There were maybe thirty stones in the large circle, situated in the middle of a grassy field overlooking the rolling landscape.
But to get to it, their father had to punch the car through hedges.
Dylan threw his arm across Bells as they were slammed forward and dragged sideways by the force of his turns, until they were shooting through the grassy fields towards the stones.
‘Get ready to run!’ their father ordered, slamming on the brakes when they got close enough, the car spinning slightly. ‘Into the circle,now!’
Dylan grabbed Bells and dragged her out of the car.
They ran at a dead sprint, his legs pumping and heart screaming, their father ripping something open with his teeth. Dylan couldn’t tell if it was just his sleeve, or a pack of something. An antidote to the poison he’d been taking to keep his power at bay?
If they didn’t make it, it might not matter, because the demonic creature was faster.
It flung their SUV with a great curved limb, the vehicle spinning through the air before landing with an epic crunch of metal and glass.
Dylan turned to see their father blast the creature back with a pulse of dark power, giving them a last moment to fly through the bounds of the stone circle.
But it also allowed the other SUV time to pull up.
Gunshots cracked loudly as bullets spiked off the stones in a spray of shards and dust. As one pinged beside Bells, Dylan threw himself over his sister and bit deep into the fleshy part of his palm until he tasted blood.
A moment before his hand could meet one of the stones, another shot fired, and his father grunted in pain, staggering backwards.
‘Dad!’ Bells screamed.
Dylan slammed his slick hand onto the nearest stone and magic hummed through his arm at the circle’s activation, sending up an immediate shimmering forcefield that domed over them.
The creature threw itself at the wards and theboomof impact shook the earth and blasted the beast backwards. But it gave them enough time to see it up close.
Its body looked like some mix between a dragon and a rangy wolf. It was at least fifteen feet tall, its too-long front limbs ending in talons like bent-back scythes, which it used to run on all fours. Its head was featureless other than the mouth, ringed with two rows of razor teeth. Its skin was a deep navy, as if it had been dragged from a pitch-dark sky: some mutated thing that could only claw through life on a lost planet.
Its otherworldly shriek seared his ears and vibrated his bones, every inch of skin crawling.
The boundary was supposed to hold, but this was no normal creature. As it slammed itself against the invisible wall, the wards began to splinter.
‘It won’t hold!’ Bells screamed as a great crack sounded, and the creature broke through.
Their father stood in front of them, bleeding, but steady. Before Dylan could haul him away, the creature’s arm swung.
‘No!’
Fear cleaved through his adrenaline as their father was flung across the circle into one of the stones and the kill scent blasted into Dylan.
The transformation dragged through his body despite the tonics he’d been taking: hauled up something buried and gnarled and impatient, all claws and keen destruction.
Fire razed his limbs with his scream.
He didn’t know what he was, he just knew his height extended and a terrible tearing sounded that could have been his clothes, his skin, his bones. He knew his teeth sharpened with the great pressure in his jaw. Knew his body scaled with sheaths of keratin that cut through his skin to layer over him like armour.
And then he was colliding with a beast lost to time and myth.
The force slammed through Dylan’s newly made bones. He felt the razor slice of the creature’s talons as they seared through his newly thickened scales to nearly pierce the vulnerable organs beneath.
Suddenly, there was only the kill, and the scent. The creature’s snapping maw and the epic, wicked hunger inside that obliterated all humanity from his mind.
He slammed into it, again and again. Keeping it from the beings he was protecting, using the arms that had turned into their own long blade-like limbs, noting that his body had turned pale blue, like a creature that had hauled itself from a sky-reflecting loch.
Dylan’s jaw unhinged as he bit deep into the creature’s neck. Its shriek of pain was near deafening, the vibrations of it razoring through his body.
