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“I only need to hold out longer than your wizard, and he isn’t going to be conscious much longer. Look at him.”
Indeed, Seth did not look good. He was barely holding on. I urged my legs to move. They didn’t, they couldn’t. Eva reached out to me, her hands stopping just short of my body.
The wizard cackled. “Aww. So close, yet so far.”
I gritted my teeth and strained against the magical bonds, but my best effort only got us a fraction of an inch closer, not near enough for us to touch.
“Do you hear that, manticore? That’s the sound of my guards coming to my aid. I hope you can swim, because my crocodiles are hungry.” Augustine laughed like he’d already won.
Sure enough, I heard footsteps coming down the hall.
“You like this witch, don’t you? Maybe I’ll let you watch while I fuck her. Maybe I’ll even let a part of you live. Yes! How about just your head? I’ll mount it above the fireplace, and you can watch me bend her over the furniture every night.”
I growled and turned my head toward him.
“Mateo!” Eva’s voice had me turning back to her. “Don’t listen to him. Focus on me.” She still had her arm outstretched. “We have to get through this. You still owe me all those dinners, remember? I’m not letting you get out of them.”
The wizard scoffed. “You think she’s going to want you after she’s had me? What can you give her? Nothing. Look around you. Look at the utter splendor she could live in. You could give her—what? A tiny hovel of a home? I know all about you, manticore. You are nothing. She’s just using you, then she’ll discard you. Just like your mother did.”
The beast in me demanded I run over there and tear him to pieces, but the rational man in my head insisted I remain calm. Augustine was only distracting me, trying to stop me from reaching Eva. I was smarter than this. I was more than my beast, more than base reactions, more than instincts. I was more than the sum of my parts.
I ignored him and turned back to Eva. Her lips were now sealed with what looked like magical stitches, keeping her mouth closed. This was why she hadn’t protested his disgusting words. I gathered up all my energy and heaved myself against the magical barrier.
The slight brush of her fingertips against my arm told me we had completed the connection, and the power of the amulet rushed through me and into Seth.
Eva’s eyes held mine, and the electric pain coursing through my body from fighting the barrier abated. For a long moment, I was lost in her eyes. When I finally looked away, the wizard was no longer protected by his shield. Instead, Seth had him pinned to the ground, like a specimen ready for dissection.
I found I was no longer frozen in place. I carefully placed Seth on the ground, and Eva moved to touch his shoulder directly.
“Go for it, Matty,” Seth said. “He’s all yours.” Then he released the wizard.
I didn’t even mind the nickname this time. I let the beast take over and pounced on my prey, claws extended. By the time I was done with Augustine, he was unrecognizable. I did, however, resist the primal urge to eat him, even though the beast inside really, really wanted to. I doubted he would have tasted very good anyway.
I looked up from the bloody carnage to see Eva looking at me.
Fuck. She’d witnessed all of that. Would she be frightened of me now that she knew what I was capable of?
I wasn’t given much time to dwell on the worrisome thought, because she threw herself at me, her arms wrapping around my blood-stained body even before I could get back into my two-legged lion-man form.
I wiped my paws on the closest thing I could find, which happened to be some velvet curtains, before wrapping my arms around her.
Prax and Liam, who had been keeping the human guards busy, arrived on the scene.
“I guess you didn’t need us after all—” Liam began. Then he saw Seth on the ground and a cry of anguish tore from his throat as he ran to his love.
Suddenly there was a low rumble, and chains appeared connecting Augustine’s mangled body to the two ifrits that Seth was holding against the hallway wall. Currently, they were no more than two-dimensional outlines.
Then the chains broke and vanished. So did all the other chains extending from Augustine to the entities he had held prisoner. Usually, ownership passed from father to son, but without an heir, it ended with him.
One of the ifrits, still a flat image on the wall, bellowed a laugh. “We are free!”
Prax, grinned. “Feels good, doesn’t it? Welcome to your new life.”
Seth groaned and tried to sit up. “I will release you, but if you attack us, I will not hesitate to bind you again,” he said, still struggling for breath.
“Release us, even after we attacked you? You are injured because of us.”
“You were only doing the wizard’s bidding.”
