Not terror.Kara was too stubborn for terror.But enough fear that his wolf wanted blood for it.
“She’s too early,” Nick growled, his free hand sliding up to cup the back of her head, fingers threading into damp hair.
Verna’s gaze flicked sharply toward him, her mouth a hard line.“Time moves differently near the foundations now.I told you that.And I think the power below us has accelerated the development of your baby.”
“That does not help me.”
“No,” Verna agreed grimly, glancing toward the widening fractures.“It does not.”
Kara sucked in another sharp breath and grabbed the front of Nick’s shirt, twisting the fabric in her fist hard enough to pull him down closer to her face.“Okay.I need everyone to stop saying ominous things around the pregnant woman.”
Nick wrapped both arms around her immediately as the foundations trembled again, shielding her with the curve of his body as another shower of dust came down around them.
“We’re leaving,” he said.
The Troll King appeared through the chaos, his massive sword already drawn, the blade catching streaks of silver-gold light along its edge.Behind him, troll warriors moved in a tight wedge to intercept dark shapes beginning to crawl upward from the widening fractures below.
“You cannot,” Verna snapped before the king could speak, one hand snapping out to brace Kara’s elbow.
Nick turned on her instantly, his teeth bared before he could stop them.“Watch me.”
The elder female did not flinch.She held his gaze with an awful, ancient calm.
“If she leaves the foundations now, the child will not survive the separation.”
Silence crashed through him.
It was not silence in the chamber.The chamber was still screaming, still cracking, still lit with the strobing fury of magic at war with itself.But inside Nick, every sound dropped away at once, leaving only the hammer of his own heart and the small, panted breaths of his female pressed against him.
Kara went still against his chest; even her trembling stilled.
Nick stared at Verna as though she had started speaking another language entirely.“What?”
Verna stepped closer, her lined face illuminated by the violent silver-gold light surging through the chamber, every wrinkle thrown into stark relief.“The foundations recognize the child now.They are responding to her life.”Her gaze shifted briefly toward Kara’s stomach, softening for just a heartbeat before turning iron again.“The realms are trying to stabilize around her presence.”
Kara gasped sharply as another contraction hit, the sound tearing free before she could catch it, and buried her face briefly against Nick’s chest.Her whole body seized in his arms, shoulders rounding, breath hissing through her teeth, while his entire soul tried to tear itself apart from helplessness.
“Do something,” he snarled at Verna, the words half human, half wolf.
Verna’s eyes softened slightly.Her hand moved to rest gently against the side of Kara’s face.
“I am trying.”
The corruption exploded upward suddenly from the nearest fracture.
Not smoke.Creatures.
Shadowed forms dragged themselves from the blackness between the broken foundation lines, claws first, scraping against stone with a sound like bone on bone.Humanoid only in the loosest sense.Too many limbs.Hollow eyes that drank the silver light without reflecting it.Bodies that seemed stitched together from darkness and old grief, every movement wrong in ways the mind refused to accept.
The troll warriors charged instantly, their war cries rattling the broken air.
Steel crashed against shadow.
The chamber erupted into war.
Wadim shifted first.The massive gray wolf burst out of his skin in a single liquid motion, fur streaked with foundation light, and slammed into one of the creatures hard enough to send it flying backward through silver fire.Zara shouted something furious from his other side, before she too shifted, the mated pair moving in a brutal, practiced rhythm.
Rachel’s healing magic burst bright gold across the lower ledges where injured trolls staggered back from the spreading corruption, the warm glow racing along their wounds and pushing the dark back inch by hard inch.Gavril remained directly in front of her, claws extended, body coiled, ripping through anything that got too close to his mate.
