Beside me, Griff stepped into view, a visual reminder that we were running out of time, a ghostly countdown clock to the next attack. He trembled. His eyes took on an odd, otherworldly light.
“I’m losing it,” he said. “The pressure—it’s pulling me—he’s pushing me—”
Lake stepped into my peripheral vision, right next to Griff. I began counting down in my head.
Three, I thought, training my eyes back on Sora’s.
“You’re not going anywhere,” Lake said from beside me, her words aimed at Griffin, not me.
Two, I thought.
“Lakie, I’m so sorry—”
One. I took a deep breath. The muscles in my arms tensed. I went to pull the trigger.
“Ow!”
I stopped.
“Bryn, please.” Sora’s voice was more insistent this time, less gentle, but I turned to look at Griffin.
“What did you say?” I asked, my voice catching like a sob in my throat. “You said ow,” I continued, my voice rising—high-pitched, desperate, loud. “You said ow. Why?”
Griffin stared at me like I had lost my mind. Maybe I had. My fingers tightened around the barrel of the gun.
“Tell. Me. Why.”
“Lake hit me,” Griffin said.
“Of course I hit you! You think you can just blink out of existence, and I won’t even hit you?”
Lake had punched him, and he’d felt it. It had hurt.
I lowered the gun, my body shaking like it might never stop, my arm weak, my shoulder useless.
“She hit you,” I said dumbly, “and it hurt.” I didn’t wait to see the words register on their faces. Instead, I turned back to Sora.
Her eyes were sharp.
“You don’t know that it will work,” she told me.
“We don’t know that anything will,” I countered. “All we know is that up until five seconds ago, the only thing that had ever hurt Griffin was someone hurting Lake, and now it looks like she might be able to hurt him, too.”
Two Shadows couldn’t exist in the same place.
A Shadow was injured when you injured his living twin.
And—if Lake and Griffin were any kind of test case—the twin in question could fight the Shadow.
“Let him come,” I told Griffin, before turning back to Sora. There was no room for questions here, no room for doubt. I took the gun from my hand and transferred it to hers.
“You can fight him. You can win.”
Sora handed the gun back. Without a word, she began to strip off her shirt, and that was when I knew—she’d fight the Shadow, the way she’d fought her brother when he was alive.
As a wolf.
Her face was impossible to read. Her hands hung loose by her sides. The last thing she said to me, before she started to Shift, was five little words.
“Permission to enter your territory?”
Beside me, Lake dropped her hand from Griffin’s shoulder. She took a step back, masking her anguish with a broad and predatory smile. Griff closed his eyes, spread his hands out to the side, and stopped fighting.
The moment before he disappeared and everything went to hell in a handbasket, I gave Sora her response.
“Permission granted.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
THE SECOND GRIFFIN DISAPPEARED, THE REST OF us scattered like shrapnel. Behind me, I heard Sora Shifting: snap-snap-crunch-scream-snap. The sound was an unholy rhythm, a grossly melodic call to arms. My skin itched with the sound of it; my bones ached with the desire to shed my human flesh like unwanted clothes.
Opposite me, Chase tilted his head slightly sideways, the muscles in his neck straining against his human form.
Shift. Shift. Shift.
The call was there, in the air—but it wasn’t alone. There was another presence, just as feral, just as hard to deny.
He was here.
The humid summer air was thick with violence, thick with rage—everywhere, all around us.
Small room. No windows. No doors.
I called up the image, and power rose in my body, heat radiating outward from my stomach. The constant pain in my shoulder faded to mere memory, taking with it my limitations, my awareness of anything except my opponent.
I felt his presence like an actual shadow, blocking light from my eyes. I whirled around and stepped sideways, caught in an unthinking waltz.
I just had to survive until Sora finished Shifting.
I just had to keep him here until she could take him out.
Ghostly fingers stroked the back of my neck—human fingers.
For now. I ducked out of their ice-cold grasp, exploding forward and away, adrenaline pumping through my body, my limbs tingling with an almost electric charge.
And then I saw him.
He must have wanted me to, must have chosen that moment to let me see his face. His hair was dark brown, a shade or two lighter than Sora’s. His eyes were darker than they’d been in life—so dark that the pupil bled into the iris, a single, inky orb.
He smiled.
“Hello, little Bryn.” He didn’t sound like a monster. He never had. “Still so beautiful. Still so strong.” He breathed in deeply through his nose and stepped forward. “Still mine.”
Seeing him made it easier to track his movements, but I held to my Resilient state, let it flow through my body, like water through a dam.
Fight. Fight. Fight.
“What do you think will happen,” the Shadow with Wilson’s face said slowly, “if I Change you now?”
The question sent a chill down the back of my neck, like a spider crawling down my spine. The chunk this thing had already taken out of my shoulder had numbed me, before it had hurt. This wasn’t a normal Were we were dealing with. If Wilson brought me to the brink of death and Changed me—the way Callum hadn’t, not yet—what manner of beast would I be?
No. I wouldn’t think about that. I wouldn’t think about anything, except the smell of death and clammy palms and the claustrophobic room in my head, where my nightmares lived.
Fear.
The Shadow stepped forward and then blurred. One second, he was ten feet away from me, the next, he was rubbing his cheek over mine. In a flash of black fur, Chase leapt for me, leapt for him, but Wilson disappeared.
“Nuh-uh-uh,” the monster said, his voice coming from all around us. “Can’t run, can’t hide.”
I felt him, felt his breath on my skin, felt him closing in.
“I should thank you,” he whispered, in stereo. “For killing me.”
I flew backward and hit a tree trunk. I absorbed the blow and rolled to my feet. I heard the sound of paws on the ground. I felt him leaping—
Thud.
A large wolf—tan fur, white markings, lethal—collided with the invisible predator midair. A high-pitched yelp turned into a growl as the two of them hit the ground, each grappling for control.
Sora was brutal, efficient. Fighting an invisible opponent, she was nothing but fangs and claws, beautiful, deadly grace. Blood, so dark it was nearly black, marked the white fur around her muzzle. Phantom teeth sunk into her flank, but she shook her assailant off violently and whirled around, jaws snapping, fur on end.
The air quivered, like the surface of a pond under an onslaught of skipping stones, and then Wilson appeared again.
This time, I doubted it was on purpose.
In wolf form, he was the creature I remembered from my nightmares. There was a white star on his forehead. His eyes were intelligent, his fur matted with blood. Suddenly, I didn’t have to work to hold on to the red haze.
It threatened to overwhelm me.
Escape. Have to—run—have to—
I reined it in, pulling the power inward, feeling it as a ball of fire in my chest. I wasn’t four years old anymore.
I wasn’t running.
Sora flew through the air again, mouth full of blood-marked teeth, death in her eyes. She grabbed him by the throat.
She pinned him.
His legs scrambled for purchase, but she slammed her body sideways, crushing his limbs under her weight. She met his eyes, his blood filling her mouth.
And then he Shifted—silently, effortlessly, as only a dead werewolf could. She let go of his neck, just for a second. Blood dripped off his body, disappearing the moment it hit the ground.
He gargled.