Our carefully planned mission of infiltration fell to pieces mere moments after crossing the threshold into the greenery-lined atrium. Wesley had been correct in his guess that the passage Caleb and I had been watching would lead us to the greenhouse. From what we could tell, the exteriors of the building were totally separate from this center area and the only way in or out of this inner part was via underground passageways.

That was all well and good, except for the booby traps Bridget had left for us along the way. Turned out she wasn’t as stupid as I had thought she might be.

Cole and Vali had found another way in, accessed via a manhole in the street on the other side of the building, so they had taken that way in, along with River. I could only hope they were faring better than we were.

After disabling the wolf shifters guarding the entrance, we had made it barely fifty feet inside before Caleb stepped on a trap spell that immediately encased him in ice. Thankfully, both he and Austin had their familiars out, and Sam was able to relay Caleb’s message to me that he was fine and to go on ahead. He was confident he could get out, but unsure how long it’d take. Seconds after delivering that message, the ice extended to Sam, even though the snake was nowhere near the trap.

“Because he’s part of Caleb,” Austin explained without me asking.

No sooner had we left him than we ran into our next roadblock.

“Shit,” Austin cursed as he threw a white hot ball of magic at the first half-shifted wolf who lunged at us from the darkness. His ball hit, sending the deformed beast flying back several yards, only to be replaced by another. “How many? Can you see, Wes?”

“No,” Wesley replied, sounding frustrated. “They’re moving too fast for me. There’re a lot though.” Even as he said that, he spun to narrowly avoid the slashing claws of another wolf and then seized its furry head between his palms. Whatever he did in those few seconds that he clasped the shifters face resulted in the creature slipping lifeless to the ground, twitching as foam bubbled from his mouth. It was scary as fuck, and also crazy awesome.

“There’s a hell of a lot more than fifteen shifters in here, Princess,” Austin snapped as he took on two more rabid creatures who both tried to pounce on him at once. “Something tells me your mom expected you to show up.”

“No shit,” I replied, using my handgun to shoot a third shifter who was attempting to catch Austin unawares. “Notice none of them are going for me?”

Something heavy dropped from the ceiling of the tunnel, and Wesley dodged it just before being flattened. When it moved, I fired off three shots into its mass to prevent it disemboweling my dorky lover.

“Thanks,” Wesley called out to me before slamming his hand into the forehead of another attacker. Whatever it was he could do to them, it looked fucking painful.

“Yeah, I noticed that,” Austin replied to my question. “I figure Bridget needs you in one piece until the spell is completed. This lot is just intended to slow us down, I imagine. None of them are even trying to kill me.”

“No, they wouldn’t,” I agreed, shooting another half-formed shifter in the throat. “She wants your strength too, remember? She’d only be weakening herself if she killed you guys now.”

“Well, in that case, we must still stand a chance of stopping her,” Wesley offered, panting with exhaustion as he got a short reprieve between attacks, thanks to my silver-plated bullets. “Otherwise why bother trying to slow us?”

“Fucking good point,” Austin grunted, throwing the immobile corpse of another half-wolf off him. “Push forward then. Let’s get Christina to the atrium as quickly as possible.”

Bolstered by the knowledge that these shifters weren’t actually trying to kill us, our progress was a little easier. Tyson offered damn good help in the fights, too, being quicker and more brutal than the shifters.

By the time we reached the leafy atrium, the guys were both panting with exertion, and my gun was already out of bullets. Not a good thing when we had yet to even start on the real fight. Nothing could have prepared us for what we found, though.

“River,” I gasped, spotting him first across the emptied-out room.

He was being held by two enormous, half-shifted creatures that seemed to be some variety of bear... maybe. Whatever they were, their teeth were longer than River’s head.

Casting my gaze around, I spotted Cole in a crumpled heap in the corner, while Vali was being dragged out of the opposite corridor by his ankle. He was totally unconscious, from what I could tell, and both their bodies were covered in a glittery sort of dust.

“Christina, darling, you made it!” Bridget crowed from her seat on top of the ornately carved silver box. “Hope you don’t mind; I have to stack the deck in my favor, you know?”

A small movement out of the corner of my eye was all the warning we got before Nicholai appeared out of the shadows and blew a sharp gust of shimmery, glittering powder at the three of us. On reflex, I sucked in a breath and choked as the dust infiltrated my lungs. It only caused me to cough a few times, though, and then I was fine again.

Austin and Wesley, not so much. They both collapsed into boneless heaps, just like Cole and Vali. Tyson winked out of sight the second Austin lost consciousness, too, so I was alone on my side of the room.

“They’ll be fine,” Bridget assured me, her blood-red lips split in a toothy grin. “This will just take them out of commission for a few hours. I wouldn’t want my new harem of men to be harmed in all of this, now would I?”

“I don’t understand,” I puzzled. “Why didn’t it affect me?”

“Because right now you’re nothing more than human. Same, it seems, as your other handsome friend here.” She hopped off her box and prowled towards River on spike-heeled shoes, her velvet gown dragging across the ground behind her. “Imagine my surprise to find you haven’t even changed one of your guardians yet! Not to worry, though. It’s the very first thing I will rectify when I have your magic.”

River’s golden eyes met mine across the room, and his feelings were clear. There was no way in hell he would let that happen.

“Bridget,” I started, taking a step toward her.

“Stop!” she cried out, and I froze. “You foolish child, do you know nothing? If you step on the wrong rune, you’ll be incinerated.”

Foot frozen in mid-step, I peered at the floor a little closer. It was dark within the artium, the only light coming from the stars and the slowly rising moon, but I could still make out vaguely familiar runes etched into the stone floor.

“These are...” I frowned, crouching to inspect the designs more closely. “These are actually cut into the stone?”

“You have no idea how long that took me,” Bridget informed me. “So don’t spoil all my hard work by dying now.”

Pursing my lips, I looked at the runes a little longer, trying to pick out the pattern. It had to be possible to walk across them; Bridget had just proven that herself. So it must just be the occasional rune that wasn’t safe.

Trouble was, these weren’t the mage runes that the twins had taught me. These were Ban Dia runes, the same as on my ring or that appeared during a bonding. Runes that I knew nothing about. Thanks, Mom.

“You’re playing with fire, girl,” Bridget snapped as I tentatively slid my foot closer to the nearest design. But her words gave me an idea. Twice now she had made fire references, which meant the runes to be wary of could be fire runes. If Ban Dia magic followed a similar formula to Mage magic—which stood to reason—then all of the elements would be incorporated into a major spell such as this. So if I just...

Ah-hah.

I spotted one that seemed to vaguely resemble the Mage rune for water and hopped onto that, squeezing my eyes tight shut and praying for the best. When nothing happened, I heaved a sigh of relief and opened my eyes to grin triumphantly at Bridget.

“Lucky guess,” she spat, ignoring River and stalking confidently back to her silver chest. I could see now that the top was laid out with a few candles and herbs, but I got the feeling the majority of the preparation had been in her cutting the runes all over the floor.

I shrugged at her comment. Lucky or not, it was right. That was all that really mattered, wasn’t it? Confident in my guess, I didn’t bother trying to decode another safe rune; instead I just hopped across a few more water-type runes until I’d reached almost the center of the room.

From there, I could see something seeping out from some small holes at the base of the silver chest. A blackish sort of fluid that I couldn’t make out in the darkness was seeping from the chest and into carefully cut grooves in the floor. They were lined up too damn perfectly for it to be a mistake, and the fluid was slowly filling the etched designs like it was inking them in.

“You may as well just give up, child,” Bridget told me in a condescending way. “As much as I do appreciate you bringing my new lovers to me so I wouldn’t need to hunt them down, your presence really wasn’t required for this part of the spell. As soon as all of the runes are joined and the moon reaches its zenith, all of your magical essence will transfer across to me.” She held up her own wrist where a twin gold band glinted in the moonlight. “See, the funny thing is that this is the spell my mother was trying to create to strip me of my magic. She was missing this part though. The receiver’s bracelet. She just thought she could strip my magic and have it dissipate into the earth. But it doesn’t work like that. That’s why it all backfired on her, foolish old woman.”

“Right,” I said, nodding like I was appreciating her genius. “So, she had all the other components in place, like the runes cut into stone and the, er, liquid stuff?” I indicated to the box she was perched on, which almost seemed like it was bleeding. “And the full moon... but just not the second bracelet?”

I wasn’t as dense as I was sounding; I was just trying to get her to fill in the gaps if there were any other important factors to the spell. So far, my only hope was in stopping the slow-moving fluid from filling all of the furrows in the ground.

“Yes, that is what I just said, isn’t it?” she snapped at me, and I sent up a mental thanks that she had given me up as a kid. I couldn’t imagine she was very good mom-material.

Pausing where I was in the middle of the floor, I needed to make a choice. Get to River and try to free him from the huge fanged creatures, or work out how to stop this spell, which was already underway.

A short glance at River told me he wasn’t totally unaffected by the glittery dust shit. His eyelids were heavy and drooping, and he had yet to speak. Not really within character for him. It confirmed my own suspicion that although I’d never healed him, he hadn’t been totally human to begin with.

Bridget had already said she wasn’t interested in harming the guys, though, because she wanted them for herself. I couldn’t help wondering if her caution around them had anything to do with Victor and the horrific scarring on his face. Something had clearly gone wrong between them, and now she was trying to replace him.

I refused to even acknowledge the ick factor of my mom planning on sleeping with the men I loved. That was the icing on the shitcake that was my lineage, really.

No, my first priority needed to be stopping this fucking spell, which meant either stopping the moon from fully rising or stopping the liquid shit from filling out all the runes. No prizes for guessing which option was going to be easier to achieve.

My gaze rapidly scanned the floor, checking the progress. It had gotten far enough that there were too many channels filling now to simply block them up. I needed to somehow get rid of the blackish fluid altogether. A high pressure hose would probably come in handy at a time like this...

Actually, that wasn’t such a terrible idea. I still had plenty of unused spells in my spine tattoo. Surely if I used a couple of water ones, I could wash that crap away. It wouldn’t stop it permanently, but it’d buy me enough time to do some damage to the runes or push the box off alignment with the floor grooves.

Hiding my hand behind my back, I summoned as much water energy as I could, drawing directly from the blood ink and praying it would pack enough force to disrupt the pattern.

Not wasting time with grand gestures, I hurled the water at the floor, right at the line where the dark fluid was trickling across freshly cut stone. My water hit with an explosion of red-tinted spray, and it was then that I realised what was filling the runes all over the floor.

Blood.

Bile rose in my throat, but I tamped it down and refused to let my mind wander onto what might be inside that box. I needed to keep my focus on the water before the spell was used up.

Directing the stream, I used it just like a high pressure water blaster, forcing the blood out of the floor grooves and spreading it over the flat stone in between. When the magic dried up moments later, it looked like I had succeeded.

Until the diluted blood began gravitating back to the grooves with the speed of a receding tide. It was almost like it was being sucked back into its correct position, but what was worse, my water had only served to spread it faster and thin out the consistency so it travelled faster through the designs.

“No,” I groaned, seeing the red blood move faster through the patterns, linking up rune after rune and bringing the spell so much closer to being finished. “No,” I muttered again, even as Bridget broke out into peels of laughter at my expense.

There was only one option left. I needed to destroy some of the runes. Surely if I hacked into a few of them, the spell couldn’t be completed.

Not allowing myself another second’s indecision, I summoned lightning from one of the runes I remembered being near the base of my tattoo. With a forceful throw, I aimed it directly into the centre of what seemed to be a water rune. Water was surely going to be a safer rune to explode than fire, right?

Too late, I realised my mistake. Ordinary lightning and water were a volatile mix, at best. Magical lightning and water was a whole other story.

The impact was so extreme that I was knocked off my feet, smacking my head hard on the floor and rolling over just in time to avoid slapping my hand down onto a rune that looked a lot like fire.

“Fuck,” I groaned, putting a hand to the back of my head and coming away with bloody fingers. Dazed, I looked to where Bridget had been sitting, but her silver box was vacant. Next, I looked for River.

He and his guards had been hit by the impact too, and I saw the second River spied his opportunity to escape. He probably would have made it too, except his motions were delayed thanks to that glitter dust crap and his guards were supernaturals. They moved ten times faster than him, and he’d barely made it two steps across the room to me when a blade protruded out of his chest.

“No!” I screamed, my voice echoing off the walls and bouncing back at me in a cruel mockery of my pain.

River was frozen on the blade of the enormous shifter thing, and I was powerless to help him as the bear-beast tore his weapon from my lover’s body, causing a sickening arch of blood to spray across the floor.

Freed from the long blade, River’s golden eyes held mine without a single drop of fear as he crashed to his knees, then crumpled face forward. Lifeless.

“No!” My cry was echoed, but this time it wasn’t from me, but my mother. “No, you incompetent sack of shit! I told you not to harm them!” she screeched at the two shifter guards, hurling blue-purple balls of flames at them that set them alight instantly.

For several long moments as the two shifters howled and screamed their death song, I crawled over the rune marked floor to reach River’s body. Ignoring the painful deaths of the shifters nearby, I rolled him over and swallowed a scream of pain at just how much blood there was. His own was mixing with the creepy box blood and filling the pattern all that much faster, but I couldn’t bring myself to care.

“River,” I sobbed, turning his face to mine and finding him still clinging to life. Barely. “I don’t know what to do. I can’t heal you. None of the runes on my back are for healing.” Why were none of the runes on my back for healing? Because they were all for combat. We’d never guessed I might end up needing to save the life of one of my guardians.

His mouth opened to say something, but no sound came out. Only a bubble of blood that caused him to choke and convulse, while tears streamed hard and fast down my face.

“Alpha, you can’t. I can’t do this without you,” I cried, holding his face between my hands and desperately trying to pretend my knees weren’t wet with his warm life blood. “What do I do? You need to tell me how to save you!”

Bridget’s mocking laughter bounced through the room, and as much as I tried to block her out, I couldn’t.

“You do nothing, Christina,” she sneered at me. “Soon enough you’ll be reunited, though. Don’t you worry about that. Oh look. The pattern is complete.”

As I watched in horror, the last lines of the blood-filled runes linked up, and the whole thing pulsed with power. My lightning strike had done nothing to disrupt the spell. Worse than nothing, it had gotten River killed.

All my fault. Always my fault.

Grinning with glee, Bridget looked up to the sky to check the progress of the moon.

“Only a minute or so left, I would guess,” she informed me with delight. “Any last words, child? After I take your magic, I will need to strike you down. I hope you understand.”

“Fuck you,” I spat at her, my face wet with tears and my voice husky.

“No, sweets, that’s what my new guardians will be doing, just as soon as you’re gone. Trust me, darling girl, I’ll make it so they never even remember meeting you. Now, isn’t that kind of me?” Her grin split her face, and her sharp teeth showed through. “Oh, but I almost forgot. I have one last parting gift for you.”

She circled around behind the bleeding chest and unbolted the lid of it. I wanted nothing more than to run screaming from that room, but I was frozen to the spot, crouched over River’s dying body and unable to look away from whatever my evil, sadistic mother had inside that chest.

“Do thank this one for me,” Bridget implored me. “She was such a big help.”

With one high-heeled foot, she kicked the heavy chest over so that it landed with its lid open, allowing me an unobstructed view of the contents. Not that I needed to see inside. The force of the chest falling caused the person inside to tumble out and roll to a lifeless stop in the middle of the runed floor.

There was no mistaking those delicate limbs or that short, bright purple hair.

“Lucy,” I moaned. “No, this can’t be happening!”

The inside of the box she had been contained in was lined with sharp spikes. Each and every one of them was coated in her blood, while her body was riddled with corresponding puncture wounds. She was pale, almost blue, and based on the amount of blood filling the floor... well and truly dead.

“Oh don’t worry, she’s been dead for days,” Bridget informed me, “I just kept her blood flowing with my magic for this very purpose. Little scamp had the audacity to try and escape me, and I accidentally hit her a little too hard. You know how it is with our sort of strength.”

Rage was building in me like a tsunami, and every word that bitch spoke pushed it higher. My heart and soul had just been ripped to shreds; my best friend—my sister—had been dead in that fucking box this whole time and I’d never known.

Now my lover lay dying in my lap, and this psychopath was making jokes?

“Ding!” Bridget exclaimed, like a deranged game show host. “Full moon is up. Now, come to Mama, you delicious magical essence.”

The gold band on my wrist began glowing under the bright moonlight, and hers echoed the glow with its own dimmer version. Judging by the laughter peeling out of her, this was exactly what was supposed to happen.

I didn’t give a shit about the magic, though. I didn’t care about her plans for world domination or her intentions of enslaving the human race. All I could focus on was Lucy’s pale, bloodless corpse in the middle of the room and River’s slowly diminishing heart rate under my fingers.

Most of all, was the pain. The sheer heartbreak at losing these two people who I loved so damn hard.

All of that manifested in me like a geyser, and I screamed my frustration and fury. All of my agony and despair, my heartbreak and hopelessness poured out of me with that scream, and to my abject shock and fascination, the band around my wrist clicked off and hit the floor with a delicate sounding ping.

My magic all came snapping back into me like a rubber band that had just been released, knocking me flat on my back and leaving me gasping.

“What?” Bridget’s scream bellowed through the room, and I pushed myself back up to look at her. But then I remembered I had my magic back. I could heal River!

Frantically, my hands found his wound, and my magic rushed into him with the speed of a bullet train. There was no stopping it or holding it back this time. The second I gave the okay to heal my lover, the magic took over with a life of its own.

Numb and still wracked with agony over losing Lucy, I willingly relinquished control, taking a backseat and letting the almost sentient magic do what needed to be done to try and save River. He would be changed, there was no avoiding that now, but at least he would be alive. That was all that mattered.

Bridget’s screams and protestations reached my ears as the magic finished all it needed to do inside River’s broken form and began retreating back up my arms, leaving the feeling behind that my fingers were sinking into dense, silken fur.

“This isn’t possible!” my biological mother howled, holding her own bracelet in her hands and shaking it, like that would make it suddenly work again. “It’s not possible! You can’t... No!” As she screamed and ranted, I withdrew my red-slicked hands from River’s chest and turned my gaze on her.

Whatever she saw in my face in that second scared her.

Her skin blanched almost pure white, and she took a shaking step back before recovering her wits and casting a hasty rune portal before I could cast anything to keep her in place. In seconds, she was gone, leaving nothing behind but a glowing circle of runes and a trail of destruction.

Almost instantly, I dismissed her from my mind. I’d find her sooner or later, and she’d pay for what she had done.

Under my fingertips, River stirred. Shoving all thoughts of revenge and punishment aside, I crouched back over him, checking and finding a steady pulse in his throat. The relief that washed through me when his golden eyes opened was almost enough to choke me.

But it was short-lived.

“What have you done, Kitten?” he whispered in a hoarse, pain-filled voice. “I can’t hold him back. You need to kill me, please.”

“Wh-what? No, River, I just brought you back.” Confusion clouded my brain, and I shook my head at him. “I’m not fucking killing you. What the shit, River?”

“Then...” He trailed off, grinding his teeth together and grunting in pain. “Then wake Vali. He made me a promise.”

I sat back on my heels in shock. Vali had promised River he would kill him if he ever changed? What the hell could be that damn bad? And if he was so afraid, why didn’t he just fucking leave me?

“River,” I started, but it was too late. His body was already shifting, despite his clear efforts to hold it at bay. “Jesus fucking Christ, River. Just give in to it. This is insanity!”

He looked like he was going to disagree with me, but he was losing the fight.

Trying to get out of his way, I went to shuffle backward but slipped in his blood and smacked my elbow painfully on the floor. Hissing with pain, I took my eyes off River for the briefest second to regain my balance, but that was all it took.

When I looked back, the River I knew was gone. In his place stood an enormous, snow-white wolf with River’s beautiful, golden eyes.

“Holy shit,” I breathed, pushing myself unsteadily to my feet so I felt a little less like food. I could hardly be blamed for that reaction with a wolf the size of a donkey staring me down. “River? Are you okay? See, that wasn’t so bad, was it? You’re just a wolf. A really massive, white wolf.”

Unlike when Cole and Vali changed into dragon form, though, there was no trace of the River I knew in this beast’s eyes, and I sucked in a sharp breath of fear.

The wolf lowered his head, his lips pulled back in a growl and his eyes locked on me. Like I was the enemy...

“River—” I started once more, but cut off when his form began to ripple again, like he was about to shift back. Or that would have been the best-case scenario.

Instead, he shifted again into something else. His snow-white coat shuddered once and turned completely ink black. His form increased in size until he stood towering over me, and fangs extended throughout his mouth until it was like staring into the mouth of a shark.

Most frightening though, were his eyes. No longer were they the familiar liquid gold of my British lover. They were molten, rolling, fiery pits that made me feel like I was staring straight into the mouth of Hell itself.

This.

This was what he had been so afraid of.

“River?” I whimpered, feeling desperate. Not because I feared for my life; I couldn’t care less for that. I was desperate to see that there was some small flicker of him left inside that beast. To know that I hadn’t just condemned him to a fate so much worse than the death he’d been so close to just minutes ago.

His huge head lowered, saliva dripping from his rows of razor fangs and hitting the ground with a hiss like acid. Actually, based on the holes in the stone, it seemed like his saliva really was acid.

A low, menacing growl rumbled from deep within his chest, and I braced myself. For what, I wasn’t totally sure. To get my head ripped off, probably.

I squeezed my eyes tight shut out of reflex as his jaws extended and came close enough that I could feel his scalding breath on my face. But then... nothing.

Peeling one eye open again, I found myself standing alone in the room of horrors.

Scattered around the edges were the motionless forms of my guardians, at my feet was a sickeningly large puddle of River’s blood, but there in the middle of the room, like a broken doll, lay Lucy.

“Lucy,” I moaned, taking three stumbling steps across the room to where she was, then I collapsed to my knees like my strings had just been cut. With a shaking hand, I reached out and rolled her over to face me, trying not to cringe at her ice-cold, waxy skin.

“Lucifer? You can’t be...” I trailed off as a sob ripped through my body. For a long moment, I just clutched her to me. The raw ache inside made an unsealable wound where Lucy belonged—my best friend, my partner-in-crime—my sister. The tears wouldn’t fall, even though the primal scream inside me didn’t seem to have an end. I pressed my face against her purple hair. I needed Lucy to be alive. I’d fought to keep her that way, pushed, pulled—dammit. She would never give up on me; I would be damned if I’d give up on her.

Sniffing back tears and trying to calm my breathing, I sat back on my heels and laid trembling hands on Lucy’s chest. Surely if Bridget could keep her blood pumping for several days after death, I could restart her heart. Couldn’t I?

“Come on, come on, come on,” I begged my magic to do it’s thing, mentally grabbing it with both hands and trying to force it down into Lucy’s body. At first it seemed to be working, transferring through my hands and into my best friend, but all it did was circulate her body uselessly and then return to me feeling confused.

Over and over I tried the same thing, despite already having seen it wasn’t working. Sometimes, it just wasn’t that easy to admit defeat.

How long I knelt there, trying to force my magic to heal the girl who had been there for me my entire life—my oldest friend and closest companion since as long as I could remember—I had no idea. At some stage, I exhausted myself and just lay there on the cold stone floor beside her, sobbing and cursing that poisonous bitch that had birthed me.

I didn’t hear Caleb arrive, and when he smoothed the hair away from my face with frozen fingers, his words weren’t reaching my ears. His blue, frostbitten lips were moving, sure, but all I could hear was a dull whooshing noise.

Maybe I was dying too? Maybe Bridget’s spell had worked after all and this was just how a Ban Dia died. That would certainly explain why I couldn’t heal Lucy...

My limbs were numb, and I couldn’t have moved even if I’d tried to as Caleb collected me up in his arms and carried me out of that horrific place. My eyes drifted closed somewhere along the tunnel we had come in through, and I put no effort into opening them again.

What was the point?

Jonathan was dead. Lucy was dead. And River... probably wished he was dead right now.

Everything I touched turned to shit.