Chapter Twenty-Six
Darius…
My jaw aches like a son of a bitch, at least two of my ribs are in the process of restitching themselves back together again (which hurts as much as having hot candle wax poured on my balls—don’t ask, you don’t need to know all the dumb shit I’ve done in my life), and there’s a constant high-pitched ringing in my head since I failed to duck in time to avoid getting clocked by the tree limb Nikos is swinging around like a baseball bat.
“Had enough?” Nikos asks.
Or at least that’s what I think he said. He’s missing a few teeth and he can’t open his mouth very far, so it’s hard to tell.
“Not even close.”
“We’ll see about that,” he says as he tightens his grip on the limb and his gaze dips to my side where my ribs are still healing.
The man couldn’t telegraph his next move any more if he sent an actual telegraph.
So before he can even pull back on the limb to wind up for a big swing, I land a solid blow to his solar plexus.
He gasps for breath and stumbles back, but not far enough.
I slam my fist into his chin, and his head snaps back.
My wolf lets out a bloodthirsty howl as it takes over, and I know this next blow is going to send Nikos literally six feet underground.
But before I can deliver the knockout, my wolf turns his attention away from our target and over to Effie.
She’s loose from the glowing rope that had been holding her in place, and she’s sprinting toward Formido or Kyle or whatever the fuck the Council asshole wants to call himself.
Overwhelmed with an all-encompassing urge to protect, I pivot without thinking, leaving Nikos a bloody but still-standing mess, and rush toward Kyle. My wolf braces for a fight we won’t lose—we can’t, not when Effie is involved.
The thing is, though, that in the midst of the blood and broken bones in the heat of the fight, I lost sight of who I was rushing to save.
Effie Sherwood doesn’t need me to hold her own with that prick.
The scent of honeysuckle seems to fill the whole woods as a whirlwind of magic surrounds her, sweeping her hair back and making the crunchy autumn leaves at her feet shoot upward and outward like a fountain.
Her hands are glowing, and she’s chanting something in Latin that I don’t understand.
I don’t need to. I already know she’s about to kick that dipshit’s ass.
Kyle watches her approach, the popcorn in his hand forgotten even though he still has a smug expression on his face. But I can smell his magic, the acrid foulness of it, and I know he’s about to pull some underhanded shit.
“We have to shield her,” my wolf says in my head.
“She doesn’t need our help with the witch,” I tell him.
“Not with him,” my wolf shoots back before letting out a low warning growl. “With them.”
I whip my head to the right. The Council wolves and a handful of Nikos’s followers are clumped together, watching and growing more agitated with each step Effie takes.
Nikos is nowhere to be seen and must have taken off to lick his wounds in private, but that’s not a shock.
He’s always been the kind of shithead who only looks out for himself when the fight gets hard.
Of course he’s not going to stick around for what’s about to go down.
I have to time this just right. If I make my move too soon, it will fuck with whatever hurt Effie is about to lay down. My body is primed. My wolf is pacing, ready to leap out for a full transformation. My power is drawing tighter and tighter into itself like a bomb before it explodes.
Effie lifts her arms over her head and then flings a ball of glowing magic at Kyle, but he dodges it, and it slams into one of the Council werewolves, who lets out a strangled oof before transforming into a pockmarked boulder.
“Is that the best you can do, Effie?” Kyle asks. “I’d always heard you were powerful, if obviously lacking, since your family’s magic turned up its nose at you.”
He lets his popcorn drop and shoots a beam of magic toward Effie, but it goes wide, hitting one of the werewolves, who starts transforming.
His body isn’t ready for it though. Without a full moon, only alphas can transform at will, and even with a moon, most werewolves’ bodies have to prepare for the change.
The Council’s werewolf, though, doesn’t get to do that.
The pain he feels during each snap of bone and growth of sinew as his body reconstructs has to be excruciating.
Effie hurls another ball of magic at Kyle, this one hitting him square in the stomach and making him double over.
“You fucking bitch,” Kyle says, sounding as if he has just inhaled a dozen helium balloons.
“That’s Ms. Bitch to you,” she says as she circles her hand around another ball of magic.
Before she can launch it, though, the transformed Council werewolf lurches up from his prone position and bounds toward her.
I’m rushing him before I even realize I’m moving, slamming into him and taking him down to the ground.
My wolf howls in triumph as I hit him with a barrage of punches, his bones breaking under my fists faster than they can reform.
Out of the corner of my eye, I see movement as Kyle gets off another bolt of magic.
I heft up the werewolf and execute a spinning throw move like an Olympic discus athlete, tossing him so he flies between Kyle and Effie.
The Council witch’s magic hits him instead of Effie, and he crumples to the ground, unmoving.
Effie looks over at me and winks. “Thanks, honey.”
“Anytime,” I tell her, fighting the urge to kiss her because she is such a fucking badass. “Anything for you.”
“I hate to break up this little lovefest you’ve got going,” Kyle says, shooting magic at the half dozen werewolves and starting their forced transformations.
“Oh, wait, I don’t give a shit about that.
” He turns his attention to Effie and raises his arm, already grasping another bolt of magic.
“Because no matter what you do, we’re going to win.
You should just give up now like a good little bitch. ”
He flings it at Effie, who knocks it to the side with a ball of honeysuckle-scented magic.
“That is never gonna happen,” she says. “You and the rest of the Council are just a bunch of assholes having a tantrum, and I’m going to put you in time-out.”
She starts up with the Latin again as her hands begin to glow with a spell, but I can’t watch her in action, no matter how much I’d like to, because that’s when the other werewolves start to transform so they can launch their attack.
They run toward us. I take up position at Effie’s back, knowing my job is to take them out before they can get to her so she can concentrate on blasting Kyle into oblivion.
Which is exactly what she does while I take care of the werewolves coming at her from behind.
“Fuck, she’s hot,” my wolf says. “Are you seeing this?”
“Kinda busy,” I tell him as I crash two werewolves’ heads together, knocking them both out.
“These losers?” he says. “They don’t even want to be here. Can’t you smell it?”
I slam my foot into one guy’s gut in a roundhouse kick and then sniff the air.
It takes me a second, but the dank scent finally hits me when I block another one of the Council werewolves’ punches and send him down to the ground with a haymaker.
He looks up at me with something close to relief in his eyes before he scurries off into the woods.
Suddenly, it makes sense. Maybe they joined up of their own free will. Maybe they believed whatever lies the Council told them. Maybe they didn’t think they had a choice. Whatever the reason, a spell is tying them to the Council, and they can’t break free on their own.
Fury stokes my power as an alpha into something that’s pure instinct and rage as it whips through me like a gale-force wind.
I send it surging out of me, letting it reach out to the shackled wolf in each of the others, breaking their bonds to Kyle with a blast of power I didn’t even know I had until this very moment.
The other werewolves jolt to a stop as the stench of Kyle’s magic evaporates off them. A cacophony of grateful howls fills my head. Then the werewolves take to the woods, no doubt returning to Arcadia or their own packs.
“Looks like you lost your muscle,” Effie says as she builds a ball of magic in her hand.
Her hair is going every which way, she’s sweating, the green of a bruise is already starting to show on her cheek, and there’s a hole singed into her sweater, but she’s standing, and she hasn’t lost any of that fuck-you-asshole spirit in her eyes.
“So. Fucking. Hot,” my wolf says in my head.
I don’t correct him because, despite the circumstances, he’s right.
“Are you ready to surrender, or do I need to kick your ass some more?” she asks.
Kyle doesn’t say anything. He just stands there looking like a bullet train slammed into him and shoots her that smug asshole smile of his.
I’m ready to go at him myself when the wind kicks up.
It’s a wall of air that tugs and pushes us at the same time, pelting us with sticks and leaves and small rocks sent flying from the woods’ underbrush.
I curl myself around Effie, blocking all the flying debris from hitting her as a trio of witches dressed all in black appear out of nowhere.
Power radiates off them in wave after wave of foul-smelling magic.
“Looks like you’ll be the one surrendering,” Kyle says, his voice as creaky and battered as the rest of him. “Because I’m not alone.”
“Oh yeah,” says an unfamiliar woman’s voice behind me. “Well, neither is Effie.”