“You don’t have to be a spoilsport every time something good happens,” Oz quipped, clapping Drake on the back. “You need to lighten up a bit. Stop being so serious.”
“That’s about as likely to happen as snow in Arizona during a heatwave,” I joked. “You should know this by now.”
A frantic pounding thundered on the door, shaking it in its frame. All of us went quiet as we turned to look at it, the atmosphere in the air shifting from relief to uneasy caution. Drake hurried over and cracked the door ajar. I watched as the color drained from his face as he stepped back, pulling the door open, and one of the pack guards, Robert, stumbled into the room. Robert was young, just starting out, but a good fighter and had potential to go far. And currently, he was as white as a sheet, a large scrape running down one cheek.
Elias shot to his feet, staring intently at Robert, all sense of celebration dissipating in an instant.
“What happened?” he asked.
Robert swallowed, taking a moment to respond. “The wraith’s on the outskirts of town,” he said, panting.
You could have heard a pin drop in the silence that followed.
“What?” Elias asked.
“It’s close to the oasis,” Robert explained. “It just showed up there and started attacking people. It’s bad. We’ve got to—”
But we were already moving.
“Go get Emma,” Elias told Robert. “Tell her what’s happening and get her to the mountain at the edge of the oasis. She needs the high ground. And for God’s sake, don’t let her out of your sight.”
The fact that Elias trusted Emma enough to let her handle this without him next to her would have amazed me were it not for the fact that I was more preoccupied with everything else going on. Still, I had to wonder if I could have been able to relinquish that sort of control if it were Rachel and me.
I shoved that to the back of my mind. At the moment, that wasn’t important. At the moment, we needed to take care of the wraith. Still, that didn’t stop me from calling Rachel and telling her to stay home. She must have sensed the urgency in my voice because she didn’t argue.
“Be safe,” was all she said. I felt as though there was something more that she was refraining from saying, but right now, I didn’t have the luxury of trying to parse it out.
“You too,” I said, then hung up, already running out of the building.
We sprinted, running toward the oasis. People raced past us as they ran in the opposite direction, trying to run away from the destruction and chaos we could hear even from here. All four of us shifted as we darted into the fray.
Several demons swarmed the area, the greenery around the oasis rotting in front of our eyes as they attacked people and buildings, trying to cause as much devastation as they could. Already, several other pack guards were attacking, some in wolfform, while others attacked the demons with iron, sending them scattering, keeping them away from the people still fleeing.
Toward the edge, the sand wraith loomed, sending swirling tornadoes of sand in all directions, uprooting more trees and tearing large chunks out of buildings.
Elias lunged forward, leaping for the nearest imp and taking him in its jaws. Teeth might not hurt them as badly as iron, but they were still an effective weapon. The imp squealed and writhed until Elias released it, and it tore off, racing toward the desert.
I turned back into a human and took a spare iron blade from one of the other guards, ramming it into the nearest demon. It twitched once at the edge of my blade and stilled.
Sand stung my eyes as I kept tearing into demon after demon. Even as I did, something bothered me in the back of my mind. The last time the wraith had attacked the town, it had caused far more destruction. We were still recovering from it. This time, though bodies and debris lay scattered across the courtyard, the wraith seemed to be more interested in watching as opposed to being an active participant.
Something’s wrong, I thought, but I had no time to chase that idea as another demon lurched toward me.
Eventually, the bodies of all the demons lay scattered all across the oasis. The sand wraith had barely moved, its glowing eyes darting all over as it continued to watch with interest.
Panting, ignoring the cut that one of the demons had dragged across my arm, I marched over to the wraith.
“It’s over,” I said. All around us, the other wolves had finished their fights and began stalking toward it. “Give up now. We’ve beaten you, and you know it.”
The wraith watched us closing around it, its head swiveling as if trying to assess its options. It seemed too calm, as if it was right where it wanted to be.
“It’s no matter,” it jeered. If I didn’t know better, I would have said his eyes were dancing with mirth. “I have what I came for.”
“What does that mean?” I asked. Unease and alarm rippled down my spine at the words. Nothing about this fight made any sense. It had ended too easily, and now this ominous declaration. Whatever was going on, we were missing half the story.
It let out a gravelly chuckle that set my teeth on edge. “You’ll see soon enough, wolf.”
Then, before I could even begin to figure out what the hell it meant by that, the wraith had turned and begun gliding out of town, away from the destruction, back toward its lair.
