Page 292 of Cursed Evermore

My whole body shuddered, then an unexpected warmth pierced through my fear, comforting me. It bloomed inside my chest and tingled through the shackle around my wrist. I instantly recognized what it was.

It was Wolfe's magic. I could feel it pulsing through the shackles, then deep inside me as it reached across whatever distance separated us through the Void.

He was coming for me.

The sky above us began to tremble.

A deep rumble echoed through the forest, growing louder by the second. The rebels looked up in confusion as the very air seemed to vibrate with power.

The trees swayed and creaked, their branches whipping back and forth as if caught in a violent tempest, though there was no wind.

Then I saw him. My beautiful villain.

He’d come for me.

Wolfe descended from the dawn sky, his massive black wings spread wide as they cast shadows across the forest floor, dimming the oncoming sun. Blue flames danced along the edges of his sword, mirroring his unbridled fury.

The rebels scrambled backward, their earlier bravado evaporating in an instant.

"What the fuck—" one of them started to say.

He never finished the sentence.

Wolfe landed with earth-shaking force, his boots hitting the ground so hard that cracks spider-webbed out from where he stood. Without hesitation, he raised his free hand and unleashed a sphere of crackling energy that slammed into the nearest rebel, sending him flying into a tree trunk with a sickening crunch.

The shockwave that followed was devastating. It rippled outward in a perfect circle, lifting the remaining rebels off their feet and hurling them backward through the air like ragdolls. They crashed into trees, rocks, and undergrowth with bone-jarring impact. One of them even exploded as he smashed into a tree and his body parts shattered into the air.

In the sudden silence that followed, Wolfe looked at me and rushed to my side.

He undid the ropes with the flick of his wrist, then he crouched and cupped my face, examining my bruises.

“Who did this to you?”

I touched his face, too, so happy and relieved to see him. I just wanted him to hold me. But I would happily answer his question.

To my left, the rebel with the sharp teeth who’d hit me was struggling to pull himself upright against a fallen log.

“Him,” I whispered, pointing toward him.

Wolfe's eyes went completely black, raw fury returning to his face. He released me, and the temperature around us dropped several degrees. Shadows began to writhe around his body like dragons in the sky as he faced the rebel

"You." Wolfe’s voice cut through the forest in a gravelly rasp as he rose to his full height and moved closer to the rebel. "You made the mistake of putting your hands on her. Now you must die.”

The rebel tried to scramble backward, but there was nowhere to run. “Please, Lord Nightblade, I?—”

Wolfe threw a ball of dark energy at the rebel. The instant it struck him, his skin ripped away from his body, then the rest of him splintered into a million fragments. He didn’t even bleed. Before I could even blink, what remained of him became ashes in the wind.

The other Fae rebels who weren’t dead from the attack Wolfe launched on his entry tried to get up and run away, but they were too slow.

Wolfe disintegrated them, too.

When he turned back to me, half his face had become skeletal, swarming with shadows, no different from a…wraith.

The glimpses of those powers I’d gotten over the past few weeks were enough to make my soul shiver. I’d seen more of them when he’d killed the Ruskiel, and I knew they weren’t of the Fae.

I’d always wanted to ask him about them but held back, hoping he’d tell me.

He was about to return to me when the ground began to shake violently. Trees crashed and splintered somewhere deeper in the forest, the sound growing closer by the second.