“Get out!” I shouted.
“Now, now,” Andrei said, “is that any way to talk to a guest you’ve already insulted?”
“Andrei!” I shoved at him. “Go! If Max catches you he’ll–”
The side wall disintegrated. Max exploded into the kitchen, a look of pure death in his eyes. They had gone black again as wild madness took over. No other part of him had shifted just yet. He didn’t need to for the wave of aggression to slap at me. The mating link was a ball of golden spikes, spinning out of control.
“Oh well,” Andrei said. “May as well make it count.” He didn’t even graze me when he sank his mouth over my exposed shoulder and pretended to bite. Max’s leash snapped. He went flying over the broken bench top, destroyed the last of the food, and snatched Andrei around the throat.
The vampire didn’t struggle at first. It was a fraction of a second before he realised that he wasn’t teleporting. Lightning rolled around Max’s limbs as his body counteracted the celestial magic that was imbued into Gabriel’s Key. Eventually it would succeed but it would take time. Andrei would be dead before then.
The vampire choked as Max squeezed his neck. I heard bones cracking. Capillaries burst in Andrei’s eyes as Max slammed his back against the double doors of the ingredients closet. It bucked under Max’s strength. I heard glass cracking inside. I realised then that if Max wanted to kill him, Andrei would already be dead. Right now, he just wanted to inflict as much pain as possible.
Sinking into the mating link, I threw a circle around Max and used all of the strength of my alchemy to dampen his blows. It wasn’t much, but the tug of my magic gave him a second’s pause. A second was all Andrei needed to teleport the heck out of there.
He had the audacity to wink at me before he disappeared.
Max whirled around. His nostrils flared as they sifted through the various scents in the room. Savoury and sweet notes overlayed with vomit and the choking fumes of enchanted alcohol. Over the top of that was probably the apprehension sloughing off me and the metallic scent of my blood where I’d cut myself.
“What did you do?” he said. His voice was like steel honed in fire. Hot, hard, angry.
“Nothing.”
One minute he was on the other side of the room. The next, he was right in front of me, a wall of pure shifter rage. “I can smell him all over you.”
“It’s not what you think.”
He roared right in my ear. The urge to curl up in a ball and tremble was overwhelming. When I flinched, it only just stoked his fury.
“He’s dead,” Max said with a finality that I didn’t doubt for a second.
“Don’t you dare.”
He punched the wall behind my back. It fell to pieces. I jumped and landed squarely against his chest. His nostrils flared again. This time he dipped his head and inhaled close to my shoulder where Andrei had essentially kissed me. The hand that wrapped around my arm was a vise. He hauled me behind him towards the bathroom. I saw his intention to throw me under the shower. We passed by the mirror in the hallway, and I caught sight of us. Max with his mad golden eyes and me with leaves in my hair and blood trickling down my cheek. It was absolutely the opposite of how I had hoped this would go.
The disappointment ignited a fire under my own cauldron of fury. “Get your hands off me!” I screamed.
He only pulled harder. My rage detonated as we crossed the threshold of the bathroom. I grabbed onto the mating link, funnelled it into a blade with my alchemy, and stabbed him through the chest with it.
The blow incapacitated him for about a second. Enough time for me to bolt out of the room and down the hallway. I had every intention of initiating the ward in the bedroom that I had set up to keep out malachim.
Intentions were great and all, but they didn’t necessarily work when you had a six-foot-four shifter who was impervious to magic charging at you. Using the mating link as a warning signal, I flattened myself against the wall at the very last second. Max sailed past me, hit the wall on the other side of the bedroom, pivoted, and came straight back. Slapping my hand over the ward, I completed the circle a breath before he bashed headfirst into the blood barrier. The impact against my magic had my molars rattling. It wouldn’t hold him for long. But it would be enough time for me to figure out what I wanted to do.
He struck out at the ward. That same lightning I had seen crackling over his skin now spiralled through the circle. It seared my magic, heated up my blood, and made me wince. He stopped hammering at the ward when he realised it was hurting me.
“Let me out.”
“Sure,” I said. “Just as soon as I’m outta here.”
“Don’t you dare set foot out that door.”
“Or what?” I said. “What are you going to do?”
He pressed his palm against the ward. The physical contact manifested in the same type of burning as when Charles touched the demon blade. The bitter scent of scorched skin filled the room. The blood barrier ate up magic at an alarming rate and siphoned it through to me as essence. I gasped, terrified that I was hurting him in return. I needn’t have worried. His claws sliced out. They scraped slowly against the barrier. He shoved his fist into the ward once and locked his eyes on me. “Kasarah,” he said. Break. A word of power.
Oh hell! The ward disappeared.
“How did you…” I backed up.
“You and I went to the same Academy.” His voice was no longer quivering with rage. Instead, it was steeped in lethal potency.
“But you’re–”
When he grabbed my arm
