Chapter 59 #2
We fought as a pair, guarding each other’s backs as the battle closed around us. Foe after foe, enemies on every side in an unrelenting stream. After I engaged with the first few, they became a faceless blur.
Cat shifters, warlocks, trolls, pixies, and vampires all fell to my blades one and the same.
Nothing fazed me, nothing slowed down my death march through their middle. We stayed close to our Hungarian and Blackwater packs, stepping in to help when anyone got outmatched. My gaze was always roaming, always protecting. Fiona caught my eye, fully shifted and stock-still amid the melee.
“Valens, there!” I caught his attention and ran to her side.
“You okay?”
“Fine. Can you cover me for a minute? I can’t use my powers on any of the people closest to us, or I might hit us. But I can rain lightning on their back line, maybe get some of them running scared.”
“Do it,” Valens said, and the two of us bracketed her, keeping a clear circle for her to work.
Thunder crashed overhead as her raven-shifted hair began to float around her.
To my surprise, she began to rise off the ground, floating upward with her hands outstretched, amber eyes closed in concentration.
Thick black tattoos I hadn’t noticed before snaked up both of her arms, and within seconds, she rose up, up, up, until she was enveloped by the thick mists she’d called.
“Is she vulnerable up there?” Valens hollered to be heard over the noise of the battlefield.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “But there’s nothing else we can do from down here. I can’t fly up to watch her back.”
“She’s completely covered. I don’t think anyone but a fae or warlock could strike her. We’ll watch closely.”
I nodded, my staff lopping off the tip of a pixie’s wing, sending him spiraling toward the ground as he shrieked in pain.
The shrieks cut off abruptly as he landed, his neck at a funny angle.
I noticed he wore a silver anklet, and a small glimmer of regret flared up before I shoved it down.
He attacked us first. I would not apologize for defending the people I loved.
“How does she get down?” I asked, glancing up in the brief pause before another ODL goon arrived to test me right where the last one fell.
“Great question,” Valens huffed as he swung his broadsword, lopping off a vampire’s head after narrowly missing the slash it made toward his arm. “Hopefully not by falling.”
The thought made me shudder. Fiona was powerful, yes. But she didn’t have wolf healing. “We’ll stay right here under her, just in case she needs a soft spot to land.”
Valens snorted, wiping blood spatter off his face with the neck of his shirt. “Soft might be a stretch, but good idea.”
We did just that. We held ground as the battle surged back and forth all around us. Occasionally, one of us strayed a small distance to help out another pack mate—Brielle was wicked fast now, but still not a skilled fighter, and twice I’d had to bail her and Galyna out.
But for more than an hour, we held firm and followed the cloud that held Fiona aloft.
Lightning strikes happened every few minutes at first, zapping powerful magic users at the back of the army and eliciting bloodcurdling screams and the scent of burnt fur and flesh.
But as the hour wore on, the strikes began to slow, and I worried she was growing fatigued.
Reed was surely somewhere on the field, but it was impossible to single out anyone who wasn’t close in the middle of the mayhem.
Another check of the skies showed her cloud cover was thinning, and my nerves skyrocketed.
“Brute, I think we’ve got a problem.”
“Just one? Good for us.”
“I’m not joking. Fi’s starting to tire.”
He beat back a snow leopard with an aggressive parry and then used the spare second to look up. “I think you’re right. If she starts to tumble, give me a heads-up.”
What the hell would we do if she did start to tumble?
The attackers had begun to thin, but there was still an enemy to replace each one that fell.
And I knew wolves had fallen too. I was trying not to check faces as I stumbled past. It wasn’t time for that yet.
I couldn’t let myself go to that place until this battle ended. Distraction was death on the field.
I stuck close to Valens’s back, keeping my eyes on the sky every spare second. The cloud surrounding Fiona had thinned to the point I could see her dark blue outline, when a magical bolt from the enemy side streaked up, up, up, and landed.
I watched her wobble under the force of it, heard the thunder stop as my breath caught in my lungs. Her body lurched backward, head tipping toward the ground, feet toward the sky.
“Valens, she’s falling.”
“Turn and switch!” he bellowed, leaping to the side and sheathing his broadsword as I turned to take on the fucking lion he had been fighting with. I dove in, delivering a spinning kick to the beast’s snout to hopefully stun it.
It was built like a brick shithouse, and all it did was roar its indignation and charge me for my troubles.
Normally, I’d run and flip over it, take a few whacks at its flank before it could turn, but Fiona was falling and Valens had sheathed his weapon.
I couldn’t give up an inch of ground, no matter what.
“Here, kitty, kitty,” I taunted as it eyed Valens behind me, a temptingly disarmed target. “Pussy wussy thinks he can’t take on a maiden, huh?”
The cat hissed, sending hot, sour breath over my face.
“Blech, why do you guys always smell like piss and rotten meat?” I tossed out an insult, needing to enrage it so it left Valens alone.
It leapt, all six hundred or so pounds of him coming at me, dead center.
Fuck.
If I shifted, my weapons would scatter. So I did the unthinkable, standing to brace for the blow. Until the last damned second, when I dropped like a sack of rocks, turning the grip of my staff so it separated into two short swords, which I lifted overhead.
The lion made an ungodly sound as it died, hot blood and intestines raining down and soaking me in the world’s worst shower.
The only saving grace to the whole awful ordeal was that its momentum and sheer bulk carried him over my head, where he hit the ground in a boneless heap.
I stood, my boots squelching in things I preferred not to think about as I jogged back to Valens’s side, and saw Fiona as limp and lifeless in his arms as the lion shifter I’d just gutted.
“Shit! Did she hit the ground?”
“No, I caught her. She’s going to have some bruises, though. That was a hell of a fall. She’s breathing, but whatever hit her is not good.”
His hands were full, so he used his chin to point at her stomach, where a burning hole smoked in her shirt, the rotten stench of sulfur emanating from the wound.
“Shit, we need Brielle or Olivia, now.”
“Brielle’s busy.”
I followed the line of his gaze as I batted away a water nymph with one of my short swords. Brielle was indeed busy, fighting for her life at Kane’s side. Her snowy fur was tinged pink all over with blood, some of it hers, some of it not.
“Olivia’s in the bunker, leading the team of healers from all the other packs. We have to get her back there.”
“Agreed. You good?” he asked, concern etching his face as he took in my blood-drenched state.
“Not a scratch. Let’s roll.” I spun the short swords with grim relish as I turned back toward the castle. I ran in front of them, creating a wedge of empty space as I cut through the enemies we crossed with all the speed I could.
We were halfway there when I heard a scream I’d remember in my nightmares forever.
It was Brielle. I knew it in my blood and bones and marrow.
“It’s Bri. Can you make it the rest of the way?” I asked, already half running back to the front.
“Don’t go. Let the maidens handle it.”
“Something is wrong!” I shouted, my feet carrying me past without my consent. He’d already shifted Fi’s limp body over his shoulder and drawn his sword as he swore and began to run hell-for-leather through the stragglers between us and the castle.
I am the guarantee. The simple promise beat behind my eyelids with every step until I reached the front.
What I saw gutted me.
Kane was down.
Kane, son of Kosta, son of Konstantin, son of Kasmiro, ruler of the nine great packs, the strongest shifter in all the world, was down. Brielle was on her knees at his side, several maidens around them in a ring, weapons out.
His head was nearly severed from his body, and I couldn’t stop myself from bending over and retching my guts up when I saw the white bone of his spinal column.
I didn’t even wipe my mouth on my blood-soaked arm. I just ran up to Galyna. “What happened?”
“Fucking warlock somehow materialized right behind him with a blade as long as his forearm. It was less than a heartbeat, and the fucker had slit his throat so deep, he nearly decapitated him.”
“How is he alive?” I whispered, my horror seeping through as I watched Brielle rip his shirt from neck to hem and place the omega stone on his bare chest.
“I’m not sure he is,” Galyna admitted, grim sorrow drenching every word.
“She’s alive, so he’s alive,” I insisted, pushing my way into the circle and dropping to Brielle’s other side. “What can I do?”
“I need more power. My wolf can pull it, but it won’t feel good.”
I offered my hand without hesitation. “Take what you need.”
Her glassy, tear-filled eyes met mine for one brief second of gratitude. It was more than she had to spare. She grabbed my hand with her right and slapped her left hand directly over Kane’s destroyed neck.
I felt the drain within seconds. As if I’d drunk too much and stumbled out of a bar at midnight, that was how it started. Woozy, trippy, like everything around me was tilting to the side even though I hadn’t moved.
Determined, I just gripped Brielle’s hand harder, willing my strength to aid hers.
My wolf howled in my mind as the life began to drain from my limbs. She scratched and fought, but I was too far gone to move my numb lips.
My gaze sharpened as she forced her way forward, but still I kept my death grip on Brielle’s hand.
A broken hum lifted from my throat as I collapsed, and through my brain fog, it took a second to realize what it was.
The maiden’s death dirge. My cheek was pressed to the damp earth now, but I was so cold, I couldn’t feel it.
Valens.
His name was a prayer on my lips, but I didn’t have the strength left to utter it as my final rites.
Someone called my name as cold swallowed me up.