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To choose someone, to give oneself entirely to another, was to accept their battles and their dreams, their deepest fears and their sharpest qualities.
You will not take him from me now. Words fought against my long tongue, stirring even more anger in my chest. The ability to speak stolen from me, I rose onto my hind legs, enjoying the familiarity of standing but also feeling a strange imbalance in this new form. I crashed forward.
When the first attacker leaped, I roared and swatted him with a paw. It was so much bigger and reached so much farther and faster than my human hand. The man slammed into one of the adjacent dining tables and fell to the ground, groaning. He didn’t rise.
For a moment, I couldn’t draw breath, surprised by my power, but also worried I’d killed the man. These fae, with their bloodlust and glamours, hardly seemed like men or women. Still, I didn’t want to kill.
The presence of the next attacker stalking toward me snapped my focus back to survival. It was the harpy who’d taken my dagger. I jumped, shocked at how far I flew with a single leap. I sprang fully over Rafael, only to turn back and scramble awkwardly on my paws to defend him.
The woman spun to face me, her long, dark hair whipping out like a hundred snakes. Her eyes blazed with magic and rage.
Silver streaks of light shot at me from off to the left, stinging as they buried into my furry hide. I grunted and snapped my jaws. Everything felt strange. My mouth was enormous. My awareness of my limbs had become so confusing, as my hands were more like feet now, but I still wanted to use them like hands.
The harpy leaped and flipped in the air, soaring over me. Standing on my hind legs, I reached one paw upward. My claws sliced through the folds of her dress.
My dagger clattered to the terrace floor.
I crashed to all fours and turned, nearly tripping as it took each of my paws instead of just two feet. I could no more grasp the dagger than curtsy in this hideous form.
My head spun as a sparking arrow pierced my side.
“Big bear claws aren’t as helpful as you thought, are they?” jeered a silver-haired woman, trying to lure me away from Rafael’s fallen body. “I can see it in your eyes—the change is going to turn you mad.” She knocked another crackling arrow. Tiny white lightning bolts sizzled around the sharp point. “And madness doesn’t disappear. You’ll be as mad as marbles by morning.” She chuckled and aimed at me.
This time, I ducked and felt the arrow nick one ear. It stung and tiny prickles raced down my face and neck. My muscles grew sluggish. The woman watched me with eager eyes as she strung another arrow.
No. It couldn’t end this way. To reach her, I needed to move away from Rafael, but to my left, a shining figure in a white suit crept forward, a glinting dagger in his hand. I wasn’t strong enough to fend off this woman and the Sun Sovereign.
“Rafael!”
The sound came out not as a word but as a ground-shaking roar. Rafael’s hand twitched.
A second arrow sank into my shoulder. My next roar was high-pitched and full of pain. At this sound, Rafael rolled toward me, and for a single breath, we locked eyes. There was more power—more light—in those eyes than in the sun itself.
As his brother descended upon him, night vanished and light burned so brightly around the two men that I had to look away.
Then I jumped, a little more aware of how far I would travel in a single leap. My sluggish muscles responded, even if they were still a little slow.
The woman blinked and fired an arrow without aiming. It stuck in my outstretched paw. As I landed on my attacker, the woman’s own arrow stuck perfectly into her neck, just shy of her collarbone.
I had only meant to pin her to the ground, but now the arrow was sticking up through my paw and down into the screaming woman’s neck. I knew better than to rip the arrow out like that, but being pinned to a fae warrior with strange electrical magic was not something to savor. Before I could free my paw, the fae let out a feral snarl and yanked the arrow from her own neck. I recoiled from the outpouring of blood.
The woman tried to raise her hand to the wound, crackling magic now skittering over her palm. But the hand collapsed across her chest, the white lines of magic dying out in fits and bursts as the fae took her last breath.
Shaking, I sat up, feeling enormous and entirely foreign in my own body. I really would go mad by the time I changed back into a human—whenever that happened. How had Rafael endured being a bear for so long?
When I looked back at him, my heart flipped in my chest.
Fabian circled Rafael, twin swords flashing. The air around the two brothers swirled with streams of light. Rafael batted away each thrust.
I shouted—but the sound came out as a nasty snarl. With a paw, I raked the dagger across the tile toward Rafael’s feet. It ricocheted off his riding boot. In a breath, it was in his hand.
As Fabian lifted his arm to swing again, a dart of pure, white light shot from the end of his sword. To my horror, Rafael stuck his hand out, and the shard of light cut through him. Blood splattered his face. Fabian cackled with laughter.
Then Rafael lunged, and the shard of light shot forward into Fabian’s chest. For a heartbeat, the blindingly bright weapon connected the two brothers. Dark red blood spilled from them both.
“The crown was never yours,” Rafael spat through gritted teeth.
Then, he jammed the iron dagger into Fabian’s stomach.
