They staggered down the corridor, ducking various flying objects and sparkling lights. It was obnoxious and annoying, but seemed to be less deadly inside, which made sense. Presumably, there would be witches fighting inside, and he was never supposed to get this far.
She burst into the study and said, “Rip it off its hinges.”
He glanced at the doorless arch leading into the library. “What?”
She pointed to the bookshelves. “That’s a door.”
He spared a single glance at her, one eyebrow raised, before putting both hands on either side of the shelf and yanking.
He stepped away with two boards in his hands that he’d ripped right out of the wall.
He threw those away and tried again as books started flying off the shelves at them. One whacked right into her back, andshe cried out in pain. He stopped and spun her toward him, sheltering her with his body.
“Get in there!” she said. “Don’t protect me!”
“Get out of here!” he shouted.
“We need the book!”
“My wolf will not leave you if you are in danger.”
She groaned and ducked under his arm and out of the room so the bookshelves didn’t have an angle on her. When she stepped too far into the corridor, she got drenched in multicolored lights. She didn’t know what they were doing, so she tried to stay balanced on the threshold between the two rooms as he barreled his shoulder into the shelf.
The bottom shelf jarred, and he hit it again until it bowed inward as the top of the bookshelf came loose, knocked in the opposite direction. With another hit, everything on the top shelf poured onto his head. He braced, and she cried out, but he just stood up and shook his head.
He put both hands around the final anchor point where a latch would be and yanked it off.
He ducked inside, and she joined him quickly.
“Holy shit,” he said, examining the room. “Who the hell are these people?”
“They’re afraid,” Penn said quietly. How afraid did you have to be to fill your house with this much violence?
Weirdly, there didn’t seem to be any protections within the room itself.
Keep going,she told herself, trying to shake out of her fear and shock. She examined the shelves, grabbed the grimoire, ignoring the way her fingers buzzed on the leather, and said, “Come on.”
He spared another glance around. “That’s it?”
“Unless you want to learn how to disembowel yourself, yeah! Come on!”
He tucked her into the shelter of his arms, and they headed back across the destroyed library, stomping on piles of books to get out. One nearly brained him, but he batted it out of the air with lightning-quick reflexes.
The corridor was similarly awash with water, glitter, and other projectiles, and they waded through that toward the front door.
She tucked the book into the back of her jeans and put her shirt over it, hoping to keep it protected as they burst through the front door in a wave of water to find a motley crew of witches arrayed on the lawn before them, the twins at the front.
Tori’s van was parked in the middle of the street. It was for her job acquiring things for rich people and kept all number of bizarre things in the back, like a fridge full of caviar and a chainsaw. Penn swallowed. Tori was at the front holding the chainsaw. Others held shovels and rakes.
“We cannot suffer the wolf to live,” Siobhan said in a voice Penn had never heard before. She hated that they were here, but she couldn’t help feeling relieved that a moose hadn’t gored the older woman; it meant the animals had listened to Penn.
Seven other women of various ages, looking nothing like each other, stood behind them—the strays and adoptees of the Griffin Coven.
Penn’s heart broke a little. They were such good people to build this little found family in the woods and try to keep them safe. It was so different from the power games her own coven played and lost, and certainly different from the violence of the coven that had taken them over, who saw her family as good for nothing but breeding stock and land.
They just had this one tiny problem. They wanted to kill the love of her life.
He’s not the love of your life.The love of her life couldn’t be a wolf with a snake problem she’d just met the week before. People’s hearts didn’t work like that.
