Page 294 of Alpha Mates

Katerina … doesn’t even lift a finger.

All my life, I thought that a witch’s magic required spells to be activated. A witch needed to speak the words; that’s why, as a wolf, we went for a witch’s throat first. The strongest might be able to do one or two incantations in their mind, but there needed to be an active thought and intention behind a spell.

All my life, I thought wrong. I’d beentaughtwrong.

Katerina did not use spells. She only wished to hurt, to seek revenge, and her magic did her bidding like a living, visceral being that was enslaved by her.

Lips agape, entirely useless and completely horrified, I watch from my space, not bothering to move even when I hear another escape. Katerina’s magic catches them all before I have to.

It continues for longer than I understand.

I try counting it at first, the minutes, but then I lose track of time, and what feels like hours might just be one. It’s hard to concentrate on something like time when there’s only suffering and misery.

When it does end, when there’s no one left to kill, only two remain—Katerina and another that kneels at her feet. Their frantic sobs are the onlysounds that fill the forest now, mixing in with the popping and crackling of the fires that slowly burn themselves out with nothing left to scorch.

“Please! Katerina, please!” They beg between harsh sobs. “P-please don’t!”

I take a chance at moving forward.

I go slowly, hesitant that her magic might rise and strike me down, but it remains dormant, still until next called upon.

The damage only becomes clear when I break from the treeline, and it’s ten times worse than what I’d glimpsed through that mere sliver. The coven’s lands, which stretched further than I’d guessed, are flattened. Any former structures are destroyed, and all the trees within have been reduced to rubble.

There is nothing—no one for miles. Nothing but Katerina and the witch at her feet.

I stop when my steps bring my shoes to the edge of a burnt hand.

“It’s over,” the shrill voice sobs. “They’re dead! You’ve killed us all! Let it end, Katerina. Please.”

From here, I can see that the woman on her knees is no woman at all. She’s no older than Katerina, no older than me, and though her hair isn’t weighed with beads or anything as colourful as the girl looming above her, it’s the same colour.

Katerina stands tall, her head hung low, her face hidden from me. I don’t seek it out.

“I’m sorry,” the girl sobs as she brings her head to Kat’s feet. “I’m sorry! For it all! For everything!”

“Are you, Selene?” Katerina asks, sounding genuinely curious. She also sounds exhausted. “Are you truly sorry, or are you only saying that because you know I’m about to kill you?”

The girl’s sobs grow higher, shrill with her distress. Green glows behind her brown eyes, but the power sputters out of her like a dying bulb as Katerina tucks a hand beneath her chin.

A tear-stained face stares up at her with nothing but fear and loathing etched within from beginnings that are clearly deep-rooted.

“You—” she begins in a sneer, but she only manages the single word before the black in her eyes bleeds, piercing past her brown irises, filling the entire cornea until they’re coated in it. It spills into the veins beneath her skin, and then across the rest of her.

Blood trickles from her lips, and as Katerina’s hand slips away, she falls on her side. Her unseeing black eyes stare ahead while the rest of her skin darkens from the poisoned veins within.

Katerina inhales deeply, filling her lungs before she lets it out. Then she laughs, the sound piercing and deranged like the rest of her laughs. Her shoulders shake, her entire body rattling as if it can’t hope to contain it, then they contort into sobs.

They still shake her, she still struggles to stand, but they’re no longer humoured, only filled with misery.

“Katerina,” I call, and she immediately turns, her face laced with evidence of her misery.

I lift a hand, and Katerina hesitates for only a moment before she takes the first step towards me. The next is harder—she drags her foot across the charred bodies before lifting it—and the third is much the same. But I wait.

Arm lifted, hand outstretched, I wait.

Katerina stumbles towards me, her sobs coming faster now. She runs, not caring for the charred bones she crushes beneath her feet or the smell of their flesh. She comes to me, as if I’ve known her all her life, as if we’ve been friends for ages rather than relative strangers who just happened to know a kindred pain.

When she reaches me, her hand envelopes mine with a heat beneath his fingertips that burns, but I ignore the pain. I clench my fingers around hers and turn, taking us away from this horror she’d created.