Page 33

33

Dakota

I couldn’t breathe properly, my very lungs burned by the massive fireball Jiro had thrown at me, and I couldn’t open my eyes. They were almost certainly as ruined by the fire as my lungs, and for a moment, when someone bent down over me, I panicked, thinking it was Jiro, come to finish me off.

Not that he needed to.

I was dying.

I didn’t need to have any particular medical knowledge to know that if I couldn’t breathe, I wasn’t going to live.

It wasn’t Jiro’s voice that drifted into my ears, though, but Jax’s, like a soothing balm over my literally fried nerves. “You’ll be all right.”

I wondered if he believed it, or if he was just trying to give me comfort. If we had a pack bond, like Prudence and I had discussed, I would have likely known.

But that sparked something in my mind. Jax had been hit by the exact same fireball as I had, and he was fine. Werewolves, I’d been told, healed incredibly efficiently.

And I was dying.

So even though every movement hurt, I reached for Jax, curled my fingers into his rough and ruined lapel. “Bite,” I managed to rasp out, even though I couldn’t manage a full breath.

“What?” Jax asked, sounding initially horrified, but damn it all, I didn’t have time for him to worry about things. I couldn’t breathe. I wasn’t going to last long enough to—“Oh.”

For a moment, I worried he wasn’t going to do it. That he was going to insist I’d be fine like a character in a movie holding his gut-shot beloved, telling him he’d be just fine if only he would hold out. I wasn’t sure I had the breath to even ask again, let alone explain, and I very much didn’t want to die because Jax didn’t understand what I wanted. Or didn’t understand that I was dying.

But he seemed to understand just fine, because a moment later another fire ripped through my veins, my left wrist torn open by his teeth. At least, I hoped it was his teeth.

It hurt more than anything before in my life, more than the fireball had, because unlike the fire, it wasn’t gone in a moment, leaving only blessed cool office air behind. It felt as though my flesh was being flayed from my bones.

It made sense, I thought, near hysteria. I’d been cooked, now someone was serving me up for dinner.

A moment later, laughter filled the air. “Perfection. I should have thought of it myself. It turns out that pompous, ridiculous American was worth hiring to keep an eye on you after all, little cousin. This has worked out as perfectly as I could have wanted.”

Jax’s teeth left my wrist, and he made a clicking sound, like he’d opened his mouth to speak but decided against it. Forced to swallow the blood in his mouth, maybe.

I hoped he didn’t get in trouble if I died.

No, they’d just get rid of my body instead of turning it over to anyone. No one would have to explain the burns or torn wrist.

“Good luck, little cousin,” Jiro’s grating fucking voice continued. “I hope you do live. Become a dog. It’s perfect for you. It isn’t like a mutt can inherit the family legacy. Mages have standards.”

As the elevator doors opened with a ding and I heard footsteps retreat into them, I started to feel... something. The burning in my wrist grew sharper, even though Jax had clearly removed his teeth from the wound, and my whole body went from burning up to ice cold.

I would probably die because my magic was powerful, Prudence had said, and I didn’t doubt her in the least. I was sure it’d happened many times, all of them essentially the same. Every mage bitten had tried to stave off the inevitable using their magic, trying to force the wolf away.

Trying to defeat it.

They all failed, because while I had no proof, I believed something that would have made the mages furious: the wolf was stronger than they were. However magical, if the wolf won every single time, it had to be true, and that said something about magic and wolves that I doubted the mages appreciated terribly much.

So believing that, all I had left was the one thing I doubted other mages had ever considered: I didn’t try to fight the change at all.

Quite the opposite, in fact. I embraced it fully, welcoming the freezing bite of the wolf as it rushed through my body from the wound on my wrist.

I wanted that wolf.

I wanted to live.

I wanted Jax.

I wanted the family that came with being in a pack of wolves.

Hell, I’d almost wanted it more than the magic already, so this changed little. It was just that I’d only been left with this choice, so I reached out and latched onto it with my whole self.

The wolf.

The cold tang of snow in the air on a frozen night filled my head. Running through a foot of white powder in an evergreen forest under a deep blue velvet sky, stopping only to take stock of the moon. Finding her full and bright like a fat drop of candle wax, I lifted my head and howled, singing to my sister in the sky.

But no.

It wasn’t I at all.

It was we .

I wasn’t running alone. I was surrounded by other wolves. More than a dozen voices lifted to the sky beside me, because I wasn’t one lonely mage anymore. I was wolf pack.

I was home.

And I was going to fucking live.