And there’s nothing for me to do but watch in horror as he brushes his paw across his chest like he’s irritated by a pesky fly and wants to swat it away.
Only he didn’t swat away a fly. He broke the tether, invisible but present, binding him to the white wolf whose fur still drips blood from her first kill.
No! I scream in my head, and finally, he hears me. It’s like he’s finally snapped out of a trance, and his head swings around, eyes narrowing. I feel his confusion and irritation, but it’s the enormity of what he just did that matters most. I don’t even know why I sensed their connection before he did or how I know he just snapped that invisible thread.
All I know is he’s made the biggest possible mistake one of us can make.
He threw away Fate’s gift.
For some reason, I look to the white wolf instead of my brother. How is she going to react? This is her first shift—she has no idea what she’s doing, what she’s dealing with, and her fated mate has rejected their bond. The stupid, careless, thoughtless son of a bitch.
The wolves who stuck around through all this react first, gasping, crying out. “Look at her!” Yes, because she’s breathing hard, her fur blowing back like a strong wind is pushing against it, even though no such wind exists in here. She raises her head and howls, and the sound pierces my ears and drives itself into my brain while the others cover their ears, screaming, a few of them falling to their knees.
And I thought there was tension in the air before? It was nothing like the way the ground is starting to shake now. Forrest looks at me, surprise and fear in his eyes, and I would tell him this is all thanks to him, only I don’t have the chance before cracks begin to run down the walls. One by one, the windows explode inward, showering glass down around us. The overhead lights explode all at once, and the room is plunged into darkness, darkness full of screams and pleas and howling, howling that seems like it will never end.
“Stop!” I try to scream at her over the chaos, but it does no good. It’s too late. I was never going to stop this.
She’s in the center of a hurricane. No, she is the hurricane, wind, magic, and crackling electricity whirling around her. There’s no hearing me. I’m not even sure she sees me or whether she’s here in more than her physical form. The broken magic has broken her, and she’s about to break all of us.
A wave of energy radiates from her and shoots out in all directions. It’s like a nuclear blast, knocking down everything in its way. The cots that were so evenly lined up across the room fly in all directions, hitting the walls and ceiling before crashing back down on the floor as Forrest and I, and the other wolves, are thrown across the room, slamming into the walls. There’s screaming, the snapping and crunching of bones, and the clanging of metal twisted in the force of the blast.
When parts of the ceiling start to fall, I know we have to get out of here. I jump over the bodies of two fallen wolves—injured, not killed—and grab Forrest by the scruff of his neck. He’s dazed and slightly wounded, and I end up having to drag him out of the room. I want to look back at her to see what she’s doing and how she’s reacting, but I also value my life. And my idiot twin’s.
How could he be so fucking careless? I want to ask him, but he’s only half-conscious as it is. Dragging him across a floor that’s shaking and cracking is no easy feat, but I manage to stay upright. Wake up, damn you! He’s too far gone, maybe even suffering from the broken bond and the magic he unleashed. I won’t know until he wakes up. If he wakes up.
It isn’t until I manage to open one of the doors by throwing myself at it and dragging him outside that the fresh air seems to revive him. I feel him again, hear his wolf in my head, and I’m relieved.
But the absence of worry allows room for the rush of absolute fucking rage that follows. This stupid, thoughtless ass.
“What are you doing?” he demands as I continue dragging him by the neck as far from the building as I can get. “Get the fuck off me!”
Finally, once it seems safe, I hurl him away from me as he demands. By the time he’s on his feet and facing me, I’m snarling. “Do you have any idea what you just did?” I shout at him in my head. “Were you paying even a little bit of attention?”