Page 19

19

LEO

I was prepared to die. That was such a strange sentiment to have since I’d spent my life fighting for survival, but it was the truth. The gem had led me on quite the long journey, especially on human foot, and in my hours of walking I’d had even more time to digest the reality of what was going to happen.

Sure, I wished I’d had more time with Ven, and I wished I didn’t have to go through the pain I was about to go through, but it would be worth it.

At least, that’s what I told myself.

The gem’s light finally dimmed, and I looked ahead. The foliage shifted apart, revealing a deep-set shadow even my enhanced vision couldn’t see through. The entire thing was foreboding and dripped of evil.

As far as I knew, there were no residences or cities anywhere near here. It was rare to find such places of wilderness within America, and I was sure Katarina’s heavy enchantment was to thank for it. As much as I was all for anything that helped keep the wilderness as the wilderness, the way the witch went about things felt so unnatural.

Taking a deep breath, I walked forward and stepped into the dark. The time it took to travel through that space was barely a breath of a second, and yeah, that made my skin crawl. That strange lack of light was almost oily in nature. Viscous, slippery, clinging to my skin with an almost desperate persistence.

Once I stepped through the other side, I half-expected to come out encased in the stuff, but there wasn’t even a speck of it on me. Rather unsettling.

I quickly forgot about that phenomenon when I looked up and saw what could only be Katarina’s home. We were still in the forest, but it was different. Gnarled trees curled in unnatural ways. Leaves ranged from pitch black to deep purple to oil green and shifted color with the breeze. The foliage was overgrown, and leaves were just as likely to have teeth at their tips as they were to have thorns. Flowers bloomed crimson, and I swore they dripped actual blood from their silken petals.

At the center of it all was quite possibly the biggest living organism I had ever seen. It was a tree to rival all other trees, standing so high and wide that its shadow blocked out all light around it. Built into the center of that tree’s trunk was a witch’s cabin but dialed up to eleven. Everything about it screamed luxury and opulence, from the polished wood walls to the mass of gemstones encrusted in meticulously rendered murals across different parts of it. Even the roof tiles seemed to be made from precious metals with crystals embedded within them. It was easy to see where her sons had gotten their lavish taste, but the warlocks had all seemed to go for new age, whereas Katarina’s home spoke of old money. Ancient money. Money that was just as likely to be carved of bone as it was to be squeezed out of blood.

It made sense. She’d had centuries to accumulate wealth, and she used to be a lot less tame than she had been when she crashed my birthday party.

It was weird to think that her casually destroying half of Ven’s house with a flick of her hand was tame, but it absolutely was. While she hadn’t been a common fixture in stories growing up, I had heard she’d eradicated entire villages by turning their bodies inside out. She’d raised cathedrals high into the sky only to slam them back into the ground. Katarina had done things that made an impression. The woman who had arrived at Ven’s had seemed much more reasonable, which was why I trusted her to keep her promise after I was gone.

Hopefully, that trust wasn’t misplaced.

The sound of a door opening caught my attention, and I glanced at the entrance. Katarina stepped out. She wasn’t dressed in the black leathers akin to armor. She was wearing a beautiful, flowing, red dress, the kind that looked to have been handcrafted in another age. Given what I knew about her, it probably had been.

“You’re early.”

That really was the one way I could have surprised her. She’d expected me to either surrender myself or to fight, but arriving like I had a schedule probably wasn’t on her list of probabilities. Who, when only given a week left to live, would waste an entire day of it?

Me, apparently. But it was worth it to make sure Ven and everyone else I loved was safe.

“I didn’t want to be late.”

“Your punctuality is appreciated.” She tilted her head a bit, and those unnaturally bright eyes of her narrowed. “You didn’t want your lover to try to convince you not to come, did you?”

I didn’t know if women were naturally more perceptive, or if Katarina had done this to so many people that she knew from experience. Either way, I shrugged. She didn’t need to know everything about me. I was sacrificing my life to save people she was intent on harming. That would have to be enough.

“Come inside, dear. I’d rather not do this out on the lawn.”

“Or you could not do this at all.”

It was a long shot, but I had to try.

Katarina shot me a rueful smirk. “Come now. You’ve been so brave. Don’t ruin it by trying to weasel out at the end.”

“All the more reason for a little humor.”

“Fair enough. They say life is too short not to laugh. But for me, at least, so little brings me actual joy.”

What a statement. It almost made me feel bad for the witch, but it was hard to feel anything for her when she was about to kill me in a way more painful than I could ever imagine.

I walked up to the porch, and she stepped aside so I could enter. The room was about five times bigger on the inside than it looked on the outside. Real police box vibes. But instead of being full of all sorts of technology and bits and bobs, it was quite organic. Everything was made out of trees, stone, and crystal, with wide open spaces and multiple gaps in the architecture so one could see out into the massive tree. Ven would love this place. Well, she’d love it if the plants weren’t so carnivorous.

“Right this way,” she said as if she were a receptionist showing me around an office, gesturing toward an actual waterfall tumbling down from floors high above my head. As beautiful as it was, the huge space had to be lonely. Especially for one woman. But then I remembered she used to have seven sons who’d lived here with her.

We stepped onto a crystal dais in front of the waterfall. The cascade didn’t slam into the floor and make a mess though. No, even with magic, that sounded awfully messy. Instead, there was a sizeable pond surrounding it, the center turbulent but the edges calm enough for me to see fish and other aquatic creatures moving through it.

A flurry of movement caught my eye. Snapping my head in that direction, I saw a bear idly ambling in from another entrance. His eyes had that glassy look that spoke of an enthralled shifter, and his thick hide was covered in battle scars. I couldn’t imagine what would leave such deep and obvious marks on a shifter given our healing ability, but it reminded me that the woman beside me was not as affable as she seemed. Sure, she was polite, but much like her sons, she wasn’t above enslaving shifters.

Abruptly, railings shot up from the floor around the crystal dais, then it smoothly moved up like the magical equivalent of an elevator. Why was Katarina showing off for me? She could have killed me in her yard. There was no reason to take me on a grand tour.

“I loved my sons, you know,” she mused as we went ever higher. “I know they had their flaws, but when I think about them, I still see those chubby cheeks from when they barely came up to my hip. I remember the gaps in their teeth, I remember holding them when they had nightmares at night. I suppose they were also old, at least to your perspective, but they were my little babies.”

Perhaps she was just musing to me, but I couldn’t help but feel a wave of irritation course through my system. Was this woman really trying to play the pity card to me when she was about to execute me?

“They were also trying to kill you.”

“Not actively. It was a lofty goal of theirs, and one they would never have reached. While they would never admit it to themselves, they were all mama’s boys. My little angels.”

I scoffed openly at that. I couldn’t help it. But honestly, why even hide my derision? I was going to die anyway. What was she going to do, make it extra super painful? She’d already made it clear she was going to do that.

“I know it’s hard for you to understand because of what they did to your people. But all of it, and I mean all of it, will end now. The violence will stop. My bloodline is wiped out, and your pack will be scattered to the winds. I will spend the rest of my years alone, as I can’t go through all of that again, and even if your love finds another, there will always be an empty space for you. Everyone has earned their fate, and our fate is tragedy fueled by revenge and loss.”

The sudden drop in her walls and admission of the bleak future we were facing surprised me. Once more, it seemed almost like she had no desire to kill me. Rather, she was doing it out of obligation.

But I also knew that was total horse shit. If she really wanted the violence to stop, all she had to do was let me go. That was it. But it was clear to me that while most of her battle-lust and evil desires had faded in her elder years, Katarina was still a cruel, prideful woman at heart. She knew her sons were murderers, and yet she wanted to punish their victims for standing up to them. She wanted to act like a victim herself.

It was insulting, really.

“What do you think of the house?” she asked, all smiles as I saw floor after floor. Some of them had closed rooms, which I guessed were where her children had spent their long childhoods, but most were open concept and a strange mix of old-fashioned and over-the-top luxury. The kitchen looked like it was straight out of the Middle Ages, complete with uneven stone brick built into the tree. It seemed oddly impossible to have a full firepit for roasting in a tree, but I supposed that was slightly more understandable than actual witches and people shifting into animals.

I didn’t answer, though. I was done with this pretending to play nice. It was another form of torture, and I wasn’t going to participate in my own torment any more than I had to. I had to say, my execution was going far differently than I’d imagined it. I had planned to go into it with my head held high, no begging, hardly any tears if I could help it, but I hadn’t anticipated that I would have to deal with idle chatter or discussions on interior decorating.

“What’s the matter?” Katarina said as if she was surprised by my silence. “Cat got your tongue?”

I cocked an eyebrow.

She sighed. “Right. I suppose it was foolish of me to expect good conversation. Years on my own have somewhat ebbed my ability to read the room. Perhaps I simply never had good social skills to begin with.”

“You managed to seduce all of your son’s fathers,” I said, surprising myself. Antagonizing the witch who was going to torture me didn’t exactly seem like a good idea.

Katarina merely smiled. “I really did, didn’t I? But you’d be amazed what a pretty face and untold power will do to cover for poor social skills.”

She had a point there.

The conversation stilled as the crystal dais finally stopped and the railings dropped back into the floor. For a brief moment, I allowed myself to be impressed with how smoothly the circle slid into the wood, leaving not even a crack to see down below, but then the witch ushered me forward.

“Stand here,” she said, pointing to a spot on the floor.

Although it grated at my nerves, I did as she said. I was not an alpha she could order around, but I was an alpha who was choosing to do what he had to for his people.

Katarina walked away from me without even a glance behind her, settling in a throne more than a dozen paces in front of me. Behind her, I saw the only window I’d spotted in the place—a giant, stained-glass mural of an angel descending from the clouds, laying a serpent on a baby’s crib that was surrounded by roses.

“Do you like it?” the witch asked, following my gaze. “It’s my birth.”

“Is it a literal thing? Or a metaphorical one?”

“Look who’s suddenly in the mood to talk.”

I leveled her with a flat expression. “If I’m curious, I’ll ask a question. If you need genuine information from me, I’ll answer. But I’m not interested in being your dancing monkey. So, no, I won’t reply to anything frivolous. I know some people would stall for time, but I’m not interested in that, either.”

“I would argue that achieving the perfect interior design is far from frivolous, but I understand your point, and I have to respect it. And to answer your question, it is quite literal. I was born a human, to regular human parents, then this great and terrible creature descended from the sky and put a seven-headed snake in my crib. That’s how I was born, although some would say that’s how I was cursed. I don’t much care about the semantics.”

That was news to me. I’d never heard anything about an angel-like figure or any reptiles in the legends about her. All I knew was that Katarina had begun terrorizing her town at the ripe old age of ten and had escalated from there. Some even whispered she was the reason witch hunts became so popular. Now, I had a feeling that was more propaganda than actual fact.

“You’re right. There’s no need for me to draw this out. Normally, I would delight in such things, but you delivered yourself to me, and you delivered yourself to me a day early. You deserve for me to make this quick.” She paused, then a slow smile spread across her features. The grin was suddenly filled with teeth that weren’t human at all. They were far too large and extended down to needle-like points. She was letting me see a true part of her. The part that the terrible magic in her had corrupted entirely. “Grab him.”

I had no idea who she was talking to until two stone golems emerged from mossy, rocky murals on opposite walls.

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m still going to do everything to you that you did to my sons. I’m going to hurt you until you’re right on the edge of Death’s door, then let you heal and do it all over again.”

The golems shoved forward, hulking in their steps, and their too-large, three-fingered hands gripped my forearms before hauling me off my feet.

“And I will repeat that over, and over, and over, until whatever magic that fuels you shifters runs out, and your wounds bleed freely. Then, and only then, will you have peace, and our feud will be over.”

Ow. My shoulders would definitely feel that the next morning—if I lived to see the next morning. I could only pray the torture wouldn’t last that long.

“I won’t interrupt things with theatrics. I won’t give you false hopes only to take them away. I won’t let you rot for weeks, thinking I forgot about you, just to bring you out and start it up all over again. I will be as direct as I can as I eviscerate you.”

“Am I supposed to be grateful for that?” I spat.

Again, I knew it wasn’t the smartest thing to create conflict with a somewhat amicable executioner, but her fake, magnanimous tone rubbed me the wrong way. She was acting like some poor, put-upon person who’d been ordered to do some terrible action and had no choice but to fulfill her duty. She was framing herself as the victim when really she was the aggressor.

“You should be,” she mused, before resting her chin in her hand and making the slightest gesture with a single finger.

It felt like I had been set on fire, and I had to bite my tongue not to scream out in pain and surprise. It caused such strange dissonance in my brain, because when I looked down, there wasn’t a single flame on me. I didn’t know if it was in my mind or whether her magic was in my nerves, but it didn’t matter. I was literally burning alive, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

It was pure, undiluted agony. I didn’t remember ever setting any of her sons on fire. Maybe this was a warm up for her. And if it was just a warm up, that did not bode well for what was to come.

My inner wolf thrashed, panicking hard as it desperately tried to find a way to survive. I clamped down on it with all I had. There was no running away this time. This was our sacrifice to our pack.

He bristled at that, but stilled. If there was anything my wolf and I knew, it was that our pack was our ultimate responsibility. They came first in every way, as did our mate.

Ven.

Picturing our love gave us something to center on, and it was exactly what we did. It wasn’t all that different from how I’d retreated from the torture at the medical facility, except already this seemed so much more profound. I had no idea how I would endure everything the witch had in store for me, but I would do it.

“There it is. That’s the pain I wanted to see on your proud features. This is how my sons looked when you killed them all, isn’t it?”

I didn’t know what possessed me to respond, and it was definitely stupid, but I pulled my lips back from my teeth and snarled, “Usually they either had a dumb look of surprise or were crying as they begged for their lives.”

Even when I was trying to be noble, the more brutish side of me could still slip out. Oh, well. What was she going to do? Kill me harder?

“And here I was being so gracious.”

She raised her free hand, and it felt like every single bone in my body was being ripped through my skin. I screamed. But once more, when I looked down, nothing was moving under my skin, and my bones were all safely where bones were supposed to be. It seemed the son who specialized in pain had gotten his powers directly from the source.

“I don’t have to be nice, you know. I don’t expect you to be the politest guest, but do not mock me about my loss.”

Her loss? I wanted to spit at her, but I couldn’t. My jaw was locked in place, and it felt like my teeth were bleeding. Yes, her seven evil sons had died, but what about Ven’s mother? What about my pack? What about all the shifters who had been kidnapped and sold off or used as their personal harem? What about the ones who’d been turned into mindless security guards? What about the families her sons had torn apart, and what about all those who died? Their lives ended alone, possibly mind-controlled, separated from everything they knew and loved.

She knew nothing of loss. As far as I was concerned, she was a giant baby trying to masquerade as the boss, when really she was throwing her toys out of the cot because she was mad that her family finally got their just desserts.

“I see that contempt in your eyes. I’ve heard stories about you, Leo. I didn’t believe them because you are so very young, but in truth, it would take someone very special to take down all my sons.”

She squeezed her hand into a fist, and several of my bones cracked. This time it wasn’t just in my mind because I could feel the bones healing. The golems never let go of my arms, leaving me hanging in my torment.

A sharp scream tore out of me, and Katarina sat back in her throne, a pleased smile on her face. She lifted that clenched hand once more, and I braced myself for whatever awful sensation was going to come next, but it never did. Suddenly, a glass bottle went sailing through the air and shattered on the throne right above the woman’s head.

“What the fuck?” she blurted as the liquid poured over her.

What the fuck, indeed.

As soon as the contents of the jar hit the witch’s skin, it began to sizzle and slough away, like acid eating her flesh. I watched her eye collapse in on itself and part of her cheek disappear.

Katarina jumped to her feet and waved her hand. Her skin returned to normal, like it had never happened at all. I got the impression that wasn’t usually the case when a witch was hit with whatever had been in that jar.

“What’s this?” she spat, her demeanor changing entirely. “I knew there was no way you were noble enough to come willingly!”

I had no idea what she meant until I craned my neck back. I gasped in horror as dozens of my pack members poured in from the open areas on the branches of the tree. Wolf shifters. Coyote shifters. Eagle shifters swooping in. Even a couple of bear shifters, and the giant of a man who waited until he was on solid ground before shifting into the behemoth of a moose he was.

“No!” I cried. “You can’t do this! She’s too powerful!”

Most people would be relieved to see their family rushing in to save them, but all I could feel was abject terror. I had been ready to die. I had sacrificed myself so they would live. But if they were here, there was a very good chance that we would all die, and everything would have been for naught.

Katarina raised her hands, and suddenly a massive tornado formed in the middle of the room before rapidly moving to catch the sudden incursion of shifters.

“Get out of here! Are you insane?”

“Yes,” Katarina said. “Listen to your alpha. There’s no need for all of you to die, but I will bleed every single one of you out and dance on your corpses if you dare try to stop my revenge for my sons!”

“Your sons deserved what they got,” a familiar voice said, and for a moment I couldn’t believe it was actually her. Ven stood on a balcony a floor above us, determination etched on her face. “I will give you one chance to let our alpha go, and you are welcome to live out the rest of your long life however you want. But if you insist on enacting this insane revenge plot on your sons’ victims, then we will be forced to end your line entirely. The world will likely be better for it.”

It wasn’t often that I heard such steel and fire in Ven’s voice, but she spoke with total authority. The way she was standing, elevated above us, the high wind and the canopies buffeting her clothing and hair, almost made her seem like a beautiful Valkyrie. A war goddess. As much as I didn’t want her here, I was in total awe.

“You think your ragtag group of zoo animals can defeat me?” Katarina spat.

“No,” Ven answered, her voice icily calm. “I know we can.”

With that, my love raised her arms high above her head, her palms flat, and the throne behind Katarina came alive, parts of it extending to grab at the witch like it was trying to tear her limb from limb.

Not missing a beat, Ven vaulted over the balcony railing. I shouted in shock once more, wondering what the hell she could be thinking, when a branch broke through the floor, rapidly rising up and extending giant leaves that caught my love and gently deposited her on her feet.

Since when could she do that ?

“Leo!” She ran to me. The golems moved to attack, but she flicked her hand, and the moss between their rocks rapidly expanded until they fell to the floor as a random collection of stone. I dropped down to the floor, too, and that was honestly the only thing that stopped my chin from dropping down to my chest. I had seen the incredibly impressive and powerful things Ven could do when we were fighting Frederick, but this was on an entirely different level. Did she come into her own because she now knew what she was? Was it because she’d found out Frederick had been responsible for the death of her mother? Or was it...

Was it because of me?

“Ven, what are you doing here?” I gasped as she caught me in her arms, clinging to me tightly. “I was doing this for you!”

“We don’t need you to sacrifice yourself. Look around you! You may have lost faith, but I know we are strong enough to take her on. So, get on your feet and fight for your family! We can’t do this without you.”

She spoke with such authority. Normally, my alpha side would bristle against something like that, but I was completely touched. Honored. More shifters were pouring in—far more than had been in our ragtag, merry band. All week, everyone had been reaching out to allies, but I thought I had left early enough that they had no chance of assembling. Clearly, I was wrong, because there were nearly a hundred shifters in the room, and they were all dialed in to fight the witch and whatever she conjured up.

“Look, Leo. We’re all united because of you. So, lead us to victory, do you hear me? Because I’m not living the rest of my life without you.”

Well, it looked like a change of plans was in order.