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“She’s half,” the duke said, exposing yet another secret of mine I thought I’d hidden so well. “At least, that’s my suspicion. There’s the off chance she could be a chimera, but from what the enchantress told me, it’s much more likely that she’s of mixed parentage.”
“That seems…unlikely,” the king said, still remarkably calm. I couldn’t believe it. I half expected him to fly off the handle and start screaming. With everything I knew about him, he was an alpha obsessed with being the most powerful in the room, in subjugating everyone who came into his sphere of influence. But the man in front of me seemed…detached, like he was two steps to the left of reality. Reacting, but not feeling.
“Then, let’s test it. Should be easy enough. A simple injections of wolfsbane should do.”
I paled at that. For a brief moment, I’d entertained the idea that I could somehow refute it all and make the duke look insane, but he had me dead to rights. It didn’t take a healer to know that monkshood, when boiled down at the right temperature, could force every other shifter into their animal forms. There were a few exceptions, mostly with avian shifters, but that was about it. Half, full, quarter, no matter my blood percentage, it would pull my wolf out of me.
My gut clenched at the idea, and it took all my willpower to not just slam them with a wall of magic and run away. Would they really inject me with something that would just rip my wolf out against my will? As wolves themselves, they understood how incredibly violating that would be.
But Kai reacted even more viscerally, his head snapping forward as he snarled, eyes blazing gold, his teeth elongating. I was flattered that he had such an intense and immediate reaction to me being threatened. Shifting so rapidly, especially as an automatic reaction, wasn’t the easiest thing. But mostly, I was just terrified.
How had everything gone to hell so fast? We were having such a lovely evening, dancing in our own fae tale moment and then laughing like a normal couple. But now we were facing down the king and queen with far too much on the line.
“I have a better idea,” the king said, his voice pinging around my head so strangely. I didn’t know if it was just adrenaline or everything else going on, but there was something in the back of my mind sending alarm bells ringing, and not just because we were in a stressful situation. There was something else to it—something I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
“Oh?” the duke asked. “Such as?”
Instead of answering, the king gestured to his line of guards in the hallway. “Just kill her.”
His words were like cannon fire directly to my heart. We were going there so quickly?
The world went fuzzy for a moment, but Kai, once again, reacted immediately. He let out another snarl before his form rapidly expanded, then practically exploded into his wolf form.
Then we were fighting.
I’d been in plenty of battles, that was for sure, but I’d never been in such a small fight in an even smaller place. I pulled up my magic on instinct, ready to wield it and defend Kai to the best of my ability, only for it to fizz reluctantly under the surface, as if neutralized yet again.
But that only happened in direct contact with either the physical manifestation of my curse, or the Shrouded Sh—
I never quite finished that thought as a rush of movement to my right had me diving behind Kai. I didn’t miss how the guard’s teeth snapped at the air where I’d just been, because they didn’t have orders to capture, disarm, or even apprehend.
No, they were trying to kill me.
Kai whirled as his front paw swiped at the guard while his teeth snapped at another. It was chaos, the room erupting into a feral cacophony of teeth and claws. Never in a thousand years would I have thought the situation would turn so quickly, and I couldn’t just lay about and not use my magic.
So, despite that strange, fizzing feeling, and despite the way my magic tried to recede into nothingness, I gripped it with all I had and yanked it right up to my heart, telling it in no uncertain terms that it was going to be used now.
It bolstered slightly at that, and I didn’t let a second go to waste. I sent it outward in a desperate burst. There was no solid command, no spell in my head, just the desperate urge for things to stop before everything was over in a puddle of blood.
It ripped through the room, slamming into the walls so hard they shook. For a moment, I was worried I’d somehow managed to kill everyone in one fell swoop, but I felt more at ease when I saw everyone except Kai and I were frozen in place.
Ayla? I heard my mate’s voice echo in my head.
“Come on,” I said, rushing out the door. “We don’t have much time before the spell releases. My magic is still recovering from that assassin!”
Kai didn’t argue, and we both erupted out into the hall. He gave a howl as an alert to any of our traveling party, yet most were at the gala, so we tore off down the hall. Just in time, too, because we barely reached the double doors leading into the main corridor when his uncle stumbled out of what’d once been my room in his wolf form.
He was much smaller than Kai, and if his fur wasn’t the same color, I wouldn’t have assumed he was from the same bloodline.
Kai paused, as if he wanted to backtrack and teach his uncle a lesson, but I knew better.
“There’s no time,” I panted as we dashed out.
While I knew I’d be much faster in my wolf form, I didn’t want to shift yet. I was so used to hiding that part of myself that the idea of showing it to the whole palace made me nauseous. Besides, I couldn’t use my witch magic in that form, and even as shaky and weak as it was, it made me far more powerful than some teeth and claws. It wasn’t as if my animal form was a massive direwolf like Kai’s.
Full retreat! Full retreat! Wherever you are, flee the capital now!
I couldn’t answer back, but it wasn’t the time for me to do that, anyway. It was time to run. Run and stay vigilant for anyone who got too close. My magic may have been flagging, but that didn’t mean I was helpless.
