“Oh,” Tara says, turning and smiling serenely at me even as I’m thinking about getting my teeth in her throat. “This is going to be fun.”
She raises her hands toward me, and I see the faint spark of magic in her palms.
“Don’ttouchhim!” Phina shouts, and I realize a second later that I’m not the only one running into this scene—Xeran and Lachlan are on either side of me. Apparently, we all decided that we’d had enough of whatever was going on here.
Enough of our mates being in the presence of a madwoman.
A blast of magic strikes through the air, flashing through the space around us like a lightning bolt. I see it flash off the bark of the trees around us, illuminating the clearing and all the people.
Then, it slams into Tara’s side, sending her rag-dolling across the dirt before we can reach her. We skid to a stop a few feet from Tara and a few feet from the girls, watching Tara as she lies completely still in the dirt.
“Is she…?” Phina asks, her voice small, and despite everything, I get the feeling she might actually mourn the loss of this girl.
“No, bitch,” Tara moans, pushing herself into a sitting position, cracking her neck, and lolling her head to look at thegirls, apparently not concerned with the three wolves staring her down. “I’m not dead. Even though you clearly gave it your best shot.”
“I didn’t,” Phina says, her eyes darting to Xeran. “I just didn’t want you to hurt him.”
Even in his wolf form, I can feel Xeran bristle. As the supreme, there aren’t a lot of things that should be able to scare him. And not many things could hurt him.
Nothing that his luna should have to protect him from.
“Ugh,” Tara says, pushing herself to her feet. I break formation and walk around to the other side of the clearing slowly until I’m standing behind Maeve. The others come to join me, all of us keeping our eyes on the blue-haired girl in front of us. “When are you guys ever going to learn your lesson? Boys are such a waste of time.”
“She really is just like she was,” Phina whispers, her words only intended for Valerie and Maeve on either side of her. “Like she’s still a teenager.”
Tara cracks her neck again and stands up, letting out a loudwhoop.“You know what, actually, that wasgood. Hit me again, Sera.”
The face-off is completely uneven—only Tara against the five of us and the three girls. Then, laughing, Tara raises her arms, and deeper laughter choruses after her, echoing through the forest.
“I might be struggling to start a fire,” she says, her eyes glinting dangerously. “But I have absolutely no problem fucking youup!”
In a flash, several dancing figures emerge, like flames licking into the night but somehow more real, thicker, and moresubstantive. They advance toward us, and although the girls yell for us to stay back, we spring forward, each of us taking one of the figures.
My teeth go right through the fucker, my mouth singeing hot, my claws struggling to gain purchase. To my left and right, Lachlan and Kalen are facing their own struggles with the daemons, snarling and fighting.
And behind us, magic flies, sparks echoing through the air, lighting up the night around us in quick flashes. Again and again, the flashes illuminate the trees and the leaves. Embers from the daemons float into the sky, flipping and dancing, catching on the leaves and igniting fires around us, which start to spread in the foliage around the clearing.
“Duck!” Maeve screams at me, and I do what she says, trusting the bond, trusting that even with what I did to her, she would still have my back. Keep me from getting leveled by her weird, magical high school friend.
Magic flows in the space above me as I flatten myself to the ground, and I can feel the heat singeing the fur along my back. The daemon I was fighting dissolves into smoke, going up in a puff that leaves behind nothing but silken silver ash.
The others continue to fight, and I can hear the crackling of the daemons as I roll to the side, trying to push myself up onto my feet again. The scent of scorched earth fills my nostrils, mixing with the acrid stench of burning leaves.
“Felix!” Maeve’s voice cuts through everything—the noise, my watering eyes, my stinging nose. When I look up, she’s deflecting another blast of magic from Tara, sending it ricocheting off into the trees. Maeve’s face is strained and red, sweat beads forming along her forehead. Her dress is barelyhanging on at this point, and it’s hard for me to reconcile this scene with where we were earlier.
The easy tempo of our lives up to this point, brought to a stuttering halt by me telling her that I loved her. I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her.
“What?” Tara laughs, stepping easily through the flames, shooting off little blasts of magic that Phina and Valerie have to deflect from Lachlan and Xeran. “Having trouble keeping up?”
Lachlan lets out a loud, twisted howl as one of the flames rakes its claws across his flank, leaving scorched flesh and tendrils of smoke in its wake.
“Lach!” Valerie cries, twisting to the side and rolling along the ground, then climbing over to him.
If he were human, he might grit out through his teeth, “I’m fine,” like he does any time he’s hurt. Valerie raises her hands over his wounds, already starting to soothe the burns, repairing the flesh.
Somehow, Kalen manages to pin his daemon down with nothing but sheer resistance, ripping at the slippery thing until it gasps and disappears into smoke. With it dead, Kalen slides over to us, and we form a circle around Valerie and Lachlan, protecting them from Tara and the daemons.
“These daemons are tied to her,” Phina says through ragged gasps of air. Maeve is strong with her magic, but Phina is the most powerful of the three. When Xeran first came back to town, she protected us from a bout of daemon fire that would have left us nothing but ash. “We need to break her concentration.”
