Page 99 of Jagged Souls

“What the fuck?” Dayne jumps back, his hands raised. Electricity crackles between his fingers.

Stormie throws up bubble after bubble as she shrieks in fear. As terrified as she is, at least she’s being smart about it.

Closing my hands into fists, I kill the urge inside of me.

All my life, I have wanted magic, but with my wife gone, this moment just tastes like ash. Colorless and numb.

“Release them, Stormie,” I say, somehow knowing they won’t do anything unless I tell them to. Yesterday, I would have stayed down here all night, too excited to sleep, testing the limitations of the gift I have been given, but today, all I want is my wife.

Turning on my heels, I head for the exit. Khalid’s just entered, and his face is expressionless as he scans the room. “We’ll do this upstairs,” I say, and without a word, he heads back up before me, then sucks the cars into his shadows.

The three of them spread out in the now empty space, and each one starts drawing two circles of runes, one inside the other. Red energy pours out of their forefingers, glowing neon as they create a rune by pushing their power into it. Then the light fades, the magic becoming dormant until it’s activated. It’s going to take a few minutes for them to draw them all, so I stand with my arms crossed, trying my best not to focus on the pull of my girl. If I do, I’ll run to her, and she doesn’t need a headless fucking chicken.

My shoulders tight, I look over at Dayne. I don’t know anything about his past, and though I will continue to trust him just because Micha does, I need to figure out what he’s hiding. Is he a hybrid like me? Does Micha know? Is that why she didn’t bat much of an eye when I told her what I was? All she was concerned about was how she managed to get pregnant when all hybrids are infertile.

I study him as he moves in a crouch, making a circle barely big enough for a person to stand in. He looks normal, isn’t moving any faster than expected. Perhaps I should get into a proper brawl with him when there are no witnesses, see what he can actually do.

Khalid finishes his containment circle first, and he pulls his shadows into it immediately. A small pink bubble rises out of them, holding one of the chimeras. The beast shifted into his human form in an attempt to give himself more room, but Stormie’s magic just shrank around him so that he’s forced to lie on his back along the curvature of the wall, scrunched up, with his legs in the air. There’s no room to stretch out at all. He has been like that for hours, and he’s struggling to breathe what little air remains in his cage.

The bubble pops, and his limbs splay out uncontrollably. As soon as he touches the runes, a web of bright-red energy shoots up in a cylinder around him. The smell of burning flesh permeates the air, and he screams as he jerks his arms and legs in. He scoots into the middle, then tries to stand, but his legs are too weak. He collapses immediately, hitting the edge of his cage and burning himself all over again.

The second wolf Khalid pulls out, inside Stormie’s circle, is lying in his own piss and sobbing, but despite how easy he’ll be to break, it’s the third one I want the most. The one with the limp arm. The fucker who helped kill Leno. The one who raped my wife in his werewolf form.

The two of us stand in front of him, radiating with a need to rip his bald head off his shoulders. He stares up at us, his green eyes full of a bravado I’m going to enjoy destroying.

“How’s your brother?” he taunts as he climbs to his feet. Careful not to touch the runes, he leans towards us with a sneer. “I enjoyed tearing him apart almost as much as I did your wife.”

Dayne yells as he charges from behind us. Khalid throws up a barrier in front of Micha’s friend though, and he slams into it, then falls to the floor. The reaper knows what the wolf’s trying to do. Containment circles are near impossible to break from within, but a single brush of the outer ring will shatter them easily.

“When I ripped her cunt open all the way to her ass –”

Khalid isn’t fast enough to stop me.

Swiping my foot across the runes, I destroy the spell so I can throw a fist at his face. The wolf would have been ready for it had I been a mere witch, but I’m a fucking hybrid.

More, I’mpissed.

So my knuckles slam into him hard enough to dislocate his jaw. He staggers to the side, and I kick down at his knee. It cracks apart, bone pushing out of his skin. As he drops to the ground, I grab his arm and pivot behind him, yanking it up at the shoulder.

He screams, finally able to fucking register that his piss-poor attempt at escape is never going to happen. Slamming my foot between his shoulder blades, I shove him forward hard as I rip his humerus completely out of its socket. His skin tears at the joint, but his muscles and tendons still keep it attached.

I pivot to the side, tossing him over onto his back. I slam my heel into his balls, then drop on top of him, straddling his waist. Able to imagine all too well what he did to Micha, I hammer my fists into his jaw. I’m careful not to hit his nose though. I don’t want to send any shards into his brain, don’t want to kill him and let him off that easily or take that right from my wife.

His jaw fractures, then shatters, cutting through his skin like pieces of glass. Blood covers my face, arms, and chest. He wheezes harder, unable to breathe through the mess that is now his face.

My body shakes as I imagine all the pain this fucker caused my wife.

I want to kill him.

I want to shove a dildo up his ass so deeply that the only way his shit can come out is through his mouth. I want him to choke on it. I want him to suffer. I want him gone from this fucking world because he doesn’t deserve to breathe on the same world as my wife.

But she might want to kill him herself.

She might need to in order to heal after all they’ve done to her.

Emitting a broken, hoarse cry from the void in my chest, I punch him one last time. Then I shove to my feet and face the other captives. Blood drips from me – his and mine, my knuckles having split apart in my rage, my fingers broken.

Breathing heavily, I demand, “Tell me about his plan to resurrect Siome.”