This was magic saturated with the same corrupt signature we’d sensed at the warehouse and outside the Lincoln sisters’ clinic. White luna power surged instinctively in my veins. I felt the barrier recoil from me like it had been burned and hoped the witch who’d put it up didn’t notice.
Didi caught Mrs. Chen’s arm as the elderly witch staggered through.
“That one was real nasty,” Mrs. Chen grunted. “It has vampire blood in it.”
Barney’s jaw tightened.
The house loomed inside the magic perimeter. I could hear muffled voices from within. My wolf stretched her senses.
I picked up four heartbeats that were fast and erratic, the kind of rhythm thatcame from fear. Melody and the three Ashgrove witches. A layer of corrupt magic overlaid their vitals.
The fifth heartbeat was slower, steady, and utterly controlled.
Samuel silently indicated the east side of the house, where the cellar entrance Barney had identified lay behind a tangle of dead rhododendrons. We began moving again, keeping to the shadows along the tree line.
Two things lit up on my radar when we were thirty yards from the house. A surge in the convergence. And three more very faint heartbeats.
A cry came from the building before I could react. I smelled Melody’s pain.
The front door crashed open. A shape shot out of the doorway.
It streaked across the porch in a blur of dark fur and leapt the railing in a single fluid motion. For a frozen heartbeat, it was silhouetted against the warm light spilling from the hallway.
It was the black cat with the golden eyes.
My wolf surged beneath my skin with a power that made my breath catch, every instinct I possessed locking onto the animal. Muscles thickened. Nails sharpened into claws. My vision snapped into the razor sharp clarity that came when my luna abilities were fully engaged.
The cat hit the lawn and bolted toward the trees, its sleek form moving with a speed no ordinary animal should possess. It was headed toward a gap between the property boundary and the forest.
“That’s her!” Mrs. Chen hissed.
I had already broken into a dead run, Samuel a second behind me.
Barney dashed past us, the vampire accelerating so fast his body blurred.
The cat veered hard to the left, cutting across the lawn at an angle that took it away from where it would have crossed paths with the vampire and toward a stone wall that bordered the eastern boundary. It was heading for a narrow crack between two moss-covered stones, one barely wide enough for a rat.
Barney adjusted his trajectory. He was quick, supernaturally, terrifyingly so. But the cat had the advantage of size and agility. It wove between the weeds and tall grass with a fluidity that made it hard to track, its golden eyes catching the ambient light.
Samuel and I closed from the other side, our wolves pouring speed into our human forms, our heartbeats in sync. I clenched my teeth.
Between the three of us, we were narrowing the cat’s escape route.
My stomach lurched when the cat suddenly changed direction, her motion defying physics. She raced for a corridor of shadow between two pines.
It would take her into the forest and away from the convergence point. Away from everything we could use against her.
I threw myself sideways with a burst of luna speed.
My fingers raked the air.
My hand closed around the cat’s tail as I landed hardon the grass.
The animal screeched, the sound cutting through the night like nails scraping across chalkboard. It was a woman’s scream compressed into an animal’s throat and it was raw with fury and shock.
The cat whipped around, claws slashing at my flesh as I pushed to my knees. Pain lanced up my wrist when its nails scored deep lines across my skin. I gritted my teeth, held on grimly as it squirmed and tried to escape, and drew on my white wolf power.
It surged through my veins and into my grip.
