In the next second, she doubled over. “Brax.”
Fur sprouted along her body and face. Everywhere that wasn’t covered by clothes.
The human pushed open the door to climb out. “What is happening to her?”
I shoved him back into the car, slamming the door closed behind him for good measure. “Stay there. Don’t move.”
I barely remembered to lace my command with a compulsion before tossing the human to the back of my mind and hurrying over to Caroline.
She was curled in on herself, making agonized sounds. I knelt beside her, my hands hovering. I was afraid to touch lest I hurt her more. She looked like she was in the throes of a transition to werewolf. Only I’d never seen a change take this long—or be this painful.
“Caroline, talk to me. Tell me what’s going on.”
I accessed my other sight, the special ability that allowed me to physically see the magic in the world around me. It was a product of my magic breaking power. No one was quite sure how or why I was able to do something so rare that the mere whisper of it would put me at the top of everyone’s hit list.
Over the past few years, I’d done some research into magic breakers and found that they weren’t always rare. Sometime in the last thousand years or so, they’d started to die out. Or were killed off.
From the descriptions I’d pieced together, my power wasn’t quite the same as theirs either. As their name implied, magic breakers could break magic but it was usually limited to spells and the like. Something like adjusting the balance of a demon tainted werewolf or taking away the madness of an ancient vampire wasn’t supposed to be possible. Even for them.
Yet I’d managed both.
I didn’t know what any of it meant either. Nor was there anyone I could ask since my biological father, perhaps the only person who might truly understand why I was so different, had disappeared.
Caroline grabbed my wrist, her grip bruising. Her claws dug into my skin, drawing beads of blood. “It hurts.”
Her eyes had gone fully over to the wolf. A beautiful, mesmerizing amber.
In my magic sight, a wolf was superimposed over her body. The wolf writhed in agony, trying to throw off the rope of golden light that had settled over her neck. It looked like a dog collar. About three finger widths wide and too tight, practically strangling her as it forced her obedience.
I reached for it, guessing that this was the cause of Caroline’s pain. My palm and fingers blistered the second I came into contact with the gold.
Caroline’s howl echoed, nearly deafening me. More fur sprouted, her nose and jaw elongating. The sound of crunching came, the pop of bones breaking and reforming. Her spine twisted, her limbs warping as she fell to all fours.
“Hold on, Caroline. I’m going to fix this.”
I didn’t know how, but I was a magic breaker. I could do this.
Grabbing the collar with both hands this time, I pulled with all my strength, ignoring the stench of burning skin and the searing pain that came along with it.
The collar didn’t budge.
That was okay. I had other methods.
I reached for the part of me that I considered the source of my magic breaking. It unfurled, responding to my desire. I aimed it at the collar and the complex magic I could see at its heart. It was a nasty piece of work, meant to subjugate its recipient.
The strange thing was that there was something eerily familiar about it. Just out of reach. Like an echo of something I’d encountered before, but the details eluded me.
Sensing my attempt, the collar tightened around Caroline’s neck, drawing another pained whine from her wolf.
Whether I recognized the magic or not was no longer important. This needed to come off. Now. Otherwise, I’d lose her.
“Shit. Shit. Shit.”
Hurriedly, I sorted through the magic, trying to find a weak spot. Something I could use to tear it apart.
It would help if I knew how it came to be on Caroline in the first place.
At that thought, my magic shifted, sharpening and bringing into focus something that was hard to describe. I couldn’t “see” this change. Not with my eyes anyway. And yet, that’s exactly what it felt like. As if I was using a sense outside the normal five. With it, I knew how the magic had managed to infiltrate Caroline’s defenses. Like a virus sneaking through a back door. In this case, Caroline’s connection to her pack.
