This one he caught by the shoulder, shaking until it dissolved into darkness. Another charged from behind. Dominic swung a massive paw without even looking, slamming it into the wall so hard the stone cracked.
The effigy burst on impact.
Saint stared up at him, a smirk playing across his mouth as he shook his head. “You know,” he said, ducking beneath a sweeping dagger aimed his way, “this feels wildly unnecessary.”
Dominic snarled back around a mouthful of smoke.
“Go find Sammy,” his brother called as more figures poured from the walls. “I’ve got this.”
He lowered his head, a brief mark of gratitude and respect, then reared back on his hind legs, driving both forepaws into the floor.
The mansion shuddered. Wood exploded, and the concrete beneath it fractured in a spiderweb of cracks. But magic surgedupward through the boards, dark and hostile, trying to seal the damage as fast as he made it.
Dominic roared and struck again, claws punching through splintered timber into the space below. He managed to tear free an entire section of flooring and hurled it into the swarm.
Then he dug. Not with precision. Not with patience.
With pure, furious determination.
Boards, nails, rock, enchanted supports—nothing survived the assault of claws fueled by wrath. The corridor buckled around them as he ripped downward through beams and masonry, refusing to play by the house’s rules another second.
Suddenly, light flashed beneath the wreckage.
He plunged both forelegs through the opening, widening it with a savage wrench. With a deafening roar of splintering wood and shattering stone, the floor finally gave way beneath his weight.
He crashed through in an avalanche of debris, striking the level below hard enough to crater the black marble. Dust exploded outward in billowing clouds, choking him and obstructing his view.
For one breath, everything was still.
Then the dust began to settle, and from somewhere ahead, faint but unmistakable, he caught Sammy’s scent. Dominic rose slowly from the wreckage, shoulders rolling, claws scraping across the polished marble.
This corridor was nothing like the madness above. No shifting walls. No cluttered grandeur. No theatrical nonsense.
The space stretched long and elegant beneath vaulted ceilings of dark stone veined with gold. Marble pillars lined the hall at perfect intervals, and gilded sconces waited cold and dark between tall mirrors framed in carved obsidian. Here, the air smelled faintly of old incense, polished wood, and blood buried beneath expensive perfume.
Dominic’s lips peeled back from his teeth as he stepped forward.
Every bowl-shaped sconce ignited at once, green flame racing down the walls in a chain reaction, bathing the hall in eerie corpse light.
At the same time, sound vanished, the silence instant and complete.
No crackle of fire or shifting debris. No breath in his lungs or growl in his throat.
Shaking off the disorientation, he took another step, stopping again when runes flared across the marble. Thin gold lines spread from the crater at his feet, branching through the floor in intricate circles and jagged symbols that pulsed with awareness.
Then the tiles softened, turning slick and malleable as inky goo covered his paws and climbed his legs in grasping ribbons. Dominic jerked free with brute force, marble snapping under the effort, only for the thick tar to reach for him again.
As he struggled, he caught movement from the corner of his eye, ripples across glass like a disturbance on the surface of a lake. One by one, as if perfectly choreographed, reflections stepped forward in the mirrors.
Mockeries.
Predators built from his own shape.
A dozen towering wolves made of silvered shadow and green flame emerged soundlessly, stepping through the glass to fill the hallway. Nostrils flared, eyes burning amber, they lowered their heads and pawed the tile.
The nearest one lunged.
Dominic met it head-on, their bodies crashing together in utter silence, jaws snapping, claws tearing. He seized its throat—its hide slick and dense, like ink wrapped around steel—and slammed it into a pillar.