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Sylvan drags Maddy out of the room, around the corner, and out of view. He’s laughing as though he’s won, and it chills Caleb’s blood.
“Maddy!” Caleb bellows. “Maddy!”
She doesn’t move. She doesn’t answer. Has Sylvan already ended her life?
Knowing he has no other choice, Caleb clutches the pendant on his chest and summons as much magic as he can. He focuses on the shield then punches with the other hand, relieved as the faint sound of cracking splinters the air. He does it again and again, feeling the growing hole each time. With a final shout, he bursts through it, reaching the doorway on the other side of the magic spell.
Not bothering to check on Alec, he breaks into a run, heading the way Sylvan dragged Maddy. Every second it took to break out of the invisible shield felt like a lifetime. He just has to hope he’s not too late.
Caleb reaches a doorway at the end of the long corridor and tries the knob, but it’s locked and warded. He takes three steps backward and throws himself onto the surface.
“Help me!” a voice calls.
Is it Maddy? He doesn’t know, he can’t be sure. He peers behind him, trying to decide whether to break in or go another way to find her. There’s no one who can tell him where Sylvan’s taken her.
A shuddering wail echoes on the other side of the door. “Oh, help me. Please.”
Renewing his effort, Caleb batters the door. On his fourth try, the thick door splinters, and he crashes through into a small room with a thin mattress in the corner.
“Maddy!” Caleb stops at the edge of a mattress on the floor of the tiny room and drops to his knees. “Maddy?”
The woman rolls to her back, the chains which connect her wrists and her ankles to the wall rattling each time she moves. Her matted and tangled hair falls away from her face, exposing the points of her ears.
Caleb’s heart falls, and his stomach twists. It’s not Maddy, which means Sylvan has her somewhere else. He’s wasted more time. Seconds, minutes they don’t have.
Yet he can’t leave an innocent to fend for themselves in the middle of this mess. Whispering an apology to the girl who he promised to save, he summons more magic, forcing the spell into the metal of the chains. Carefully, he weakens the material until he can pull it apart with his bare hands. Finally, he helps the stranger to her feet.
“Thank you, thank you,” she whispers.
“Who are you?” Caleb asks. “Where can I take you?”
“I’m Sylvan’s wife…” Her voice catches in her throat. “Just take me away from here.”
Caleb almost reels back, realizing he just saved the wife of the Fae who’s kidnapped Maddy, not some innocent woman. Gritting his teeth as she leans against him, he escorts her out of the mansion, unwilling to think through the consequences of what he’s done.
Right now, heneedsto find Maddy.
The scene outside the mansion is even worse than it was before. He spies Sylvan at the edge of the battle, and his wife breaks away from Caleb with a cry, making her way toward her husband. Caleb doesn’t bother to watch the reunion.
Not when his world is crumbling around him.
An army of evolved shifters overwhelms their forces. Malcolm’s cult surrounds them all.
And Maddy is nowhere in sight.
Chapter25
Madeleine
Sylvan’s magic wraps around Maddy, and his right arm hooks around her neck. He pins her in the crook of his arm, dragging her out of the private little study on the second floor of the remote mansion. He hasn’t found the stake.
Alec’s on the ground of the room, and Caleb… He slams into an invisible wall, and it prevents him from coming after them. Her last view of Caleb is him, clutching his pendant with panic in his eyes.
Inside her mind, Maddy kicks and screams and fights against Sylvan. She flails wildly…
In her head.
But her body doesn’t move at all.
