Killer Crescent by Leigh Kelsey

23

Agony, blinding and complete, was all I knew for minutes, until the sound of fast, panicked breaths filled my ears, and a buzzing rope of something insubstantial wrapped around my middle, just behind my front legs. I gnashed my head, snarling at the glowing silver cord, not fully processing that it was the only thing keeping me from plummeting to my death.

My bones still ached with the memory of snapping and contorting, but I panted through the pain as I gradually adjusted to my wolf form.

“Easy, Blossom,” a tight voice said to my right. I snapped my sharp teeth towards the speaker with a menacing growl. “It’s me, it’s Edison.”

I growled louder, deeper. He was the mate who’d rejected me, who couldn’t see past his hatred to the person I was. I was more than a magic-less dud, and I would have been well suited to him if he hadn’t sneered and insulted me, hadn’t cut a wound so deep I hadn’t recovered from it in two years.

Don’t talk to me, don’t even look at me,I roared, but it came out as a garbled mess of snarls instead of words. My wolf’s instincts were blurring my brain, and the rejection hurt so much worse in this form. I couldn’t think for it, couldn’t get past the pain.

“I’ll get us down,” he muttered, his mouth twisted into a scowl. “You just stay there and growl, yeah?”

I bared my teeth in a threat; he smirked and flicked his hands up at the noose around his throat. If he hadn’t had magic, if he hadn’t broken through the wall between our trial rooms, my neck would have broken. I’d be dead. But my wolf didn’t know that; all she knew was looking at him hurt.

“Easy,” Edison warned, but he was talking to his power, not to me. Still, I growled deep in my throat, my fur bristling as tingles of cool power filled the space between me and my never-mate. The magic slid over my fur until I was trembling, wrestling against the ropes to get away. No matter how my rational side tried to stop squirming, my instincts were running wild and wouldn’t be stopped. I knew the whites of my eyes must be showing.

I was a wolf, hanging twenty feet in the air, bound by hexed ropes and Edison’s bright magic. I hadn’t thought I’d ever be as scared as that day I’d hidden under Ana’s bed, but I was. I was terrified to drop to my death here, or for the noose to snap my neck before I ever reached the ground. I wouldn’t even die as a human; I’d die a beast.

“No,” Edison rasped, and my head shot up just in time to see a spark of magic race out of control and fray the rope—too fast for my never-mate to react.

Too fast for him to stop his fall.

The animal cry that ripped up my throat was like no sound I’d made before. Crying, I watched Edison plummet to the ground, his pale hands grasping at branches and vines as he passed, and missing every single one. He fell so far that he became an indistinct blur of black ink and icy skin and pale hair, and I waited for his magic to rally, for him to stop his fall. My wolf whined, no longer caring that he’d rejected us, only that he was our mate and he was falling.

But then he hit the ground.

And the sound of bones snapping was the loudest thing I’d ever heard.

What had broken? I twisted against my bindings and cried, desperate to get down, to see how badly he was injured.

Was it his arm I’d heard snap?

Or his neck?