“He’s mine!” Valberdon’s eyes glittered with malice.
“He fucking ran away from you,” Titan spat. “He never should’ve been your slave.”
“He was my apprentice,” Valberdon hissed. He threw up a larger shield, then an energy wave to force Titan backward.
Titan’s shoes skidded against the asphalt. He pushed against that force, reaching out with his senses. Mathlin was still on the ground behind him. Still breathing. So he stalked forward, slicing into his thumb again to keep his blood flowing. It soaked into the spell sheets; fireballs shot toward Valberdon and slammed into his invisible shield. The shield rippled with each impact.
Titan was getting close to the last of his spells; he glimpsed the ones with Mathlin’s drawings.
“Balls of fire,” Titan announced, activating that spell on the heels of a lightning attack.
Mathlin giggled weakly as multiple flaming balls shot out of the spell sheet.
Three spells left.
The moment Titan’s assault ended, there was no telling what Valberdon had in store for them.
Where was Uriel? Panic crept through Titan’s gut.
Titan’s hesitation left a break in his attacks. Valberdon cast his own spell, firing hot beams of light that Titan had to dodge. Some of them grazed Titan’s limbs; he snarled and surged closer, activating his last spells in quick succession: a laser blast, a huge fireball, and a spear of fire that pierced Valberdon’s shield.
There!
Titan was shifting before he knew it, his clothes ripping, the wolf consuming his human skin. He kicked off his pants and sprang forward, smashing himself through the wizard’s cracking shield spell.
The shield shattered. For a tense second, horror consumed Valberdon’s face.
Titan landed with his paws on Valberdon’s chest, sending him crashing to the ground. He snarled and sank his fangs into Valberdon’s forearms, ripping apart his muscles so he could no longer cast spells with his hands. The wizard screamed.
“You should suffer a little,” Titan seethed in his face. “You took years out of Mathlin’s life, out of his childhood.”
“He learned things! He was going to succeed me!” Valberdon yelled.
Disgust filled Titan. Before he could tear off more vile flesh, Valberdon muttered something under his breath.
A summoning circle appeared beneath the wizard.
To Titan’s horror, a sea of giant slugs popped into existence around them.
Valberdon smiled grimly. “If I can’t have Mathlin, then you won’t either. These flesh-eating slugs will consume him and his child.”
Titan roared and ripped open Valberdon’s throat in a spray of blood.
Finally, that threat was neutralized. But the danger wasn’t over.
Already, the knee-high slugs were crawling all over the wizard and oozing onto him. Titan flung away one that tried to eat him. “Math!”
“I’m okay!” Mathlin croaked.
Titan wasn’t going to believe that until he saw Mathlin with his own eyes. He ran over several slugs to get to Mathlin, grabbing them with his teeth and flinging them off his mate. “Math. You okay?”
Mathlin rolled onto his knees shakily, grabbing fistfuls of Titan’s fur. “Gods, you’re so beautiful.”
“Math, you hit your head and I squashed you,” Titan growled, ripping apart the slugs when they got too close. “Are you and the pup okay?”
Mathlin rubbed his belly and nodded slowly. “Yeah. I healed the damage.”
Titan shifted back into a human, carefully running his fingers over the back of Mathlin’s head. It was wet with blood—and that made Titan’s gut clench—but Mathlin’s eyes were sharp; he didn’t smell of pain. Titan trailed his hands over Mathlin’s arms and back, carefully touching his belly.
