Shadow Fall

another.

A growl shuddered through his mind, hungry and impatient for the storm to break. For the street to run with red.

He took Annabella’s arms and forced her grip to break, knowing he’d leave bruises. Her hold on him loosed with sobbing shakes. “Not letting go” ran together in a notlet-tinggo chant forced through the clench of her teeth. She slid down his body to her knees, her forehead hot against his hip, arms locking again elbow to elbow.

Insensible to anything but holding on to him, she’d just given Adam and his soldiers a clean shot. Custo’s head and chest were in plain view. There was little danger of hitting her.

The time was now.

He glanced down to stroke her hair in a last comfort, but his hands were altered, fingers thick, mottled with gray, and tipped with wicked-sharp, curling black claws. They itched to gouge, crush, and tear, incapable of gentleness.

Custo fisted them tightly, his heart fisting, too. He would not lay those hands on her head. Would not touch Anna-bella with violence while a shred of his soul remained intact. His love for her condensed into a bright will not that roped the beast of his rising bloodlust.

He lifted his arms open to the side in a wide arrest position, his nails cutting into his palms. He’d come full circle, ready again to face death. This time a final, endless, consuming darkness.

No sniveling allowed.

Custo sought Adam’s gaze, found it waiting, his brother’s face lined with grief and pain, mouth curling downward as if to spit a bad taste out of his mouth. And yet, it was so much better that death come at his hands, than it had at that piece of shit Spencer’s. A mercy and a gift.

Custo nodded, quick and short, shoot now, as the wolf snarled within to fight. To use the woman as a shield, and if she still lived when they’d fled this place, to mount her and fu—

He brought his hands to his head to smother the impulses.

Hunger clouded his mind, voracious as a killer. His will burned with a lust to kill, hunt, to rut. His sight darkened, the day churning with a spitting and cursing storm, obliterating light and all sense of time. The streetscape was heavy with gray, the wind whipping the dust of the tower into spinning devils, awaiting the break of violence.

Shoot. End this.

His vision sharpened, and the darkened world edged with keen outlines of the men, his prey. He could almost scent them individually, their blood and sweat a dark bouquet. He touched his tongue to a sharp canine tooth, elongating in his mouth. How easy it would be…

Hot tears snaked down his cheeks as small fissures cracked his strength.

Adam, please! Custo couldn’t voice it. Annabella, whose sobs had gone hoarse, would come to her senses and stand. Protect him with her life while he fantasized about murder.

Adam worked his lower jaw, coming to a decision.

Make it quick. No time. Custo waited for the bite of the first bullet. Welcomed its relief as lightning sliced the sky.

Waited. But nothing happened.

“Stand down,” Adam said, dropping his weapon and his gaze to the rubble.

“Sir?” a soldier asked.

“I said, stand down.”

Custo gaped in disbelief. His gaze flew to Luca, who must know the horrors crowding his mind and the weak grasp he had on his will.

Please! He could hold on until Luca walked ten paces forward and impaled him. He’d have to hold on that much longer.

But Luca’s eyes went dull and he dropped his blade. A puff of dust-smoke lifted. I can’t. I won’t.

So much for family. Custo was abandoned, alone, and made a bastard all over again.

At least Death, callous as stone, would not discriminate. Shadowman?

Death lifted the hammer Custo had given him from the ruin of the tower. “We’re even now.” With that, he folded himself into Shadow and stalked silently away.

Custo was alone with the rising beast, Annabella, and an audience. They’d betrayed his trust when he needed them most. Did they want to see a monster?

So be it.

Custo threw back his head and howled to the sky. The sound was a mix of wrath and soul, a curse to God and a prayer for deliverance. Lightning flashed in answer and black Shadow lifted like mist from the pavement, dark trees growing in the midst of the city, his hunting ground, prey packed into buildings like cages. Their myriad thoughts would both betray their locations and their intentions. So easy. Too easy. A glut.

The air filled with layered fae voices: Anna. Bella. Anna. Bella. Anna. Bella.

Annabella stood, eyes blazing with her formidable temper. She assumed a position, arms outstretched, to create a circle around them into which she allowed no curling dark tendril of magic to pass. Shadow seethed behind her, cold and silky, but she wouldn’t let Custo have it.

The beast in him roared.

“No,” she said. Her magic kept Shadow from feeding Shadow. She’d found the shift of mind that permitted her to draw from or deny the Otherworld. He’d helped her learn that trick himself, and she raised the sun.

How dare she?

“Custo or…or Wolf…” She shook her head in irritation. “…or whoever you are. You want Shadow? You deal with me first.”

Custo almost laughed. What did the puny woman hope to do?

Her hair whipped in the rising foul wind. She was graceful and strong, but tactically ignorant. With one swipe, he could drag his claws across her belly and end this.

But that would be too easy. He went for her neck.

Annabella flinched as his large hand closed around the pale, slender column. Her stubborn chin dimpled as she glared at him, unafraid. Angry. Willful. A tight bundle of passion daring him to do his worst.

If it hurt, she didn’t signify. But then, endurance was second nature to her.

Teeth bared, he snarled in her face. She was a pain. In the ass. She’d been this way from day one. Obstinate. Irritating. Intractable.

Before he did anything else, he would break her, body and spirit.

Hand around her neck, he forced her backward toward the ground. She had to know, had to learn, who was master once and for all. And then he could be finished with her. If she cracked her thick head on the pavement when her legs gave and she fell, so much the better.

But her legs didn’t give. Her body bent like a willowy bow, the epitome of supple strength. The kind that weathered hurricanes. And she made it look easy. The arch of her spine into the brace of her legs was the antithesis of submission. The satisfied smirk on her lips told him what he knew already. That her soul was made of the same stuff.

Her face was getting red. He could kill her, easily and with pleasure. The storm thundered its approval, echoing the primeval growl in his head.

—Anna. Bella. Anna. Bella. Bella. Bella. Bella.—

He could squeeze and squeeze and squeeze the breath out of her, until she collapsed from suffocation. The action required only the slightest contraction of his hand.

But that wouldn’t satisfy him. Not remotely.

Why wouldn’t she break?

Custo’s animal mind sought an answer, the means of her undoing. There had to be another way, and with it the secret to human will, the power of mortality.

Lightning flashed, illuminating the area. The bolt was caught in an eternal moment, the scene laid bare to Custo’s hungry eyes: On one side of the wreckage stood Adam, his dark, brooding eyes watching in expectation.