Not caring about the battle anymore but desperate to get a better look at things, I inched over and opened the door.
“Maddy, no!” Mom screamed.
Ignoring her, I crawled out onto the porch, closing the door behind me. The sound of battle was even stronger now. I gazedout at the fight. The shifters seemed to have the upper hand. They were pushing the humans back to the gate. We’d managed to prevent their force from splitting up to encircle our group. It didn’t look like it could have gone any better.
Then the wind shifted. The breeze coming from the forest surrounded us instead of the gate. A bolt of fear shot through me. My head snapped around to look toward the forest. Sinthy had dropped all the wards. This had been the final battle, and we’d assumed Viola would bring her entire force to bear here at the gate. We’d been wrong.
Understanding, fear, terror, and hopelessness tore through my mind in quick succession. Before I could scream or do anything to warn Nico and the others, dozens of men and women erupted from the trees around the battlefield. They carried weapons, but… not the typical machine guns or rifles. The weapons looked strange.
Another sound ripped my attention away from the reinforcements. The fighting was nearing the house, and I could hear Maxwell screaming. He was being pulled backward by Viola, who had a pistol to his head. Her bodyguard was there too, armed and blocking her. A patch of red spread across the bodyguard’s stomach. One of the shifters had clawed him.
“No!” Maxwell screamed with such furious agony that I was sure my heart would shatter.
“Yes, goddamn it,” Viola shouted and jammed the pistol harder into his head. “This is all you’re good for. Now do it before I blow your traitor brains out.”
My eyes widened, and everything seemed to slow down. Sinthy, at the edge of the fight, caught sight of Maxwell and Viola. She turned in time to see the reinforcements before she looked back at Maxwell.
Sinthy raised a hand, her terrified voice exploding out of her. “No.”
Maxwell’s lips formed the words “I’m sorry.”Then he lifted his hands toward the intruders with the strange weapons. He murmured some kind of spell, and then the world exploded. An arc of lightning shot from his fingers. It crackled across the grass, then split into dozens of different smaller arcs until they slammed into the barrels of the strange weapons the anti-shifters had brought. The guns glowed bright, then they fired.
It didn’t sound like regular gunfire. Instead of explosive popping sounds, there was a boom like thunder as the weapons fired. Sinthy, already seeking to understand what was about to happen, had pressed her hands into the ground to try and create a forcefield around the fighters. She succeeded—I saw the wavering shimmer in the air as the shield was raised, but most of the magic-infused bullets tore straight through her ward. It stopped maybe one in three. Even from as far away as I was, I could see shifters topple and fall. The bullets passed, magically, around or over the human fighters, leaving them unharmed. I’d never seen anything like it. In seconds, we’d lost our advantage. The humans were rallying and pressing our force backward, and we were in disarray. The shouts and screams of confidence from the shifters had turned into yelps and barks of fear and confusion.
Sweat trickled down my face as I watched the disaster unfold. Panic tore at my heart as I tried to find Nico in the frantic chaos. Luis, blood oozing from a wound in his leg, was back in his human form, limping away as he fired a pistol toward a group of humans following him. Felipe was being hauled backward, a knife sticking out of his leg. Sebastian, in wolf form, had him by the collar and was desperately trying to pull his friend to safety. He had deep gouges in his side as well. Sinthy sprinted across the field toward a man who was on his knees, bleeding from his sides. My breath caught in my throat.Nico.
The edge of the fighting was now less than twenty yards from our yard. We were being pushed back. Nico stumbled to his feet and spat a mouthful of blood on the ground as Sinthy put her hands on him, trying to heal him. My eyes burned with tears as I took stock of his injuries. He was cut in dozens of different places, his face and arms bruised. It looked like he may have been shot in the side.
“It’s over, Nico!” Viola shouted, her gun still jammed into her son’s face. Maxwell was openly weeping as she dragged him along. “I’ve won. You animals can’t fight against our weapons.” She pointed the gun toward Nico and Sinthy. “When you fall, they all follow. Cut off the head, and the serpent dies.”
Sinthy, teeth bared and seething, threw up her hands, the air crackling around her. Immersed in magic, she never noticed the group of humans descending from behind. They swarmed the young woman, tearing her to the ground. Nico broke away, sprinting toward Viola. He dodged the volley of bullets she fired at him, almost as though he anticipated exactly where each would go. My mate was beautiful, like nothing I’d ever seen before. I watched, mesmerized, as he narrowed the distance between himself and Viola.
I almost didn’t see the man with the rifle.
The humans grabbing and tearing at Sinthy were suddenly blasted away in all directions as the witch flashed some kind of spell that left her free. She stumbled to her knees, trying to get to her feet, then her eyes went wide with fear, the little color remaining in her complexion fading.
The only reason my gaze pulled away was because I caught sight of the red laser flashing in my peripheral vision. My eyes flicked over. A man in fatigues had his long-barreled rifle and laser sight aimed at Nico. I snapped my attention back to my mate just as a glaring red dot appeared on his chest. I opened mymouth to scream… but the gunshot silenced any noise I might have made.
Nico jerked backward, blood spraying from his chest, arms flailing as he twisted, spun, and then fell face-down in the grass.
He lay there, unmoving, and my vision blurred, then turned red. A crimson sheen descended on the world in front of me. Rational thought vanished. I could barely process the fury and grief that coiled around my heart. My jaw creaked because I was clenching my teeth so hard. Unbidden, my wolf leaped forward, filling my mind with her own hatred and bloodlust. Now was not the time to think of what-ifs. It was time. There would be no second chance.
Viola turned to me. Her lip curled in victory. She had her mouth open to gloat but froze when she saw what I held—what I was raising to my lips. Her smile faded, replaced by fear, anger, and terror flashing over her face in quick succession. The sudden realization that she’d miscalculated was written all over her face in that last instant before the glass vial touched my lips. She never believed I would have the guts to do it. She never thought, in a million years, I’d have the nerve to actually use the weapon. Proving her deadly wrong, I put the vial to my lips, tilted my head back, and let the thick liquid pour down my throat.
140
NICO
Grass. I could smell grass. That was my first thought when my eyes opened. My face was pressed into the lawn. My fingers curled into the blades of green. I pulled in a ragged breath, but that sent me into a coughing fit. A bolt of pain shot through me, so excruciating I couldn’t even cry out in agony. Rolling gingerly to my side, I looked down and saw where I’d been shot. The bullet had hit me in the chest. I should be dead, except whoever had shot me had hit me at a bad angle. The bullet had slammed into the muscle beside my sternum, traveled through the flesh of my chest, and exited beside my nipple. It hadn’t gone through my ribcage, but it still hurt like a motherfucker. I’d been shot in the chest and had somehow lived.
The pain was like a never-ending ripple of heat searing across my chest and torso. I could barely think above the agony. The battle around me sounded dull and indistinct, and I tentatively touched my ears to check if I was somehow suddenly wearing earmuffs. As bad as the injury was, I wasn’t dead. Not yet. I still had a chance to fight. That was if I could move. I tried to brace myself and get up, but it was like a blazing rope of fire being pulled taut around my ribs. Gasping, I collapsed onto myback. An instant later, Sinthy’s cool fingers brushed over my cheeks. My blurry vision righted as I focused on the dirty, blood-smeared face hovering above mine.
“Don’t move,” she muttered as she ran her hands across my body.
Her magic felt like static electricity as she healed me as best she could. The bullet in my side popped out of my skin and tumbled to the ground, and the wound in my chest went from agonizing pain to brutal discomfort.
“Maddy?” I croaked.
“She—”
