Chapter Thirty-Nine
It was as though Voss’s insanity had made him invincible. Even Sam was having trouble with both his defense and his attack. I let myself wallow in the horror and grief for maybe five minutes before it became unbearable.
Then, before I was healed, before I was physically ready, I shifted from my wolf to my woman.
And I called my psycho. I called her like she was a wolf, and I physically felt her slam into me.
I didn’t care about the pain. I embraced it. It made me angrier. Crazier.
It was a night to be crazy.
I looked up at the moon. “Look what you birthed,” I whispered. “Look at your fucking children.”
And I stood, bloody and broken and naked, my hair as wild as my heart, and stepped out into the moonlight. Voss saw me immediately, and when he stopped slinging magic, his eyes wide, Sam turned to look at me.
“Sam,” I murmured. “Take off my face. I want to be the only Kait Silver in this fight.”
He was happy to do it. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, Kait.”
He didn’t doubt me.
Gavin Voss continued to stare at me, quiet and grim, even as Sam shifted to his own body.
It didn’t occur to me that I should ask Sam to go tell the others that Rick was dead. They were still fighting. I heard them. I felt them.
They had their hands full. And it didn’t matter. I would either kill Gavin Voss, or he would kill me, and then someone else would kill him.
Either way, he was going to die.
And that was what mattered.
Sam found the blades he’d been using and threw them at my feet. “Fight, Kait. Don’t forget who you are. Don’t forget what you are.”
Yeah, I could’ve shifted into a bear or a tiger or even Voss again and fought him that way. But I wasn’t doing that. I’d fight him as my woman and as my wolf.
As my alpha.
It was just something I had to do.
Voss lifted his hands, magic swirling. He didn’t smile. He didn’t speak. And in the end, he dropped the magic and came at me as his beast.
Fair fight.
Sam crouched a few yards away to watch.
I scooped the blades off the ground and went to meet the werewolf, coldly raging. He’d murdered Rick. I was free to kill him.
Every time I felt something snap or saw blood hanging in the air or took a hit that would have made a normal person lie down and die, I got madder. The pain fueled me. It fueled my psycho. She needed that push. She liked it.
Already damaged from Voss’s magic and fists, I wasn’t exactly healthy, but I was far from weak. And just like when I’d fought Gavin in Shadowfield, the violence was extreme, and both Gavin and I were suffering. But neither one of us would give up.
And maybe neither one of us would live through the night and what we were doing to each other. Two powerful alphas, both driven by incomprehensible things, both determined to be the one left standing.
Eventually, we both shifted to our wolves—not his wolfman and not my shapeshifter, but just our wolves—so we could continue fighting and still manage to heal a little faster. Just enough to keep going. And then, as though we’d spoken to each other and agreed, we shifted back.
We were equally matched, both of us out of our minds, both of us nearing our ends.
Both of us broken.
And still we fought on. I wasn’t sure that either one of us would ever heal from what we were doing to each other. But we couldn’t stop, not now. I lost my knives but partially shifted, just my hands, to use my claws as my blades.
He did the same.
“Can’t you die?” he shouted once, his face a mask of torn flesh and blood. “Can’t you just die?”
I had a moment to marvel at the fact that my claws were no longer the black of normal claws. Beneath the surface, beneath the dark, was a core of silver.
I had somehow grown silver claws. Now I literally was the Silver Claw alpha.
We fought on. The full moon lit our way, feeding us insanity, savagery, and darkness.
I was lost in that darkness, that bloody darkness, and by the end of it, I wasn’t just fighting Gavin Voss.
I was fighting myself. I wanted to stop, to run away to heal, to let Voss go so he could do the same.
We could hunt him down eventually, avenge Rick’s death, and rid the world of the blight of the werewolf.
But I could not stop. My psycho was fully in control, and she didn’t think about the fact that my body was giving up. She only thought about causing pain, feeling pain, and drowning in the blood of her enemy.
Once, I inadvertently shifted into a weakening butterfly, and Voss shifted into his waning werewolf. He grabbed me and crushed my wings, but not before I sliced so deeply into his hand that he might have lost a finger. I couldn’t tell.
And I shifted back, but changing into my shapeshifter when I was so weak had weakened me further. The shapeshifter used up what little energy I had left.
But Voss was just as weak.
In the end, the brutal fight didn’t end because one of us killed the other. It ended because a man strode from the shadows, others spreading out around him, behind him, all of them coming to end a fight I could neither stop nor run from.
Jared, Remy, Joe, Zach, my mother, Anika Draper, Gray Shadow wolves, even Gavin’s beta and some of his wolves. Their fight was over and they were coming to mine.
My alpha hooked an arm around my waist and yanked me from the bloody circle of torn, battered ground, and even as I struggled to finish what I’d started, Detective Rick Moreno slammed a shotgun to the back of Gavin Voss’s head and pulled the trigger.
Then he dropped the gun while those with him fell upon the Iron Fang alpha and made sure he would not rise again.
“Kait,” Jared said. “Kait.” There was nothing else he could say. And then because he seemed to see in my face that I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, he murmured, “He’s not dead, wolf.”
Rick wasn’t dead.
He wasn’t a ghost, he wasn’t gone, he wasn’t ended.
He was there.
And oh my god, was he raging.
I would have fallen then, but behind me, Jared slid his arms around my waist and held me up, just as Rick reached me.
Rick yanked me into his arms and he didn’t care that my entire face was torn and bloody. He wrapped me in his arms and lowered his mouth to my battered, swollen lips, and he forced me out of the darkness.
“Kait,” he whispered against my mouth, “don’t ever die for me.”
And as I began to fall into a darkness of another kind, my alpha separated us, but gently. “She will shift now,” he told Rick. “She will heal.”
“Will she?” Rick asked, full of despair.
“Oh yes,” Jared assured him.
“She’s too weak to shift,” my mother said, abruptly beside Rick.
“I will help her,” Jared said.
As he always did.
And then Remy, Joe, and Zach were there, and Sam, who peered into my face, smiling and proud, though I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why.
Joe wasn’t smiling. Joe was pissed. He balled his fist and hit Sam in the face. “You were going to let her die,” he roared.
Something terrible burst to life in Sam’s eyes as he wiped blood from his face, there and gone. “She was never going to die,” he said. “She’s not fucking human, asshole.” Then he went after Joe.
“No,” I murmured. “No more. Stop.”
My alpha thrust me at Rick and waded into the fight, breaking it up almost before it got started. Emotions were high, and everyone needed to give themselves a chance to come down from a night that had apparently been hellbent on killing us all.
My legs collapsed and my mind blinked out, for just a moment, and then I was in Rick’s arms, cradled against his chest, staring up at his face. He tried to smile, but he failed miserably.
“You’re alive,” I whispered. “You’re alive.”
Jared reached for me, and after the tiniest hesitation, Rick handed me over.
“I’ll bring your wolf,” Jared promised, then looked at the detective. “She’ll be okay.”
And maybe I would.
My alpha carried me away from the noise, the blood, and the violence, and as Gavin’s beta and his wolves buried their former alpha in my woods, Jared brought my wolf to life.
He pulled her from me gently, but firmly, insistent when my poor battered body rebelled.
And then he shifted, as well, and curled up around me on the ground. With his heat and his love seeping into my body, my heart, my very soul, I slept, and I began to heal.
Despite the madness of the moon, the brutal battle, and my own best efforts to do otherwise, I began to heal.