“This would be an excellent time to be saved by that vampire king who supposedly will kill anyone and anything that touches me,” she grits out. “As I’ve been repeatedly assured the past few months.”
“I don’t need Ty to save me,” I growl. “I just want him to hurry up and free me so I can start collecting heads.”
Up above us, Vinca is starting to ... expand.
At first I think it’s a figment of my imagination. An unhappy hallucination.
I stare up at her and I see her bones stretch, breaking to stretch more. I know what that looks like. I can feel it in myself every time I switch forms.
Another shot of pure ice washes over me.
I think about what I know for a fact. Vinca isinBriar, but she wasn’t fully inhabiting Briar. Not until tonight.
Whatever she plans now, she clearly has to use Briar’s body to achieve it. Whether she will be bursting free of it and creating her own with the pieces that are left or fully taking over the body of the dark fae, I can’t say.
But it’s clear that every word that’s chanted makes another gristly, hideous break or stretch happen. I can hear the joints pop, the bones crunch, and that awful cracking sound. Vinca whips around and around as if she’s writhing on the floor, though she’s hanging in midair.
My only comfort is knowing it must be extraordinarily painful. I love that for her.
Come on, Ty,I think, reaching down deep inside of me and trying to find that link. Trying to pull on it as hard as I can, telling myself that it won’t matter that we’re not mated yet. That I’m not fully claimed.
What we have is bigger than any of that.
Ty,I think and feel and scream from deep inside of me,I need you.
Then I do it again, so hard it feels like something rips deep inside me, but I don’t care.Now.
26.
I measure time by the beat of my heart. I focus on it and try to block out everything else. One beat. Breath. Another beat.
I tell myself sensation is a lie. Perception is what I make it. It’s not an eleventh-hour attempt to achieve enlightenment, it’s a defense mechanism. The less I feel what’s happening to me—crawling all over me—the better.
Another beat of my heart. Another breath. Something like a sob rolling up from deep inside—
But then, in the distance, I hear it. Maybe what I mean is that Ifeelit.
It’s possible Iscentit in the air. It’s all of these things at once.
Pack.
They’re here. They came. They found us.
I tilt my head back so that I’m closer to Winter and Savi and can make sure Vinca—still writhing in the air above us—isn’t paying attention to me. Much less to what I’m saying.
“They’re here,” I tell them, low and fierce. “They’re here.”
Winter doesn’t answer, but I can feel her vibrating. With tension, horror, fury—maybe all of the above. She blows out a breath and mutters something. It takes me a moment, beneath the clamor of the goddess’s snapping bones and stretching sinew up above, to make sense of it.
“The tunnels,” she says.
I remember those maps in the den. Not only maps of our expanded North American territory but the ones on the walls that showcase all sorts of geographic points of interest around here. Including the lava tubes that were blocked for centuries, then opened on the solstice. Then were used to empty out Crater Lake, washing away structures and lands and flooding the old reservoir at Lost Creek Lake.
Rumor is, it flooded most of the Klamath Basin, too.
Savi murmurs something and, suddenly, it’s like I can see with a different part of my head. I know that my eyes are showing me what’s right in front of me—the dancing acolytes, the red, flowing robes. Now there’s another screen inside my head.
I can see them coming. My heart kicks up a gear. I can see vampires and werewolves, an army of goblins, and shockingly, representatives of almost every other clan of the Kind I can think of. All the denizens of the Rogue Valley. Marching together.
