A blood ward was the strongest defensive spell in my arsenal. However, bleeding all over the place weakened me and was inconvenient. It also gave away the nature of my power. The undead blood charged with my magic was almost as good, and it conveniently masked the clear signature of my blood.
I circled the prone shapeshifters, dripping blood from the vial at regular intervals, and stepped into the circle I’d made. The undead blood waited, ready for my magic.
I picked up a pinecone, dripped a drop from the vial on it, corked the vial, put it away, and hefted my improvised grenade.
“Fire in the hole!”
I threw the pinecone at the rocks and dropped, activating the ward with a pulse of magic.
Magic crackled like thunder. The four spheres toppled over and spun in midair at a dizzying speed, expanding into car-sized boulders in a blink. The boulders whipped around each other in a circle like moons that lost their planet.
The magic binding them snapped like a rubber band. The boulders hurtled through the woods like runaway trains, crushing everything in their path.
One rocketed directly toward us, smashed into the ward above our heads, and bounced off, into a pine tree. The three-foot-thick trunk snapped like a toothpick. The ward shattered, its power exhausted. The backlash slapped my brain. Oww.
Wood cracked, trees collapsed in four directions, birds screeched in alarm, then everything went silent.
Hakeem, Troy, and Owen stared at the crossroads of destruction with wild eyes.
“And that’s why we don’t poke random shit we find in the woods with a stick,” Keelan said.
A tree to our left, with a chunk of its trunk sheared off where one of the boulders grazed it, careened and fell. A humanoid figure dropped out of the branches, landing twenty-five feet away. A shapeshifter in warrior form. Huge, almost eight feet tall, with orangish fur splattered with dark rosettes, claws like knives, and giant fangs. A gold collar clasped his thick neck. He snarled and charged.
Keelan leaped. A human started the jump, but a werewolf landed, thrusting the claymore at the charging beast. Keelan was abnormally large for a werewolf. The enemy was bigger. Holy shit.
The collared shapeshifter batted the blade aside with his left hand and raked at Keelan with his right. Keelan danced back, slicing. The collared shapeshifter lunged at him and howled as the pain from the nearly severed wrist finally registered.
The woods came alive.
Shapeshifters closed in on us from all sides, charging through the trees, howling, snarling, a mass of fur, claws, and gleaming teeth, every single one over seven and a half feet tall.
Fear washed over me in a prickly adrenaline rush. I had forgotten what it was like to be scared of shapeshifters, and it all came back in a painful split second. It felt like the wilderness reached deep inside itself and spat these monsters out, designed only to rip and tear into flesh. Human flesh. My flesh. Every instinct shrieked at me that these things would eat me alive while I screamed.
The fear brought the world into crystal clear focus. Another massive orange shapeshifter dappled with rosettes bore down on me, her mouth gaping. Her fangs were enormous, at least nine inches long. Sarrat was already in my hand. I twisted out of the way and sank my saber between her ribs, ripping through her liver. She spun away as I withdrew and leaped on me, trying to pin me with her bulk. I stabbed up as she came down, driving my blade through her upper abdomen, past her sternum into her heart.
Her weight drove me back into a tree. She clamped her huge beast hands on my shoulders. Her heart was impaled by Sarrat’s blade. She should be dead or dying. Even a shapeshifter couldn’t shrug off a ruptured heart.
Claws tore at my shoulders. My bones groaned. She was trying to rip me in half.
I shoved Sarrat deeper, twisting the blade. Her heart had to be a popped balloon at this point. Ruined beyond even the strongest shapeshifter’s ability to repair.
Her jaws gaped open, way beyond the normal point. She bit at me, trying to catch my head and sink her fangs into my skull. I tucked my chin in and headbutted her lower jaw. My blood and her spit wet my face. I hit her with my head again. Teeth scraped my scalp, cutting through the skin. I pulsed magic through my wounds and let it rip.
A forest of blood spikes exploded in the shapeshifter’s mouth, puncturing her tongue, her cheeks, and digging into her sinuses.
She dropped me. I stomped on her knee, kicking her leg out from under her. She went down, and I sliced her head off with a single horizontal cut.
Heal that.
The battlefield blossomed in front of me like a flower. In a fraction of a second, I saw everything.
Keelan to my right, claymore discarded, ripping at his orange opponent, both covered in blood.
Owen, a massive werebison, gripping a werewolf’s head with his hand and pounding it into a tree, while another shapeshifter tore at him from the side. Owen’s back was a raw, bloody mess.
Hakeem and Troy, back-to-back, fighting off three shapeshifters. Hakeem’s stomach was ripped open. Troy’s left arm hung limp.
Every enemy had the same gold collar.
I charged at Owen’s group. The power word burst from my lips, packing a wallop of magic. “Aarh Saar!” All Stop.
My power splayed out in a wide semicircle.
The shapeshifters froze, petrified by my magic. Five seconds.
One. I beheaded the one attacking Owen from the side.
Two. I drove Sarrat across Keelan’s opponent’s spine, severing the spinal cord in two places with a crunch.
Three and four. I reached Hakeem and Troy.
Five. I decapitated a shapeshifter to my left.
Time restarted.
The two remaining collared shapeshifters in front of me spun away from Hakeem and Troy and lunged at me.
I opened my mouth for another power word.
A gray werelion tore out of the woods, his eyes filled with golden fire, and roared. The blast of sound hit me like thunder.
Curran grabbed the shapeshifter to his left and snapped his spine like a twig. Leonine jaws gaped open. Curran bit down on the shapeshifter’s neck just above the collar. Blood poured. The remaining shapeshifter turned to flee. My husband tore his opponent’s head off and hurled it at the escaping enemy. The bloody head smashed into the shapeshifter between his shoulder blades. He stumbled and then Curran was on him. The shapeshifter collapsed with Curran on top of him. Bones crunched. An arm flew by me.
Across the clearing Keelan pulled handfuls of entrails out of his opponent’s stomach and dug up, into the collared shapeshifter’s chest. The air was a mist of blood and bile.
Owen dropped the bloody stump of a body to the ground.
It was over.
We walked through the woods smeared in blood and carrying seven bodies. The dead had reverted to their human form, but my team was too beat up, so Curran’s shapeshifters got the hauling duty. Except for Owen, who carried one in spite of everyone’s advice, and Keelan, who insisted on dragging the biggest shapeshifter, the one he had killed, all by himself. My husband, the overachiever, was carrying two, one on each shoulder.
I had insisted on decapitating every corpse, just in case. Originally, the shapeshifters planned on impaling the heads on sticks and transporting them that way; however, I pointed out that approaching Penderton waving around gory, blood-dripping skull sticks was not the best idea. Curran and I had both brought our backpacks with waterproof bags in each, and now Da-Eun carried two sacks filled with shapeshifter heads. At eleven pounds each head, she was hauling seventy-seven pounds and she did it with a pep in her step.