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The sound that tears out of my throat doesn’t sound like me. It doesn’t sound like a civilized doctoral candidate with an extensive vocabulary and a minor in Latin syntax. It sounds like an animal whose den just got caved in with a backhoe.

Lachlan’s bear drops out of the air.

He hits the checkered marble tile with such force it rattles every crystal droplet in the chandelier forty feet above us. The beast doesn't fade gracefully; it dissolves in a cloud of black smoke, bones cracking and snapping backward as the shift is torn from him.

Someone’s screaming his name. My throat’s raw with it.

The spear juts from his left shoulder, punched clean through hide and muscle until the barbed point is buried deep against his ribcage.

My brain does that weird, detached thing it used to do in high school when a foster home went from "tense" to "call the police." The panic stops fluttering in my chest. My knees stop knocking together. Every hysterical, petty thought about property values and water damage simply evaporates, replaced by a cold, flat line of pure, lethal survival instinct.

No. Not him. You do not get to take him.

I don’t bother with the steps. I throw my hip over the wide mahogany banister, slide down the slick varnish at breakneck speed, and hit the bottom newel post with a brutal thud that knocks the wind clean out of me. I don’t even stop to breathe. I hit the floor on my hands and knees, my sneakers squeaking against the wet tile, sliding through splinters of doorframe, torn pages, and sewer muck.

I scramble across the marble like a feral badger, tearing the skin off both knees through my jeans, until I skid to a halt in the filth right beside him.

"Lachlan!"

My hands slap against his jaw. His skin feels like ice pulled out of a freezer chest, clammy and gray. The pupils of his hazel eyes are blown wide, almost entirely black, ringed with faint, dying flecks of gold. The veins along his throat are standing out in raised, necrotic cords, black sludge weeping from the puncture wound.

"Viv..." he rasps, his throat clicking on the syllable. A thin stream of black venom trickles from the corner of his lips into his dark beard. "Run... get to... the cellar..."

"Shut up," I tell him, my voice completely steady, completely devoid of mercy. "Shut your stupid mouth right now."

I look down at the spear. The shaft is carved bone wrapped in blackened silver wire, humming with a magic frequency that makes my skin crawl.

I don't think about it. If I think about it, I’ll hesitate. I can’t afford to hesitate.

I clamp both hands around the shaft.

The necrotic silver bites into my palms like dry ice. It burns with an instantaneous, searing cold that turns my skin white and makes the nerves in my wrists shriek, but I lock my fingers around the metal anyway. I plant my right sneaker squarely against his uninjured collarbone for leverage, grit my teeth until I can hear enamel creak, and yank with everything I have.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I chant. “I swear I’ll let you train me if you’ll just fucking live.”

The barbed point tears free with a foul squelch.

Black, foul-smelling venom spatters across my chest, soaking into the knit of my black sweater. The spear is so heavy my arms shake, but I cock my arm back and hurl the five-foot spike across the foyer. It clatters against the far stone wall, spinning across the floor before coming to rest in the corner like a piece of dead scrap iron.

The relief lasts half a second.

Without the spear plugging the hole, the wound bubbles. Thick black sludge wells up between his ribs, eating away at the edges of his flesh faster than his shifter biology can even attempt to knit it together. His chest rattles, his hands twitching helplessly against the wet stone.

He’s dying. I don’t know what this thing is, what this poison is, but I know what it’s doing. The magic in me can feel it. My eyes are full of tears.

A shattered vessel cannot hold wine, but a mated stone does not crack under the river's rush.

Elizabeth Anne’s jagged handwriting flashes across the back of my eyelids like neon on a rainy street.

He grounds the magic. He’s the anchor. My mate is the anchor.

And then the missing puzzle piece slams into place.

We never finished the bond.

"The mate bond," I whisper, grabbing his face again, my thumb wiping the black blood from his lip. "Lachlan, look at me. Look right at me!"

His head rolls toward me, his eyelids fluttering, fighting through the haze.