“We have to close the Door before it can open,” he says while I’m busy trying to text Imani to forget the damn horses, we have bigger problems to deal with.
Torin takes off at a run, and I decide to show him how fast I can run as a werewolf. I merely think about shifting and the magic wraps around my body, morphing me into a wolf that stands about waist high to Torin. Kit leaps to the top of my head so I can see where I’m going.
When I catch up to Torin, he hesitates and stares at me. “You are… so fucking cute,” he exclaims as he grabs me and hugs me. He’s squishing the life out of me for some reason. “You’re so fluffy!”
“Stop, dammit! We’re in the middle of something!”
“Right! Closing the Door,” he says as he releases me and resumes running. I bound after him, thrilled by my ability to run down the hallway. It’s not my first time as a werewolf. George’s favorite thing to do is zero in on whoever looks busy and tell them stories, so he finds me enough that I’ve tried my hand at being a werewolf a few times. Itisrather fun galloping around on all four paws. I feel fast and the magic isn’t so powerful that it’ll hurt me, yet I can still defend myself if I need to.
“Hey, Torin. Do we even know how to close a goddamn Door?” I ask.
“No idea,” he says. “But that thing can’t get loose here.If it does…” He trails off, but I’m with him on this. Whatever that man we faced last time was, there was something so wrong about his power that I’m afraid if he made it over here, his strength would be unstoppable.
The floor begins to shake while the walls and ceiling shudder. I’m worried the building is going to fall apart as I follow Torin, who seems to know exactly where the Door is opening up.
Suddenly, a surge of magic hits me, ripping through my body and causing the werewolf magic I’d just held to be torn out of me. The shift back hurts, and I’m flung forward, not expecting any part of this as I slam down onto the ground. Kit goes rolling off me, but Torin catches her before she goes far.
“You okay?”
“That magic is back,” I say through gritted teeth. Most magic tingles when it invades my body, but not this one. This one feels like I have a storm rolling beneath my skin. Torin helps me to my feet and places Kit in my arms. She quickly climbs back onto my shoulder, her nails digging into my shirt—which thankfully shifts with me when it comes to George’s magic—like she’s determined to stay on this time no matter what.
“Do you need to go?” he asks.
“No, we need to stop it,” I respond, fighting to push the intrusive magic down. It’s such an unfamiliar magic. Every other magic I’ve ever felt in my life, I immediately knew how to wield it… but not this. I know nothing about it and I’m afraid to even touch it.
“In here,” Torin says, grabbing my wrist and pulling me into a large meeting room.
Just as we rush in, I see the table sitting in the middle crack and crumble to pieces while the glow of a doorway flickers into existence.
Darkness descends upon the room. The wallpaper begins to shrivel up and brown before it peels away. The paint on the ceiling cracks and drops to the ground as black vines stretch out from inside the doorway.
A dark creature steps through, like some kind of wolf made up of flickering mist, standing taller than I did as a werewolf,and I realize that I have no damn idea what I’m supposed to do. Yes, I have my witch magic, but what the hell can I do with it? It’s not the best in terms of defensive magic. And my elemental magic is strong enough that it hurts me when I use it.
I need to protect the people in this building, the ones I see nearly every damn day, the people who slowly shoved themselves into my life whether I wanted them or not.
The creature lunges at Torin. He pulls one of his weapons out, but when he slices it through the air, it cuts straight through the beast as it dissipates and reappears away from him, almost like it really is made of mist. The moment it appears, I press my finger against the third notch on my pendant, calling on the elemental magic I have stored in it. I know using it hurts me, but if it stops the beast, then it’ll be worth it. I hold my hand out, and ice materializes in front of me in the form of small, almost quill-shaped shards that drive toward the beast, but they go right through it without hurting it at all. Instead, the magic simply hurts my hands.
“What do I do?” I question, hating that I have to ask this.
I’ve fought for years. I’ve never had to ask someone what to do before. I was always the leader in every single mission we went on. I was the strongest. I was in control; I knew how to make decisions and how to harness magic that would get us all out safely.
And now I feel anger boiling inside me over the fact that I feel absolutely useless.
“Don’t use your magic; you’ll just hurt yourself more. I can close it,” Torin says, rushing toward the Door as a hand reaches through it, like the man from the other day is fighting against something to get out.
Seeing this, Torin swings a chain that appears to be connected to the handle of the scythe he’d used earlier. He flings the scythe through the doorway that’s glowing black, swirls ofmist hovering around it. And when the chain grows taut, he jerks hard and the arm withdraws just as the beast slams into him.
There’s nothing he can do about the creature that seems to turn to mist every time he tries to touch it.
It’s fast, pinning him to the wall while he tries to hook it with his scythe, but the weapon cuts straight through the mist that makes up the creature. And it’s giving the man behind the Door time to break through into our world.
I have to do something. I can’t just stand here and let that man through or allow Torin to be killed.
I clutch my pendant, anxious about the fact that the last time this foreign magic invaded me, I leveled the entire building. Why did I lack so much control over it? Was it because of the state I was in? The state of the building after the Door had torn it apart?
What if I level this building and kill everyone in it? All these people I care about?
I take a deep breath, and the wolf made of mist rips off Torin and rushes me, like it knows what I’m about to do.
