Chapter 495
Panic was steering the ship.
She knew it. Aurelia knew it. The panic was a living thing in her chest, massive and loud and producing a heartbeat so fast her ribs were vibrating. The panic was telling her legs to run and her legs were obeying and the obeying was survival but the survival was directionless because she was running through a jungle she had never been in toward a destination she could never find while the things behind her were faster and older and could smell fear the way wolves smelled prey.
Aurelia: Turn. Left. Now.
She turned left. A vine caught her shin. Her foot hooked under a root that was raised just enough to catch a boot moving at speed and whose catching was total.
She went down.
Face first, driving the air from her lungs in a single forced exhale that left her empty and gasping on the jungle floor.
For two seconds, she couldn’t breathe. Her diaphragm was locked. Her lungs refused to expand. The fall had compressed everything in her chest into a space too small for oxygen and the too-small was producing a suffocation that was temporary and felt permanent.
Behind her. Movement. Closing fast.
More of them. Three. Five. The rustling of bodies moving through canopy at speed, the specific sound of predators converging on prey that had stopped moving, and the stopping was a signal and the signal was dinner.
“Run, little luna…”
“Shift for us…”
“We want the white one…”
The voices were layered. Overlapping. Coming from every direction, designed to pin her in place with sound alone, the acoustic equivalent of a net thrown over her mind.
She pushed herself up. Her hands were shaking. Her palms were scraped raw. Blood was running from a cut on her chin where the ground had split skin.
Aurelia: SERENA. GET UP.
She got up.
A shadow dropped from the canopy twenty paces ahead. Another landed to her right. A third materialized from the undergrowth to her left. Black eyes. Grey skin. Fangs extended. Three vampires forming a triangle around a woman who was standing in a jungle bleeding from her chin and whose bleeding was producing a scent that was drawing more of them and the more was audible in the trees above.
She was going to die here. The thought arrived clean, clinical, delivered by the part of her brain that processed odds and whose odds were zero. She was human. She couldn’t shift. Her magic was depleting. Her mates were gone. Her mages were gone. She was alone in a jungle surrounded by creatures whose hunger was ten thousand years old and whose old was patient enough to wait for her legs to give out.
Then Fin’s wolf spoke in her mind.
Xeon: SHIFT, AURELIA.
His words carried the specific frequency of an Alpha command delivered through a wolf-to-wolf channel that bypassed human consciousness and hit Aurelia directly.
An Alpha command through mindlink. From his wolf.
She didn’t know any of that was possible.
But Dex and Fin could feel her emotions. Fin must have felt her panic.
Light erupted.
White light. Blinding. Consuming. The shift detonated from her body with a force that sent the three vampires staggering backward, the light itself acting as a concussive blast that bought the four seconds the shift required.
Four seconds.
The shift completed in four seconds. Down from six.
Aurelia hit the jungle floor on four legs.
White. Glowing. Small. Fast. Her golden eyes opened and her chin lifted and the three vampires were still staggering from the light blast when the white wolf launched between two of them and into the jungle at a speed that erased her from their visual range in under two seconds.
Aurelia: They will not bite us in wolf form. Mate says that.
No one heard her say it because Serena was gone. Aurelia was alone.
That was how it worked. Aurelia shifted in, Serena shifted out. The default. The woman who had been running through a jungle bleeding from her chin and surrounded by vampires was now unconscious inside a wolf’s body, and the wolf was in control, and the control was total, and the woman would remember nothing.
The white wolf blazed through the dark jungle like a star fallen from its orbit. She dodged two vampires, spun under a third, and snapped the neck of one that lunged too close. The crack was loud. The neck reattached before she cleared the next tree.
She paused to fight a second. Three more appeared. She tore through those. Five replaced them. Ten materialized from the undergrowth.
Every second spent attacking only drew more of them. The kills were a dinner bell. The jungle was producing vampires at a rate that scaled with violence.
She bolted. Desperate. Scanning for Xeon’s scent. Any lifeline.
But the shadows grew thicker. Voices circling. Fangs gleaming.
A ring of vampires closed around her. Dozens deep. Then dozens more behind those. Too many. A set of claws raked her shoulder. Hot blood hit the dirt.
Another twenty surged in.
Xeon: AURELIA. I see you. I’m coming.
Fin’s wolf sprinted through the brush in a flash of black fur. He launched forward at Alpha speed. Aurelia heard him, saw him in the chaos, and sprinted low and fast, sliding beneath his leap as he collided with the front line of vampires like a meteor.
Xeon hit the swarm. Black fur rippling, eyes burning gold, his jaws snapping around the nearest vampire’s throat and ripping its head off in one brutal wrench. He spun. Claws tearing through another, shredding undead flesh. A third lunged from behind. He twisted and tore its arm off at the shoulder, flinging the limb into the dark.
More surged from every direction. Xeon snarled, pivoted, and launched himself toward Aurelia in a single massive leap that cleared two vampires and landed directly over her.
Aurelia sprinted beneath him, like a cage made of fur and teeth and the absolute refusal to let anything touch what was underneath him.
His hackles rose. His lips pulled back. A growl erupted from his chest that vibrated through her spine and into the dirt beneath her, the frequency of a wolf whose mate was between his legs and whose between was the safest place on this continent and whose safety was being enforced by every fang in his skull.
Xeon: Stay under me.