Chapter 28: Gavin

Chapter 28: Gavin

Rage blinded me the moment I saw Colt move on Billie.

Knowing David lured me into a position of vulnerability, I couldn’t fight my wolf from consuming all semblance of control I possessed. My body jerked and a furious roar ripped from my chest as my body began the transformation. I’d only managed to undo my jeans before my morphing anatomy ejected me from my clothes, tearing apart my shirt and leaving it in tatters in the grass. At the same time, gunshots popped around me; David’s men fired on me, and mine fired back, but still I felt a bullet cleave into my arm. It didn’t affect me. My transformation pushed the bullet out of its fresh wound, gushing blood through my timber fur as I became wolf.

My reinforcements swarmed toward David and his followers. Through the havoc unfolding, I saw both David and Catrina transform while Colt dragged Billie away. Aislin and Oslo transformed as Lothair lunged for Muriel, grabbing her arm, then Gretel intercepted and Lothair had to retreat from the wolves advancing on them. I staggered to my feet as Gretel accompanied Muriel back to the safety of the pack house. I looked past David to where Colt held Billie in front of David’s truck, fighting to open a wound on her shoulder and shove his forearm between her lips, to cut his skin on her teeth. He saw me and pointed the gun at me.

“Say the words or I’ll shoot him,” threatened Colt.

If they shed one another’s blood and spoke the words asking for the Moon Goddess’ blessing, it would induce the marking ritual. Both of them had to speak it, but I feared the gun in Colt’s hand would persuade Billie in her desperation to keep me alive.

Billie cried out as Colt gouged her shoulder. He muffled a grunt as her exposed teeth sliced his arm. Blood darkened their skin. “Mark us, Luna, we are ready to be one,” declared Colt.

“No!” Billie resisted.

I launched toward them without thinking. I should have killed him. All I wanted to do now was kill him.

Colt fired at me and missed. “Say it! Billie, please!” he growled.

“Don’t shoot him,” she rasped.

My heart pounded as I kept my eyes on the gun, knowing the closer I got, the better Colt’s chance of hitting me. I had to risk it—I had to save Billie. Leaping through the rain, my mind was reduced to feral anger and I didn’t notice the threat that had been prepared to stop me in my tracks.

A body collided with mine, knocking me off course and into the grass. With a snarl, I rolled onto my flank and was immediately beset by David’s teeth. As a wolf, he was the embodiment of midnight, his dark blue eyes abyssal like a hellish ocean and fangs like lightning. He bit into the side of my neck and I bellowed at his relentless grip.

“Gavin!” Billie’s voice blurred in the frenzy.

Thrashing on my side, I managed to get my feet underneath me and duck my head, mustering my strength to yank David through the slippery mud. He might have had the side of my neck, but my fur was thick enough that it would take him more than a hard grip to rip my throat. I sunk my teeth into the junction of his shoulder and chest, wrenching my head to sever as much musculature as I could. That was enough to get David to let me go, but he retaliated by swinging his teeth at my eyes. A sharp canine tore over my eye and into my eyebrow. White-hot agony throbbed across my face. I didn’t know if he had damaged my eye, but I felt blood pouring out of the wound and hindering my vision anyway. Half-blind, I lunged at him and our teeth locked in primal warfare, snarling like mindless animals as each of us vied to destroy the other.

Backup arrived in the form of Aislin, her red hues cutting through the dim rain like wildfire. She crashed into David’s hip and disengaged him from the clash with me. Oslo too had come to fend off David. I backed away, squinting through the rain with only one eye open, where I saw Colt and Billie still struggling. She had knocked the gun out of his hand. That was my opportunity.

I dashed toward the truck, then took another blossom of pain in my haunch, my step faltering as I glanced toward the next threat. Lothair’s pregnant wife wielded a gun and had sought refuge in the other car. There was no time for me to worry about her. She could keep shooting at me, it wouldn’t fucking stop me. Within seconds, I had devoured the distance between myself and the prick that was trying to mark my mate.

With Billie trapped between us, I slammed into her and Colt, unable to stop myself from crushing her. My wolf didn’t seem to care, as long as I could reach Colt. He was more worried about shielding himself. Billie fell into the grass, leaving me to attack Colt with jaws snapping wildly at his face, strands of saliva melding with the rain. “Fuck you, Gavin!” Colt yelled at me. “You don’t deserve Billie!”

Neither do you, I wanted to shout back. It manifested as a wicked roar undercut by thunder.

I grabbed the arm that he had cut on Billie’s teeth. The incision that would have become their fateful marking was shorn into a gaping, bloody wound, inciting a wail from Colt. He swung his fist into my nose and made my eyes water. His fingers jabbed at my eye already wounded by David. He tried everything to cripple me, but my rage couldn’t be stopped. I grabbed his abdomen and penetrated a kidney, intent on gutting him until another gunshot hit my flank and shattered one of my ribs, taking my breath away.

“Stop! Please don’t kill him!” This time, Billie’s voice rang clearer through the cloud of agony.

I hadn’t realized that I’d let go of Colt. He slipped away and I stumbled, trying to look at the wounds hemorrhaging blood around the bullets lodged in my flesh. A body lunged at me, and I reacted with a gaping maw, instinctively going to bite whoever it was—before Billie’s scent flooded my senses. She wrapped her arms around my neck, shaking.

“Gavin, you have to get out of here. Go to Muriel. You’ve taken too much damage,” she implored through tears.

But I wasn’t about to abandon the fight. I couldn’t. I was the Alpha of Grandbay, it was my duty to stand by their side and fight until I could fight no more.

My legs trembled. I barely held myself up.

A shadow passed through my vision. Colt once again tried to grab Billie, and I withdrew from her arms and snapped at him. When he bent down to grab his gun, I glanced at Billie, and in that passing moment our fated bond revealed a synchronous idea. If nothing else, I had to get her out of here. She understood that. I gestured for her to get on my back. Her extra weight only made it more difficult for my legs to support me, but her closeness inspired me to keep going. I wheeled around and bolted back toward the pack house. Colt pointed the gun behind us, but at the risk of hitting Billie, he didn’t fire.

We ran together through the carnage. Thunder rippled above us as the rain fell harder, stinging my eyes and impeding my footfalls on the slickened ground. All around us, wolves from Grandbay and Eastpeak clashed with wolves from Dalesbloom and the insidious Inkscale dragons. Catrina tore into my packmate Philip. Oslo was locked in battle with David. Aislin and Niko savaged Lothair, and even Everett had joined the fray, holding two dragons at bay alongside three Mythguard humans.

The moment I reached the lawn of the pack house, I collapsed, panting as pain seized my body. Billie slid off of me and cried into my neck. “Please be okay,” she spoke, clutching my pelt.

Muriel appeared beside us. “You have to get to safety,” she urged Billie.

I growled out the same sentiment to her.

Billie looked up, eyes glistening. “Can you help him?”

“Yes. I’ll try,” she said. But when I felt her palm on my flank, she recoiled, the sticky texture of my blood too poisonous for her. Muriel clenched her jaw and tried again, shuddering past the unimaginable pain as she summoned her healing magic. My flesh began to mend around my rib, the sizzling warmth dulling my discomfort—but it was cut short.

Once again, a jet black Hexen sailed into view; this time, it was Catrina smashing into Muriel, her sinister growl sounding like laughter. My reaction was instantaneous, my body thrusting up off the ground and reeling around to face her. Dizziness stalled me for half a second, but it wasn’t enough to stop me from lashing at Catrina, taking hold of her haunch and pulling her away from Muriel. She rolled onto her back and kicked my jaw. I saw her stomach exposed and dove down at her, my only thought to stop her, to bring an end to her chaos, to make her pay for all the misery she had afflicted on me.

I found purchase on her tender underbelly. And unlike with Colt, I didn’t let go.

With a mouthful of skin, I clamped down and tore back. The sound breaking from Catrina was otherworldly, a fiendish and gruesome cry embodying the destruction I caused. I tasted blood and didn’t care. Had I been more sound of mind, maybe it would have occurred to me what I was doing, but I just wanted her to stop. I wanted her to see what she had pushed me to do. She wanted to unleash my anger, and she did; this was the worst of what I was capable of, this savagery that she had forced me to turn onto her. I ripped and wrenched her flesh apart until all I could see was red bleeding into the rain, shiny viscera exposed out of clefts of tattered fur.

The voices around me melded together. They screamed at me to stop and I kept ripping. The body beneath me convulsed and gurgled, no longer recognizable to me. I would have rendered my enemy to a bloody pulp if not for the jaws and hands that pulled me away by force. When I was finally thrown back into the mud, I rolled to my feet and saw what I had done.

Catrina’s breathing staggered. Her eyes rolled in the throes of death as her bowels spread into the grass. I had done that to her. My own ex-girlfriend, the girl I thought I loved—she laid dying because I couldn’t stop myself. The entire battle had come to a standstill as everyone beheld the death of Catrina Hexen.

I didn’t know what to think. My eyes dragged back to where I had last seen David, and there he stood across the distance, staring at what had become of his daughter. He erupted in a howl wrought with grief, and soon he was joined by Colt, realizing that his sister had met her grisly end. As David began to revert back to human, I sobered from my rage-induced outburst and transformed too.

He made me do this. Catrina made me do this.

But I only felt revulsion for what our hostility had come to.