Defying the Lycan King

"I have to find him."

They were moving fast down the corridor, Derek half a step ahead, Kira’s hand still locked in his.

"The Shadow King." She glanced up at him. "It’s not enough to fight them out there. Every single Umbra in this place is running off one tether, and every tether runs back to him. Kill enough of them and he’ll simply make more. He’s been making them for years."

"I’m not letting you go near that thing," Derek said.

"No." She said it gently, because she knew exactly what she was asking him to swallow. "I need to go. I need to stop him. That’s what I’m for, Derek. It’s the whole reason they’ve spent my entire life trying to get their hands on me."

He was quiet for three long strides.

"I’m not letting you go there alone," he said. "Not for a second."

Kira’s mouth twitched. "That’s fair."

"It isn’t up for discussion."

"I said it was fair."

They stepped through an open set of double doors into a vast room that must once have been a ballroom. The high ceiling was lost in shadow. Broken chandeliers hung at odd angles. All across the polished floor Lycans and Umbras tore into one another.

A fresh group of Umbras turned toward them at once.

Derek and Kira met the attack side by side.

They fought like they’d rehearsed it a hundred times. Kira went low and Derek went high without either of them signalling.

She’d feel him shift his weight behind her and know to duck, and he’d feel her turn and know to catch what came round the other side. When she moved left he was already covering the space she’d left behind. When he lunged she was already there to close the gap.

Both of them didn’t shif, they fought in their human form.

Light rose up through Kira, spilling out along her arms and pouring off her skin until the marble around her feet glowed pale gold.

She didn’t strike the Umbras. She raised a hand and they came apart anyway, dropping where they stood with their faces going blank a half-second before their bodies caught up.

Somewhere off to her right, a black Lycan was fighting.

She noticed it in the middle of taking down three at once, and the noticing snagged on something.

He was close. Closer than any stranger had reason to be, working the space at her flank as though he’d been assigned to it, tearing through anything that got within ten feet of her back.

Something about him pulled at her. Something familiar, sitting just under the surface where she couldn’t get a grip on it.

She turned her head and looked at him properly for half a second. The Lycan didn’t look back and Kira turned away and kept fighting.

But they were coming faster now. For every one she unmade, two more poured in through the far doors, and she could see it happening across the whole room, the Lycans being pushed slowly back towards the walls.

Derek. She caught a claw on her forearm and threw its owner across the floor. It’s not working. We could stand here all night and it wouldn’t matter.

I see it.

They don’t run out. That’s the point of them, they don’t run out. She dropped another two. The only way any of them die is if I find him and end him. All of this stops the second he does.

Then we find him.

Nobody saw Rolf coming. He came in through the servants’ door at the eastern end, and he moved through that room like a man who wasn’t in it, ducking behind pillars, letting the fighting swallow him, the sword held low against his leg where the light wouldn’t catch it.

There were three hundred people in that ballroom trying to kill each other and not one of them had any attention to spare for one more bloodied man walking through the smoke.

He got within twenty feet of her.

Then fifteen.

Then ten.

And then, because he simply couldn’t help himself, because years of being made a fool of had to go somewhere, he opened his mouth.

"Kira!"

She spun.

She had perhaps half a second to take it in. Rolf, ten feet away and closing, his face ruined and grinning, the sword already coming up over his shoulder and starting its arc down towards her.

There was no time to move. There was no time to raise a hand, no time to reach for Lux, no time for anything at all.

Two things happened at once.

Derek’s arm closed round her waist and tore her sideways, spinning her round and folding his whole body over hers, his back to the blade.

And the black familiar Lycan stepped into the gap at the same time, putting himself between them and the sword and stood there, and Rolf’s thrust went in under the ribs and straight through his heart.

The black Lycan’s legs folded, and he went down onto his knees on the bloody marble.

For a moment, the whole world slowed down.

Kira saw it happen in pieces. The sword going in. The black Lycan’s body jolting round it. The way his legs simply stopped working, folding under him as though somebody had cut the strings.

The noise went first. Three hundred bodies tearing at each other across that ballroom, snarls and steel and screaming, all of it dropping away into something distant and underwater.

What was left was very small and very clear. The wet gasp of the Lycan going down. Derek’s heart hammering against her shoulder blade where he still had her folded against his chest.

And her own, banging away in her ears like something trying to get out.

Kira turned slowly in Derek’s arms.

The Lycan was already shifting. Fur retreating in patches, bones grinding back into shape, the huge black shape shrinking and collapsing in on itself until what knelt on the bloody marble was simply a man with a sword through his chest.

Blood ran freely from his mouth and down his bare chin.

Her eyes filled before her brain caught up.

"Brian."

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