Total pages in book: 97
Estimated words: 91002 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 455(@200wpm)___ 364(@250wpm)___ 303(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 91002 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 455(@200wpm)___ 364(@250wpm)___ 303(@300wpm)
Basajaunak crawled across the street, low to the ground. They darted into the bushes or against the trees growing from the dirt squares breaking up the sidewalk. Once they were near any sort of natural element, they disappeared. Very clever.
“How about this?” The resident alpha scowled at her in annoyance and confusion. “How about you get back into your crappy vans and see yourselves out of here? The people here are doing just fine. We don’t need any outsiders.” He paused for a moment. “What the hell are you, anyway?”
She shrugged one shoulder. “A mom.”
She spun away from Alpha Steele as a peal of thunderous magic rang out around her. Attack.
A jet of magic sliced across the five newcomers and their hostages. Tristan had a moment of abject terror that she’d hit the children, but then the people standing behind them shook. Their knives fell from limp hands. She was disarming them. She’d figured out how to do it without messing with the animal portion of a shifter.
The enforcers shuddered in fear and confusion, watching the knives drop from fingers they no longer controlled.
A basajaunak surged forward from behind one of them, seemingly appearing out of thin air. Then another. One of the enforcers reached for a kid, but another basajaunak was there immediately. A vicious crack said his neck snapped.
Jessie ignored the resident alpha and shoved out her hands at the shifters nearest her. In a moment, it was like someone had lost control of a paint blaster. Red sprayed everywhere—across the ground, jetting into the air, and then smearing into a sort of paste on an invisible wall. Bones turned into pulp. An eye somehow rolled away.
Tristan could handle a lot, and had, but the suddenness of all that, and the extreme nature, made his stomach roil.
She didn’t stop, only turned and fired another jet of magic. And another. Skin was ripped apart. Limbs were severed. A man was torn in half, and then each half exploded like a piñata, parts blowing out or collapsing or who knew what.
Brochan stood there, stunned, like Tristan. Like most of their people…except for Aurora. She burst into her animal and loped across the grass for the beta, who had dropped his phone and started running. He caught sight of the up-and-coming alpha tiger at his back and morphed into a mangy wolf. She was on him in an instant, clawing at his back and ripping into his fur.
A giant roar startled Tristan. Alpha Steele stood on his hind legs in his great polar bear form. In front of him, cowering, was a largish black bear with matted fur and no hope in hell. Alpha Steele gave no quarter and was on him in a flash, punishing him for all he’d done. For daring to bring out children. For daring to breathe.
Tristan finally shook himself out of an embarrassing stupor.
“No.”
It took him a moment to realize that command had come from Edgar, who was currently standing very close to his side.
“No, no, Uncle Trish,” the vampire murmured. “We must not interrupt the miss when she is practicing. I wish I would’ve brought my helmet and padding. This situation clearly calls for it. She’s really on a roll.”
And so she was, having trapped the other shifters in a magical bubble to keep them from running and systematically trying one horribly grisly spell after another. Blood spatter hit him, and he didn’t know what part of a body it had come from. Or which body. Or why he was suddenly having trouble with his stomach when he had surely done worse in his lifetime.
Right?
Nessa really should’ve been here to see this. It would lay to rest all her misgivings about her own darkness. She could never hold a candle to this.
Alpha Steele finished ripping the resident alpha apart before he launched forward to help his mate. She let him into her magical cage, leaving the enforcers trapped with a monster. She finished off a spell that had a shifter strangling himself, the least gruesome of them all but somehow the hardest to watch, before magic pumped into the field.
Boom. Boom. Boom.
It came out in gushes, hard and heavy. It wasn’t meant for her people—it was meant for the watchers in the cars. The alphas wanting to see what Jessie and Alpha Steele could really do.
Boom. Boom. Boom.
If they hadn’t already been staring with slack jaws at the field, they would now. The magic made it so.
Jessie stripped quickly, and the feeling through the connections told them all to do the same.
No, not all of them. Just the fliers. The spectacles. Those a shifter was unfamiliar with.
The directives came quickly, pulses of magic through the sky and through the connections, just like they had in Kingsley’s territory. Like in a genuine battle.
Tristan let out a mighty roar before he shot into the sky. Once there, he hovered and issued the call for the other gargoyles, working his hardest to ensure the vibration worked into the bones of the alphas in the cars. It would blast for miles.