Amara stands and I force myself to my feet as well.
With danger lifting its boot from our collective throats, and my body knows it’s safe to do so, my legs have started to shake, and exhaustion collapses inward. Everything that’s happened in such a short time period is catching up to me all at once.
As I pass Siggy, who’s still sitting vigil at Rhosyn’s side, I brush my fingers against her bare shoulder in silent reassurance that I’m still here before hobbling on stiff legs toward Talis. I force myself to avoid thinking about my exposed skin, about how the shift stripped me completely nude. No one looks twice. It’s me who has to recalibrate to this new normal.
I have to sidestep the writhing bodies scattered across the ground as I move. Amara’s witches and my pack advance with quiet, deadly efficiency, taking the opening I deliberately gave them, finishing what I set in motion when I trapped every remaining enemy inside their own terror. With each passing moment there are fewer screams, the air growing heavier as fear gives way to death.
I keep waiting for my softer, caretaking heart to recoil. For disgust, for remorse, for even the smallest flicker of doubt to take hold.
It doesn’t. Instead, I feel…balanced.
There’s this sense that I’ve done what my mother always wanted to but was never able to see through. Like I’ve righted the scales she spent her last years trying to keep even through her work at the sanctuary. Her life bond to Merritt tempered her, blunted the ruthlessness she knew was sometimes necessary to confront people like him. So, I accept the mantle she was denied, fully and without regret, and I am at peace with it.
I stop in front of Talis, my breath catching as horror climbs my throat and stays there.
In her panic—in whatever nightmare I locked her inside—she turned on herself. Her fingernails shifted into claws and sheraked them down her face again and again, driving past reason or restraint. Her once pretty features are shredded beyond recognition, skin hanging loose in strips, blood runs from the wounds into her knotted hair and ears. I don’t know how long it took before she reached her eyes, only that the damage there looks deliberate, as if some part of her believed that if she could blind herself, she might break free of whatever her mind conjured.
The thought turns my stomach, not with guilt, but with something else I don’t have a name for—cold, satisfied, and nauseating all at once.
I glance to my left and spot Vardis, Ashvale’s illusionist, and then Eldrith, my favorite crone. The realization that she’s here at all hits a delayed moment later, a brief spike of disbelief cutting through my exhaustion that she came and fought beside us, but I don’t have the luxury of dwelling on it.
“Find something to restrain her with,” I say, my voice worn and rough.
Eldrith tilts her head as she wipes blood from her manicure on her old eighties rock band T-shirt, unbothered, as if this is just any other night’s work. “Are you sure?”
I nod once, decidedly, my mind made up. “Letting her wake up and live with the consequences of what she’s done will hurt someone like her more than dying ever could.”
They find a discarded zip tie left behind by one of our invaders. I take it and pass it to a beta male from Gareth’s crew, asking him to bind her hands. This will take strength I or the crones don’t have.
Once he’s done and walking away, my gaze drifts back to Talis and I note of all the damage. Her shifter healing will take the edge off the damage in time—I’m not naïve enough to think otherwise—but it won’t erase what’s been done. Scarring is hard to come by as shifters, but she’s all but guaranteed she’ll bemarked for life by these wounds. They’re too deep and frenzied, the skin too jagged to be stitched back together neatly to help the healing along. With all the blood, I can’t tell yet what she’s done to her eyes, can’t say how much she’s taken from herself there, but my first impression isn’t exactly a hopeful one.
Eldrith’s attention is split between me and the mutilated she-wolf. “If you let her go, she might come back for you again.”
I look at the whimpering she-wolf at my feet—at the devastation she carved into herself, at the woman who thought she was entitled to the life fate blessed me with and tried to steal it for herself, to wear it like an ill-fitting skin.
“She can try.”
Chapter 48
Noa
“Noa!”
He calls for me before he even appears through the trees, my name torn from his chest and flung into the night with frantic urgency. It reaches straight for me, snapping my attention off the road and pivoting it toward the tree line before I have time to think. My new sharpened senses settle on him immediately, tracking him through the dark even now that the green light has faded and the night has closed in around us.
I smell him before I see him.
Leather. Vetiver. Mint.
And blood. Too much of it. Enough that my wolf bristles, a low, possessive warning curling through my chest as she registers it on him. Onmymate.
Rennick breaks through the trees at a sprint, already in his human form, bare aside from the dark layer of spilled blood and mud he wears. His gray gaze finds me immediately, panic and relief tightly tangled as one, and then he’s on me, crossing the space between us in seconds, his arms locking around me with enough to crush the air from my lungs. I don’t care.
He gathers me into him and holds on as if letting go isn’t an option, as if keeping me pressed to his chest is the only thing standing between me and the dark that tried to take me from him.
I let myself go, surrendering to it, fingers clutching at his neck, his back, anywhere I can anchor myself to the solid proof of him. That he’s here. That we’re both still here.
His strong body trembles, not from cold, but from everything he’s been forcing down since that first scream tore through the territory.
