As if placing his hands on an invisible table before him, the demon’s body contorts. Bones twist and snap. Flesh tears and gone is the human skin the creature has been hiding in. Now an enormous dark creature with several limbs and eyes lunges toward me.
I pull out my gun and shoot, but the silver bullet ricochets off the creature and dings on the floor. Dove’s arrow catches one of the demon’s arms and it shrieks, the ear-splitting noise almost cracking my skull in half from the frequency. A rush of dizziness washes over me and hundreds of records, filed away in the cabinets, crash onto the floor as the demon jumps on top of the cage and continues shrieking.
I cover my ears in an attempt to dull the pain, but it doesn’t work. This demon’s scream is all-consuming, affecting every part of my body. The blood in my veins pounds and my heart squeezes under the pressure.
Darkness seeps into my line of sight and I fall to my knees just like the rest of my team. “S-stop!” I cry out, but the word leaves me in a pathetic whisper. Bile rises from my stomach and I hunch over, seconds from passing out. “Just… stop…”
My wolf howls deep within me, but it’s not from pain. It’s from rage. It’s as though she’s feeding on the demon’s pain, growing stronger with each second it screams. For whatever reason, this gives me the strength to stand, and the agony in my head fades into nothingness. A resolve spreads through me like fire. I pull my hands away and take a step forward. All around me, even in their shifter forms, my team is crouched over in excruciating agony. My heart breaks for them, but my body is moving as if controlled by another entity.
I pick up Dove’s bow off the floor and knock a steel arrow while looking the demon dead in the eye. “You. Will. Stop!”
The demon clamps its mouth and silence befalls the room as the magic he was using drains away. In the seconds before I release the arrow, it stares at me as if cast under a spell. But the spell breaks when the arrow cuts through the air toward him, and the demon lunges onto one of the cabinets. I release another arrow, thankful the prince taught me archery during one of our training sessions. However, once again I miss the demon, but at least my team is slowly recovering around me.
“Song…songbird.” Caspian shakily gets to his feet, his suit stained in blood. “You need to get out of here.”
Alaric’s wolf limps over to me, his body trembling from exertion. He looks wounded too, he’s barely using his front paw, but he drags himself all the same. Like nothing will stop him coming for me.
The demon shrieks again and splits up into several miniature versions of itself that crawl over the floor like ants. Before I can even shoot another arrow, they pile on top of my guys.
Dove grabs me by the shoulders and shoves me backward into a crimson light.
Chapter 23
Lilith Thornblood
“We have to go back!” I whisper, my blood running cold. I crawl off my knees and turn to Dove, who straightens up. Ash, dust, and blood coat her ripped clothes, and she brushes some of it off her cheeks like she has all the time in the world. How the fuck did she open a portal? How could she just leave them there? “Caspian is hurt! We have to help them!”
Her expression drains of all the light and kindness I’ve always seen there, morphing her into someone else that I’ve never seen. It’s like a lightbulb going off, and she bows her head, looking over my shoulder. I don’t need to turn around to know who is there, to know she has betrayed me. I can see it in her cold eyes, and I was an idiot.
“My alpha, I have found your runaway mate like you ordered.”
I slowly turn around, every second more tense than the next. My boots scratch across the stone ground as my heartbeat fills my ears, and I can smell nothing but fire. The Stormfire alpha is standing in the middle of the courtyard, dressed in black leather, and he smiles. A triumphant and deadly smile.
The alpha I’ve been hiding from this entire time has caught his prey. I have to push my worry about the others to the back of my mind. Caspian and Alaric are outstanding fighters, the best I know, and if anyone can survive what just happened, it’s them. I need to focus on somehow surviving this.
Dove tries to walk around me, her stupid heels clicking on the stone, but I catch her arm. Not giving her a second, I pull her to me and make sure she looks into my eyes.
“You’re going to regret this,” I warn her and I tighten my fist.
She opens her lips to say something, but I smack her as hard as I can, not wanting to hear it. The badass demon hunter in training I once respected and cared for cries out before collapsing.
“Seems you’ve learnt some tricks,” Rizer drily comments as I step over Dove and try to put her betrayal to the back of my mind for now. My knuckles throb and at the same time I realise I have no weapons on me, thanks to the mission. I can’t even shoot the alpha fucker.
“A few, but
