Page 68 of Jagged Souls

But worse, she is cursed. I don’t know how capable of fighting she actually is. The amount of magic she’s used recently has been vast. She could die at any moment, hiding the fact that beneath her flawless skin, she’s rotting away, the curse eating her alive.

So I want Rudy with her, as much as I’m terrified I might lose him and Micha at the same time. The two people I love the most. I don’t know if I could survive their deaths (Rudy can die if his magic is first drained, meaning he can’t bank on his nightmares to keep him alive), but I sure as hel know I won’t survive failing to rescue my wife.

What they’ve done to her…

What they’lldoto her if we don’t get her out today.

Antonio knows now that we’re bonded, so he’ll move her constantly.

He knows we have a soul doll of her and that we can see and hear through her senses, so he’ll kill her over and over again to ruin all the pieces of alexandrite we have left.

“Go!” I shout even as a wolf’s claws slice open my chest. If I have to die so she lives, then it is a trade I’m willing to make. “Please!”

I will find her in the next life. I don’t care that we’re not fully bonded, that I won’t have anything to pull me towards her. Iwillfind the djinni who gave us the possibility to bond with our chosen mates, and I will kick the shit out of them until they return me to my wife.

Pain fills Rudy’s eyes. As much as he’s a son to me, I am a father to him. But he makes that split second decision I need him to. He shifts into his shadows and races off down the hall, after Mother, towards my wife.

I tumble to the side, my feet twisting out from under me as pain explodes across my back and chest. I hit the ground and fall into a roll. Pulling on my hybrid speed, I regain my feet, but fighting multiple opponents isn’t like in the movies. They don’t come at me one at a time. They don’t wait for me to get back into a defensible position.

I’m tackled while I’m still in the middle of straightening. Teeth latch around my shoulder. I punch the wolf in the jaw. He yelps as his teeth go flying, but though he releases me, the second one is already biting down on my left leg and dragging me across the floor. I scream as she shakes her head, snapping my bone in half. Fighting through the pain, I lean up and slash my knife across her face multiple times. I hit her eye, her nose, her cheek – not precisely aimed cuts, just mad slices anywhere I can reach.

She releases me, but the wolf with the missing teeth is at my back. I can hear him thundering across the floor, and I know I’m not going to be able to turn in time.

Still, I try. I might be willing to die for Micha, but I’m going to fight until my last breath to see her one more time.

I roll over and stand on one leg. I raise my knife, but the wolf never reaches me. Stormie has him wrapped in a pink bubble of magic, and now she’s compressing it, tightening it, squeezing it so small the wolf is pretzeled inside. Then his organs and bones pop out of his flesh, all nicely contained within a ball of pretty, glittery pink.

I grab two healing potions from my jacket and quickly guzzle them as I spin around to face the wolf I cut up with a knife. The bone in my leg snaps back together, and the slice on my chest heals, but the one on my back isn’t as deep, isn’t as serious, so it still bleeds. I’ll need another potion to heal it, but I don’t have the time right now.

Slasher has regained her feet. With one eye missing and most of her face covered in blood, she lunges for me. I duck, going low and getting in close and personal.

Werewolves stand at seven to eight feet on average, with some fuckers as tall as nine, so forcing them to bend down messes with their balance. Getting into their space removes their reach advantage. They focus on using their mouth and claws; they don’t put as much thought into their footwork.

So as I dance around Slasher, I kick out and slice at her legs. She topples to the ground, her tendons now severed. I quickly step up to kill her, embedding my knife into the back of her neck. With her paralyzed, I lift her head to slice open her throat, but a brother’s scream stops me cold.

My focus snaps to the right, and between the fighting crowd, I clock Leno’s being pulled apart by two wolves. One has his arm between its teeth, the other has his leg in an iron grip. Leno’s vines are wrapped around his body now, trying to keep him in one piece as they tug him hard in opposite directions, but there is blood pouring through the vines at his joints.

Leaving the female, I run towards him, as does Khalid, having just killed the wolf he was fighting with his magic. Enoch, Ezriel, Stefaan, and Dayne are all still engaged with their own opponents. One of the vampires is dead, two of them are dying, having been bitten and infected. Aleric ran down a random hallway soon after Mother left, and I don’t know if he’s gone to find his own men that are being held here, forced to breed, or if he’s caught Antonio’s scent.

Stormie runs beside us without hesitation even though she isn’t a fighter. She’s never been trained in combat. She wrestled with the twins when she was a kid and won more times than not, but as soon as she hit puberty, she had to learn to become a lady. All the fire she was born with was tightly wrapped up behind fancy clothes and thick layers of make-up. But clearly, it was never doused, never snuffed out completely.

As we close the distance to our brother, Khalid builds up a ball of dark-red magic in his right hand, muttering under his breath to shape it. I pull out a gun from a holster on my side. In close, crowded quarters, where allies take up as much space as the enemy, it is a terrible weapon to use. But I can’t throw a knife from this distance, so if I get a clear shot, I’m taking it.

Leno screams again.

More blood pours beneath him.

His vines are starting to tear.

Khalid launches his ball of magic at the wolf on his leg. It arcs through the air, a missile of burning energy.

Someone else screams from behind me. But it’s a voice I don’t recognize, a woman’s. One of Aleric’s vampires, so I don’t turn, don’t get torn between who to help. I’m getting Leno home to his dog.

Though fuck, Louise better not let Krypto die. If she does, it won’t matter what these wolves are doing to him now. Losing his dog will kill him.

As Khalid’s magic nears its target, the werewolf releases Leno. It darts out of the way, and I raise my gun, my finger on the trigger. I aim straight for his heart. But right before I fire, I yank the gun down. One of the man’s arms is hanging loose, flopping around like it’s missing a bone. I didn’t catch the face of the wolf in the video Antonio sent me, but he had a dead arm just like that.

This is one of the fuckers who raped my wife.