Page 123 of Devoured

Evander doesn’t anticipate the way my bones shift. The way they break all at once, just as he advised the day he burst into my room. He doesn’t know I’ve been practicing. Shifting over and over so I could do it at will. He doesn’t suspect the explosion of pain that shatters me to my core, and the brief second of my transformation.

In the broad light of day, in my hometown where I played on the street as a little girl and first met my best friend, I transform into a werewolf.

And lunge at him.

41

VANESSA

I HIT EVANDER HARD WITH BOTH SETS OF FRONT CLAWS, driving him into the wall behind him. He gasps, wrestling an arm between us to keep my fangs from his throat. It’s no use, however. He can’t transform without a moment of fatal vulnerability, and he can’t defeat me as a man.

I will not hurt my father or my friends. Instead, I am going to kill Evander.

I’ll tell Cora it was an accident. He exposed us, threatened us, and I had to end his life. Then I’ll grab someone off the street to bite, maybe someone in the hospital already suffering. I’ll bring them to Cora as a show of loyalty, and I’ll talk to Evie, and we’ll find a way to end this. It’s the only way forward.

I can suffer Cora’s wrath. For my father, to save his life, I will endure whatever torment she thrusts my way.

I snap at Evander—to bite, to kill—but… something makes my fangs close a fraction too slow. Instead of flesh, I taste the rough, musky wool of his sleeve. Why didn’t I bite deeper?

My heart stutters as he unleashes a sharpened claw. As he swipes it wildly, desperately, at my chest. “What the fuck, Vanessa?”

I twist away from the impact, seizing his wrist between my jaws instead. He tries to pull free, planting his shoulder against me, fighting with a brutal, unnatural strength. But I am bigger. I should be stronger. I slash his leg with my claw, and his pants rip. Blood wells. He snarls, his eyes glowing, burning, as his arm begins to slip from my grasp.

Impossible.

I bite harder, but—he’s gone.

He whirls away from me, his chest rising and falling with rapid fury, that arm as slender as a blade. Modifier. Within a blink, it transforms back to normal. But now his fangs grow dangerously longer. His claws sharpen into individual daggers. Transformations don’t slow him down, I realize with an aching breath. His powers—they’ll make this difficult. Maybe too difficult.

He laughs before spitting blood on the pavement. “Did you really think you could murder me, littlest Vanessa?” I land on all fours, taller than him by a few feet. His scent—ash and grass—blows hot between us. “Down, kitty,” he purrs. “I don’t want to fight you.”

That nickname, his thick condescension, sends me sprinting toward him. I charge at full speed, prepared to knock him into the road. Prepared to bury him in gravel. He helped torture Calix. He is just another of Cora’s pawns. But he dances out of my reach before I can slam into him again.

Another laugh. Harsher this time. “You don’t have what it takes. You’re too afraid, full of guilt and shame. You reek of it.” He prowls around me as I scrape a claw against the ground, my breathing ragged and my bones shuddering with rage. “You can’t kill someone, Vanessa—not on purpose. Not with intent. You can’t kill me.”

He’s lying.

Even though I don’t feel it in my chest, even though his words curl terrible honesty around my heart, he has to be lying. Because if I can’t do this, how will I defeat Cora? How will I save my father? How will I help Evie and Portia and Calix save the goddamned world?

I snarl, but he merely grins. “You know I’m right. Deep down, you know you’re weak, Vanessa. You are not a killer. You are a coward. A pitiful, useless coward.”

The words stir something inside me. The whisper of a memory. But before I can latch on to it, before I can let it distract me, I lunge at him again.

This time, he doesn’t dance away. This time, he races toward me—then leaps over me, above me, on top of me.

No.

His weight crushes my back as I thrash to dislodge him, but he pinches two fingers at my nape. He strangles the pressure point on my neck until my body seizes. Until my spine snaps. Until I am no longer my own to command.

No. No. No.

With a haggard gasp, I lose control, and I transform. He steps away as I break, as my bones snap and my fur melts back into flesh. Only when I press steaming palms to the gravel, only when I’m naked on the ground, does he move forward. He throws his jacket over my body with a rumbling growl.

“I told you,” he says. “Coward.”

Then he saunters off. And I stay in a useless heap as a coward.

Evander returns after several minutes with a sundress and a pair of flip-flops for me to wear—either stolen from a nearby home or purchased from one of the boutiques downtown—and turns around to give me time to change. I don’t thank him for any of it. How can I? I needed to kill him—an infuriating, inconsequential man—and I couldn’t.