Roy slowed down, skidding on loose pebbles, and sent his own wave of power at Austin.
Austin felt as if he’d been hit in the head with an anvil. His whole body throbbed with agony. His fangs tore through his gums instead of sliding smoothly through the way they did during a normal shift, and blood ran out of his mouth. His claws punched through his fingertips, spraying droplets of blood. He’d never felt anything like this before. It was bizarre and hideous, more like the werewolf transition of a horror movie than the beautiful melding of his animal with his human form.
Roy was staggering but still advancing relentlessly. He was moving slowly, but he would get there, and Austin didn’t know how much longer he could keep this up. He had never encountered power like Roy’s before.
He felt fur shooting through his skin, and his bones snapped. He let out a scream of pain.
Nobody had been able to force him to shift since he was a cub.
It took every ounce of strength he had to force his wolf back down so that he could handle the gun, which was going to be his only hope.
He had really, foolishly hoped that his Dominus power would be a match for Roy. It wasn’t even close.
He fired at Roy. One dart didn’t do it. Roy didn’t even seem to notice.
He fired again. And again. Roy kept coming.
He had no idea how potent Savannah’s darts were, but he suspected that three darts would be enough to kill an average shifter. And Roy was still bearing down on him. This gun had one more dart. He fired it.
That one seemed to be the charm.
Thank God, because Roy was twenty feet away from Austin. But now the crazed wolf was staggering, his eyes rolling back in his head, tongue lolling in his mouth.
Austin stood there, gasping and wheezing like a hundred-year-old asthmatic. He closed his eyes and concentrated all his self-healing power, and his whole body felt as if it had caught on fire. He forced bones back into place, reattached muscles and tendons. He spat a mouthful of blood onto the ground.
Roy lay on his side, his flank heaving, eyes closed. A dart stuck out of his shoulder.
Austin could barely see or hear or smell. He swayed where he stood, gulping air, for several long minutes before he finally felt well enough to walk towards Roy.
When he got there, he looked down at the defeated wolf. He felt a wave of pity rush over him. He knew how strongly he felt about Savannah, a yearning that had only intensified after they’d had sex. He couldn’t imagine growing to love and trust and bond with a mate, then losing them. He understood why it had tipped Roy over into madness.
Still, he was here to do a job, and he’d do it.
“Sorry, old man,” he said.
Roy’s eyes snapped open, and he leaped gracefully to his feet. He shifted into human form in seconds, so fast that the air around him seemed to blur.
Son of a bitch. He’d been faking to get Austin closer. Those tranquilizer darts hadn’t even slowed him down.
“Sorry?” Roy said, with way more self-control than Austin would have given him credit for. “Why are you sorry? Because you fucked up and now you’re going to die?”
Austin gathered all his strength, determined to take the bastard down with him.
And then it hit him – the darkness.
No! Not now, not now!
The vision swept over him, and he sank to his knees. All around him, he could see flames. Savannah was on fire, surrounded by darkness. Staggering. Screaming. Smoke swirling up from her hair.
He could smell the stench of her burning flesh, and it was driving him mad.
Desperately, he pushed back against it, as if Savannah were really burning, and erasing the vision would save her.
Panic and rage roared through him as he flailed through pitch blackness. Savannah disappeared into the ball of flames, but her wails grew louder and louder, calling to him, pleading.
He pushed harder.
Lloyd, his dead father, appeared, running towards Savannah with a knife in his hand. Jessica, his mother, stood next to him. She had an enormous martini glass in her hand. So big that it took two hands to hold it, and she was chugging from the glass. Horns swirled up out of her head, and her eyes turned bright red.
An enormous paw hit him in the head, and he felt agony as claws raked down the side of his skull. Real, nightmare, he couldn’t tell.
He fell to the ground. Then he heard a shout of rage. It sounded like Savannah. “Get the hell away from him, motherfucker!”
He tumbled into the darkness, gratefully letting it fold around him and swallow him whole.
