I opened my eyes, pushing the burning debris off my body. The festival was in ruins. The stands were broken, the wooden beams split, cracked, or on fire. Broken wood chips covered everything. People lay on the ground, moaning.

As I rose to my feet, pain blossomed all across my body. The hard fall of the explosion throwing me backwards had left me bruised. My top was stained with blood. A sharp piece of wood protruded from my side like a stake. I gritted my teeth, grabbed on to the piece of wood, and yanked it out. Dizzy, I swayed to the side but managed to stay on my feet. Thanks to the gods’ gifts of magic, my body could take a rough beating before it gave out—not to mention, I was no stranger to pain. I’d had much worse in my time at the Legion.

I looked for my family and anyone else I could help. As far as I could see, no one appeared dead. But they needed healing. I reached for the tiny emergency potion vials I kept in my belt.

As I was leaning over the first victim, I picked up the hint of a sound. And it was growing louder. I could hear them walking, the scrape of their thick boot soles against the cobbled road, the rough rasp of their breathing. There were six of them. And they were sneaking up on me.

The wind changed direction, and I smelled metal and gunpowder, the kind used for fireworks. The explosion had been caused by these new arrivals; I was sure of it.

There was something more, the scent of sweat, thick and harsh. Werewolves. I rose in my knees, facing them. There were six men, and they looked just how they smelled—wild, rugged, and untamed. A combination of denim and leather, of a cowboy posse and a motorcycle gang, they looked like the type of Frontier outlaws the festival visitors came here to gawk at.

The six bulky guys weren’t part of the entertainment, however; they were mercenaries. There was no missing that distinctive hired-gun look in their eyes, in the way that they moved. They were trouble, plain and simple. Add in their werewolf magic, and that meant double trouble.

They hadn’t shifted into beasts. They didn’t have to. They were very strong in human form, and I was horribly outnumbered.

But I had the element of surprise on my side. When they looked at me, their gazes were dismissive. They didn’t see me as a threat. I wasn’t in uniform, so they didn’t know I was a soldier in the Legion of Angels. They didn’t know I’d wrestled their kind before.

The werewolves walked under a canopy of decorative lights. The explosion had left the strands of flickering bulbs in a twist. The lights hissed and zapped over the chime and jingle of the carousel music. The festival site was in ruins, but that eerie carnival melody continued to play, as though possessed by a dark spirit.

“What are you?” gasped the werewolf with the big belt, his voice distant. His eyes were wide, locked on my hair.

My hair had only ever mesmerized humans and vampires before. Now here it was bewitching a werewolf.

My hair was not mundane, and it never had been, even when I’d had no real magic. And the stronger my magic grew, the more it enthralled people. I had no idea why it did that. I’d never heard of anyone with glowing hair. The ability to make vampires—and now werewolves—want to bite me was apparently my special superpower. Lucky me.

“She’s a woman,” another mercenary told Big Belt, giving him a hard slap on the back. “Haven’t you seen one of those before?”

Big Belt blinked, snapping out of the trance. His cheeks flushed red with embarrassment.

“Stop fooling around,” said the biggest of the bunch, the flickering overhead lights dancing across his perfectly bald scalp. “She’s just the right type.” His eyes scanned me, dissecting my features one by one. “A bit old, but otherwise the right type. Bag her.”

The right type? For what?

Slap Happy didn’t give me much time to contemplate those questions. He was already closing in, his tree-trunk arms ready to grab me. The rest stood back and watched with cool detachment. Honestly, I’d have preferred at least two or three of the mercenaries to come at me. That would have allowed me to play them off one another, but I’d make do with what I had.

“What are you doing?” I asked, infusing my voice with panic. I backed up slowly.

Slap Happy’s response was to lunge at me with a pair of handcuffs. I stepped aside and he stumbled past me.

“She’s fast,” he commented, glancing at the other mercenaries.

“You’re just slow,” I said, evading him again.

He tottered past me, and his hands bumped into a building. He turned away from the house, addressing me this time, “You’re more trouble than you’re worth.”

“If I’m more trouble than I’m worth, then why don’t you just leave me be?”

“No can do, darling. I’ve got orders.”

“What orders?”

He grabbed at me, moving fast. But I was faster.

“Stop moving, you annoying girl,” he grumbled.

“If you’re annoyed now, just wait and see how annoying I’ll be if you capture me,” I said proudly to him. “Hours and hours of me talking. Nonstop.” I flashed him a grin.

He paused, looking like he was contemplating that. And he didn’t like the thought of it at all.

“Just bag her already,” Big and Bald told him.

Slap Happy didn’t respond. He didn’t move. I’d compelled him, locking him inside my siren magic.

Big and Bald pushed past his frozen comrade, moving to subdue me. Slap Happy swiveled around and jumped in front of me, shielding me with his body.

“What the hell are you doing?! Get out of the way!” Big and Bald shouted, shoving him aside.

Slap Happy caught his hands, heaved him over his head, and launched him across the street.

“He’s been bewitched!” Big and Bald told the others, jumping off the pile of overturned trash cans. He pointed an accusatory finger at me. “She bewitched him.”

“Not bewitched, but compelled. Not a witch but a siren,” said the werewolf with the icy blue eyes.

The mercenaries were holding back, keeping their distance from me now. Sirens had an unsavory reputation of putting people under their spell by shattering their willpower. Werewolves didn’t like the idea of weakness. In fact, most of them refused to acknowledge that they had any.

Big and Bald waved them forward. Slow and cautious, they surrounded me from all sides at once.

“Don’t look at her,” he told them. “That’s how she put Gavin under her spell.”

“Sirens don’t just take control of your mind,” Icy Blue said. “If you make eye contact with them, they can turn you to stone.”

I laughed. “Those are just stupid stories. And, fyi, I don’t need to look at you to take control of your minds.”

The jaws of my magic clamped down on Icy Blue’s mind, locking it in my will. He turned around and joined Slap Happy in defending me. I’d planted one simple thought in their heads: that the fate of the Earth depended on their protecting me. It was an easy sell to their werewolf brains, feeding their innate desire to be heroes. I could take over all the other mercenaries’ minds without shedding a drop of blood.

The werewolves had other ideas. The four of them shifted all at once. I felt my two defenders slipping away as the magic of the pack worked on them, as they connected minds and combined willpower to resist my compulsion. My spell popped, ripping like a satin slash torn to shreds. My two werewolves changed into beasts, no longer mine.

They charged at me from all sides. I cast a fire barrier around myself, cutting them off.

“What are you?” Icy Blue demanded as they all stalked the border of my fire wall. “You can’t have the powers of a siren and an elemental.”

I’d never before heard a shifter talk in beast form. While I pondered that, one of the wolves jumped high. He was almost over my fire barrier, and then he would drop down right on top of me. I’d stolen their free will from them. They wouldn’t bag me now; they’d tear me to shreds.

I extended the orange flames up into the air, swallowing the wolf. Then I froze the fire to ice. The wolf fell to the ground with a thump, encased inside an ice block.

The other five werewolves snarled, spittle flying everywhere as they bared their yellow fangs at me. They circled around in a right formation, jumping at me from different sides, like five silver cannonballs. Unfortunately, my last spell had dissolved my fire shield, so nothing stood between me and them.

I dodged the wolves’ lunges, grabbing a string of the downed festival lights. They were still sizzling with a residual jolt of Magitech. I poured my own magic down the translucent string. The lightning charge on the string grew stronger, crackling and snapping. Slashing it like a whip at the wolves, I zapped one of them unconscious. There was enough power hissing on that string to take down an elephant—or one of those dinosaurs that thrived on the Black Plains, for that matter.

I slashed and snapped, striking down more wolves, then tying them up in the sizzling string. Four down, two to go.

Only I couldn’t see one of the wolves anywhere. His comrade knocked me down from behind. We wrestled and rolled across the dusty street. I was pretty strong, but unlike my opponent, I didn’t have claws or fangs. Under normal circumstances, I could have shifted to even the odds, but I’d already expended a lot of magic fighting the mercenaries. The wolf had me pinned down, his snapping fangs mere inches from my face.

He yelped once, then collapsed in a heap on top of me. Pushing his unconscious body off of me felt like bench-pressing a brick house, but with a few grunts and a lot of swearing, I made it back on my feet. Bella stood a few paces away, glittery magic powder glowing on her hands.

“I’m so glad to see you,” I told her. “Perfect timing.”

“Don’t celebrate yet. There’s another one around here somewhere.”

“He’s on the roof of the grocery building,” I muttered under my breath.

“How do you know?”

“I can hear him breathing.”

“How do you want to do this?” she asked me.

“We go to—”

Above us, a gun fired off a single shot. A large, furry mass dropped to the ground and landed with a sickening thump on the cobbled road. I looked down at the dead werewolf—and the bullet hole in his head. How had he died from that? Like vampires, werewolves were pretty resilient. It took more than a single shot to the head to kill them.

“The wound looks wrong,” Bella said beside me.

I inhaled deeply, picking up a harsh bitter scent. “Poison?”

“Likely.”

Wires snapped and magic sizzled behind me. I looked back to find the three mercenaries I’d wrapped up so neatly in festival lighting had broken free. They were all in human form now, their magic expended. In unison, they drew their guns and aimed them at me. As gunfire echoed off the buildings, I grabbed Bella and jumped out of the way.

But the shots weren’t for us. The five remaining werewolves lay on the ground, dead. I ran up to the rooftops, looking across the town to find the shooter who’d executed the mercenaries, but whoever it was, he was long gone. It was as though he’d vanished into thin air.

Frustration and anger twisted up inside my stomach. That shooter was linked to the bombing of my town, and he’d gotten away. I really wanted to punch something, but knocking holes into people’s houses wouldn’t help matters. So I hopped down and joined Bella in looking after the wounded.

“You were right, Leda,” croaked the townie who’d asked me to do magic tricks just an hour ago. “Magic isn’t a toy.”

“No, it isn’t,” Calli said.

Relief flooded me. She was all right. There were a few noticeable scratches and bruises on her skin, but nothing Bella couldn’t heal.

“Magic is a weapon,” Calli continued, brushing slivers of wood off of her. “And it’s dangerous.”

I gave the townie a small vial of healing potion to drink. “Rest now. Give the potion time to work.” I joined Calli.

“Have you seen Gin and Tessa?” she asked me.

“No. They were over by the dunking tank right before the explosion.”

Bella walked up beside us, and we searched the debris pile that covered the spot where the dunking tank had once stood. We didn’t find Tessa or Gin. We found a dozen dead paranormal soldiers instead.

“They were attacked,” Calli stated.

Bella looked down on their mauled bodies. “Those wounds were made with knives, not claws.”

A pained moan called out from beneath a wood board. I grabbed it and tossed it aside to reveal Brokers, the paranormal soldier I’d spoken to earlier. He was still alive.

“What happened?” I asked him as Bella grabbed her potion pack and tried to heal his injuries.

“Attacked,” he croaked, wincing like it hurt to speak.

One of his ribs had broken through his chest. I glanced at Bella, who shook her head. His injuries were too severe. He didn’t have long.

“Mercenaries?” I asked, even as Bella tried to save him. She refused to give up.

“Yes.”

“Werewolves?”

“No, different mercenaries,” he choked out weakly. “Not sure what they were.” His hand gripped my shoulder and he met my eyes. “The mercenaries took them.”

“Who?”

“All the young ladies between the ages of seventeen and nineteen.”

I looked around, frantically searching for my sisters. “My sisters?” I said.

His chest shook, and he coughed up blood.

“Tessa and Gin?” I asked, my heart racing.

“Gone,” he said, his voice like the drop of a coffin lid. “The mercenaries took them and fled across the Black Plains.”