Page 69 of Jagged Souls

I don’t want to kill him with one shot to the heart.

The bullet slams into his thigh, so close to his fucking groin. He stumbles to his knees and growls. I can almost smell my wife on his skin. The urge to empty my gun into his face is damn hard to resist, but a bubble goes up around him, and I decide that’s infinitely better.

“I want him alive,” I say to Stormie. After we get Micha back home, I’m going to gift her this piece of shit. Then we’re going to cut him open together. Turn him inside out. It’ll be a lovely date night, the first of our hunt as we kill every single fucker who hurt her.

The other wolf, with snow white fur, drops Leno as it charges at me on all fours. Along its back is a row of bone-colored spikes, rising up like hackles. But it’s his eyes that are drawing my attention. Violent and cruel and so fucking familiar.

This is the wolf who took the lead, the one who tortured my wife as well as raped her. His death is going to be slow, so fucking slow as everything he did to Micha is repaid a thousand times over.

I charge forward, tackling him before he gets to Khalid, my control breaking, my bloodlust making me mad. I bare my teeth, wanting to rip out his throat like a fucking beast, but I bite it back. Because when I feed from my wife, it’ll be with virgin fangs. She’ll be my first and last. The parts I sink inside her will never be tainted with the flesh of another.

As we collide in the air, my shoulder slams into his solar plexus. I press my gun against his belly and fire twice. He grunts as we hit the ground. I land on top of him, then scramble up to beat his face in with the butt of the gun. I don’t want this fight to be long. I want to get to my wife and come back for him.

Then I will kill him slowly. Over four years and thirty-eight days.

But as I lift my arm, the wolf rakes a hand across the left side of my face, cutting my eye clean in half. Blood pours down my cheek. Khalid can’t blast him with magic with me this close, and I’m sure he’s cursing me for having lost my fucking mind, but I’m a slave to the madness, to the rage and fury, to the desire for revenge, and the bloodlust of the Craving.

So despite being blind in one eye, I follow through with my attack of hammering my gun into his face. I bust his lip and crack the corner of his eye. He still manages to flip me under him though. He’s much bigger than me, and his pain receptors don’t seem to be fucking working.

I fire my gun once more, this time in his chest. As much as I want to take him in alive so Micha can torture him, I’m not going to let him kill me.

I’m not letting him take anything more from my wife.

His grip crushes my hand as he wrestles me for the gun.

At the same time, his mouth aims for my throat, his hot breath blowing across my face.

I throw my free arm up to intercept him. Scream when he chomps down on it sideways.

He shakes his head, trying to rip it free, but a blast of magic from Khalid explodes across his back, singeing his fur. He yelps as he lets me go and rolls away from us. He tries to stand, but my first two shots paralyzed him from the waist down.

Dropping my gun to free up my right hand –my left arm shredded and almost dislocated– I pull out a knife. Lunging for him across the floor, I stab the eight-inch blade through one of his legs, pinning him to the ground. He tries to slice me up with his claws, but Khalid hacks off his entire arm with a scythe. His precision with a blade is fucking magical. Anyone else would’ve cut me at the same time.

I pull another knife out to restrain his other leg, but a blurry form slams into me, knocking the air out of my lungs and my knife free from my grip. I go flying.

I crash into a wall, plaster raining down on me as I go straight through it. A pup screams for her father as I land in their home on my back. Lifting my head, I have just enough time to glimpse the charging werewolf before he’s on me.

He isn’t as fast as Antonio, and his fur is pitch-black, not red, but his scent tells me he’s recently been near my wife. I don’t care if he didn’t rape her. He hasn’t helped her, and that is enough to sign his death warrant.

Grabbing the leg of the bedside table I’ve landed beside, I swing the whole thing at his face. I clock him in the jaw mid-air, and his head whips sideways, the lower half of his muzzle hanging broken and free. The table splinters apart. He lands on me, causing agony to explode down my mauled arm and across the wound on my back. I push through the pain, grab one of the table’s long splinters, and stab him in his back, right through his right lung.

Leaving the weapon inside him so he can’t heal, I throw him off me. He wheezes as he struggles to reach me, but his eyes close, and his arm drops to the floor.

I stagger to my feet to rejoin the original fight. Right before I got hit, I clocked another four heartbeats. Khalid is a better fighter than I, but even with his magic, he can’t take on four chimeras alone, even if they are ‘failures.’

“Khalid!” I scream as I stumble towards him.

He’s pulled his double-edged scythe out of his shadows. A cursed weapon, it can kill with one cut, no matter how shallow, no matter where it is on the body. He’s no longer trying to take these four wolves alive.

He spins it around himself, forcing them to keep their distance, buying himself time to work a spell. Normally, a witch needs a free hand to do so, but Khalid’s learned how to speak magic for his job as reaper. He hasn’t mastered it, and the energy he’s building is chaotic and wild. It sizzles in the air, forming around him in little sparks of heated magic, a bomb just waiting to go off.

Snarling and snapping their teeth, the four werewolves instantly charge at my brother as one. It doesn’t matter if he cuts one or two with his scythe. He won’t be able to stop the others from ripping him apart.

But just as they breach the range of his weapon, Leno’s vines shoot out of fucking nowhere.

They grab two of them by the back legs, then slam the werewolves into each other. Khalid pivots, smoothly shifting gears to fight off the other two. His scythe slices one across their chest as he dances out of the way of their mouth. He spins it around himself as he finishes his spell, and one of the wolves drops to the ground, their heart having exploded in their chest. The other one gets a blade straight across their face. Knowing he’ll be fine, I turn my attention to the two trapped in Leno’s vines.

They’re dazed from having been knocked into each other, but the vines aren’t wrapped around them anymore. They’re lying on the floor, loose and limp. My heart plummets into my stomach as I follow their green trails to my brother.