Epilogue
Wren
Her dragon’s voice, his voice, echoed around her mind. It was a fucking shifter.
The rifle jammed as she tried to shoot it, and she grabbed it hard enough that it could snap between her fingers. Her magic wasn’t working. And her familiar, the shifter, was flying away with her sister and another shifter in its claws.
“Fuck,” she muttered under her breath as they disappeared over the hill.
Lowering the scope, she took in the scene around her. Carnage rained, bodies littered the ground, and injured enforcers crawled across the ground, groaning.
“Call the healers!” Wren barked at the stunned enforcer next to her.
The young woman stared blankly back at her.
She was obviously not high-ranking or had even been an enforcer for very long, given the way she reacted to the blood flowing in a river towards them.
Wren felt nothing looking at the gore, had stopped feeling anything about blood years ago, but watching this girl freeze pissed her off.
She stepped over it and walked towards an enforcer tending to one of the wounded before he saw her coming and stood and saluted.
Her dragon was a shifter.
She forced the thought out of her mind. No. There had to be an explanation for it. Her mother would never do that. Not after all the shifters had done to them.
“Call the healers,” she barked at the enforcer.
“Yes, Commander.”
Turning back to survey the damage, Wren took it all in: four dead, maybe five depending on whether the enforcer missing half her leg made it.
This was a fucking mess. One that her sister, her sweet, naive sister, or so she thought, had left in her wake.
What was she thinking? Bonding a shifter?
Letting him walk around the campus? A rare pang of guilt hit her chest as she questioned why she had never come to her for help.
Wren knew why. But instead of entertaining that, she quickly buried it and filed it away under something to be unpacked when she was alone in her room.
Her face went blank, a practiced mask that she wore in public.
Wren looked over her shoulder, feeling a looming presence sending daggers into her back. Her mother stood in the shadows of the forest, her face as blank as Wren’s, but she knew her mother far better than that. The way the lines of expression were hardened, she was pissed.
She approached her the same way one would approach an angry wolf. She lowered her eyes, making sure not to look directly at her mother, and when she was in her mother’s immediate vicinity, she knelt. The wet grass soaked through, the coolness grounding her for one needed moment.
“Get up.” Her mother seethed.
Fuck. She was pissed.
“I’ve sent a task force to secure the island; they couldn’t have gone far with the wards.
” They were impenetrable for shifters. Avery may have had power, but nothing that could break through them.
The wards should have held. Should have trapped them on the island like rats in a maze. Either someone had inside help, or…
“They’re already off the Island, Wren.”
What? It took her back for a second, blinking, she tried to hide the shock on her face. “But—”
“They got through them,” she ground out.
No. They couldn’t have. What kind of magic could do that? Wren looked to the side, a habit she had formed when she was lost deep in thought. How?
Her mother sighed, rubbing her temples. “Follow them,” she said calmly.
“There could be more shifters on the island. We need to lock Caerwyn down,” she said before thinking.
“That’s an order,” she hissed. “That dragon is too special to lose, your magic is too special to lose, Wren. Gather a task force and go after them.”
An uneasy feeling crawled through her. That dragon. Not your familiar.
“And Avery?” Wren asked, unable to hide the bite in her voice. Wouldn’t that be her first priority? She knew her mother was harsh on Avery, but her mother loved her.
“Yes,” she said, gritting her teeth. “Avery, of course. Bring her back here.”
Wren nodded and went to walk away before her mother reached out and gripped her wrist, her long nails digging in. Wren didn’t even flinch.
“Do not, under any circumstances, believe what they say. They will try to influence your mind like they’ve done to Avery, to your familiar.”
She had never seen her mother so undone. Her hair, usually slicked back, was fraying at the sides, and the bags under her eyes were particularly noticeable. She almost looked afraid.
Wren wrenched her grasp from her mother. “Understood.”
Whatever Avery had stumbled into, whatever had made her run—Wren would find it. She would drag the truth into the light by its ears and make everyone involved answer for it. Something about all of this wasn’t right. And she would stop at fucking nothing to unearth it.