled.
“Old money buys old magic,” Dominic commented, dispatching two more haunted puppets.
And this was some very old magic. He hadn’t seen anything like it in centuries.
“What the hell are we supposed to do?” Saint demanded. “We can’t keep running in fucking circles.”
No, they couldn’t, but maybe they didn’t have to.
The shortest distance between two points was a straight line. In theory, if one didn’t exist, he could make his own. If he couldn’t break through the enchantments, he would tear through the house itself.
He had no way of knowing if it would work until he tried, but he couldn’t keep fighting shadows and hoping for better results.
“Fuck it.”
Magic surged through him, blistering and violent, as he called forth the change.
He braced as every muscle locked tight. Bones snapped and lengthened beneath his skin. Tendons stretched. The corridor filled with the brutal music of cracking joints and tearing fabric as his human shape gave way to something far larger and far deadlier.
Dark fur burst across his shoulders and spine in a rippling wave. His hands twisted into massive paws tipped with claws that carved trenches through the floorboards. His jaw thrust forward, teeth sharpening into lethal points as a growl rolled from deep in his chest.
By the time the transformation finished, Dominic loomed over the ruined effigies and the narrow hall alike, a twelve-foot nightmare of fang, muscle, and fury. Saint stared up at him, and in his eyes, Dominic caught the burn of his own gaze—amber lit from within, glowing like banked embers.
The scent of ozone and wild magic thickened the air. Raw power rolled off him in waves, primal and vicious, pressing against the walls hard enough to make the sconces rattle.
When more effigies spilled into the corridor, he hit the horde like a battering ram, scattering them like confetti. One of the conjured guards barely had time to lift its sword before Dominic’s jaws closed around its torso. Smoke burst between his teeth as the thing came apart in a black plume.
He spat the remnants aside and lunged for the next.
This one he caught by the shoulder, shaking until it dissolved into darkness. Another charged from behind. Dominic swung a massive paw without even looking, slamming it into the wall so hard the stone cracked.
The effigy burst on impact.
Saint stared up at him, a smirk playing across his mouth as he shook his head. “You know,” he said, ducking beneath a sweeping dagger aimed his way, “this feels wildly unnecessary.”
Dominic snarled back around a mouthful of smoke.
“Go find Sammy,” his brother called as more figures poured from the walls. “I’ve got this.”
He lowered his head, a brief mark of gratitude and respect, then reared back on his hind legs, driving both forepaws into the floor.
The mansion shuddered. Wood exploded, and the concrete beneath it fractured in a spiderweb of cracks. But magic surged upward through the boards, dark and hostile, trying to seal the damage as fast as he made it.
Dominic roared and struck again, claws punching through splintered timber into the space below. He managed to tear free an entire section of flooring and hurled it into the swarm.
Then he dug. Not with precision. Not with patience.
With pure, furious determination.
Boards, nails, rock, enchanted supports—nothing survived the assault of claws fueled by wrath. The corridor buckled around them as he ripped downward through beams and masonry, refusing to play by the house’s rules another second.
Suddenly, light flashed beneath the wreckage.
He plunged both forelegs through the opening, widening it with a savage wrench. With a deafening roar of splintering wood and shattering stone, the floor finally gave way beneath his weight.
He crashed through in an avalanche of debris, striking the level below hard enough to crater the black marble. Dust exploded outward in billowing clouds, choking him and obstructing his view.
For one breath, everything was still.
Then the dust began to settle, and from somewhere ahead, faint but unmistakable, he caught Sammy’s scent. Dominic rose slowly from the wreckage, shoulders rolling, claws scraping across the polished marble.
This corridor was nothing like the madness above. No shifting walls. No cluttered grandeur. No theatrical nonsense.
The space stretched long and elegant beneath vaulted ceilings of dark stone veined with gold.
Marble pillars lined the hall at perfect intervals, and gilded sconces waited cold and dark between tall mirrors framed in carved obsidian.
Here, the air smelled faintly of old incense, polished wood, and blood buried beneath expensive perfume.
Dominic’s lips peeled back from his teeth as he stepped forward.
Every bowl-shaped sconce ignited at once, green flame racing down the walls in a chain reaction, bathing the hall in eerie corpse light.
At the same time, sound vanished, the silence instant and complete.
No crackle of fire or shifting debris. No breath in his lungs or growl in his throat.
Shaking off the disorientation, he took another step, stopping again when runes flared across the marble. Thin gold lines spread from the crater at his feet, branching through the floor in intricate circles and jagged symbols that pulsed with awareness.
Then the tiles softened, turning slick and malleable as inky goo covered his paws and climbed his legs in grasping ribbons. Dominic jerked free with brute force, marble snapping under the effort, only for the thick tar to reach for him again.
As he struggled, he caught movement from the corner of his eye, ripples across glass like a disturbance on the surface of a lake. One by one, as if perfectly choreographed, reflections stepped forward in the mirrors.
Mockeries.
Predators built from his own shape.
A dozen towering wolves made of silvered shadow and green flame emerged soundlessly, stepping through the glass to fill the hallway. Nostrils flared, eyes burning amber, they lowered their heads and pawed the tile.
The nearest one lunged.
Dominic met it head-on, their bodies crashing together in utter silence, jaws snapping, claws tearing. He seized its throat—its hide slick and dense, like ink wrapped around steel—and slammed it into a pillar.
The creature burst into glittering shards of obsidian before dissolving into black mist.
Three more charged.
Dominic roared soundlessly and launched himself into them. He tore through one, crushed another beneath his forepaw, then bit through the spine of a third. Green fire sprayed across the walls and vanished in puffs of thick smoke.
More stepped from the mirrors to replace the fallen, because of course they did. The floor dragged at him. The silence rang, piercing and disorienting. The reflections kept coming.
Then through it all, faint, fragile, and real, he scented his mate.
He jerked his head around, his eyes scanning the distance. There, beyond the end of the corridor, past the double doors carved with gold sigils and dripping enough magic to choke on.
He glanced at the endless row of mirror wolves, then back at the doors.
Enough. No more games.
Driven by instinct and powered by fury, he barreled through the center of the corridor, mirror wolves snapping at his flanks as green flames streaked past in silent arcs. Claws raked his side. Tar clung to his legs. Teeth gnashed at his throat.
He ignored it all.
Twenty feet away from the pulsating doors, sound returned. Not all at once, but little by little. Only a muffled snap at first, then voices bleeding through the seams.
“Really, mother.” Sammy. “Language.”
Dominic’s heart slammed against his ribs as he turned on a burst of speed.
Another voice followed, waspish and female, rising into shrill accusation. “You did this. You caused this. Everything is ruined because—”
A crack split the air. Then a heavy thud as something, or someone, hit the floor.
“Ah, that’s better.”
The words came faintly through the warded doors. He didn’t recognize the voice, didn’t know who it belonged to, but something in the oily cadence made his blood run cold.
His steps faltered for half a stride, then every instinct in him sharpened to a killing edge. He hit the next mirror wolf hard enough to tear straight through it without slowing, glass and shadow exploding behind him.
“Now,” the male murmured, calm and calculated. “What to do with you.”
Dominic shoved off his back legs and launched himself the final distance. The first impact bowed the doors inward but held as the sigils blazed around the frame.
He landed, spun, and struck again with both forepaws. Hinges screamed, and cracks shot through the wood, but still, it held.
Magic surged through him in a violent wave, gathering in his chest and racing down every limb. He drove forward with all of it.
Black oak shattered. Metal screeched. Gold wards burst with loud pops, burning out like used-up lightbulbs. Behind him, mirrors detonated like ticking bombs, broken glass raining across the floor, and the twisted clones evaporated into fog.
Dominic roared, a sound ripped straight from his soul, and hit the doors one last time. They exploded inward in a maelstrom of splinters and dust as the magic that held them together shuddered and gasped.
Dripping with blood and sweat and vibrating with rage, he stepped through the wreckage to retrieve his mate.