She gathered the materials on instinct: chalk, salt, a cord, a vase. The motions were automatic, jerky and instinctive.
As she began to draw the circle on the stone floor, her thoughts fractured into fragments. Memories blurred, her mother’s voice, Theodore’s warnings, the nights she’d practiced in secret by candlelight, terrified someone would smell the magic on her skin.
And Dominic. His warmth, his touch, the way he’d once looked at her like she was something precious.
A sob tore from her throat, but she kept drawing.
When she finally stood, the circle was complete, crude but stable. The symbols carved into the floor seemed to shimmer faintly, though she wasn’t sure if that was her vision or the magic itself.
She stepped into the center.
Her voice came out raw and hoarse as she began to recite the words from the page. The language was old, the syllables jagged, slicing her tongue as she spoke them. Her heart slowed, her hands heating.
At first, nothing happened.
Then the air shifted.
The candle flames bent inward, flickering blue. The walls seemed to stretch, the shadows lengthening, reaching toward her. A low hum filled the room, the sound of something ancient waking up.
Layla’s chest constricted. She tried to keep reading, but the words slipped away, her breath catching on each syllable. The light from the circle brightened, searing white, and suddenly she couldn’t feel her hands.
The pain hit next, not in her body, but deeper, like her magic itself was being dragged out through her ribs.
She gasped, clutching at her chest. “No—wait—”
The floor swayed under her feet. The light swallowed the room. Her heart pounded once, twice—
And the world broke open.
The basement was gone.
She stood in the snow. Endless, blinding snow.
Wolves howled somewhere in the distance, hundreds of them, their cries of rage and terror echoing through the air. She turned, spinning, trying to see, but the storm swallowed everything. Then a shape took form in the white, a pack of wolves, their eyes gleaming gold and silver, fighting against things that weren’t wolves at all.
Monsters.
Gray and twisted, their eyes white as bone, their claws like knives. They moved in jerks and shudders, half-shadow, half-flesh. They were spilling from a great maw cracked open in the mountain, spilling out as if from the bowels of hell itself. The shifters rose to meet them. Layla’s pulse raced as she recognized some of the wolves. The white, blue-eyed Nordan. The dark, shadowy Volkhov. Theodore.Dominic.
The hybrids werewinning.
Blood stained the snow, vivid against the white.
She screamed Dominic’s name.
He was in the thick of it, his dark wolf form slick with blood that wasn’t all his own. His movements were a blur of precision, brutal, efficient, but there were too many of them. For every monster he struck down, two more appeared from the fog.
She couldfeelhis exhaustion. The rage was burning under his skin. The raw, desperate instinct to protect his own, even when he was bleeding out.
“Stop,” she whispered, though he couldn’t hear her. “Please, stop—”
Her voice was swallowed by the wind.
The snow deepened, rising to her knees, then her waist. It pulled her down, heavy and cold. The harder she fought it, the more it took. She tried to reach for Dominic, her hand stretching through the storm, but her fingers passed through him like smoke.
The hybrid behind him moved too fast.
Layla screamed again as it leapt, jaws unhinging, claws outstretched.
