It’s three against two and I’m the puny human with no weapon, no magic, no ability to shift.
I duck to shield myself from the spell and crowd closer to RJ and her fixation on maintaining the spell.
Concern narrows her eyes, lines bracketing her mouth. Her brow furrows as the light fades and I expect the wolves to be on their backs.
I’m wrong.
“It failed.”
The words hardly leave her lips before the nearest creature lunges for me. Its head swings to me at the last moment, too strong for the spell to have made a dent, and I freeze.
Fight, flight, or freeze, and I choose the absolute worst one without conscious thought. My insides are destroyed, mind spinning away like there’s some kind of mystical exit out of this situation I haven’t seen yet.
Heat presses against my skin and the wolf swipes its claws level with my face.
Someone is yelling. The hit is right there and I brace for impact.
The thwap of flesh meeting flesh echoes but the hit never happens. My eyes fly open.
The moon-mad wolf is on the ground with a dark form plastered on top of it. Unclear edges resolve into broad shoulders, a young man with close cropped brown curls and tawny skin.
He rears back and plows a fist into the wolf’s snout.
And everything else fades away.
His next hit lands home.
Grayson.
Hands curl around the creature’s throat and he finds his seat, knocking its skull into the ground.
How did he find us?
“Look out!” Aimee warns.
I bend and snatch a rock nestled near the base of an oak tree. The witches send another spell ricochetting out in a bright arc.
Resolve steels my spine. I clench my fingers around the rock and run this time. RuntowardGrayson with his hands locked around the wolf’s throat.
If those claws make contact with him, he’ll be shredded. He’ll be?—
No, it won’t actually matter. Not if the wolf that bit him in the first place was actually mad. Not if this fight prompts the change we’ve been waiting for, in him. I hurl the rock and it hits the second wolf in the torso before he has a chance to grab Grayson.
It jerks backward, snarling.
Refusing to be dislodged, Grayson slams the first wolf’s head into the ground until its neck snaps. A low groan rattles its throat as Grayson pushes to his feet.
“Are you okay, Mandi?” He thrusts out a hand for me, long fingers waiting to link us together.
Something inside me still goes with his presence, with the intensity written on his face. The same thing that went still the first time I saw him outside our community.
Stillness lets the whispers flow of how nice it would be to actually fall in his arms and call it the one precious thing I’ve never managed to find.
Home.
He lurches for my hands, grabbing hard enough to squeeze my tendons together. A tug drags me out of the way before the stunned wolf I’d beamed with the rock swipes for me.
“I didn’t know they travel in packs!” RJ holds the line, gathering power from her sister.