How Becca wanted access to my powers was beyond me but it was pretty obvious she managed to convince the Melbringer's to align into provoking me.Running into town blindly to halt the attacks would be something the old Harlyn would do. But I wasn't as foolish or sentimental.Abigail leaned forward as she tapped the sharpie on an intersection she’d already circled twice. “It's hard to believe she'll gut the entire Springville as a distraction from something else. It's you she wants.“I understood their skeptical line of thought but the reality was, she wanted me alive. “But why? If they wanted me dead, why have they been consistently probing rather than just killing me off?““They want something out of you,” Khalid caught on quicker than I thought.“Exactly!“ I affirmed. “The question now was what they wanted?“I voiced out. I wasn't ready to reveal what I knew. Not yet. They might collectively decide to hinder my movements when it mattered and that wouldn't help me confront Becca in t
Footsteps rattled up the stairs before faces appeared behind the broken door frame. Abigail and Khalid spoke in turns.“Reports just came in, South Block’s in flames. Werewolves and humans are being openly attacked by the district,” Abigail narrated.Khalid followed up, breathless with a handheld transceiver held to his mouth. “The road out of Springville has been blocked. They're swarming every corner of the town.“I turned to face Ethan, to really look at him. His palms were still bloody and his mark still burned on my neck. His eyes pleaded I stay, but I had already made up my mind. I was going.“Well,” I rasped, cutting through the panic blooming in the living room downstairs, “it looks like fate has other plans for me.”He grabbed my wrist before I could walk away into the chaos. “If you go out there—”I wouldn't be able to ever take anything back. Every decision I would make from then on would be cemented in my history to become a part of me. Even the ugly decisions. But it didn
“Are you okay?“ Ethan darted my way, the wind of his speed blowing through my hair. His hands were coated in splatters of blood so he didn't touch me but I felt his worry with the warmth of his body.“You're asking the wrong person, Ethan,” I retracted my claws and the bones of my fingers snapped back in place. It tingled as they did.“How did they get in?“ Pieces of conversations from outside reached my ears and I wondered, how did they get in?“Think we can question her in that state?“ I flicked my gaze to the frozen woman by my bed.“Let us handle her,” The Moonstone werewolf with a white streak in his dark hair entered quietly. I barely heard him coming.I spun around to catch him by the door, holding an ivory knife with carved symbols. Ethan hummed behind me, “You hold their artifacts.““We figured at some point, the best way to fight fire...” he strode past us to the sorceress, “...was with fire. Any sorceress cut with this knife loses her ability to use any form of sorcery for
Morning came in the blink of an eye, the frost in my body had thawed to leave me numb as I'd wanted. I rose almost mechanically on my bed running my hand through my hair.“What do you want?” I asked groggily.My eyes adjusted to the light in my bedroom, the obnoxiously bright light that couldn't possibly be illuminated by a window.All of my senses began adjusting from the numbness and it took about a minute to realize that the fresh scent of earth and the chirping in the trees was abnormal.“This better be a dream,” My claws sharpened out of my fingertips as I guarded up, squaring my shoulders back.“Sisters,” a pearly smooth voice called out, “She's awake.“My ears listened in to find out where the voice came from in the trees. I couldn't see anyone yet I could feel their presence.“Finally,” another voice, more rough and sickly, followed, “It's been too long.““I for one am still failing to fathom why we had to wait for the thing to wake,” a third voice protested and I veered in th
We were back at my old parents' house, if it could even be called mine anymore.The Moonstone werewolves had been tucked into the spare outbuildings owned by Ethan in Springville. Some Crescent Moon werewolves were scattered around the edges of the yard with Ethan's security detail like territorial dogs clinging to the scraps of their rank.Higan had left them a mess and now they had confronted their origins shamefully.Inside, all of us gathered in the living room. I perched on the arm of the new maroon couch identical to the same couch my dad once dragged into the center of my mother’s carefully curated living room. He had boasted about winning it in a bid off, claiming it was ours now.It wasn’t ours anymore. As my eyes swept through every piece of the room, the reality settled once again. None of it felt like ours anymore.Abigail sat cross-legged on the floor, flipping through files she’d taken from Crescent Moon’s alpha’s office on our way back.Khalid hovered near the open wind
“So, how did you find me?“ I asked simply. I needed holes in their answers to gauge what they were going to mean to me. Allies that could be weaponized or enemies in disguise?One of the younger women, fierce-eyed and wind-bitten rose up just slightly, enough to speak.“We heard,” she began, “of the girl pulling in powerful Melbringers for a cleansing.“She ambled forward, her boots crunching frostbitten moss. “We were hunting one of them. A Melbringer who thought she could pollute the coastlines of the east. She bargained for information for her life.”I raised a brow at that. They were hunting? Melbringers? A joyous grin almost split across my face at the thought. They were experts at being at the end of offensive Sorcery.“She said they were all coming for you. So we all thought to come along too, to meet you and to rid you of those condescending pests,” her teeth gritted at the end. I could almost taste the hate in her words.If they hated Melbringers, did they know what I was? I