Chapter 46
Noa
Juno’s teeth sink into the side of Zephira’s face, right over her eye, and the witch’s scream rips across the night.
And chaos ensues immediately.
The omegas move all at once, hands still bound as they scramble and break in different directions, using the distraction to put distance between themselves and the threats looming like sentinels over them.
Witches shout and move to contain it, magic already sparking at their fingertips.
The McNamara wolves rush to close ranks, shifting mid-stride to block escape routes.
Some of the omegas shift anyway, knowing they might not get another chance.
Wolves tear free of human skin in the span of a heartbeat, and the heavy-duty zip ties snap as their bodies expand and reshape.
It should feel like relief, like the scales are finally shifting in our favor after all of this.
All I can focus on is Juno.
She’s still clamped on Zephira, her small body shaking with the muscle strain, but her jaw remains locked tight.
Zephira’s face is ruined—blood and torn skin—and beneath the green haze of the ward it looks darker than it should.
Almost black. I can’t tell if that’s the light playing tricks or something worse. I can’t tell if her eye is still there.
Her hand scrapes along the road, feeling through mud and slush.
Searching for the knife.
I spot it before her fingers can brush against its cursed bone handle, the serrated curved blade glinting in the green light. I don’t think, I just move. Half crawling, half lunging, I drag myself forward.
My fingers barely brush the handle before something slams into my ribs. A boot. The kick precise and intentional.
Pain explodes through my side, and my body lifts clear off the ground. I come back down feet away, chest-first. The impact knocks the air out of my lungs so thoroughly that I can’t cry out.
I twist, curling onto my side instinctually as I try to get my body to accept oxygen again.
Footsteps approach.
When I look up, an ex-council member stands over me, the alpha male’s face twisted with contempt.
“You’re as much trouble as your mother,” he sneers, his hand poised and ready to come down, his fingernails extend into claws. For a moment, I’m certain he’s going to carve me open right here in this road, and I brace myself for the pain, frozen and helpless in the muck.
Then the air shifts. Magic, not dark, but familiar this time.
The pressure changes so abruptly my skin prickles with goosebumps. I turn my head, sensing the source, just in time to see it happen, the precise moment a concealing glamour falls away. It doesn’t tear or shatter, it simply peels back, as if someone has carefully lifted a blanket off the world.
Amara’s coven stands where there had been nothing a heartbeat ago, close enough that my mind stumbles to catch up and accept what I’m seeing is real.
And then, between them, Fallamhain wolves step forward.
One after another, familiar bodies filling the spaces, closing ranks without a word.
They aren’t the pack’s fighters, but they stand all the same.
It isn’t a barricade they form. It’s a declaration.
They’ve brought the fight to the enemy, and the way they claim their places, digging their heels in, makes it clear this road is where they intend to make their stand, no matter the cost.
Amara stands at the front, fire coiling and ready in her palms. And Rhosyn—Rhosyn is here too, positioned at the High Priestess’s flank in her fawn wolf form.
I think back to earlier, to the moment in the car when I tried to reach Rhosyn’s mind and thought I felt her closer than the others. It happened too fast for me to really trust it as real.
Now I know why.
Amara doesn’t waste any more time. The fire in her hand forms a tight ball and then she hurls it.
It slams into the council member still standing over me with violent force and sends him flying backward.
His body flings off the road and crashes into a sturdy trunk there.
The cracking of his bones on impact is something everyone hears, the silence left behind when the Ashvale coven’s glamour falls making sure of it.
The breaking of the ex-councilor’s spine is all it takes.
Amara and Rhosyn lead the witches and wolves into the madness.
Tanith’s coven collides with Amara’s, magic slamming into magic, until the air hums with it. McNamara wolves crash into Fallamhain wolves, bodies hitting hard, snarls splitting the night open.
The road vanishes under the roar of it all, snow and mud are kicked skyward, screams and howls stacked on top of each other.
A sharp yelp cuts through it.
I whip my head around in time to see Zephira move.
She’s on her back in the freezing slush and mud, her face a mess of blood and shredded skin, but her hands lift anyway from trying to fight Juno off.
Her fingers shape something invisible to anyone who doesn’t know what they’re looking for.
I do, and I spot the faint shimmer forming between her palms.
An illusion.
Whatever she crafts, I can’t see, but Juno’s body language changes instantly.
The omega’s distress is unmistakable and nearly tangible.
She staggers back with a soft, broken sound that hits me straight in the ribs.
Her gaze is fixed on something that isn’t there, and her body shakes and braces for a blow that doesn’t come.
I still don’t know Juno’s full story, but I know enough.
This is a Nightingale who has already endured too much—survived so much unspeakable pain, she’s been stuck in her wolf’s skin for months because the world has taught her it’s safer to not be human at all.
Watching her break further beneath the weight of Zephira’s magic cracks something wide open inside my chest.
Heat blooms there, filling a part of me that’s been dormant and quiet long enough for me to forget about it.
It spreads faster than I can make sense of it, and beneath it, my wolf surges.
No longer content with her measured pacing or the quiet she’s been choosing for days.
Her anger meets mine head-on, and the two of them braid together and demand space I don’t have to give.
Juno’s agony fuels it, the sight of her fighting and bleeding out pain is something neither of us can tolerate. The pressure keeps building until it’s clear this much fury was never meant to be held inside a single body.
I’m on my feet before I consciously decide to move. The blade lies where Zephira dropped it, half buried in mud and splatters of her blood. I don’t break stride. I scoop it up, my fingers curling around the smooth bone handle, and the rest of the distance between us is gone in seconds.
There’s no pause, or second thought to be found.
Zephira has just pushed herself up to her elbows when I reach her.
I don’t allow her to rise higher. With my free hand on the center of her chest, I shove her back into the dirt.
A half second later, I plunge the knife into the damage Juno already left behind—into the ruined socket where an eye should be.
The blade drives home.
Zephira goes still.
The illusion releases its hold on Juno.
My hand opens but the knife remains in place, embedded deep into the bone and ripped flesh. I leave it there.
I turn to Juno, breath still ragged and my heart hammering, but I can’t hear it over the roar of the fighting still happening around me.
Her eyes lift to mine, unfocused, and the near-feral gleam that seems to be a constant for her shines too bright under the green light of the ward.
For one awful second I’m not sure if she knows who I am.
“Juno,” I murmur, directing it toward the wolf half while understanding it’s the human part that really needs me to reach her. I push the thoughts in her direction and pray they find their way to her. Juno. Are you with me? What the witch showed you wasn’t real. It was an illusion.
Her ears flatten again, her tail curling tight around her hindquarters as she sinks lower, her frame trembling as though she’s trying to escape a cold that’s settled too deep.
He left me, she sends back, the words catching and repeating. Over and over again. Whatever she saw triggering her trauma. He left me. He left me. He left me there alone.
Right here in the middle of this improvised battlefield, my heart breaks a little more for the Nightingale, and even though every shred of logic and basic situational awareness tells me this isn’t the moment, I reach for her anyway.
I offer her something solid to lean against and hopefully something to tether her to this reality.
My fingertips never reach her dark fur.
A cry cuts through everything else, wounded and distressed, and my head snaps back toward the fight, a sound catching in my throat as recognition wraps its cold fingers around my neck.
Siggy.
She’s in her wolf form now, pale wheat fur stark against the tangle of bodies and magic, trapped beneath the weight of a larger alpha from Pack McNamara.
He has her front leg locked in his jaw, his sharp teeth biting deep enough that fur and muscle part before the bones finally give with a deafening crack.
It’s a sound I feel more than I hear. My instincts surge ahead of conscious thought, and a fresh wave of heat fills all the cavernous places as my wolf surges hard against my skin.
My world narrows until there’s nothing left but Siggy.
The alpha shifts his weight. He releases her damaged leg, not because he’s done with her, but because he isn’t.
The way he lines himself up above her, it’s all too clear he’s set his sights on her throat next.
From here, I can see the bloody saliva dripping from his gaping maw as he hovers over her pinned body.
Something structural within my being fails as I throw myself forward.