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Outside, I push Bunny to move even faster. If we can make it to the trees, she can shift to whatever her rabbit size is to run and hide while I handle Zaleski. We make it to the last column of the temple façade, and Bunny bunches her legs to leap to the ground. A rush of air and sudden whoosh has me yanking the rabbit back. During my short stay in Syn City, I’ve learned the telltale signs of incoming wings, and those don’t belong to Sadie.
“Hello, Bunny.” Devlyn steps out of the trees with an arrow notched and bowstring drawn. Two Huntresses flank her. “Silly rabbit. Shouldn’t have come here.” She lets the arrow fly.
Instinct has me firing my gun at the Huntress before any thought of eternal curse on me and mine registers.
A crack snaps out, and a whip streaks through the air impossibly fast—faster than the bullet, faster than the arrow. The damn thing strikes both down.
“Holy Hades,” Bunny whispers. “I think I peed my pants.”
Sadie zooms from the sky to fly in front of us, shielding us from the Huntress. Wings extended and blonde hair flying, she looks like an avenging angel with a scary ass whip. So much for the fiery Grim Reaper blades or even the axes she hurled at the Hack and Ale. Sign me up for my Fury’s brand of weaponry.
Footsteps come from behind us, and I spin, aiming at Zaleski. I can’t tell if she means to shoot me or Sadie. Either way? Not happening on my watch.
Two more Furies swoop in.
“I wouldn’t.” The crazier of Sadie’s sisters flies upside down, flipping her hatchet over and over. In clear defiance of gravity, the thing returns to her hand every time. “Shoot at us and curse everyone in your family tree.” She ruffles her wings with the arrowheads as if making a point. “Give me that before you hex yourself.” Yanking the gun from Zaleski’s hand, she releases the magazine, racks the slide, and ejects the chambered bullet. “Got any more on you?”
Zaleski reaches for her boot, then changes her mind when the other Fury flashes her fiery sickles. My former captain puts her hands in the air.
With her Fury sisters blocking one side and Sadie the other, I holster my gun rather than risk shooting a deity daughter.
“Did the mating link kick in again?” I ask Sadie. “That how you found us?” I must be in worse shape than I thought because I can’t feel it.
“Nope,” she says. “Bear shifter nose followed your trail here. Just in time it seems. You all right, Bunny?”
She doesn’t ask about me, but hell, she let one shifter lead her here and bothered to check on another, so I’m taking that for a win given her prior hatred of my kind.
“This was your mate’s idea.” The flippin’ rabbit narcs on me after I saved her ass.
“I figured,” Sadie replies.
Two other Huntresses walk out from the woods to flank their leader. Neither reaches for their bow. “Your wolf trespassed.” Devlyn sounds pissed, but I can’t see her face with Sadie blocking the view.
“So you decided to shoot him again?” my mate answers, and oh, she is definitely pissed.
“You have no proof.” The Huntress doesn’t sound as confident this time.
“They have silver arrowheads inside,” I announce. “They killed you, Lowell, your family, the shifters.” I look at the Fury sister who died at their hands. “The marshals picked the targets so they could rule over us, and the Huntresses acted as the assassins to satisfy their god Pan.”
“Did you say Pan?” Sadie’s voice comes out strangled, and she turns to look at me, keeping her whip between the Huntresses and me. Her eyes seem darker than normal.
I nod.
She glances at Devlyn. “I thought your House’s mother was Artemis, goddess of the hunt.”
Devlyn gives her an ugly, cruel grin. “We’re not those Huntresses. We work for the great god who wants to tear down society to restore what was before—the wilds.”
An awful roar shakes the building though the damn thing had to have come from across the city. Bunny covers her ears, and I fight the urge to do the same. Shit happens quick after that.
Zaleski screams and takes a swing at Sadie’s sisters. The hatchet-happy one thunks her on the head with the handle, and the captain goes sprawling across the marble.
Devlyn says, “Our god’s calling. Gotta go.”
The Huntresses reveal wings. Wings. So much for them being one of the only two Houses without them. Worse, those awful wings look like bones. They’re the killers that Sadie’s baby sister Mable saw in her visions and Sadie remembered killing her. All three Huntresses blast into the sky and toward The Rink and that terrible noise.
Pan’s shout. Panic. Chaos.
Great. We’re all going to die.
