Page 59 of Shattered Stars

“I’m not worried.”

“Dueling isn’t the same as real fighting. Killing someone, taking a life, alters your soul. Watching someone die, withering away in front of your eyes, changes you forever.” He pauses. “Seeing your friends die …”

“But it happens rarely. Skirmishes with the western forces are few and far between.”

The enforcer snorts, picking up his tin again and poking the remaining beans with his fork. “That’s what the authorities will have you believe. There’s constant fighting, constant battles, constant bloodshed.”

I ball the wrapper in my hand and look at the enforcer, trying to determine if he’s bullshitting me, trying to scare me, the new recruit. “If that were the case, why hide it?”

“The authorities like to keep the illusion that they have matters under control. But do you think they’d go to all the trouble of training us, of sending us to serve, if the threat was so minimal?”

“I thought we were more of a deterrent than anything else.”

He shakes his head. “No, the force is there protecting our people, our lands.”

“Good,” I say. I want to be useful. I want to serve, to make a difference.

The enforcer shakes his head as if I’m stupid.

“How long ago did you serve?” I ask him.

The enforcer scrapes his fork around his tin, removing the last traces of beans. Then he tosses the tin to the ground and drags his hand over his face. “It was a long time ago. More than ten years.” He stares into the fire. “Turns out I was very good at killing people. At tracking them down and killing them.” He glances down at his hands as if he can see all the lives he’s taken with them. “I was in the forces less than six months before they recruited me to become an enforcer.”

“You wanted to be one?”

“It seemed as good an option as any. Preferable to doing whatever my goddamn family would have wanted.”

I remember Tristan telling me about it when we were kids, whispering with a kind of reverence about how his cousin had gone against his family’s wishes.

“You still think it was the right decision?” Being an enforcer may be thrilling, adventurous, but I imagine it’s also dangerous and lonely. An enforcer is not a great marriage prospect. Always away, always in danger. He has a fated mate now, he has the pig girl. Does he wish he’d taken some political position after all? Made her his society wife so they could live together in some grand mansion in the city?

“I think fate chose this path for me. I think it was inevitable,” he says again in that irritatingly cryptic manner.

I go to ask him another question, but a distant noise catches both our attention. It’s faint. A rumbling? No, it’s boots hitting hard earth.

“Someone’s coming,” I say, the beast inside me suddenly alert, listening.

The man in black jumps to his feet and kicks dirt over the fire. I do the same. The flames smothered, plunging us into darkness.

“You think they’re coming for us?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” he says, cocking his head.

“They’re coming this way,” I say, the beast’s hearing far better than mine.

In the next moment, we see them breaking through the trees. Two … three … five … eight … so many I lose count. Magic thunders through the air towards us.

“Run,” the man in black tells me, swinging around to face the men sprinting towards us.

“No,” I say, as a bolt of magic explodes on the ground by my feet.

I’m not running. This is what I came for. This is why I’m here.

I pick up my feet and charge through the trees, pounding magic in the direction of the fuckers.

“Moreau!” the man in black calls after me.

But it’s too late. There are no longer any boundaries, no rules, no limitations. I roar with anger as magic singes my shoulder and my hip, and then the beast is taking over. My body morphs as I run, bones snapping, muscles stretching, until it’s paws that hit the ground not feet, and together we charge at the men, ripping them to shreds with our teeth and our claws.