A Love Untamed (Feral Warriors #7)(72)

Okay, so she was Sabine. And she’d still attacked him. He didn’t bother to answer her. Slowly, he lifted his hand to his neck and felt the stickiness.

Gun aimed at his heart, she stalked toward him, her eyes flashing green fire. A beauty. Two beauties. Now four.

His world began to tilt. Why had she shot him when she knew what he was?

But then he realized he knew. Sabine could see into a man’s soul. Apparently she’d done just that and found his to be as black as his hair. But he knew that. He’d been afraid he was the worst of the grizzly line. Now she’d just confirmed it.

He hadn’t even realized he’d gone down until he felt the mud sinking into his wounded shoulder.

Another face swam in his vision. Blond, pale, lovely. A visage long departed from this world. Had she come to welcome him to the afterlife?

“I tried, Hildy. I tried.” Then his vision went black.

“Mel, behind you!”

Almost too late, Melisande turned and attacked the Mage. Fox could swear she hadn’t even heard his shout. As he lunged at the nearest rider, knocking his sword arm up with one hand, cutting it off with his other, he kept an eye on Melisande. She was shaken by Castin, he could see it in her eyes, in everything about her.

Fox grabbed the bloody stump of his opponent, pulled him off his horse, and beheaded him. The wind, already furious, kicked up another notch, blowing with stinging force, clouds blotting out the sun as Mother Nature fumed over the deaths of her Mage.

A shiver stole over him. To your right! He almost listened, though he knew better, almost saw the Mage swinging at him from the left too late. Fox barely missed being skewered by the sword, though he wound up taking a deep cut across his left biceps. Grabbing his assailant’s wrist, he yanked him close and cut off his head, too. Usually, the Therians avoided killing the Mage whenever possible, if only because the Earth took their deaths so poorly. But not today.

He began to shiver in earnest, the false intuitions bombarding him until he could barely hear himself think. To the right! Left! Behind you!

Fox shut down his mind, focusing on his senses, his warrior’s instincts. Only those. He killed another horseman and turned to find Castin battling two foot soldiers, Melisande fighting another.

As the battle raged, Mage deaths piling up, the weather turning increasingly foul. The remaining foot soldiers rushed them, two running straight for Melisande with orders, no doubt, to kill the Ilina. His heart in his throat, Fox called on the magic to shift . . . and nothing happened.

His scalp prickled with disbelief. The darkness within his animal spirit apparently thought he’d be more effective in his animal and didn’t want him to reach it. So Fox lunged for them in human form, taking on both of them until Melisande dispatched the sentinel she’d been fighting and took on one of his.

Side by side, they fought. Blood flew, heads rolled, Mage died, and the ground shook from the fury of the Earth. Black clouds blotted out all but the faintest trace of sunlight until they fought in near dark.

And, finally, the battle against the Mage, the first battle, was over.

It was the battle to come, the one with Castin, that Fox dreaded. Because, without a doubt, Castin had just saved their asses. And now Fox was going to have to kill the bastard. Or, worse, stand by and let Melisande do it.

Melisande whirled on Castin with a snarl, her bloody sword tight in her hand.

The whoreson stared at her with confusion. “Melisande, wait. Talk to me.”

“Talk to you?” she cried. “You traitorous, lying bastard. What in the hell do you think I have to say to you?”

Castin gaped at her. “You think I had something to do with that night.”

“You betrayed me in the most heinous of ways.”

“No. Never.” He lifted his free hand in a motion of surrender even as his right hand remained firmly clamped around the hilt of his sword. “I had nothing to do with what happened that night, Ceraph. I don’t even know what happened. As my chieftain knocked you out, I was tackled to the ground and trussed up before I could fight my way free.”

“Liar!” Melisande advanced on him slowly, the screams ringing in her head, the need to kill him, to end this, a writhing, living thing breathing fire down her neck. All around her, the bodies lay, bloody, lifeless.

So many dead.

Castin took a step back for every one she took forward. “I was sold to wolverine slavers, Melisande, without explanation, without cause. It was five years before I escaped and returned to my clan lands, but my clan was gone. Rumor had it they’d been destroyed, slaughtered by another clan.”

Melisande snarled. “They were slaughtered by me. For what they’d done to me. And for killing my sisters.”

Castin blanched. “Those f**king blackguards. They must have used me to lure you, then disposed of me before I could try to stop whatever they had planned.”

He was speaking. Some part of her brain was hearing him. But mostly she heard only the screams in her head. Enough talk.

She lifted her sword and ran at him, attacking him. Castin lifted his own blade and parried her blows. Time ceased to exist. Hatred burned until all she could see was light and red and blood.

“Mel. Angel.”

She was trapped in a berserker’s haze, needing blood, needing to kill, needing to end this.

A second attacker joined the fray and she struck at him, too, her blade finally sinking through flesh.