Defying the Lycan King

The present day...

Outside the stronghold, the shadow dome shattered with a deep, rolling crack. The dark barrier that had hidden the place for so long simply fell apart.

Claire’s body sagged at once. The pale blue glow that had been pouring off her skin for the last ten minutes flickered like a candle in the wind. It ran back down her arms, thinned at her fingertips, and went out. Her eyes, which had been burning white, faded back to their ordinary hazel, and she pitched forward.

Jessica caught her before she hit the dirt.

"I’ve got you," she gasped, taking the older woman’s whole weight against her chest and going down on one knee to manage it. "I’ve got you, Ms Claire, I’ve got you."

It had all been the plan. Every part of it. A full Nexus could have brought that dome down without breaking a sweat, but a full Nexus was inside it, and so they’d done what they could with what they had.

Claire was only ever half of one. A semi-Nexus, but she would kill herself for her children. She’d emptied every scrap of herself into that dome, and it had been enough.

"ATTACK!"

Derek’s voice tore across the ridge.

They came down the slope in a wave. Dravengard’s warriors first, then Tan and his warriors, the Northern King’s special forces behind them, then the alphas who’d finally chosen a side, running shoulder to shoulder for the first time in many years.

Umbras poured out of every door and archway and murder hole in the walls, out of the treeline, out of the ground itself, more of them than anyone had let themselves imagine even after Braxton’s warnings.

The two forces met on the open ground before the gates with a sound like a mountain coming apart.

Lycans shifted mid-leap, bones breaking and reshaping in the space between the ground and the enemy, hitting the Umbra line as beasts rather than men.

Wolves poured through the gaps behind them. The night filled with snarling and steel and screaming, and within thirty seconds nobody could have said where one army ended, and the other began.

Jessica hauled Claire’s arm across her shoulders and started dragging her back up the slope, away from it, one arm locked around the woman’s waist.

"Come on. Come on, just a bit further, we’ll get you somewhere quiet, and you can sleep for a week."

"Jessica!"

She turned.

Kai was coming up the slope towards her at a run, blood already on his knuckles though the fighting had barely started. His shirt was half torn off one shoulder.

He didn’t say anything when he reached her; he just took her face in both hands and kissed her hard and deep. It was the sort of kiss a man gives when he isn’t certain there’ll be another one, and Jessica felt exactly what it meant the moment his mouth met hers.

When he pulled back, he didn’t let go of her face.

"Listen to me," he said, and his voice wasn’t steady. "This isn’t like the others. This isn’t a skirmish or a raid or some border nonsense we can laugh about after."

His thumb moved across her cheekbone. "That’s the Shadow King in there. Nobody in this valley knows who’s walking out of here tonight. Not one of us."

Jessica’s chest went tight. "Don’t." She caught his wrists. "Don’t you dare talk like that."

"Jessica—"

"No." Her voice cracked, and she pushed on anyway. "You don’t get to stand there and say goodbye to me while you’re still breathing. That’s not how this works, Kai."

He opened his mouth, and she cut him off again.

"You had a hole in your heart six weeks ago. Everyone told me to prepare myself, and I didn’t, because I knew. I knew you’d come back." Tears were running freely down her face now, and she didn’t bother wiping them. "So don’t you stand there and tell me nobody knows. I know."

Kai’s jaw worked.

Jessica pulled one hand off his wrist and held it up between them, showing him the ring on her finger.

"Look at that," she said. "You put that there. We’ve got a wedding coming up after this, Kai Mondragon. You had better be alive for it, and I have paid a deposit on a marquee that is non-refundable." Her voice broke properly then. "So promise me. Say it out loud."

He laughed. It came out rough and broken and not much like a laugh at all. "That’s the part that scares you? The marquee?"

"Say it."

Kai leaned in and pressed his lips to her forehead, and held them there for a long moment with his eyes shut.

"I’ll come back," he said against her skin. "I promise you. I’ll come back."

"You’d better."

"Stay safe. Get her behind the north ridge; there’s a hollow there, they won’t come round that side." He pulled back and looked at her properly, memorising her the way you memorise something. "Go on."

Neither of them moved.

Then Kai started to pull back, and Jessica held his hand. He kept taking steps back, until their hold broke. Without another word, he turned away from her and shifted into his beast, and sprinted back into the fight.

The courtyard and the grounds beyond it had become pure chaos. Derek moved through it with single-minded purpose.

He hadn’t fully shifted. He remained in a half-shifted state — shirtless, his arms thick with dark fur from the elbow down and claws where his fingers should have been, amber eyes glowing with fury. He moved through the fight like a man walking through long grass.

An Umbra came at his left, and he opened it from hip to shoulder without breaking stride. Two more from the front. He took the first by the throat and put it through the second, and neither got up.

Something raked at his back, and he didn’t feel it. There was no room in him for pain tonight, no room for anything at all except the thing pulling him forward. Because the bond had come alive again.

It had come alive the second the dome cracked, and it hadn’t gone quiet since. She was in there, and every step he took towards the eastern wall made him angrier and determined.

He was coming for her.

***

Inside the stronghold, three floors down, Lydia was moving fast.

"Left. Left, you idiots, not the main stair." Her voice snapped off the stone walls of the service corridor.

Four Umbras hauled Kira along in a net of woven shadow. Behind them, two more dragged Nana between them, the old woman’s wrists still shackled, her feet barely touching the floor. Viktor jogged at Lydia’s shoulder, and for the first time since Kira had met him, that smirk was nowhere in evidence.

"Your Majesty, the eastern wall won’t hold. They’ve got Northern forces on it."

"I’m aware."

"If we go up through—"

"I said I’m aware."

Kira let them drag her, kept her head down, her shoulders slack, her feet stumbling exactly as often as a woman who’d been drained for three days ought to stumble. And underneath it, very quietly, she was gathering strength.

It had been building since the dome split. She’d felt her own power come rushing back up through her like water into a dry well, and it had taken everything she had not to laugh out loud in Lydia’s face.

Her eyes had begun to glow, but he kept them lowered.

Kira? Derek’s voice slipped into her head.

Derek?

I’m here. The relief in his voice made her to almost gasp. Where are you? Tell me where you are.

Below ground. Service corridor, we came down from the throne room and turned twice, both left. She counted her own footsteps. There’s water running somewhere behind the wall on my right.

The eastern side.

I think so.

A pause. She could feel him moving, feel the fury coming off him like heat off a rod.

I need you to keep leading them on. Stay calm. He said again.

Alright. I’m waiting for you.

And then she felt him. Not through the bond—actually felt him, the way you feel someone standing behind a door, close enough that the wall between them was the only thing left.

Derek. Her heart slammed. You’re behind the wall. You’re right behind the wall.

Move away from it.

What?

Kira. Move away from the wall. Now.

She stopped walking, and the Umbra holding the net jerked at it and got nothing. Lydia, three paces ahead, felt the change in the air and turned round.

"What are you—"

Kira lifted her head, and her eyes were burning white. The net was already gone, dissolved off her arms like ash off a fire, and her hand came up empty and open. She didn’t touch Lydia, she simply closed her fingers and threw.

Lydia left the ground.

She hit the far wall hard enough to crack the stone, and in the exact same heartbeat the wall on the right exploded inward, three tonnes of granite blowing across the corridor in a cloud of dust and grit, and through the gap came something enormous and half-man and glowing amber at the eyes.

The Umbras charged at him at once. Kira tore the last of the net away and joined the fight beside him.

She took the first Umbra across the throat before he’d finished turning, her claws out, Lux singing in her chest for the first time in three days.

Derek took two more. She heard him roar and heard the wet sound of gurgling, and didn’t look, because there was another coming at her from the left and she caught him by the jaw and put him into the ceiling.

And then she saw Viktor. He was backing up towards the far end of the corridor with both hands raised, and there was something almost human in his face, some last desperate scrap of the man whose body he’d stolen.

"Wait," he said. "Wait, Kira, listen—"

She crossed the distance in a single stride.

"I’m sorry," she said, and she meant it, because somewhere in there was a tutor who’d smuggled her biscuits when her lessons ran long and had never once done anything to deserve what had been done to him. "I’m so sorry."

And her claws opened his throat. The body dropped, and whatever had been wearing it went out of the world with a hiss.

It took perhaps ninety more seconds. When it was over, the corridor was full of dust and blood and nothing standing but the two of them, and Nana, hunched in the corner where the shadows had dumped her, shackles still on her wrists, breathing hard and glaring at the wreckage.

Kira turned round to find Derek already facing her, chest heaving, fur receding from his forearms, blood running freely from a gash across his ribs that he clearly hadn’t noticed.

He looked at her the way a man looks at something precious.

"Derek," she started. "I need to say—I know what I did, I know, and I’m so—"

He crossed the corridor in three strides, took her face in both hands, and covered her lips with his.

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