Page 97

“We’ve got you,” Olivia yelled. “Help me!”

Jasper and Olivia leaped toward me, grasping at me, trying to help me move from the spot I’d frozen in. But their hands fell away as their palms bubbled and burned the second they grazed my skin.

Olivia moaned as pain surged through her. “How can you stand that?”

Jasper took a step back, stretched his arms wide, and rushed at me, but he couldn’t close his arms around me. It was as though I had an invisible energy shield aroundme, sending the heat through me, and his pain-filled grunts shredded all the reason I had.

“What’s happening to me? Get away from me,” I shrieked.

“I don’t know, lass. Hang on,” he groaned. “I’ll get ye.” Finally, he doubled over and fell to the ground, pointed away from me.

The heat wasn’t all in my head. I’d physically burned those who had tried to help me, and the blisters still spread over their skin.

In the lower portion of the amphitheater, a bright light lit in the middle of the branches. Then the magnolia tree turned brighter, and the petals of the blooms fell away, landing in piles on the ground beneath it. With a loudwhoosh, it burst into flames.No, no, no…

I clenched, unable to do anything but feel the invisible flames pouring through me.

“Shit. Shit. Shit.” They were the only words I could manage to hiss through my teeth, and my thoughts tumbled end over end, impacting and shattering against other, half-formed images. Evil magic bound me so tightly that I couldn’t move. No, I had to watch my friends suffer without being able to help.

Marcus, Torbin, and Logan lapped the gathering area, searching for the attack and not finding the one responsible. None of them glanced my way. Finally, they stopped in front of one glowing trunk and spun to view the others.

Torbin tugged a small leathery scrap from his pocket and held it up to Logan. “Look!”

“Holy fuck! It’s the trees,” Logan yelled. “The trees are positioned like the stars in the constellation. Runes are hidden in the designs scratched into the trunks!”

Torbin cursed and shifted to his bear self, making several laps around the gathering place.

But I already knew the mage’s plan, as I felt myself slipping from the protected place. I couldn’t reach Logan.

Marcus screamed his feline scream as his clothes shredded around him.

A black cloud burst out of the tree trunks, circling me tighter and tighter until it had swallowed me, strangling me until I couldn’t breathe.

My eyes slid closed, and the chaos faded as my fated mate blipped out of my mind.

What could have been…

Goodbye, Logan.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

logan

Holy fuck!

“Emma! Where are you?” I bellowed.

I searched the faces around me for Emma, seeking her but not finding her, searching for her, needing her more than anything else in my life.

She wasn’t where she should have been, down near the enchanted magnolia, and my blood ran icy cold through my veins, dragging the pain of loss with it. A black cloud lingered where she’d been a moment before, unmoved by the burst of shifter magic through the Conclave.

Fuck Acheron and his dark minions. I’d tear him limb from limb and send him to hell.

“Out of my way!” I bellowed, hurrying toward the enchanted tree as I pushed through the crush of alarmed shifters.

Maybe I should care more: tell them what to do,direct them, help them. Yet none of them mattered to me as long as I didn’t know where Emma was so long as she wasn’t in view.

Some of them seemed panicked, but most of them hunted through the amphitheater. The magnolia burned, surrounded by shifters who stared on in horrified silence.