All was not lost. At least not yet.
A surge of fight returned to me, and I searched for a weapon to use against her. I’d come here with the intention of ending her but she’d ambushed me. Or maybe I hadn’t intended to be here at all.
The dream kept swirling and changing, but the pain remained as I fought and sliced the darkness, the magic bleeding through me.
Emme, let us in,Hunter demanded, his voice in my head.
I can’t,I replied, whimpering as more pain crashed against me.She’s killing me.
I could feel my pack getting closer, but they would be too late. My body only had one more blast of magic in it… The coiled darkness tightened, and as the spell left Jewels’ grasp, I closed my eyes and murmured goodby?—
“Emme!” The jolt that woke me wasn’t from magic, but Finley’s rough hands. “Baby,” he said, his touch gentling. “You were screaming.”
Choked sobs burst from me as flashes of the dream lingered, reminding me of how close I’d come to death… at the hands of that witch. More than that, as the heart of our quintet, if I died, I’d take all of my mates with me.
Finley wrapped himself around me, with Hunter and Kellan pressing close on the bed too. In the bond our beasts huddled, and I fully opened the connection, allowing Slade and Talon to be part of this. They’d left a few hours ago to investigate the three locations with an overuse of power, and it must have been after I fell back asleep that the nightmare took hold.
What happened?Slade demanded.We could feel your panic and pain, but there was no way to push through our connection. It felt like we were being blocked.
Growls filled the room as Hunter’s gaze snapped to me. “What if that wasn’t a dream. What if it was a magical attack?”
With the bond fully open, Slade heard him, and we were all bathed in dragon heat.We should return, Talon said.It’s not safe there for you all without us.
No, I said, with more force than was probably necessary.We’re running out of time to stop her, and it’s going to take all of our strength. There are no second chances with this curse, and… I’m okay. I’ll ask Constantine if there’s a way to protect us during sleep. You two need to focus on these locations, to figure out if any of them might hold the witch.
Their worry lingered along with their rage, but in the end, they stayed on course. Through the bond, Slade sent me a flash of the town they were closing in on.This is site one. We’ll report back soon. Ask your father right now to protect your mind.
When he pulled away, I limited the connection once more so we didn’t distract them. I knew better than to close it fully, as their beasts would lose it again.
Hunter hurled himself off the bed and disappeared from the room, reappearing minutes later with a harried-looking witch-wolf in tow. “Protect her,” our entitled alpha snarled. “She was magically attacked in her dreams.”
Constantine’s sleepy expression faded, his eyes focused and alert as he examined me.
“Can you release her?” he asked Kellan and Finley, who were still wrapped around me as if they were prepared to throw their half-naked bodies between me and an attack. “I need to assess her energy to pinpoint what happened.”
With reluctance, they removed their hands, but didn’t back up more than a few inches. “Don’t touch her any more than necessary,” Finley warned my father, an edge in his tone.
Constantine nodded, showing no sign of being offended. For an alpha, he was rather unarrogant and unconcerned with dominance battles. I wondered if his witch side tempered the shifter side, or maybe it was more to do with his age and years of being on the run in the human world.
“I’m going to touch your collarbone, Emme,” he informed me, hands hovering above the sheet I had clutched to my chest.
The fact that any of the alphas were even allowing him to be in here while I was naked showed their level of worry. I mean, he was my father, so it wasn’t a sexual thing, but they would always be possessive.
When I nodded, he pressed his warm hands to my skin, a spark of his magic lighting up my own. After our time training together, I was familiar with the surge of his energy, but this felt like an even closer connection than usual, as if our magics realized we were from the same witch line.Family.
With my emotions still raw from the dream, and the stress of the twins being far away, I couldn’t help the tears that slipped from beneath my closed eyelids.
“What are you doing to her?” Hunter demanded, and my eyes opened to find him pushing against a magical barrier that Constantine must have erected around us.
I’m okay, I said through the bond.The familial ties that come with connecting our magic hit me hard, but he’s not hurting me.
Hunter’s wolf snarled until all of his pearly white teeth were on violent display.He has two fucking minutes. Tell him.
“Are you okay?” Constantine asked as he ignored Hunter’s scowl.
“Yeah, I can just feel our magic is connected.”
A soft smile lifted his lips, and I realized how rarely I’d seen him actually smile. A part of me regretted the cold and dismissive way I treated him when he first showed up, but at least we were slowly building a bond. “Our magic is connected to our family line,” he told me in a wistful tone. “To our ancestors. We inherit more than magic. We inherit the past and future from them. We inherit the essence of our covens.”
