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The sound of war came from outside, growls and snarls and screeches as shifters of all shapes and sizes took on the vampires and monsters that had haunted me for a lifetime.
I looked at Kinley.
“Through there!” she shouted and pointed.
Another creature attacked her, and she shifted and bounced away faster than I could keep track of.
I got up and ran through the door where Cal had disappeared.
Cal was on the far side of the room, close to a double bed that looked like the mattress might have rotted. There were piss stains on the floor, and the ceiling had a huge hole where water damage had never been fixed and the roof had kept leaking for what must have been years.
“How dare you come in here and challenge me!” Cal shouted.
I growled low at the back of my throat and slowly stalked him.
“You’re such a dick, you know that?” Cal carried on. His voice was a little too high-pitched. He was scared; I could taste his fear on my tongue. “You’ll never win. You’ll never get what you really want. You lost your family, and you’re a dick for taking mine. Dad didn’t love you. He just pitied you!”
I roared and launched toward Cal, tackled him onto the bed. He shifted, becoming a bear, and the fight changed. His magic joined mine in the room, and we fought with teeth and claws out, snarling and growling and scratching and clawing. It was the fight of the ages that should have happened years ago.
We bit chunks of flesh and yanked them out of each other. We slashed with sharp claws and drew blood. We tumbled through the room and crashed into furniture. Cal’s large body shattered a wooden rocking chair in the corner into splinters. When he tossed me across the room a moment later, I landed against a mirror, and it broke into a million shards of glass that rained to the ground.
The fight was brutal, filled not only with our respective magic but with the anger and resentment that had built over the years.
It felt like the fight lasted forever, and it drained us both of energy. We got tired as we fought. Outside, the battle raged on, and inside, it was the same.
I finally managed to pin Cal down. His bear growled, and Cal tried to push me off him, but he was bleeding out and getting weaker. He would never be as strong as I was, never be alpha material.
Cal shifted underneath me. His body was bruised, his eyes were red, and he was bleeding from his mouth. He gasped for air.
Piece of shit.
“Don’t do this,” Cal pleaded. “Braxton, this isn’t you.”
“Oh, I don’t think you know anything about who I am at all,” I growled when I shifted into human form, too.
“You can’t kill me. I’m your brother.”
“You burned down my house.”
“That was an accident!” Cal cried out.
“You kidnapped my mate.”
“You don’t ever get close to anyone. I didn’t know you felt that way about her.”
“Bullshit,” I growled at him. “You knew exactly how I felt about her. Youknew.”
“I’m sorry, okay?!” Cal said. “You can’t kill me. What would Dad say?”
“I think he would give me his blessing after what you did.”
“What did I do?!” Cal cried. He was literallycrying. “What did I do?”
“You betrayed me,” I snarled. “You tried to take my mate, and you made a deal with a demon that murdered my family! Like I said, Hauser would have given me his blessing.”
Darkness crept into the room as if the sun had suddenly been turned down. Black fog curled in the corners, and then a demon appeared in front of me.
It was tall and dark, darkness personified, with eyes that glowed red and a mouth that split his face all the way to the back. The red eyes glowed with an ever-burning fire, and he hissed when he saw me.
