I moved to intercept them, but Alvin planted himself between us. Ness’s roar tore me in half. Marcus and Jackson hauled her to her feet even though she thrashed in their arms. Her face twisted with rage. She threw herself forward.
Alvin swiped at me, drawing my attention back to him. The reek of rot that wafted off him wasn’t just the curse eating away at what was left of his soul. It was more than that. I caught the scent of poison.
He knew he couldn’t win a fair fight. Once more, they had to resort to playing dirty.
But that meant…Alvin’s claws had pierced Ness’s skin. I leapt out of the way of another of Alvin’s swipes and craned my neck to see Ness. Already, her movements were growing sluggish. Her eyelids drooped. She still had fight left in her, if the curl of her lip told me anything.
How long would it take for the poison to take her from me? A few minutes? An hour?
“Drop me,” she commanded.
Marcus and Jackson jerked their hands back. Ness fell to her knees. She paid no attention to the men behind her before she began crawling to Connor.
“Leave,” Alvin snarled. “This is my territory.”
I struck out, reaching for his throat. He fell back, and my hand closed around empty air. He wasn’t fast enough to dodge my strikes, so he’d shifted instead. His form shrank beneath my reach. I tried to push one attack into another, shifting my body weight so that I could throw myself at the wolf.
The missed grapple cost me precious moments. The time that it took me to turn my grasp into a full-body grapple allowed Alvin to leap away from me. My beast bellowed. It shoved its way out of me. Wolves scrambled out of the way as my claws slammed into the earth. I charged ahead with Alvin’s form in my sights.
“Stop,” Ness called out.
My body froze. My momentum nearly sent me tumbling face first into the ground. Behind me, she quickly cursed under her breath. Ness caught up and put a hand on my flank. She sighed, defeated.
The command broke, and my body relaxed. I turned my attention to the darkness ahead. No one remained in the shadows. Alvin and his minions had gotten away.
Ness pulled her hand back, clutching it close to her chest. There was a fine sheen of sweat on her forehead. The edges of her lips were turning blue. She leaned her weight on me as if she couldn’t hold herself upright any longer.
She glanced between me and the body I knew to be on the ground behind us. “I didn’t mean… I acted without thinking.”
Restless, I shook out my wings and lashed my tail. I wanted to give chase, but Ness had been poisoned. I had to stay here.
Ness sobbed. She clamped a hand over her mouth. I hunkered close to the ground so she wouldn’t fall as her knees buckled beneath her. Her breath became raspy. I tapped her thigh with my tail to keep her awake. Ness muttered.
Don’t fall asleep on me,I wanted to shout.Someone had to call Cerri. Where was the potion maker?
Cerri was pack. I’d already called her. She shoved her way through the crowd and dropped beside Ness.
I could have chased Alvin. The pack was safe. Ness was in Cerri’s hands. Yet, my body refused to move. My beast planted itself right by Ness’s side. There was nowhere else in the world that I wanted to be.
I only hoped that the pack wouldn’t see that as a sign of weakness. If they expected me to hunt Alvin down tonight, then they would be disappointed.
Ness
“You dumb bastard,”I muttered, my tongue too thick.
I pulled Connor into my lap again. This wasn’t blood loss. It wasn’t poison. We couldn’t scramble to heal him with potions or modern medicine. His shifter healing wouldn’t kick in and fix what had been broken. There wasn’t anything we could do to bring him back from a swift death.
Somehow, that made it worse. There was no tension, no breath held as we waited for a turn of luck. He’d been ripped from our hands in the blink of an eye, as if he meant nothing to Alvin.
Alvin didn’t even give Connor a chance to heal.
And now I could feel the poison trying to burn away my insides. It infiltrated my body in a way that the ritual arcana couldn’t. The chilly ice wrapped around my heart couldn’t stop poison from getting in.
Already, my breathing had turned shallow. My skin prickled when a wind washed over me. I should have felt the cool brush of it, but I had become numb. Cerri tapped my cheek. She tried to pull my attention up to her, but all I could see was the dead wolf in my lap.
The ice in my chest pulsed. Resolve hardened inside my heart. Alvin would go down kicking and screaming. This poison wouldn’t be able to take me. Even if Cerri hadn’t been here, I would have come back from this.
Maybe it was foolhardy to depend on something we knew so little about, but I was confident that my anger would bring me back to the world of the living. I couldn’t leave until Alvin was dead and in the ground.