Silas paced in the cage, an almost comical opposite to Jason who had become unnaturally still in Alex’s presence. As much as he hated Nickelova, if there was a way to free her, he would. She was far less dangerous than Alex.

“Do you remember these?” Alex asked, pulling a bag of bones from the Suburban. Silas’s forehead tightened to the point of pain, a muscle in his jaw tensing and releasing in time with his heart.

“The girl’s bones from the human crime scene,” Silas said.

“You wondered why I’d taken them, why I’d stripped the girl’s flesh from them.” Alex gave him a smug look, and the presumptuousness of the statement wasn’t lost on Silas. “While there is no shortage of human-on-human crime, it seems the perpetrator of this particular murder had a secret. She was possessed by a demon. A new demon, birthed into this world by a young girl who played with the wrong Ouija board.”

“A demon’s human bones,” Silas said, remembering Julius’s theory.

“You’re familiar? I’d not heard of it as a werewolf, but one learns things in one’s travels. Shall we call this one? An interesting fact about demons is they can fold space and travel from one place to another in practically no time. This shouldn’t take long.” Alex dumped the bones into the second circle, eyeing the darkening sky. “Come out, come out, wherever you are.” He pulled a lighter from the pocket of his cargo shorts and squatted down to run the flickering heat beneath the end of the femur.

A cold wind manifested in the trees, darkness gathering between the branches in the woods across from the cage. Shadows danced and expanded, stretching and poking toward the ritual site. Silas could swear he heard whispers in the rustling leaves. And then a woman was there, a dark woman with upturned eyes and tattoos that glowed beneath the long sleeves of her shirt.

“Why have you summoned me, wolf,” she hissed.

“Step into the circle.”

“No.”

Alex thrust the lighter under the bones, and the demon twisted in discomfort, a high-pitched keening escaping her throat. With jerky, tortured movements, she stepped into the circle despite herself.

“Ukta rho morbidae titan.” Alex retracted the flame.

The demon turned into a dark mist, flying left then right, but the ring was sealed. She bounced off the walls of the cell, shrieking in a way that forced Silas to cover his ears.

Alex seemed unruffled by the sound. He turned his face toward the darkening sky and the full moon whose face was already visible in it. “We’re running out of time. Bring the vampire.”

A familiar tug rolled under Silas’s skin, and he understood the urgency in Alex’s voice. The shift was almost upon them. He winced as his spine elongated, pitching him forward, then eased off slightly. He’d be a wolf soon. So would Alex. But the coming lunar eclipse meant they wouldn’t stay that way. He’d shift back at some point, and so would Alex. The perfect conditions for him to complete his ritual.

“Silas,” Jason whispered. “We’re both starving. What if our wolves—”

“Try to eat each other? They won’t. We’re pack. Just try to remember to dig.” In fact, Silas wasn’t sure how their intense hunger and thirst would manifest itself after the shift, but it was his job to remain positive for his brother. A leader never admitted defeat.

Alex groaned, fighting the shift, his hands pawing at the ends of his shirt. He pulled it over his head. Meanwhile, Olivia dragged the vampire from the truck, the ankh tattoo Julius had mentioned clearly visible beneath her ear. Normally a vampire could easily outmuscle and outmaneuver a shifter, but this female vamp looked like she hadn’t fed in weeks. Her cheeks were sunken in, and her eyes were dull. Drugged, Silas guessed. She’d been fed sulfralite like her partner, who had staked himself in the chest.

Beside him, Jason began madly stripping out of his suit, a red flush coloring his cheeks above his thickening beard. Silas’s pulse pounded in his ears, his breath coming in huffs. He unbuttoned his jeans and lifted his T-shirt over his head.

Alex sealed the vampire within the third circle, then stumbled to the place where the circles of the triquetra overlapped. Directly outside their purple boundary, he started a bonfire, igniting the kindling beneath a teepee of firewood.

Silas groaned in chorus with Alex and Jason as the moon tugged at the wolf within. This was the ultimate betrayal. Despite hating Alex with every molecule of his being, this shift, this reaction to the moon, was a reminder that they were made from the same stuff, cut from the same primordial cloth. How he would have loved to think he was fundamentally different from Alex, that the man was a monster the likes of which had never been seen before, nor would be seen again. But that wasn’t the case. Alex was a werewolf, same as him. A werewolf who had turned himself into a monster by choice. Which meant, there was a potential monster in everyone. The thought made Silas want to come out of his skin.

The wave of pain ebbed. As the teepee of branches blazed to life, Alex backed to the altar at the front of the formation and braced himself on the stone table. “Almost time.” He madly flipped pages in the grotesque book.

Olivia strode machinelike to his side, the fine wrinkles around her mouth and eyes deepening in the light of the fire. Alex wrapped a length of chain around his torso and padlocked it to the base of the table. “Keep me in this spot,” he said to Olivia.” Do you understand?” Olivia nodded robotically.

Alex pitched forward in time with the same wave of pain that sliced through Silas. Older wolves shifted faster. Because Alex and Silas were the same age, the shift was upon him. Jason, on the other hand, might have a few minutes more.

There was a soft rustle in the bushes behind Silas.

“What is that?” Jason asked, squinting into the dark foliage.

Silas couldn’t answer. He finished removing his clothes as his stomach hollowed out and his jaw jutted forward.

Two reflective amber eyes blinked at him from the darkness, low to the ground.

“A raccoon?” Jason whispered, creeping toward the back of the cage.

Silas didn’t care what it was. His hands hit the dirt, his fingers bending under as claws sprouted from his first knuckle. Jet black hair budded from his forearms and climbed toward his shoulders, bubbling under and bursting through his skin. He squatted on his haunches, his throat elongating with his ears.

In his altered state, he could hear the small animal breathing in the bushes outside the cage, smell the wild, musky scent of its coat. With sharp eyes, he blinked up at the full moon above and howled. Jason joined in, his throaty human moan morphing into a proper wolf call. Alex picked up on the song, instinct overriding animosity as he raised his nose to the moon.

The last thing Silas registered before the wolf completely took over was the steady sound of digging near the back of the cage. Whatever was in that bush was scratching at the dirt as if its life depended on it.

* * *

The alpha’s paws were in the dirt. No, it was his hands, and they weren’t working as they had a minute ago. The wolf beside him was faring better, throwing dirt with fully functional front claws. Silas came into his head in a rush, his human body bent over a hole. His wolf had been digging, trying to get at something on the other side of the bars.

Jason’s wolf stuck his head into the hole, snapping at the animal in the bushes behind them. He was still too big to fit through the hole and he retreated to dig again. Silas turned his face toward the full moon, now totally eclipsed, blackened out by the shadow of the earth. He’d shifted back faster because he was older. Jason would likely follow in a few minutes.

Jason’s wolf whined as the creature from the bushes emerged, a dainty red fox with upturned ears and a long bushy tail. “Meredith?” Silas whispered. The fox’s eyes blinked knowingly.

A sound behind him made her scamper into the bushes. He looked over his shoulder. The altar. Alex. The rogue wolf was shifting back, almost human again in the light of the fire. Olivia was still there, hovering over him like some kind of prison warden.

Silas looked back down at his hands, at the place where Jason was still digging. Two magical jujus, similar to the one Grateful had used on Laina, lay twitching on either side of the hole. Did Meredith break whatever spell Alex had used to stop them from burrowing under? Was she trying to help them?

The hole was almost big enough. Almost. It would be a tight fit. Silas pushed Jason’s wolf away, thankful when the beast obeyed. He must have still recognizing Silas as alpha, even in his human form. He grabbed Jason’s suit jacket and tossed it into the hole, lining the jagged earth at the bottom. Silas tried to slide under, but his shoulders wouldn’t fit. Fuck. Jason was slightly smaller; maybe he’d fit when he shifted back. Silas backed out of the hole.

“Alex. Please. There’s still time to stop this,” he heard Nickelova beg.

Quickly, Silas pooled his clothing to conceal the hole and crossed to the bars in time to see Alex stand, fully shifted, behind the stone table.

“Get the sacrifice,” he ordered Olivia, leaning over the book.

Sacrifice. Another sacrifice? Something besides the three?

Olivia strode to the Suburban and opened the hatch. There was the thump of something heavy being repositioned, and then the woman emerged with another woman in her arms, one with mahogany hair and a curvy build.

Silas forced his eyes to focus in the dim light and tried to get a better look. He sucked air through his nose. Even if he couldn’t see her face, he could smell her. Laina.

“Alex, don’t you dare! I will kill you,” he yelled. “Let her go!”

Alex grinned over the pages of The Book of Flesh and Bone. He moved aside slightly in order to give Olivia room to arrange Laina on the massive stone table behind the book. What was wrong with her? She wasn’t just unconscious. By the way her arm dangled lifelessly over the edge of the stone, Silas might have presumed she was dead.

“I gave you a chance to join me,” Alex said, looking directly at him. “I gave you a chance to die. Now you will live with your sister’s blood on your hands, as your parents’ blood is on your hands.”

“I’ll rip your heart out of your chest, you bastard.” Silas gripped the bars until his knuckles turned white. “Back away from her, now!”

He gave Silas a patronizing look. “It’s over. Laina’s blood and that of her unborn child will be the ultimate sacrifice. Watch, alpha,” he spat. “Learn what happens to those who cross Alex Ravien Bloodright.”

Alex placed his hand on the open book and began to chant, the amulet around his neck glowing bright red. Sweat beaded across his forehead and his face tightened with concentration. Purple flames sparked near the bonfire, then spread along the stones, encircling the demon, the vampire, and Nickelova.

The dragon fae’s screams sliced through the darkness. Ordinary fire couldn’t hurt a dragon, but this was far from ordinary. It blistered her flesh. Silas covered his ears at her pitiful cries, helpless against the flames that consumed her. The vampire, drugged and barely conscious, did not scream at all. She burned as if she were already dead. The demon’s shrieks rivaled Nickelova’s.

Silas had no personal attachment to the three creatures burning alive. Nickelova, at least, had earned her place in the flames. But no creature deserved the brutality of this ritual. The entire thing turned his stomach. Evil, by any definition. And he knew Laina was next.

As Alex continued his chant, Silas noticed something change. The glow of the amulet faded with Nickelova’s screams. Was it possible that once she was dead, its magic would die altogether?

And then it was over. Nickelova and the demon went abruptly silent, the three rings now entirely swallowed by fire. Nickelova’s body was unrecognizable, a silhouette of ash. The demon was gone too, along with the bones that had called it here. The vampire had been reduced to a pile of dust.

Alex slumped over the book, his chant becoming weaker. The amulet was as dark as an ordinary piece of jewelry. Now was Silas’s chance. Alex was drained, and Nickelova’s death appeared to have rendered the amulet useless. If he could escape, he might be able to take Alex down.

A hand landed on his shoulder. Jason. His brother pointed toward the hole. Meredith, human Meredith, stood naked on the other side of the bars. She motioned to him, glancing back at Alex.

Silas approached her cautiously.

“Can I trust you?” he whispered.

“It wasn’t me,” she said. “Whatever you think I did, it was my mother. She made herself look like me. Do you remember what I tried to show you in Soleil’s room?”

“The pink-tinged jelly.”

“Every time a skinwalker shifts they leave behind an excretion. It’s a thick mucus their bodies produce to protect them from the shift. When I saw it in Soleil’s room, I knew my mother had been the one to steal the book. I left you the heart, knowing the enchantment around your house would protect it. I thought you’d destroy Nickelova and end this. But then my mother lured your sister away.”

“I hate to break up this little reunion, but we’ve got to hurry. Come on, brother. There’s no time for this.” Jason glanced over his shoulder. Alex’s chanting grew louder, the fire blazing toward the sky in great plumes.

Silas stared at Meredith, trying to fit all the pieces together in his head. If what she was saying was true, his emotions had nowhere to go. Did he still love her? Could he forgive her for shooting Soleil and playing into Alex’s hands?

Jason scoffed, then tried his best to fit through the hole. It was too small, even for him. Meredith picked up a stick and started breaking off pieces of rocky soil, helping Jason fight his way through.

“Can you shift back? It will be faster if you dig,” Jason said.

With tears in her eyes, Meredith took one more look at Silas and shifted into fox form. She dug frantically at the hole.

Jason succeeded in getting his head and one arm through but could go no farther.

“What now?” Silas murmured, his heart a lead weight in his chest.

As if in answer to his question, the ground began to shake. He bent his knees to avoid falling over. The three interlocking circles had transformed into a pit of fire. In the center of it all, a dark figure rose, a huge beast, humanoid but for two massive horns growing from the sides of its head. The sight of the thing filled Silas’s heart with the kind of dread he’d only known in nightmares.

“By the goddess,” Jason murmured.

Olivia held a dagger out to Alex, his eyes focused on Laina’s unconscious body.

Rage filled Silas, a deep, hot need for revenge that made his skin bubble as his wolf came to the surface. He hated Alex and as the goddess was his witness, he would not let him win. Concentrating all his hateful energy on his right hand, Silas drew on the eclipsed moon above and willed the appendage to shift. His bones broke and his fingers melded into his palm.

“Silas… by the goddess.” Jason backed out of the hole. He looked toward Meredith. “I’ve never seen this done before.”

With his shifted hand, Silas dug, giant claws ripping through the stone and packed earth. In no time, the hole was big enough for Jason to fit through. Meredith’s fox backed away as Silas slid through next, rotating his shoulders through the hole in the rough earth. He arose outside the cage, with only one goal in mind. He was going to kill Alex Bloodright.

“What the hell is that thing?” Jason asked, gaping at the form within the fire.

Silas took a deep breath before answering. “We’ve never been formally introduced, but I’m guessing that’s Panaal.”