Kara felt the sharp edges of the bindings cutting into her veins as her blood spilled from her wrists and ran down her fingers. At first, she wasn’t sure if she was imagining it when her father’s ring, wet with blood, grew warm against her finger. Then the heat spread up her arms and extended through her legs until it caused her to curl her fingers out, the itch there turning to pain, as though her bones were coming through the tips of her fingers.
And at the same time, her eyeteeth were elongating—not simply clicking into place, like she’d seen from Julian and the others, but slowly stretching from her gums. She might have been scared if her gaze hadn’t been glued to the man she loved, watching as the witches took turns taunting him and running their blades across his skin.
Hotter and hotter, the ruby ring burned. The muscles under her skin felt as though they were bunching up, contracting and gaining mass. The feeling she usually had of sensing evil was transformed in that moment to something else, as though her energy was not just identifying her enemies, but building to a crescendo like a dragon rising from slumber, scenting the air and preparing to devour.
With her lips pulled back in a snarl, she pulled against the metal cuffs, this time feeling them give just a fraction of an inch. She focused on the ring, inviting the foreign presence there fully into her body, calling upon it to help her avenge her bondmate.
And then, with muscles flexing, Kara gave a final tug against the metal and her wrists broke free. Sage turned to her, mouth agape, just as Kara brought her hands to her wooden collar.
“Claudius! Drop the guillotine!” Sage cried.
Kara couldn’t get her long-tipped fingers around the latch, so she plunged them into the wood instead, partly amazed, partly expecting it when they tore the wood to splinters. She pulled her head free just as the large, triangular blade smashed into the broken shards.
Julian looked so weak, but when the people around him turned to glance in Kara’s direction, he roused and shifted his head to see her. She could barely make out his features with his face a slippery crimson. A spark lit in his eye when he saw her crouching in her corner with her hands before her, ready to take on the first witch who made a move. She didn’t think it was simply her own blood covering her hands that made the claws on her fingers shine red. She had red, crystalline claws like the ruby on her father’s ring.
When Julian began to fade, her first thought was that he was headed for the Abyss. He was too weak. He couldn’t endure being on the surface again so soon, especially not with his flesh form sustaining so much damage.
The first witch to charge Kara was a man who looked fleetingly familiar, perhaps one of Sage’s men who’d helped beat Kara on her first visit to the coven. He was big and slow. Kara sidestepped and grabbed his wrist in her clawed hands, twisting the dagger from his grip as she sliced through tendon and bone. He screamed, but she took the long dagger by the hilt and plunged it up through his chin, straight through the roof of his mouth, silencing him completely.
“What the hell are you waiting for? Get in there!” Sage hollered.
A tall, thin witch yanked a mace from the wall and another grabbed a sword. But as the two other men stalked slowly toward Kara, she was more concerned with Claudius’s perfectly calm countenance and the words he seemed to be reciting under his breath. An instant later, the dagger scorched her palm. She flung it like a hot potato at the chest of the man with the sword and heard it sizzle as it found his heart.
The other man’s eyes widened as his friend fell, but then he set his jaw and charged, swinging the mace in an arc destined to end in Kara’s skull. Faster than she’d ever moved, Kara launched to the side and ran up the wall, flipping over his back. Like a blur, she reached over his shoulder and grabbed the chain, intending to wrap it around his throat to choke him. But she wasn’t used to her new strength. When she tugged the chain, it buried the links so deep in his throat, it almost severed his head.
Claudius’s head shot up at attention. “They’re storming the ward! Sound the alarm—and hold her off,” he commanded the remaining men as a loud wail flooded the air, like the breathy screech of bagpipes.
He dropped the dagger and shoved the urn into Sage’s arms, then grabbed a sword from the wall and lifted it above Julian’s neck. Kara’s cry reverberated off the stone walls as Claudius brought the long blade crashing down into…the vacant, bloody wood of the inverted table.
Julian was gone. But had he flashed, or was he really, truly gone? Claudius and Sage rushed out the door of the chamber as the three remaining men looked from Kara to the bodies around her.
“Three dead, three to go,” she hissed through her long fangs.
“Hell no.” As soon as the first man turned toward the door, the others followed, and within seconds she was all alone in the room with just her and a very battered Tray.
“Shit.” She padded toward him, trying her claws on the thick metal shackles around his wrists, but it was no use. Her claws were strong, but they weren’t that strong.
His eyelids opened to small slits. His lips were cracked and bleeding. “Kara?”
She was so conflicted inside, she didn’t know what to say to the man who had broken her trust and betrayed the love of her best friend. “Why, Tray?”
“I had a job to do,” he wheezed. “I fell in love with Abbey from the get-go, but that didn’t change the assignment.”
“Do you understand what it’s going to do to her when she finds out?”
“Yeah. I was hoping she wouldn’t ever have to.” He tried to move his shoulders, but then he grimaced in pain.
“So you never did call your agency, did you?”
“I thought I could handle it. Once I brought them here, my cover with the Southwestern Coven would have been blown and the O.P.A. would have reassigned me.”
“And then you’d have no reason to spy on Abbey any longer.”
He smiled sadly. “Pretty much.”
“What’s going to happen now?”
“It depends. If word gets back to the Southwestern Coven that I’m working for the O.P.A., then I’ll have to go into hiding for a while.”
“With what you’ve done to Abbey, hiding is probably a pretty damn good idea.”
“Kara—” it seemed to take all his strength, but he picked his head up to look her in the eye, “—Abbey is my lifemate.”
Kara stepped back. “What are you talking about? How do you know that?”
“Trust me. When you find your lifemate, you know. I think she knew it, too, on some level, but she couldn’t figure out what she was feeling with me being masked as a human. She said she left me because I never truly understood her, but I think she was just confused.”
Being a witch’s lifemate was nothing like being a Demiáre’s bondmate. For Demiáre, the bond was created by physical contact and could diminish over time. For witches, a lifemate was forever. Destiny.
So many puzzle pieces were fitting together in Kara’s mind. Like, maybe that was why she could sense emotions in Tray sometimes like she could with Abbey. The connection with Abbey had been forged over a lifetime, and because Tray was her mate, Kara might have the same kind of connection with him.
But what would Abbey do when she found out the truth, that the man destiny had paired her with was also the man who’d sold her out to the government and put her and Kara in danger from the Southwestern Coven? Kara doubted Abbey would ever forgive Tray. But living the rest of his life without his lifemate seemed like a pretty adequate punishment.
“You made choices, Tray. Even if you thought the reason was honorable, you hurt a lot of people.”
He hung his head. “I know.”
Kara reached up to yank on his cuffs again. The small movement made him groan in agony. “Just hold on. I’ll get these off of you. Maybe there’s a tool or something around here.”
“Let me help you,” a voice said from behind her. She spun and smacked right into Julian’s punctured, sticky chest.
“Oh my God.” She threw her arms around him and squeezed. “I thought you were gone. I didn’t know if…”
“Not yet.” He reached over her shoulder and tugged the shackles with the strength only a black-wing possessed, yanking the fasteners from the rock.
With a grunt, Tray fell in a heap at their feet. “Thanks.”
From somewhere in the tunnels, the sounds of fighting rang out—metal on metal, shouts of pain, growls of victory. “Who came?” she asked Julian.
“Your Mercury Clan. Aiden said they had you on the block, so they were waiting for my signal that you were safe before they proceeded. I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t broken free.” He shuddered. “I wasn’t sure I could get to you in time if Claudius dropped the blade.”
“He was going to kill you, you stupid Son of the Sky! That ritual he did made your body as vulnerable as a Demiáre.”
“If we were going to die, I wanted to go first. I couldn’t have endured it any other way.”
She pulled back a few inches to look at Julian. His hair and face looked as if he’d been dunked in a bucket of red paint, and he didn’t seem as steady on his feet as the first night she’d seen him in the alley. “Are you really okay?”
He looked chagrined and held his fingers an inch apart. “I could use maybe a little sip.”
Kara scraped a crimson claw across her wrist and held it to his mouth. He sucked greedily. “Why did Claudius give up so easily?” she asked. “He made it sound like he was as strong as the Aniliáre now.”
Julian wiped the back of his hand across his lips. “I doubt he’s given up, but I don’t think he wanted to regroup in a room with a female who was calling on her power and laying waste to his men.”
Her lips drooped in a big, toothy pout. “I have fangs.”
He grinned and pressed his sticky lips to hers. “You’ve never looked so beautiful.”
They’d descended into the field like a swarm of locusts, more than fifty silver-wings each carrying a demibreed warrior in his arms. Gavin led the charge, while Aiden and Sarah hung back, trying desperately to dampen the effect of the ward as the Mercury warriors blew through. It had been Julian’s suggestion to even the playing field by giving Sarah a dose of his blood, and that had made all the difference in counteracting Claudius’s dark magic.
It still hurt when Gavin crossed the invisible barrier. He almost dropped his sword, but he steeled his spine and allowed the electric ribbons to whip over his skin. The only thing of importance was Kara. He’d grown desperate waiting, wondering if something had happened when Julian failed to summon them. But then at last, Gavin felt the tug on his charm and he was off, with the rest of the warriors frantically tracing his path.
He ran through the tunnels, slowing only to bash his fist or the hilt of his sword into someone’s face, and then he kept going, leaving the wounded for other warriors to finish. His singular goal was to get to Kara, but the place was a damn maze. Tunnel after tunnel with some pathways leading nowhere at all.
“Kara!” he shouted.
“Over here,” a woman called.
He followed her voice down another corridor and threw open the door. “Kara—” he began, but the woman had black hair and tattoos covering her skin. Kara was nowhere to be seen. The air smelled ripe with blood, and under it all was Julian’s essence.
Suddenly, the door behind him blew closed, and Gavin felt as though invisible hands were garroting his neck. He dropped to his knees, anchored in place by a strong force. A brown-haired man with bloody lips stepped in front of him, his hand curved as though he had Gavin by the throat from five feet away.
“You see, Sage. All I needed was a little more blood.”
It was Claudius Sellers. And he looked as though he’d had enough blood to send him over the edge. He was manic, smiling like a storefront mannequin with crazed eyes.
“Hurry up and kill him,” she said. “There must be a dozen more Fallen out there in the tunnels, and I still have Kara to deal with.”
“Relax, sugar.” He smiled at Gavin, squeezing tighter with his extended fist. “We’re going to pick off these weaker Demiáre like sick gazelle. And when the other hemispheres see what I’m capable of, they won’t dare challenge me.”
Gavin’s eyes bulged, and he clawed at his throat, unable to draw a breath. His lungs burned, and he felt as though he would implode if he couldn’t shake Claudius’s grip. But as his pain and anger grew, so did his power, crackling through his veins. He held his palm before him and threw a blue ball of fire at Claudius’s head. When it hit, Claudius tumbled backward.
Gavin sucked in a full breath. Then he picked up his sword, walked to the high priest and plunged the blade through his heart. “Here’s a tip for world domination—kill first, talk later.” Staring down at the high priest’s dimming eyes, he added, “And another thing—I’ve never been a weak Demiáre.” And then he twisted the blade, leaving a gaping pit in Claudius’s chest.
With a panicked cry, Sage bolted for the exit. Gavin plucked the sword from Claudius and hurled it at the door like a javelin. It stuck mere inches from Sage’s head. “I don’t think you’ll be
dealing
any more with Kara tonight.”
Chapter Twenty-One
By the time Jaxon flew onto the scene, his wings flapping and his arms cradling an overexcited redhead, more than half the Mercury warriors had already returned home and the others were assembled in the lot. Several warriors had been seriously injured, but not one witch had been successful in removing any heads. Claudius’s supporters weren’t as lucky. Only a handful had survived.