Seventeen
My back slams into a wall of the school as I struggle to keep a werewolf from ripping out my throat. Her teeth snap in front of my face, her breath rancid, her spittle flying everywhere. My arms strain from the force of keeping her head away from mine, but by doing so, I’ve left my sides completely open to her claws.
She starts to rake them across my chest, trying to open me up like a fucking pinata. I kick her in the groin with my steel shank boot, catching her off guard with my unnatural speed. Her pelvis snaps, shatters, completely obliterates. She yelps as she crumbles to the ground, then makes no sound at all once my knee connects with her chin.
The crack of her jaw is instantly followed by the squelch of the shards as they pummel into her brain. An angry howl comes from down the hall as a wolf charges at me from my right. Shoving my broken opponent aside, I turn to face them, but Leno is already on her.
Krypto wasn’t in a good way when we left the house. I did something to him that Louise couldn’t fix. When my magic spread out, it touched him. It didn’t physically hurt him; there was nothing for her to actually heal. It was just... replacing his brain, weaving in amongst the neurons and gray matter like a fungus. The only thing she could do was keep him in stasis until Mother arrived, and even she, the best healer in the world, struggled to remove my magic.
But he has a good chance of survival, which is the only reason Leno left with us.
Otherwise, he would’ve stayed by his best friend’s side.
Wanting to get this mission over with quickly so he can get back to his dog, Leno charges at the wolf. He attacks her like an animal. A beast without restraint. Flowered vines are wrapped around his forearms. Sharpened sticks point out of them at every angle, no doubt dripping with poison. Any time he blocks an arm or a snapping jaw, he’s dealing more damage than them. The wolf yelps as he beats her with his club-like fists. He pounds into her, breaking her bones and severing her arteries with every blow.
Leno rarely ever gets his hands dirty, preferring to kill in ways that don’t shed blood, but at the moment, he’s reveling in the violence. The infliction of pain. The transferring of his agony as he worries about his dog.
Turning from him, I attack the next werewolf standing between me and my wife. The hallway is full of mothers and fathers that have barreled out of their homes to protect the pups hiding inside; we normally leave no survivors, no kids that can grow into soldiers, so they’re fighting as viciously as we are.
But eventually, they will all die because I’m not failing my fucking wife again.
That damn video haunts me as I pull out a new set of knives and dance through the chaos of fur. Over the snarls and shouts of battle, I can hear her desperate screams, the ones her broken vocal cords couldn’t handle.
Over the crimson slashes of blood and the white sprays of spittle, over Mother’s shadow on the floor racing towards my wife, I can see Micha’s broken and bruised body. The unwarranted shame on her face. The pain. The agony. The hopelessness.
It fuels me as I cut down one wolf after the other. My brothers are beside me, as is Dayne in Maddox’s form, but we’re not moving fast enough. Although I planned for Zita to betray us, only really needing her to get Maddox inside, I didn’t expect Antonio to have someone bring her back. That changes everything, accelerates my need to get to her before it’s too late.
I studied necromancy a lot when I was younger. It’s a skill even humans can learn if they make the right deals with the keres and other reapers of death. If they learn how to walk all the different planes of Purgatory so they can escape at will. But there’s only one way to talk to a keres and learn the paths of Purgatory. Only one way to train as a necromancer.
You have to die.
Over and over again because if you stay too long in one visit, your body will get consumed by the souls desperate to return to the world of the living. And without a body, you’re nothing more than a trapped soul. Not dead, so you can never move on into the afterlife. Just lost without an anchor for all eternity.
I wasn’t allowed to practice. But I studied the art deeply.
I uncovered all of the legends and myths, all the secrets within them.
Including the dark side of it, the illegal practice of killing soldiers right before a mission and then reviving them.
Necromancy requires a vast amount of power. You have to open a portal to Purgatory, heal the body, and reattach the soul. That influx of energy lingers in the patient long after they’ve returned, making them practically immortal. For the next few hours, they will auto-revive, healing from every injury unless both their heart and head is removed.
So in a normal fight between Zita and Maddox, I would put my money on my brother.
But right now?
When it’s only been half an hour since Khalid saw her die through his soul doll, the stone turning black as Antonio squeezed the last air from her lungs?
Whatever Maddox does to her, it won’t be enough. Zita will get back up. Perhaps when his back is turned. Then he’ll die and so will my wife.
A set of claws scrape across my back, reprimanding me for being distracted. A fucker has come up behind me while I’ve been engaged with another wolf. I lunge forward just in time to save my spine from being severed. But that’s pushed me into the range of my first opponent.
“Leave me!”
I shout, seeing Rudy is about to come to my aid. “Get to Micha!”
I can’t shift into my shadows like he can. I can’t bypass all the wolves in our path, sliding across the floor in a form they can’t touch. Mother is already racing towards the gym. I told her about the necromancy as soon as Khalid told us Zita was still alive, but Antonio already nearly killed her once. She can’t call out her monsters when Micha isn’t our blood. They’ll turn on her as quickly as they turn on any wolf. Besides, Mother doesn’t even know if they’ll come this time. They have recently fed due to the attack at the house, and they are not pets, not dogs willing to defend. They are simply monsters who are happy to eat.
But worse, she is cursed. I don’t know how capable of fighting she actually is. The amount of magic she’s used recently has been vast. She could die at any moment, hiding the fact that beneath her flawless skin, she’s rotting away, the curse eating her alive.
So I want Rudy with her, as much as I’m terrified I might lose him and Micha at the same time. The two people I love the most. I don’t know if I could survive their deaths (Rudy can die if his magic is first drained, meaning he can’t bank on his nightmares to keep him alive), but I sure as hel know I won’t survive failing to rescue my wife.
What they’ve done to her…
What they’ll do to her if we don’t get her out today.
Antonio knows now that we’re bonded, so he’ll move her constantly.
He knows we have a soul doll of her and that we can see and hear through her senses, so he’ll kill her over and over again to ruin all the pieces of alexandrite we have left.
“Go!”
I shout even as a wolf’s claws slice open my chest. If I have to die so she lives, then it is a trade I’m willing to make. “Please!”
I will find her in the next life. I don’t care that we’re not fully bonded, that I won’t have anything to pull me towards her. I will find the djinni who gave us the possibility to bond with our chosen mates, and I will kick the shit out of them until they return me to my wife.
Pain fills Rudy’s eyes. As much as he’s a son to me, I am a father to him. But he makes that split second decision I need him to. He shifts into his shadows and races off down the hall, after Mother, towards my wife.
I tumble to the side, my feet twisting out from under me as pain explodes across my back and chest. I hit the ground and fall into a roll. Pulling on my hybrid speed, I regain my feet, but fighting multiple opponents isn’t like in the movies. They don’t come at me one at a time. They don’t wait for me to get back into a defensible position.
I’m tackled while I’m still in the middle of straightening. Teeth latch around my shoulder. I punch the wolf in the jaw. He yelps as his teeth go flying, but though he releases me, the second one is already biting down on my left leg and dragging me across the floor. I scream as she shakes her head, snapping my bone in half. Fighting through the pain, I lean up and slash my knife across her face multiple times. I hit her eye, her nose, her cheek – not precisely aimed cuts, just mad slices anywhere I can reach.
She releases me, but the wolf with the missing teeth is at my back. I can hear him thundering across the floor, and I know I’m not going to be able to turn in time.
Still, I try. I might be willing to die for Micha, but I’m going to fight until my last breath to see her one more time.
I roll over and stand on one leg. I raise my knife, but the wolf never reaches me. Stormie has him wrapped in a pink bubble of magic, and now she’s compressing it, tightening it, squeezing it so small the wolf is pretzeled inside. Then his organs and bones pop out of his flesh, all nicely contained within a ball of pretty, glittery pink.
I grab two healing potions from my jacket and quickly guzzle them as I spin around to face the wolf I cut up with a knife. The bone in my leg snaps back together, and the slice on my chest heals, but the one on my back isn’t as deep, isn’t as serious, so it still bleeds. I’ll need another potion to heal it, but I don’t have the time right now.
Slasher has regained her feet. With one eye missing and most of her face covered in blood, she lunges for me. I duck, going low and getting in close and personal.
Werewolves stand at seven to eight feet on average, with some fuckers as tall as nine, so forcing them to bend down messes with their balance. Getting into their space removes their reach advantage. They focus on using their mouth and claws; they don’t put as much thought into their footwork.
So as I dance around Slasher, I kick out and slice at her legs. She topples to the ground, her tendons now severed. I quickly step up to kill her, embedding my knife into the back of her neck. With her paralyzed, I lift her head to slice open her throat, but a brother’s scream stops me cold.
My focus snaps to the right, and between the fighting crowd, I clock Leno’s being pulled apart by two wolves. One has his arm between its teeth, the other has his leg in an iron grip. Leno’s vines are wrapped around his body now, trying to keep him in one piece as they tug him hard in opposite directions, but there is blood pouring through the vines at his joints.
Leaving the female, I run towards him, as does Khalid, having just killed the wolf he was fighting with his magic. Enoch, Ezriel, Stefaan, and Dayne are all still engaged with their own opponents. One of the vampires is dead, two of them are dying, having been bitten and infected. Aleric ran down a random hallway soon after Mother left, and I don’t know if he’s gone to find his own men that are being held here, forced to breed, or if he’s caught Antonio’s scent.
Stormie runs beside us without hesitation even though she isn’t a fighter. She’s never been trained in combat. She wrestled with the twins when she was a kid and won more times than not, but as soon as she hit puberty, she had to learn to become a lady. All the fire she was born with was tightly wrapped up behind fancy clothes and thick layers of make-up. But clearly, it was never doused, never snuffed out completely.
As we close the distance to our brother, Khalid builds up a ball of dark-red magic in his right hand, muttering under his breath to shape it. I pull out a gun from a holster on my side. In close, crowded quarters, where allies take up as much space as the enemy, it is a terrible weapon to use. But I can’t throw a knife from this distance, so if I get a clear shot, I’m taking it.
Leno screams again.
More blood pours beneath him.
His vines are starting to tear.
Khalid launches his ball of magic at the wolf on his leg. It arcs through the air, a missile of burning energy.
Someone else screams from behind me. But it’s a voice I don’t recognize, a woman’s. One of Aleric’s vampires, so I don’t turn, don’t get torn between who to help. I’m getting Leno home to his dog.
Though fuck, Louise better not let Krypto die. If she does, it won’t matter what these wolves are doing to him now. Losing his dog will kill him.
As Khalid’s magic nears its target, the werewolf releases Leno. It darts out of the way, and I raise my gun, my finger on the trigger. I aim straight for his heart. But right before I fire, I yank the gun down. One of the man’s arms is hanging loose, flopping around like it’s missing a bone. I didn’t catch the face of the wolf in the video Antonio sent me, but he had a dead arm just like that.
This is one of the fuckers who raped my wife.
I don’t want to kill him with one shot to the heart.
The bullet slams into his thigh, so close to his fucking groin. He stumbles to his knees and growls. I can almost smell my wife on his skin. The urge to empty my gun into his face is damn hard to resist, but a bubble goes up around him, and I decide that’s infinitely better.
“I want him alive,”
I say to Stormie. After we get Micha back home, I’m going to gift her this piece of shit. Then we’re going to cut him open together. Turn him inside out. It’ll be a lovely date night, the first of our hunt as we kill every single fucker who hurt her.
The other wolf, with snow white fur, drops Leno as it charges at me on all fours. Along its back is a row of bone-colored spikes, rising up like hackles. But it’s his eyes that are drawing my attention. Violent and cruel and so fucking familiar.
This is the wolf who took the lead, the one who tortured my wife as well as raped her. His death is going to be slow, so fucking slow as everything he did to Micha is repaid a thousand times over.
I charge forward, tackling him before he gets to Khalid, my control breaking, my bloodlust making me mad. I bare my teeth, wanting to rip out his throat like a fucking beast, but I bite it back. Because when I feed from my wife, it’ll be with virgin fangs. She’ll be my first and last. The parts I sink inside her will never be tainted with the flesh of another.
As we collide in the air, my shoulder slams into his solar plexus. I press my gun against his belly and fire twice. He grunts as we hit the ground. I land on top of him, then scramble up to beat his face in with the butt of the gun. I don’t want this fight to be long. I want to get to my wife and come back for him.
Then I will kill him slowly. Over four years and thirty-eight days.
But as I lift my arm, the wolf rakes a hand across the left side of my face, cutting my eye clean in half. Blood pours down my cheek. Khalid can’t blast him with magic with me this close, and I’m sure he’s cursing me for having lost my fucking mind, but I’m a slave to the madness, to the rage and fury, to the desire for revenge, and the bloodlust of the Craving.
So despite being blind in one eye, I follow through with my attack of hammering my gun into his face. I bust his lip and crack the corner of his eye. He still manages to flip me under him though. He’s much bigger than me, and his pain receptors don’t seem to be fucking working.
I fire my gun once more, this time in his chest. As much as I want to take him in alive so Micha can torture him, I’m not going to let him kill me.
I’m not letting him take anything more from my wife.
His grip crushes my hand as he wrestles me for the gun.
At the same time, his mouth aims for my throat, his hot breath blowing across my face.
I throw my free arm up to intercept him. Scream when he chomps down on it sideways.
He shakes his head, trying to rip it free, but a blast of magic from Khalid explodes across his back, singeing his fur. He yelps as he lets me go and rolls away from us. He tries to stand, but my first two shots paralyzed him from the waist down.
Dropping my gun to free up my right hand –my left arm shredded and almost dislocated– I pull out a knife. Lunging for him across the floor, I stab the eight-inch blade through one of his legs, pinning him to the ground. He tries to slice me up with his claws, but Khalid hacks off his entire arm with a scythe. His precision with a blade is fucking magical. Anyone else would’ve cut me at the same time.
I pull another knife out to restrain his other leg, but a blurry form slams into me, knocking the air out of my lungs and my knife free from my grip. I go flying.
I crash into a wall, plaster raining down on me as I go straight through it. A pup screams for her father as I land in their home on my back. Lifting my head, I have just enough time to glimpse the charging werewolf before he’s on me.
He isn’t as fast as Antonio, and his fur is pitch-black, not red, but his scent tells me he’s recently been near my wife. I don’t care if he didn’t rape her. He hasn’t helped her, and that is enough to sign his death warrant.
Grabbing the leg of the bedside table I’ve landed beside, I swing the whole thing at his face. I clock him in the jaw mid-air, and his head whips sideways, the lower half of his muzzle hanging broken and free. The table splinters apart. He lands on me, causing agony to explode down my mauled arm and across the wound on my back. I push through the pain, grab one of the table’s long splinters, and stab him in his back, right through his right lung.
Leaving the weapon inside him so he can’t heal, I throw him off me. He wheezes as he struggles to reach me, but his eyes close, and his arm drops to the floor.
I stagger to my feet to rejoin the original fight. Right before I got hit, I clocked another four heartbeats. Khalid is a better fighter than I, but even with his magic, he can’t take on four chimeras alone, even if they are ‘failures.’
“Khalid!”
I scream as I stumble towards him.
He’s pulled his double-edged scythe out of his shadows. A cursed weapon, it can kill with one cut, no matter how shallow, no matter where it is on the body. He’s no longer trying to take these four wolves alive.
He spins it around himself, forcing them to keep their distance, buying himself time to work a spell. Normally, a witch needs a free hand to do so, but Khalid’s learned how to speak magic for his job as reaper. He hasn’t mastered it, and the energy he’s building is chaotic and wild. It sizzles in the air, forming around him in little sparks of heated magic, a bomb just waiting to go off.
Snarling and snapping their teeth, the four werewolves instantly charge at my brother as one. It doesn’t matter if he cuts one or two with his scythe. He won’t be able to stop the others from ripping him apart.
But just as they breach the range of his weapon, Leno’s vines shoot out of fucking nowhere.
They grab two of them by the back legs, then slam the werewolves into each other. Khalid pivots, smoothly shifting gears to fight off the other two. His scythe slices one across their chest as he dances out of the way of their mouth. He spins it around himself as he finishes his spell, and one of the wolves drops to the ground, their heart having exploded in their chest. The other one gets a blade straight across their face. Knowing he’ll be fine, I turn my attention to the two trapped in Leno’s vines.
They’re dazed from having been knocked into each other, but the vines aren’t wrapped around them anymore. They’re lying on the floor, loose and limp. My heart plummets into my stomach as I follow their green trails to my brother.
He’s sitting up against the wall, his left arm completely gone, his right leg only attached by the smallest bit of flesh. He didn’t heal himself in the nick of time so he could join the fight.
He used the last of his energy to save our brother.
I run towards him despite the pull of my girl, trusting Mother and my brothers to bring her home, trusting her to be strong enough to survive until I get there. Leno has been with me nearly all my life. Only a year separates us. Most of my memories have him in them.
We built pillow forts in our rooms and waged battles on each other in the middle of the night, doing our best to sneak through ‘no man’s land’ (ie: the hall where Mother could catch us).
We taught Khalid how to scribble on the walls and shit in the corner of the house to distract her so we could sneak into the cookie jar.
We snuck out of the house as preteens, learned how to hot wire the family car together. Learned how to drive.
And when he lost his eyes, I found him a dog. A stray who needed him as much as he needed it.
He never backed a single coup to take my throne. He has never seen me as a threat, as an enemy, as anything other than his older brother. Not even when he found out I was a hybrid.
He stood against the fucking reaper to save my life.
I can’t lose him.
I won’t.
“Stay with me,”
I say as I drop to my knees beside him, having already pulled out a potion on the way over.
But I only have three vials left, and even in my wrecked state, I know they won’t be enough to save him. His injuries are too severe, and he’s our secondary healer. Mother’s with my wife.
At least, I hope she’s with my wife, but what if she never made it? These halls are full of werewolves, the town having shrunk to just this school over four years, since the kid in our garage basement had been chased out.
For a second, I’m torn between the need to stay with my brother and the need to run towards my girl.
But Micha doesn’t need me to save her. Doesn’t need me to carry her out of here like a white knight with a massive fucking ego.
She is my equal, and she is a fighter.
She will survive long enough for me to get a vampire to take Leno home, back to Louise so she can heal him.
So my heart hammering, I raise the potion to Leno’s lips. I can hear the beat of his heart splashing out on the ground around us. Can hear it struggling inside his chest.
“Aleric!”
I shout. “Vlad!”
Footsteps race towards me from all directions.
“Leno!”
Ezriel and Enoch shout.
Khalid reaches me first, pulling out more potions from inside his jacket. Enoch and Ezriel grab his arm and leg and hold them in place while we feed him one potion at a time.
But they’re not doing a damn thing. He’s too far gone.
“Stop…”
he finally says, admitting what we cannot. “Tell Krypto…”
“You can tell him yourself when we get you home.”
I turn to Vlad, who’s standing silently beside us. Only one other vampire has survived, a woman with dark-blue hair. “Take him back to Louise.”
He stares at me, then shakes his head. “He won’t survive the journey in this state.”
“It’s his best chance.”
“Varius…”
My head turns back to him, tears burning my eyes.
“You’re going to be fine.”
“Tell Kry...pto... he’s… a... good…”
His words trail off. I lift a new vial to his lips.
“Come on, Leno. Stay with me.”
The potion dribbles out of his mouth.
“Fuck,”
Enoch whispers.
No! I grab another vial, but Khalid places a hand on my shoulder and squeezes.
“Take it,” he says.
“Leno needs it more.”
“Take it,”
he repeats, and that is an order. A reaper’s duty to keep the Family together.
To keep me together as I stare at the empty husk of our brother.
Fighting back a scream, I close my eyes, then bring the vial to my own lips. I hate myself for giving up on him, for taking the vials he needs.
But Micha needs me too.
I can’t let Leno’s death be for nothing.
As I swallow the soft-blue liquid, heat courses through my face as the slashes there stitch themselves back together. The vision in my eye slowly starts to come back, but it stays blurry, the potion unable to heal it fully. Eyes are too complicated, and off-the-shelf spells can only do so much. I need to find a proper healer within a few hours. Otherwise, the potion’s ‘fix’ will be permanent.
My hands shaking, my gaze on my dead brother, I down two more vials, healing the wounds on my arm and back. Then I reach forward to close Leno’s eyes. My grief turns into rage, into dry ice in my fucking veins.
My hands shaking, I take another potion, healing the rest of my wounds.
“Antonio has a necromancer,”
I say as I stand, my voice hard and cruel. “Fucking find him.”
“Varius –”
“Find him,”
I snap. “And take those fucking wolves with us.”
I look towards the bubble Stormie has up around the wolf I shot in the leg. He killed my brother. He raped my wife. I am going to kill him slowly.
The same with –
My eyes narrow. My jaw tightens. The leader, the sadist who tortured Micha is no longer where we left him. A trail of blood disappears down a hall.
I start to tell Khalid to hunt the fucker down and to bring him back alive, whatever it takes, when my heart plummets into hel. Fear and terror and utter despair slam into me, shooting down our bond.
My head jerks in the direction of my wife.
I take off in a sprint.
“Varius!”
Stormie shouts as she tries to keep up with me, but I leave her behind.
I leave them all behind.
Because there is a sickness in my stomach.
A twisted mess of black poison.
Spreading through my veins.
So lethal in its certainty.
A truth that every atom of my soul is screaming:
I’m going to be too late.