She snapped her jaws a mere handful of inches from Harrod’s stricken face, but was stopped from taking his nose by the hand in her hair. It wrenched her backward, snapping her neck into a painful angle and forcing her away from her prey.
Josephine landed hard on the packed earth floor and let loose a blood curdling howl. The guards pinned her to the ground. In this form her strength was much greater, but she was still a slight woman. She could not simply toss off two fully grown men when her limbs were pinned.
She fought, though. She wouldneverstop fighting.
“You said she was docile!”
“She was,” her father cried. His voice was pitched strangely, as if in pain. “She was! I don’t know— she’s never bitten anyone before. It could be that her instincts—”
“For Glory’s sake, fuckingrestrainher!”
A fist slammed into the side of her head, but it only dazed her. Josephine knew from a decade of experiments that she could take much punishment in this form. They would not knock her out so easily.
Freeing one of her hands, she raked her claws down through the smoky glamour concealing the man’s face. Blood sprayed over her as the flesh gave way.
The guard made an animal sound and reared backward, hands flying to his mangled face and throat, as Josephine turned on the other guard. He cursed as he grappled with her, but for once her size was an advantage. Josephine managed to wiggle out of his panicked grip long enough to pounce.
He fell to her claws, too, as she slashed them down across his chest and stomach. The beast wanted to finish the job, but it knew they didn’t have time. Leaping from her gurgling, disemboweled victim, she regained her feet and focused on Harrod, who still stood in front of the door, petrified.
He raised his hands. An invisible force pushed her backward, the heels of her boots dragging through the dust, but even a telekinetic strike couldn’t stop her.
The woman in her was not quite asleep. She was aware enough to remember all the times he helped her father slice her flesh, every moment of cold cruelty, the way he invaded her space, how he wished to make her his biddable wife.
He deserves more pain that I can possibly give him.
If the gods did truly exist, she hoped Grim, goddess of death, would press his face into the mud of her riverbank, choking him on slime and refuse until the end of days. Josephine would personally see him delivered to divine hands.
He must have seen death in her eyes, because he finally found the will to run. It was too late.
Josephine struck precisely, with every ounce of her strength. What had once been Doctor Harrod Pierce’s head landed with a dull thump in the dust and rolled away. An arc of blood spewed, then sputtered pitifully as he crumbled. Harrod’s body fell to the floor in an undignified heap just as the air behind her began to warm with unnatural swiftness.
“Now, Miss Wyeth,” the patron called out, “Let us not—”
A beast’s growl erupted from her throat. Crouching in front of the cell door, Josephine turned to look over her shoulder. The patron stood well away from her, hands up and glowing with that unnatural heat. He was inching toward the door of the barn, dragging the guard with the mangled face with him. Clearly terrified of being bitten, he’d decided to run.
Her father, meanwhile, lay in the dirt, his upper body propped up against one of the old, unrenovated stalls. His right leg was bent at an unnatural angle, pink bone and yellow fat bursting from his shin.
Her eyes shifted slowly between them as the beast weighed her options. They both deserved the reckoning of claw and fang, but who would come first?
The sound of chains clinking within the cell drew her back from the bloodlust that demanded she tear the heads off of those men, too.
Get my mate. Protect him. Keep him.
The words were a screaming wall of urgency in her mind. Ignoring Harrod’s headless corpse, Josephine slapped her bloody palm against the door. She traced the sigil on the cold metal, leaving smears of his blood on the surface.
A heartbeat passed, then, with a familiarpopand metal tang, the door was unsealed.
She didn’t have time to marvel at this development. She didn’t have the presence of mind, either. Rising with a tearing, guttural sound, she grasped the bolt’s handle and pulled.
She’d gotten it open a handful of inches before she was flattened against the floor by an explosion of magic so hot and bright, it blinded her.
At first she thought it was the patron, that he’d destroyed the barn and she’d simply yet to die, but less than a second later, she realized she recognized that greatboomof energy from the fall of Washington, when even magically protected homes were wiped from the face of the earth.
It was the kickback of perimeter wards being broken.
Meadow Creek had been breached.
Urgency renewed, Josephine scrambled onto her feet and made to force the heavy door open. She didn’t so much as get her fingers around the edge before something huge and heavy was thrown against it. She flew backward and landed with a wheeze against a stack of crates half-full of provisions.
