CHAPTER SIX

JESSICA’S POV

"I don't want power!" I screamed, the words tearing at my inside throat making it dry in thirst.

"I just want to be invisible again!" My hands went to my head, my fingernails tore into my scalp, and a hairline split ran like a spider-web up beside me along the cave wall.

The rock i stood on cracked, a cracking sound that shook my feet as I stood on them. It was as if the earth itself was buckling under the pressure of a force I didn't understand and couldn't control.

Kai didn't move. He was standing within inches, walled in with cold muscle and rain-soaked leather and old scars.

The atmosphere was literally heavy with the odor of metallic smell…. the sharp, nose-stinging odor of lightning on the verge of striking. The mate pull was no romantic tug or a kindly whisper at the back of my mind.

It was a physical roar. A demand of union was so rude, so low, so coarse, that my stomach turned with an ashamed, desperate hunger.

My wolf, the mute, mangled creature that I had dragged like a dead body all these years, did not whimper. She howled for blood. She wanted Kai. She wanted the mark. She longed to set this world ablaze.

“You will never be invisible again, Jessica,” Kai hissed, and his voice was a low vibration that I could feel in my very marrow.

His hand passed through the sparkling air, and his finger gliding over the burning place on my back. He didn't touch me--he couldn't.

The sheer pressure of the energy vibrating off my skin acted like a physical shield, a barrier of pure lunar pressure that shoved his fingers back with a visible spark of violet electricity.

"Thorne isn't just coming for a wife. He’s coming for the 'Sovereign' he thinks he can chain. Look at the horizon. I can smell the rot of fifty wolves on the wind. They aren't coming to talk. They are coming to cage you."

I stared at my hands, and the scream stuck in my throat. The skin was growing clear, like fine ceramics in front of a fire. The veins underneath were no longer blue, but followed a rhythmic, liquid violet light that beat in time with my heart which was racing.

My nails were growing longer and becoming diamond-hard claws that shone in the faint light like stars. They felt heavy. They felt like weapons. Then the atmosphere in the cave changed.

The smell of dirt, wet rock, and pine smoke had not been only lost--it had been burned away. Instead, it was overshadowed with an odor that struck the rogues with the impact of a physical collision: cold starlight, broken winter lilies, and the first frost on a mountain top.

It was the scent of a Queen. It was the smell of the lady whom my stepfather had lived eighteen years trying to bury by the burden of his gambling bills and his belt. It came into the cave and stifled the odor of our fear.

I watched Jax and Ryder go wide-eyed as the side of their eyes were filled with gold, with the blow of the Alpha Command. I looked at Kai. My eyes had cleared up like to ice-crystals, and were quite painfully clear.

I did not only see the cave, but I could loudly hear the heartbeat of all the living things in five miles. I heard a squirrel in a hole in a tree three ridges away.

I heard the wrath of Thorne, a wavering, sick candle light in comparison with the blaze of the sun that was boiling up in my breast.

“What do I do?" I mumbled and my voice resembled that of the bottom of a deep ancient well.

Kai threw himself across the light again with a face baked in agony by the energy. He did not cease until his lips rubbed up against my knuckles. The touch caused a jolt of electricity to travel through the cave that burst out the fire pit in a burst of sparks and then we were in a realm of violet light.

“We do not hide this night,” Kai said with the flash of his silver eyes, which shone like two moons. "Tonight, we survive. But tomorrow... you will tell me all the secrets that your mother kept. Because this power? It is what killed her, Jessica. And it's why we all have to turn into monsters to keep you.”

I was walking into the cave, with the remnants of my wedding dress, bits of silk rags, fluttering around my legs like a battle flag torn to pieces. The violet light went behind me, a cloud of Godlike wrath which turned the descending rain into steam before it could touch my flesh.

The howling of Thorne was heard nearer. I might have heard the brush snap beneath the feet of fifty murderers.

I turned my teeth, and uttered a cry, not really a cry, but a call to the very earth. "COME AND GET ME, THORNE!"

The forest groaned. The trees appeared to turn away towards my voice. Next to me, Kai turned into a giant beast of black hair and violet eyes. He was a grizzly bear, and his muscles rolled like granite under his coat.

Once he struck my hand with his forehead--no word, no sound, but a rough vow--and then looked at the tree-line.

The first fifty appeared. One of the grey wolves, starving and starving in a mean way, and with a sick-yellow look in his eyes. He sprang out of the brush, with jaws open to my throat.

Kai didn't even let him land. He intercepted the grey wolf in mid-air, a collision of teeth and fur that ended with the sound of a snapping neck.

The grey wolf was tossed aside like a ragdoll. But more were coming. Three. Six. Ten. They were pouring out of the shadows, a tide of teeth.

I felt the power in me swell. I wanted to blast them all. I wanted to turn the forest to ash. I reached deep into that violet core, pulling on the strings of the stars—

And then, the power slipped.

The violet fire in my veins stuttered, turned to ice, and my heart seized in terror.

The mark on my back ignited like a branding iron pressed straight into bone.

I staggered.

The wolves kept coming faster now, jaws wide, eyes locked on the prey that had just flickered.

My knees buckled as the world tilted sideways.

Darkness clawed at the edges of my vision.

I was losing it…. losing the power, losing control, losing my mind….

and the pack was closing in to finish me.