He thrust his metal claws into my chest and scoured my heart.
It burned! It burned like fire. Pain writhed through me, tearing me apart. I’d never felt an agony like this, an all-consuming, terrible pain. I shoved him back, but the pain didn’t stop.
The claws had broken off. They ripped my heart apart. My magic streamed past it, unable to remove them. I couldn’t heal the damage.
I was dying.
I screamed, and the trees shook from my howl.
I flailed, trying to rip the metal out of me.
No. No, I would not die today. I tore myself from my new form and fled, into the mud, into the sludge, where my old form slumped, discarded.
The world slammed into me in an explosion of pain. Silver burned in my heart.
“I got you,” Raphael was holding me. “I’ve got you.”
I was dying.
Suddenly Doolittle was there with the scalpel.
Where had he even come from? Was I hallucinating before death?
“It’s okay,” Raphael crooned in my ear.
Doolittle sliced my chest open. “Expel this silver if you want to live!”
“Do it, Andrea!” Raphael snarled.
I pushed against the burning points of pain. Doolittle dug in my open chest with forceps. I screamed.
“Expel!”
I couldn’t breathe. My chest was on fire, and the unbearable, terrible pain burned inside me like an inferno.
The first shard slid out of me. Doolittle plucked it out with forceps.
The world dimmed, as if someone was blowing out its candles one by one. Doolittle raised his hand. I caught a glimpse of a syringe. Doolittle plunged it down. The needle bit me in the heart.
The darkness tore in a blinding flash of light and adrenaline.
“Silver!” Raphael screamed at me. “Get it out!”
I strained. Another shard slid free.
“Do it, Andrea!” Raphael growled.
“Expel,” Doolittle commanded.
It hurt and I was so tired.
Another shard left me.
“Last one,” Doolittle barked.
The world went black.
It was so cold and quiet. Can I please stay here…
I opened my eyes to agony and Doolittle massaging my heart with his fingers.
I screamed, but my voice was just a hoarse croak.
The last point of agony slid out of me. Raphael laid me flat. Doolittle knelt over me. His hands were bloody. He was holding some sort of surgical instrument. A woman handed him gauze. A cooling sensation spread through my insides. I was going numb.
Behind him I saw Anapa stagger to his feet.
Eyes lit up in the swamp. I saw them with shocking clarity, hundreds of eyes.
A flood of furry bodies poured from the underbrush. Jackals. Dozens upon dozens of them, and in the lead were the huge, muscled shapes of shapeshifters in their warrior form. Clan Jackal had arrived.
They circled Anapa.
“We will take the child now,” a gray shapeshifter in a warrior shape said.
“Give us the child.”
Anapa smiled a lopsided grin that bared his teeth and thrust his arms up. Magic flowed from him in a slow wave.
The Jackals pushed against it.
The enormous alpha in front howled. Hundreds of voices answered in a chorus of howls, barks, and yips.
Anapa pushed.
Clan Jackal gained a foot. Another foot.
Anapa clenched his teeth. There were too many of them and he was too weakened.
“Give us the child,” snarling voices demanded.
“Return the child.”
“Return!”
“Stop!” Magic pulsed, knocking the first few Jackals back. Others took their place. He didn’t have enough juice to disappear. I had been inside him, and I knew. He’d spent everything on that fight.
“Here!” He spat. “Have her.”
A little girl materialized in the middle of the Jackal pack. One of the warriors snatched her and ran toward us. The Jackals kept moving, step by step, tightening the ring.
“I gave you what you wanted!”
The Jackals closed in, one step at a time, eyes on fire, fangs gleaming.
“Stop!”They swarmed him. He screamed, but not for very long.
I sat on a muddy log. My heart was beating inside me. Doolittle had mended it through a gaping hole in my chest, while I screamed, and then he’d repaired my rib cage, and then he had sealed my wounds. He sat next to me now, wiping my blood off his hands with a wet rag. His eyes were red. He had a terrible look on his face.
Raphael knelt by him. “Thank you.”
Doolittle shook his head. “I didn’t hear that. What did you say?”
Raphael leaned closer. “I said, thank—”
Doolittle grabbed his throat and smashed his head into Raphael’s face. It was the most vicious head butt I had ever seen. Raphael fell back. Doolittle snarled something under his breath and walked away.
Raphael shook his head. Blood gushed from his broken nose.
“I think he’s mad at you,” I told him.
“He’ll get over it.” Raphael grinned at me.
“How did you know I wouldn’t die?”
“I didn’t.”
“Took a chance, huh?”
He nodded. “We had nothing to lose.”
Behind him the Jackals had dismantled one of the huts and dragged Anapa’s dismembered corpse onto a pile of wood. Two shapeshifters in warrior form dumped fuel onto the boards and set it on fire.
“How did you know Anapa would panic?” I asked.
“When you told me he had started as a shapeshifter, I went to the Jackals looking for their research on Anubis’s weaknesses. They took it very seriously. Half of the Clan was digging up information. They said that in ancient Egypt, when Anubis was still human, silver was virtually unknown. The Egyptians started getting it later, through imports, and even then it was highly prized. There was no reason he would know how silver affected shapeshifters from personal experience. Roman said that he would likely retreat to the old Anapa body if he was threatened. Clan Jackal trailed us. His ego was so colossal, he didn’t view them as a threat.”
“He didn’t even notice them,” I told him.
“The hardest part was talking Doolittle into that emergency open-heart surgery. He really didn’t want to do it. We argued for hours. He thought you wouldn’t survive.” Raphael swallowed. He looked sick.
“What’s the matter with you? Is it the poison?”
“I just realized you died on me twice.” Raphael rolled to his feet and staggered off.
“Where are you going?”
“I need a minute.”
He stumbled into the bushes and I heard him vomit.
A shadow came over me. Roman sat on a log next to me. He was carrying something long and wrapped in plastic.
“Nice guy,” Roman said. “An asshole, but he loves you.”
“I love him, too.” I petted his hand. “Thank you for everything. I had fun.”
“I had fun, too.” He grinned. “Look what I got.” He pulled the plastic back. The Bone Staff.
“You got it?”
He nodded. “Spent an hour digging through that clay. Worth every minute.” He leaned over and kissed my cheek. “I’ll see you around. You call if you need anything, yes?”
“Yes,” I agreed. “You call me, too. I owe you some help. As long as I don’t have to sacrifice any babies, I’ll be there.”
“I’ll count on it.”
He walked off and Raphael took his place, rinsing his mouth with water from a canteen. Around us, the shapeshifters were herding the snake people into a group. I was covered in mud, blood, and swampy muck. Raphael looked even worse, his hair smeared with gore. I really wanted to go back home, take a shower, and sleep for a year.
“Help me off the log?” I asked him.
“No. We’re going to get you a nice stretcher and carry you down to the boats.”
“I’m okay to walk. My chest hurts a little, but I can make it.”
“You are certifiable,” he told me. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a plastic bag.
“What’s this?”
“I swore that if we made it through today, I would do this.” Raphael pulled a small plastic box out of the bag and got down on his knees in the mud.
This was crazy.
He opened the box. A white engagement ring with a band shaped like a beast’s paw lay on a small velvet pillow, with a beautiful sapphire clasped in its tiny white claws.
“I’m fucked up,” he said. “I have many faults. But I promise if you marry me, I will love you and take care of you for the rest of our lives.”
I stared at him.
“If you put up with me, I will put up with whatever you can throw my way,” he said. “Bad days, good days, ‘I’ll cut you if you look at me the wrong way’ days. I’ll take them all.”
I knew I had to say something.
“If you kill her with this after everything I’ve done,” Doolittle said behind me. “You will never leave this swamp.”
Raphael searched my face, anxious. “Andi?”
“Yes,” I told him. “In sickness and in health, poor, rich, I don’t care.”
He was still looking at me, as if he hadn’t heard.
“Yes, Raphael.” I laughed or cried, I wasn’t sure. “Yes.”
“Put the ring on her, you fool,” Doolittle said.
Raphael slipped the ring on my finger and I hugged him.
“I’d kiss you,” Raphael said. “But I need to brush my teeth and I’m covered in blood.”
“I don’t care,” I told him. “Kiss me anyway.”
EPILOGUE
My Pack admittance ceremony was held on Tuesday in the Pack’s main gathering place, a large room deep below the Keep, where the terraced ground sloped in “steps” toward the stage with the metal fire pit. I’d heard Kate describe it before, but I had never seen it. I thought about dressing up, but it seemed kind of pointless. Whichever outfit I wore, I would still be me and that’s what really counted.