Defying the Lycan King

Kira and Derek moved through the corridors of the fortress in tense silence. Derek walked slightly ahead, claws still partially extended, amber eyes scanning every corner. Kira stayed close, her body still humming with residual light from the earlier fights.

Every door they passed, they opened and saw empty chambers, abandoned weapon stores, rooms lined with old maps and half-burnt candles.

"Nothing," he said, coming back out of another room.

"Keep going."

They turned a final corner and stopped in front of a heavy wooden door, and Derek pushed it open. Beyond was finally the throne room. They both stepped inside, Derek shielding Kira with his body as they walked in.

"There," Derek said, pointing behind the dais, half hidden by the fall of the curtain.

A narrow door stood in the wall. The bolt on the outside had been thrown across.

Kira stared at it. "We should go check it out."

Derek took her hand, lacing them together, and they went down together. Derek stopped four steps from the bottom.

"Wait."

"What?" Kira asked, looking at him.

He didn’t answer straight away. His head had gone up, nostrils flaring, and Kira watched him work through whatever he was smelling.

"Something’s wrong down here."

"Everything about this place is wrong," she whispered.

"That isn’t what I mean."

Kira was already past him, and the room at the bottom of the stairs stopped her where she stood. It ran perhaps sixty feet, long and both walls were lined floor to ceiling with shelves. On every shelf, in rows so neat they looked measured, sat jars. Each one was full of black liquid.

"This is the jar room," Kira whispered.

At the far end, on a raised step, sat a second throne. Smaller than the one above, and made of shadows. And standing in front of it, with his back to them and one hand resting on the arm of it, was Jake.

He turned round slowly, and Derek quickly moved in front of Kira, shielding her with his own body.

Jake looked entirely human. No shadow or red in the eyes, nothing at all except a middle-aged Beta in a torn shirt with dried blood down one side of his face and a cut above his eye that had swollen it half shut.

"Oh," he said. "You."

Kira stepped out of Derek’s back, all the grief, the fury, the exhaustion of the last days rose up inside her at once.

"It’s over now," she said.

Jake said nothing.

"Do you know what I’ve spent the last three days doing?" She kept walking, past the first shelves, and the light was already beginning to rise up under her skin. "Thinking of how I will put you out of existance. Quiet surprising that it is you, Jake."

Jake took a step back.

"For years you’ve been building this. Breeding an army out of dead men, wearing people like coats and throwing them away when they wear thin." Her voice climbed. "Viktor was a tutor. He didn’t do a single thing to anyone, and you crawled into him and used him to steal a pregnant woman out of a courtyard."

Another step back. He was circling the throne now, keeping it between them.

"But whatever you are, it ends today?" The gold was spilling off her arms in threads, running down onto the flagstones. "You will never hurt anyone again, and you will never distroy any Nexus again. Do you know why?"

She raised her hand and the jars nearest to her began to hum in their rows.

"Because I’m what ends you. That’s what I’m for. I’m the thing that was made specifically so that you would stop."

She was so consumed by the need to finish this that she did not notice the wrongness. But behind her, Derek wasn’t watching Jake at all.

He’d stopped, and was turning slowly, his eyes going over the shelves, the ceiling, the dark at the far end of the room where the lamps didn’t reach, his nose kept working, and his senses alert.

The Shadow King should not be backing away from anything. The Shadow King should not have been locked in a locked in a room.

The Shadow King should not look like a frightened Beta with a swollen eye, keeping a chair between himself and a girl he should be going after.

"Kira."

She didn’t hear him because she was too far into it now.

Jake moved, and for the first time the room made sense. His eyes went red from edge to edge and the shadow rolled up out of his skin and off his shoulders in a wave, and he came over the throne at her.

Kira met him halfway.

He was strong, stronger than anything she’d fought in that ballroom, and the first thing he did was get a hand round her throat and take her off her feet entirely. She went back into a shelf and glass burst behind her, black liquid pouring out over her shoulders and hissing where it touched the light on her skin.

Derek came in from the side without a sound and drove his shoulder into Jake’s ribs, and the two of them went across the room together and through the next shelf, jars exploding around them, black liquid going up the walls.

Jake’s hand came off Kira’s throat and she dropped to the flagstones, coughing. Derek didn’t give him a single chance. He got his claws into Jake’s shoulder and dragged him upright and put him into the stone wall face first, then hauled him back and did it again.

Jake reached behind himself, caught a fistful of Derek’s hair, and threw him the length of the room. He hit a shelf twenty feet away and brought the whole thing down on top of him.

"Derek!"

"Move," he snarled, already coming up out of the wreckage with glass in his forearms. "Kira, move."

She moved and they went at Jake from both sides.

"I need to hold his palm. That’s the only way I can get in!" Kira yelled.

When Jake swung at Derek, Kira was already inside his guard. When Jake turned on her, Derek was on his back with his arms locked round his throat.

Lux, Kira called once she saw that Derek had trapped Jake.

Right here, her beast answered.

The gold came up through her like a struck match.

"Hold him," Kira gasped.

Derek locked his arms tighter and set his feet, and Jake bucked and thrashed and dragged him halfway across the floor, and Derek did not let go.

Kira grabbed Jake’s right hand, lacing her palm with his, and placed one hand on his chest and pushed.

The light went into him with full force. Jake made a sound that wasn’t a human sound at all, and shadow came boiling off him in strips, and Derek’s arms were smoking where they crossed his throat.

"Derek, let go!"

He let go and threw himself clear.

Jake staggered back, shedding shadow, still trying to get his hand yank his hand free from Kira, but it was to no avail.

"You want to merge powers?" Kira yelled. "Let’s merge powers!"

The fire started in his chest and came up white rather than orange, from the inside out, spilling through the gaps in his ribs and pouring up his throat and out of his mouth and eyes.

Jake burned from the heart outward. Within seconds there was nothing left but ash drifting down onto the stone floor.

Kira stood there swaying. "I’ve done it," she said, gasped. "Finally."

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