He staggers toward us with a choked gasp, snapping back into completely solid form. Zian and I lunge together to haul him into our shelter.
He collapses there, wincing as he struggles to push himself more upright. “I can’t—I need to—”
Blood is pooling beneath him. Jacob is still bleeding too, as quickly as Dom is trying to stabilize him. Footsteps close in around us again.
Panic chokes me. And the vibration within me that I’ve been suppressing thrums up through my lungs too forcefully for me to ignore.
I can stop them. I can shred them apart and make them wish they’d never tangled with us.
My claws dig into the floorboards with the wrenching longing to do just that.
I open my mouth, and my gaze snags on the faces around me. Dominic’s, tight with urgency and strain. Jacob’s, fighting the slackness that’s creeping over his muscles. Andreas’s, his eyes glazing with pain. Zian’s, his anguish showing even across his wolfish jowls.
In that instant, I can feel that I’ll be able to shield them from the vicious rage. I’m not angry with them, not right now. I can aim this brutal energy beyond the boundaries of our little barricade, away from those within.
But that’s not the only problem.
The growing shriek at the base of my throat makes me feel sick even as the urge clamors through my nerves to set it free.
What will the guys think of me after they see it? Once they know what I’m capable of doing—what I’m willing to do?
What some part of me will revel in?
They only just started believing that I’m the girl they always knew, and I can shatter that illusion with a single scream. Make them think they were right to distrust and shun me before.
Iamthat girl. I never asked for this power. It isn’tme.
The wrongness of this whole situation sweeps over my body, and it’s a question rather than a scream that bursts from my throat, aimed at the woman I have to assume is still somewhere in this house with us and the soldiers she summoned.
“Why? Why are you doing this? Youmadeus.”
Is there anything that could change her mind, make her call off the slaughter?
Ursula Engel’s voice carries from somewhere behind me, crisp as before and somehow steady in spite of the battle that’s being raged around her.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t plan for it to end up this way when I started. But I did make you, so it’s my responsibility to unmake you when no one else is willing to take that step.”
“But—”
Her tone is so cool and dispassionate it lances straight through me. “I’ve been arguing for this since you were toddlers, when the Company of Light was destroyed by a hybrid not that different from you. I demanded it again and again when I saw how quickly your abilities were evolving and expanding, when my colleagues started pushing for you to be sent beyond the protection of the facility. But no one would listen to my warnings, and they shut me out.”
“You’re insane,” Dom shouts at her in a ragged voice. “We’re not—”
Engel cuts him off. “You’re monsters of the worst kind. Abominations growing out of control, without even the few weaknesses that make the other creatures vulnerable and not enough humanity to rein your impulses in. That’s not what I meant to create. So I’ve gathered my own guardians to my purpose, and now I can end the catastrophe I set in motion.”
She must give some signal, because the booted feet thump toward our shelter again. My stomach lurches, but I know then that this is the end.
I have no other choice. I can kill the girl I wanted to be, for myself and for the guys around me, or I can watch us all die.
It isn’t even really a choice.
As my lips part, it occurs to me that Engel doesn’t even know. She’s so confident her soldiers will be enough.
She screwed herself over by going rogue. The regular guardians haven’t been filling her in on all the details. She didn’t know Griffin had died; she probably wasn’t aware of some of the guys’ newer powers.
And she clearly has no idea about the destruction I wreaked in a cage-fighting arena two weeks ago, whether I meant to or not.
Not a single person in this building is prepared… including me.