The neophytes chant as one, their dark magic building along with their spell.

“Where are our witches?” I ask, the vile magic coating my tongue with its filth.

“En route,” Gemini says, crouching as his twin wolf snarls at his side. “They’re not as quick as Genevieve or Ines.”

“Figures,” I mumble.

“We’re out of weres,” Gemini adds, his voice tight.

“Uh-huh,” I agree, my voice cracking as my inner heat gains momentum.

Gemini keeps his focus straight in front of him, growling when two wolves race ahead. They slam into an invisible barrier, writhing and whimpering in agony.

“What are you doing?” he yells when I start forward.

I frown, my gaze skipping from where he’s clasping me by the shoulder, back to his face. “The same thing I always do, baby. Getting ready to burn shit down.”

I whirl, a pipeline of spinning flames striking the witch in the center.

He detonates in chunks, that’s right, chunks. I was more careful with the amount of magic I used indoors. But we’re outside now, and no way are these bastards getting away with this.

The writhing wolves shake off their stupor, charging with Gemini and the remaining weres.

“Keep them off me,” I yell. “I’m going after Johnny. Emme, launch me!”

I stand tall, my left arm bent at my side and my right arm up a la Supergirl.

Emme stops running, glancing back at me. “Are you sure?”

“Yes, the nematodes are here to collect Johnny. We can’t let that happen.” I resume my Supergirl pose.

“They’re neophytes, Taran.”

I slap my hands down. “Like I give a shit, Emme.”

She cuts me off with a very irritated throw.

Screw Supergirl. Once more I’m screaming, and flailing, and certain I’m going to die.

The one shoe I managed to hang onto flies off and I land in Gemini’s arms. Apparently, he “went long.”

“Put me down,” I insist.

“Not now,” he bites out.

I look behind us. The panther has left the fight and is gunning for us.

Gemini swears, grounding to a halt as a wall of skull warriors appear, blocking our path. He plants me down and from one leap to the next changes into his massive wolf form.

I don’t quite have my bearings when his fangs clamp down on a warrior’s head. He breaks through the skull, flinging the body toward the encroaching panther.

My feet are swept from under me when a warrior snatches me up by the waist. I scream, with rage and all the power boiling its way through me, forcing him to drop me when he bursts into flames.

I land on my knees, my fingers digging into the soil as the ancient magic that makes up my arm takes over and encases my body in an armor of flames.

The panther reaches me, her large paw slapping me aside when her fangs fail to bite through my fire. I roll, the pain her strike causes combined with my accelerating magic scorching the earth and singeing a path across the field.

My body and the earth beneath me tremble. The same thing that happened in Egypt. My arm knows we’re in trouble and is reacting to the threat, feeding my flame with mystical kindling and an extra-large dose of otherworldly gasoline. 

“Power,” I whisper, getting a high from the wickedly addicting heat coursing through me. “Give me, power.”

“Oh, shit,” Bren says behind me.

“Everyone run!” Gemini yells.

The absurd mix of mayhem and mysticism fusing within me peaks, and in one colossal moment it erupts, colliding against everything in the vicinity.

My head jerks up as a mushroom cloud of blue and white spreads along the sky, cloaking the atmosphere as far as I can see. The release should feel good and leave me begging for more. Yet as I find what looks like an ocean of fire eating away at the field, all I feel is out of control.

I stand and walk forward, the heat rising from my core creating ripples in the air as flaming skulls rain from the sky. I kick them out of my way when they land in front of me, my bare feet searing them and leaving marks. Their bodies are gone. Now they’re left to burn along with the barren wasteland the area has become.

I expected them to burst into color like all of Johnny’s tattoos. But these were different than the rest, maybe because he’s become so much more than he was.

My hands ball into fists as I think about everything he did. I know I’m moving toward him. I feel him. He’s no longer far away.

It’s only when I reach the skull of the panther that I stop, bending to lift it, just as I had lifted the other feline skull in my vision.

This isn’t my sister. It’s the shifter. My fire killed her as she shrank in size to return to her original human shell.

This time when I cry, it’s from relief. My sister doesn’t die. She’ll have her chance to have her babies. I drop the skull. Provided Johnny meets his own damn fate.

The knowledge gives me strength and propels me ahead, my quick steps turning into a sprint when I feel Johnny’s magic build.

I find him in the parking lot by a large Dodge Ram, clutching his belly as he shoves his way inside the cabin. Maybe I couldn’t destroy the skulls, but I did succeed in causing him a lot of pain.

Johnny yells to the fan trailing him to start the vehicle. The man, he doesn’t look good. His skin is horribly blistered and his face is smeared with soot. He teeters back and forth, struggling to reach the truck. He must have been trapped in the arena when it caught fire, along with everyone else trying to protect Johnny.

If the others look anything like this man, they didn’t make it. They died for Johnny, not that he’ll ever care.

His eyes widen when he sees me. He shuts the door and scrambles into the driver’s seat.

I launch a fireball from my arm, nailing the truck and sending it rolling across the lot. It crashes into the side of Johnny’s tour bus, igniting the image of his face on fire.

Legs kick at the splintered windshield, banging frantically against the glass. Something clasps my shoulder, brutally clamping down. I don’t turn around. I ignite, my body a conduit of flames that expand out.

I turn enough to see the last of Johnny’s skull warriors disintegrate to ash. But at the sound of breaking glass, my attention is all on Johnny.

He crawls out from the busted windshield, bleeding from the multitude of cuts raking his skin and holding tight to his stomach from the damage I did to his skulls.

Except I’m not done with him yet.

I charge after him, tackling him when he tries to run away. We fall hard against the asphalt where I proceed to beat the unholy shit out of him.

I’ll be the first one to admit that I can’t fight. But hell hath no fury like Taran Wird pissed off. I punch him in the head, kicking him repeatedly, and bringing down my elbow hard into his chest.

His hands snatch at the air, trying to catch my wrists as he yells at me to stop.

He gains the upper hand, rolling on top of me and pinning me in place. “I don’t want to hurt you,” he spits out. “Not you!”

My chest rises and falls in quick succession, my lungs desperate for air from all the energy I’ve expunged. “No, you just want to hurt my sister,” I grind out.

His features scrunch, his voice pained. “That’s not true. I would never hurt anyone you loved. The neophytes told me they’d leave you alone, that you and your family would get out in one piece.”

“They’re liars!” I scream at him. “And so are you!” My eyes burn with vicious tears. “Destiny told me, she’s saw it. Remember Destiny?” My gaze flickers to the tattoo of the serpent puncturing the heart. “She never did anything to you and you fucking murdered her!”

“It’s not murder, it’s survival!” Fluid pools in his mouth and he begins to sob. “I want to live, Taran. I want to be safe. It’s all I’ve ever wanted to do.”

He looks up at the inferno the area has become. “I didn’t choose to be a Fate, Taran. It chose me. All I’ve ever wanted was a normal life—to be a normal guy, not this freak.” He keeps his stare ahead. “But here I am, with vampires, weres, and witches all wanting me and none of them able to save me. It’s the reason I sent my messenger to find the one group of preternaturals who could.”

His messenger? My eyes widen. “The butterfly tat,” I say. “You set it free to find the shifters—God damn it, even after they killed your friends?”

“I didn’t want to, I had to. They’re the strongest, you said it yourself.” He grabs my shoulders, shaking me hard. “Can’t you see? This is my chance, Taran. My one chance to survive this shit.”

He’s playing at my sympathy. I know what it’s like to be weird and hated for it. I know what it’s like to beg God and the Powers that Be to give us a normal existence so we can have homes, and husbands, and babies. But that’s not our reality. For good or for bad, this is what we are.

Johnny breaks down. “I just want to live,” he tells me. “Just let me live.”

“No.”

My hand shoots out, my nails digging into the flesh of his chest. Johnny screams, spilling lava from his Mordor tat straight into my arm.

I expect pain, loads of it. Except all I feel is magic.

Like a volcano meeting a super nova of energy, our magic pummels each other, both ancient powers battling it out to see which bitch rules best.

The earth quakes beneath us, splitting the ground, but the Grim Reaper will golf with my decapitated head before I let Johnny go.

I clamp down on my teeth, scraping my nails further in. Through the smoke and our burning surroundings, I see Destiny, her image appearing in a strobe of scattered pictures.

Tye is on top of her, his large palms pressing into her chest as he performs CPR. He’s begging her not to leave, to come back to him, crying out that he can’t live without her.

My head spins from the diapason of energy streaming from my hand. Combine it with the heat surging around me, and relentless rumbles from the cracking earth, I can’t even focus.

The titillation of noise, power, and visuals is too much to take. I don’t know anything. What my magic is doing. What Johnny is doing to fight back. All I know is I can’t let go.

A fist comes down on my face. Then another.

I ignore the instinct to protect my head, keeping my hand in place and sinking my fingers deeper.

I think I’m losing when the visual of Destiny and Tye fades, becoming lighter. I make out things here and there: the wolves guarding her closing in, the one in front telling Tye to leave her, and how the wolf staggers back when Tye shrugs him off.

Tye’s compressions quicken. He’s not giving up on her, and I won’t either.

My nails pierce bone when the vision slips further away. “Burn, baby,” I gasp. “Burn.”

The next blow to my face stirs an additional spark inside me, causing it to intensify and gifting it with the incandescent glow and heat I need.

Like Velcro being ripped from its source, my fingers tear off Johnny’s skin.

Destiny screams.

And so does Johnny.

What happens next is hard to say. I’m no longer me. I’m one of many atoms in a bomb that goes boom.

I soar into the atmosphere, my limbs listless and weak, jolting when my back strikes a sharp rock and I roll down an incline raging with fire.

I don’t know how to stop. But my mate does. He appears, the brutal way he snatches hold of my arm, slapping me awake.

“Hang on,” he yells. “I have you.”

The earth is quaking, the remains of the burning arena falling away into the giant crater I’m currently dangling over.

“Oh, shit,” I say.

Gemini holds me with one hand, using the other and his bare feet to scale the side of the rumbling wall.

Chunks of dirt fall like hail, pelting our heads and crumbling against our faces. But I refuse to look down. No way in hell do I want any part of that inferno.

Shayna pokes her head out from the ledge. “Dude!” she says.

Koda appears, so does Bren, reaching for Gemini as he nears the top and yanking us out.

“Time to get the fuck out, peeps,” Bren says, tossing Emme over his shoulder and darting toward a nearby grove.

Gemini hauls me into his arms and races away, placing me down in a small clearing only when the trembles at our feet subside.

Everything behind us is on fire, everything. Good thing we have that arena size crater sucking it all in.

“Did I do that?” I ask.

“Yup,” Bren answers.

With the exception of me and my sisters, whose clothes hang in pieces, all the weres are naked, not that I see much.

Everyone is covered in soot and coughing. Including me.

“What exactly happened?” I ask.

Shayna and Emme exchange glances. “You sorta blew everything up,” Shayna tells me. “Again.”

I point to the hole. “But how did I create that? That’s . . . huge.”

Gemini shakes his head as if he can’t believe it himself. “Your power and Johnny’s had it out. From what we could see the impact broke through the ground and struck a fault line, empowering it with magic and creating the crater.” He frowns, looking out across the hot mess. “The witches are bespelling the first responders and survivors.” He tilts his head, listening closely, not that I hear a damn thing. “They’re inferring the fire started within the arena after the earthquake struck due to defective wiring.”

I look back at the swirls of blue, white, and gold, my power intermixing with Johnny’s, I suppose. It must have been something to see the colossal amount of energy it took to feed the fault line, and to watch nature respond so brutally in return.

But it was something else entirely to experience it, and to be the cause.

I watch the flames eating their way into the sky a while longer before I speak. “Destiny’s dead.”

The quiet that stretches out among us is almost more than I can take. Bren huffs. “Yeah. That’s what it looked like.”

I raise my chin. “You saw what happened to her?”

It’s Gemini who answers. “We all did. The magic that unleashed when you fought Johnny debilitated us. We couldn’t do or see much past the visions.” He looks at me. “They were yours, weren’t they? The ones of Destiny in bed with Tye fighting to revive her?”

“Not completely. I think she wanted me to see, so I did. With how bad she was hurting, it was the only way she could communicate.”

I remember how dizzy the strobing images made me, and how hard it was to differentiate between the here and now and what was happening in Tahoe. Tears fill Shayna’s and Emme’s eyes, except I’m the one who cries first.

“The tattoo was what Johnny used to drain her,” I say. “The one of the snake piercing the heart.”

“Destiny was our heart,” Shayna says, repeating my exact thoughts. The realization causes her tears to run faster and all at once, she breaks down.

“She was,” I agree. I sniff, trying uselessly to keep it together. “I just don’t think any of us knew it until it was too late.”

Koda gathers Shayna into his arms when she cries into her hands. Like the rest of us, his body was battered, and while his wolf has healed him, it can’t protect him from Shayna’s sorrow. He holds her, hurting because she does.

Gemini pulls me to him. “I just don’t understand how he did it,” I say, my misery making it hard to speak.

He sighs. “Destiny never knew of him. But the Fate always knew her. I think he baited her with his music, calling to her when he finally believed he could take her.”

“But he seemed so shocked when he first saw her,” I say. “Like he was seeing something he didn’t know existed.”

“I think you’re wrong,” he tells me gently, his knuckles passing gently across my skin. “If anything, I think he was shocked to see you, and your sisters. He wasn’t expecting anything like you.”

I ease away from him, just enough to see his face. “So all that screaming and suffering on the mountain wasn’t real on his part?”

He strokes my hair, appearing sad. “It was. Except where she hurt because her magic was leaving her, my guess is he was in pain due to the gamut of energy being fed into his body.” He releases my strands. “He probably spent years nourishing the tattoo so he could take Destiny’s power when they finally met. I just don’t think he expected what leeching that power would cost him.”

“We should have let Tye kill him when he had the chance,” Bren mutters. He spreads his arms out. “Look at all this shit, all these dead humans, the rest of us coming close to biting it. It could have ended before it began.”

Gemini frowns. “I don’t agree. The amount of energy passing from Destiny into Fate was colossal. If Tye had killed him then, it would have erupted and destroyed us all.”

“Instead it only killed poor Destiny,” I say.

Emme edges beside me when I wipe my face. “Here,” she says. “Let me heal you.”

Gemini releases me and steps toward the other weres to give us space. Like the rest of us, they look aggrieved.

“I’m all right,” I mumble. I’m not a masochist, but I feel like one then. I should have saved her. I should have done more. But I don’t think I was enough.

No matter how hard we fought, none of us were enough to save her.

I stare out in the direction of the fiery pit, pondering all the things that went wrong.

“Taran,” Emme says. “I don’t think you realize how hurt you are.”

Maybe I don’t. Maybe I don’t want to.

I’m having trouble breathing. Mostly though, I’m numb. Johnny was a victim of chance. Like me and my sisters, these powers were shoved upon him whether he wanted them or not. The thing is, we stopped being victims and decided to do something good with all the shit we were handed. Johnny didn’t, he continued to play the victim only to become the aggressor, attacking an innocent and killing her slowly.

My breath releases in painful bursts. I can’t imagine how much Destiny suffered, not just since meeting Johnny, but in the last few moments of her life. It must have been torture, and yet she used what remained of her strength to help us.  

Oh, Destiny, how I would love to see you bouncing along in your zebra prints one last time.

“Taran,” Emme pleads.

“Emme, I’m fine,” I tell her.

“No, you’re not,” Gemini answers gruffly, evidently articulating what everyone is thinking based on the way their stares hone in on my face. He storms to my side. “You almost died, twice, and your face and body reflect it. Just let Emme heal you.”

I raise my hands to my face, wincing when the numbing lifts and the pain sharpens. My skin is swollen. “All right,” I say.

It doesn’t take long for Emme to heal me, everything snapping into place rather viciously once she gets going. She cringes, glancing away even as her fingers slip tenderly away from my face.

Gemini takes the phone Emme hands him when she finishes and calls the Den. He’s communicating with another were to arrange our flight home when Shayna’s phone rings.

She reaches into her back pocket, her motions slow, reflecting her exhaustion. “Hello?” Her eyes widen, her head whipping from me, to Emme, and then to Koda whose gaze is just as wide. “Dude, are you serious?”

“What is it?” I ask, hurrying forward.

She looks directly at me. “It’s Destiny. She’s alive.”

My body whips around as I feel a penetrating and familiar pull. From the flames and smoke near the crater, an immense peacock emerges, clutching Johnny’s limp form.

Gemini barks out orders, alerting the pack to follow.

But he’s too late.

The peacock disappears into the horizon, taking Fate with him.