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The creature shrieked, and Isla’s legs bleated in protest as they pushed her against the sands, moving faster,faster. They needed to get to the forest, to higher ground. She needed a weapon, her dagger back. Or…
Shit, shit,shit.
She had one more weapon in her arsenal. One she hadn’t attempted to use. One she knew there was no coming back from. But they’d die if it got to them, dragged down into those watery depths.
Isla dug deep, hurtled herself into that power, her wolf, and embraced that cold, that darkness that met her. She punched through it, pulled from it, falling to her hands and knees as her foundations trembled.
“Isla!”
One of the tendrils snapped at her leg, tried to wrap around it, to pull, then recoiled. And then the world shifted, for she had not.
Isla may have screamed, she wasn’t sure, but the pressure inside her exploded as darkness and cold leeched from her.
With her arms nearly buckling, she turned and faced upright and choked when she met the glowing eyes—violet eyes—of the creature she’d glimpsed in the woods. A wolf crafted of shadows, of the deepest darkness between stars.
Her wolf.
Given new form. New life.
Because somehow, when she’d healed her, when she’d brought her back from near-death, Raana…Raana must’ve given her magic.
That had been the unending cold, the dark veil blocking her from shifting completely. Her wolf, that power, had become…this.
She had no time to dwell on it. The impossibility, the catastrophe if this was forever.
“Go,” Isla commanded through gritted teeth, willing her wolf forward, dredging up every scrap of energy she had to let it take charge.
Ameera appeared behind her, bringing herself to her feet. And then they watched the creature of the sea square itself, its claws out, ready to tear through bone and flesh—only that wasn’t what it got.
Her wolf moved faster than Isla could blink. It moved as she would have if she’d been shifted, only it had no weak spots. At least, none the creature could land on. Where it swiped with taloned hands, the wolf became as elusive as air, its body only smoke. But when the wolf struck, it became hard as stone, sharp as a blade, powered by the ferocity of a luna. Its ebony canines sunk deep into the creature’s neck, and it barely had time to shriek before its head was ripped from its body.
Pearlescent blood sprayed, its body falling to the ground in a heap, its serpentine head caught in the jaws of her monster, and its black eyes wide and vacant.
Isla met her wolf’s gaze in the swaying world, willing it to drop the head. It obeyed, and she watched it thud and roll across the sands.
Nausea overtook her but not for the gore.
“Come back,” she rasped, and her wolf collapsed, becoming nothing but mist that blew over her, into her like a breeze. Isla’s breath caught as she felt it settle right where it always had, ready to be called on again.
Ameera struggled to hold her upright as Isla’s legs gave way. “What the hell wasthat?”
A loaded question that Isla never got to answer before everything went dark.
CHAPTER34
RAANA
Raana whipped her head southward as her shadows bit along her skin, buzzing with an energy she’d never felt from them before. She’d been ascending the mountain’s final climb, just about to reach her cottage door, when she felt the pull. Not what she’d felt with Adrien on the night of the Equinox, but something…different.
Strange.
She spun back, focusing on her task: get her grimoire and get out.
It had been her own personal mission, her own small escape.
Ever since she’d snapped in the greenhouse, something had shifted in her and Nerissa’s relationship—if one could even call it that. Nerissa had wanted her to embrace herself, to get a taste for the breadth of her power, but perhaps, she hadn’t wanted it at the elder witch’s expense. Perhaps, she’d wanted or thought she could sink her claws deeper into Raana before she could get a handle on herself.
Fearing that would mean more or less declaring war between them, she wanted to brace herself to fight. She wanted all the weapons in her arsenal. And her greatest?
