Chapter Thirty-Eight
I was fast, but under the full moon, the wolfman was equally fast. Maybe even faster. But as he’d promised, he gave me a slight head start.
And the moment I was out of sight, with him watching me go, Sam appeared directly behind him. I didn’t have to see it happening. I was connected to Sam because he was sort of…me.
I shimmied up a tree, carefully moved to where I could see the two of them, and watched.
“Hello, big fella,” Sam said.
It was odd, seeing myself standing there, my hands on my hips, a half-smile of derision on my face. Sam was strong. So strong.
Even Voss’s magic would have trouble controlling him. But he wasn’t invincible.
I was a shapeshifter, as well. I was strong. And I could mess with Gavin Voss.
The wolfman jerked around to face Sam, shock in every line of his furry body. “What?” he said. “How the hell…”
Taking advantage of his shock, Sam flung a blade at Voss’s right hand, which still swirled half-heartedly with magic, as though he’d forgotten he held it. The blade pierced the wolfman’s palm and somehow short-circuited the power.
Streaks of magic were flung through the air, hissing like live wires before they fizzled out and disappeared. Voss roared and slung blood after the magic, his wound holding onto Sam’s blade as the flesh knitted around the knife.
As Voss was trying to pull the blade out of what had to be a terribly painful wound, Sam melted into the shadows of the trees and was gone.
The wolfman finally pulled the knife out of his hand and flung it to the ground, then started after Sam. I jumped from the tree, and with almost shocking ease, I shapeshifted. I became one of a wolf’s biggest fears.
A tiger.
And though I couldn’t see him, I knew Gavin paused as he heard me roar. A tiger’s roar would confuse his brain, send terror through him, and take away some of his confidence.
He would realize he’d underestimated me yet again, and he’d become more cautious. No way would he give up his hunt, though.
I wasn’t sure he had anything else to live for.
I couldn’t know exactly what was in his head. But I hoped that for a while, Sam and I would have the upper hand.
I crashed through the trees and undergrowth of the woods, leaving some blood on a particularly thorny bush, not caring even a little bit.
Voss was standing still, facing me, dread and fear in his face, but excitement, as well. “It can’t be,” he said, when he saw me. “It can’t be.”
I’d lost my weapons and my phone when I’d shifted, but that was okay. I could go back for some blades if I wanted. Right now, I just wanted Voss to see that somehow once again, he’d been chasing me and yet I’d ended up behind him.
He’d start questioning his sanity.
I couldn’t kill him, but as I’d assured Max, I could hurt him. I could scare him. And I could absolutely make him regret that he’d ever come to Jakeston.
As he stood there marveling over the fact that I was a shapeshifter, I attacked. I had to be careful, because my tiger was eager, and her claws and teeth were lethal.
He’d actually run a few steps before he hesitated, then turned to meet me.
His pride wouldn’t allow him to become the prey, no matter how huge his inborn fear of a tiger.
His magic was swirling once again, and not just around his hands.
It drifted up his arms, his shoulders, and his chest. It was red, now, as though his colors changed with his mood.
He had a couple of seconds to hit me with magic before I slammed into him, but he didn’t. I understood why when I bore him to the ground, my teeth at his throat.
He was using his magic like armor, and when I slashed his chest with my claws, it was like scraping metal with fingernails. I couldn’t penetrate it.
His magic forced me to lose my shift. The tiger transformed into the woman as though it had never been.
Voss was afraid of me now, and that made him even more dangerous. He folded his magic and his massive arms around me, and holding me tightly against his chest, he stood.
His magic squeezed and hurt my body, but it messed up my brain even more. And that was saying something.
I needed to stay alive for a hell of a lot longer than the first forty damn minutes. I needed my magic. My blade.
Almost tenderly, he held my smooth, bare body against his rough, furry chest. His fur was itchy to me, but I couldn’t scratch. I couldn’t yet lift my arms. He’d surprised me, and it was my own fault.
I could only hope that Sam wouldn’t come screaming from the shadows, and that he’d remember to be patient. We’d talked about the moment when Voss might take me down, but I hadn’t expected it to happen so soon.
Not that it was over.
I needed to shift. If I shifted, I could heal, even from magic. Like Sam, I just needed to be patient.
I closed my eyes and shut out the feel of the wolfman’s body, his awful heat, his magic. I focused on the moon. I turned my face to her, bathed in her strong light, and absorbed her energy.
And maybe before Voss believed I’d be able to break free from the constraints of his magic, I burst into my shift. Not the tiger, but my wolf. I needed my wolf.
Ever since my alpha had pulled her from her chains, she’d never let me down. She never would.
Sam would be watching, eager to join the fight, but he wouldn’t unless he saw me dying. If he interfered before then, Voss would kill Rick. He wouldn’t bargain. He’d just murder him, if he hadn’t already.
I’d already had a vicious battle with Gavin Voss that had nearly killed me, but even that was different. He’d lost his magic, and he hadn’t even been able to keep control of his wolfman.
But tonight was the full moon, and he was different. He didn’t lose anything.
So my vicious little wolf was fighting something stronger and way more magical. But he wasn’t meaner than her. Not by a long shot.
I’d shapeshift if my wolf became too damaged, but right now, she wanted to fight. I wasn’t going to deny her.
But the werewolf tore me apart. He was savage, his brain was warped, and he was so very angry. His life had led him to this point. He needed, for whatever reason, to control me. To hurt me.
And he got what he needed.
It wasn’t one-sided. My wolf was angry, too.
I had no idea how long it was before I was forced to let my wolf go so I could shift into something else. Something still damaged, but still able to handle it, because a shapeshifter was always going to be stronger than a wolf.
I shifted into Gavin Voss.
And as it always was when I shifted into another person, it was a mistake. A huge mistake.
Apparently I wasn’t built to take on another person’s pain and be cold enough to ignore it. I wasn’t really Gavin Voss, after all.
I got awful things in my memory, felt things I didn’t want to feel, knew things I wasn’t meant to know. As was almost always the case, Gavin wasn’t born a monster. He was made into one.
I guessed that was why there was so much evil in the world. Monsters were created and they went on to create other monsters.
And oh my god, was it dark in his head. He saw no point to anything, really, since he was only going to die. We all knew we were going to someday die, and then you had to wonder what the hell it was all for. All the struggling, the suffering, even the joy. We all knew that, on a certain level.
But Gavin knew it.
He felt it with every part of him. He did everything he could to find some kind of acceptance, peace, and happiness in life. But his joy came abruptly and was short-lived, and he went on to something else just to try to chase away the awfulness of his existence.
He’d done inexcusable things. Terrible things. Outside of Frederick Axton and his human servant, Avis Vine, Gavin Voss was the worst person I’d ever met.
There was nothing redeemable about him.
I needed to release his pack from his rule.
I couldn’t understand why he didn’t kill himself or get into a fight that would inevitably give him a death that might free him. Only a person more terrified of death than of life would cling to something that hurt them so very badly.
But maybe that was the real reason he’d picked on me and my pack. On Jared. Maybe he knew, deep down, that we would take his choices from him.
All that streaked through my brain in a second, and I knew I’d never really be the same.
Gavin reflexively released me from his magic, shoving me away so violently that I heard something crack in my chest. Then he came for me immediately. “No,” he roared. “No! Get out of me!”
Gavin wasn’t going to be the same, either, though being changed was unlikely to matter to a dead man.
I tried to shift to something else, anything else, as I attempted to breathe, to recover what he’d broken inside of me, but I was too hurt, and I was too slow.
He snapped then, losing whatever control he’d ever managed to maintain, and his wolfman came screaming back over him. He could only see himself, the thing he hated most in the world, lying there on the ground, bloody and beaten, mocking him.
Unable to maintain my shift into Voss, I returned to my woman’s body.
I closed my eyes as he wrapped his enormous fists in magic and punched me, over and over again. I tried to regain my focus, but his magic and his fists were knocking it so far out of me that I wasn’t sure I’d ever find it again.
I saw Nicole, my angel, floating in the darkness. Watching. Waiting. She didn’t just wait for my death. She took the overflow of things my mind couldn’t handle—at least some of it.
At last, I managed to shift to my wolf, but she wasn’t in much better shape than I was.
I was a shapeshifter, true, but not like Sam.
Sam had his shapeshifter strength with him all the time.
It was built into the man. But mine wasn’t quite as powerful and intense as his when I wasn’t shifted.
It made me stronger all the time, but not strong enough.
Maybe because it was diluted by my wolf and by the fact that I could shift into animals as well as humans. All I knew for sure was that I needed to be shifted into something to be more powerful than an enemy like Gavin Voss.
Voss jumped to his feet, finally, tearing at his flesh, his stare on the moon as he screamed words I couldn’t understand.
And while his attention was on the sky, Sam slid in beside me, lifted my weak wolf’s body into his arms, and ran into the woods, crouched low over me, his body his own. He didn’t carry me far before he placed me gently down behind a massive tree.
“Get away when you can,” he murmured, then shifted back into me.
Just in time, because the wolfman was coming.
He didn’t seem to even remember that he’d beaten me nearly to death with his fists and his magic, because there was no shock on his face that I was standing, facing him down, ready to fight.
Strong as ever.
“I can’t let you live,” he said calmly, though there was only madness in his eyes. “Not like that.”
Sam nodded. “Once more unto the breach,” he murmured. Then he threw a glance my way. “When you’re ready, Kait, join us. You have to finish this.”
I needed to finish it.
Sam understood that.
Voss might have thought the Kait he was staring at had lost her mind, but he didn’t seem to care. But then he said something that finally did what his fists couldn’t.
“Killed him,” he said. “I killed your detective, Kait Silver. You had to know I was never going to let him live.”
Then he and Sam began to fight, and I curled up on the ground, shattered.
My human world man was dead.