They started down the hallway, walking in step, her hand still locked around his windpipe from the side. One squeeze. That’s all it would take. One delicious, satisfying squeeze.
They hurried through the house, passing doors and hallways, to the back, behind the kitchen where a solid wall bisected the building in half. A metal door with a numerical lock waited in the center.
She hurled him at it. “Open it.”
His shoulder struck the wall. He yelped and turned to Augustine, his eyes shivering with desperation. “If I open it, will you let me go?”
She hissed at him.
Augustine’s hand gently rested on her shoulder. “Priorities. Kitty is all that matters. He can open the door.”
The human part of her, the calmer rational part that realized when she was three years old that she was not a panther but a person, slid into the driver’s seat.
“Fine. I give my word.”
The man keyed a code into the lock with trembling fingers. Metal clanged, something whirred, and the door slid aside.
Augustine pointed his gun at the man. “Run.”
The man turned and sprinted through the house, his feet thudding on the floor. He would not be back. She had seen enough people in blind panic, and that man was running for his life.
She dove through the hole where the door used to be. A warehouse spread before her—concrete floor, concrete walls,shelves filled with lumber and metal, and directly in front of them, a hundred feet away, another doorway filled with electric light.
She almost sprinted to it, but Augustine caught her hand in his. The sudden warmth of his touch was like a burn to her overclocked senses.
“Together,” he said, and it sounded like a plea.
She forced herself to slow to his pace. They ran across the warehouse to the door. He paused before it, checking, his gun raised, and stepped through. She followed.
A rectangular room, a hundred and fifty feet long and three hundred feet wide. Kennels lining the walls. A yellow line painted three feet from the bars with the wordSAFEstenciled on the outside of it. And eyes, looking at her from the cages with silent desperation.
A kaleidoscope of scents swirled around her: bear, tiger, fox… So many, so many sparks of life reaching out for connection, some strong, some fading, all terrified. Her magic splayed out, and she felt them all at once. If they had voices that could speak, they would be screaming, “Free us!”
She was lost. Overwhelmed by the intensity of it all. By the suffering, by the hopelessness. They didn’t comprehend, they only knew they were trapped and they were scared, but the human part of her understood what they could not—why they were here, what would happen to them, and how much it would hurt.
She tried to breathe, but there was a steel band around her chest, and it couldn’t expand. A solid clump blocked her throat. Tears blurred her vision, and the world faded into a haze of red that cut like broken glass. A dark chasm opened by her feet, and she teetered on the precipice. If she fell, she would come apart, unravel like a tattered cloth, melting into the two dozen animals scrambling for her magic.
She heard something, a voice, words, but she couldn’t make them out. Something wrapped around her, solid, protective, pulling her back from the bottomless pit of pain.
“Diana, come back to me. I need you here with me.”
Augustine.
She locked her hands on his arms, still blind, and held on until she could breathe again. His scent washed over her, a barrier to all others, and she locked onto it and took a small step back from the edge.
Gradually, with agonizing slowness, her inner world reasserted its balance. Her mental defenses rose, shielding her from the sparks scraping at her with their claws, begging for connection and safety.
A slow breath.
Another.
She had almost lost herself. It was the fate feared by every animal mage. She had come this close only once before, when she had been young and inexperienced. She was no longer an unsure 13-year-old, she knew the risks, and she ought to have made preparations.
It was Kitty, the timer on her phone warning her that too much time passed since the cub last fed, Celeste’s suffering, Kayson’s and Aleah’s loved ones’ grief, and Woodward’s imminent return. They had all combined inside a pressure cooker, and it nearly broke her.
And then there was Augustine, both making it all worse and infinitely better. If it weren’t for him, when Woodward did return, he would find her on the floor, catatonic, a living husk without will or reason.
“Diana…” Augustine’s whisper was like a velvet caress.
