The beast raised its head. Large yellow owl eyes peered straight at us.
We’d have to go for the gut and eyes. Those were our only options.
I touched Raphael and pointed to my eyes. He nodded, hunched down, muscles contracting, and leaped. His skin burst in midjump as his body snapped into a new, stronger form. A man had started the leap, but a bouda in warrior form finished it: a seven-foot-tall lethal hybrid of animal and man, armed with deadly claws and wicked teeth set into oversized jaws that could crush a cow’s femur like it was a peanut shell.
I dashed to the side.
Raphael landed on top of the beast and raked its back with his blades. Blood drenched the gashes. The creature bellowed and dropped to the ground, rolling. Raphael leaped off, into the gloom. The beast sprang to his feet and whirled, trying to lunge after him.
I struck from the side, slicing across its forehead with my claws. The creature whipped back, too fast. Teeth grazed my skin. I jumped back and the beast lunged at me, snapping its teeth. I leaped backward again and again, zigzagging as it chased me. Damn, it was fast.
Raphael shot out of the gloom and cut at the beast’s side with his knives.
The beast paid him no mind. The tentacles on its head sparked with deep orange. The orange light pulsed outward and caught my arm. An intense ache seared my shoulder, a cold burn, like someone had skinned my arm open and poured liquid nitrogen over the muscle.
I cried out and raked its snout with my claws, gouging the sensitive flesh.
The beast lunged at me. The glow pulsed and clutched me. Pain exploded in my head. I couldn’t move; I couldn’t make a sound. I just shuddered in the magic’s grip, the agony so intense, it felt like my bones were splintering.
Someone cut my legs off, the walls somersaulted, and I crashed into the dirt.
Behind the beast Raphael turned into a whirlwind of steel, flinging blood into the night.
The beast howled.
I tried to get up, but I still couldn’t move my legs. I could see them right there in the dirt, but they didn’t obey.
Raphael hammered a massive kick into the creature’s ribs.
The abomination spun toward him, its mane sparking.
Raphael ran.
The creature bellowed, an otherworldly, terrible sound. Blood from the cuts I’d caused dripped into its eyes, rendering it half-blind. It raised its snout, inhaled, and charged after Raphael.
I just had to get up. I had to pull myself upright.
Raphael sprinted along the wall, leaping over the piles of refuse. The creature raced after him, devouring the distance between them in huge leaps. The floor shook with each thud of its paws.
I rolled up to my knees, clumsy like a drunk, and forced myself upright.
The creature’s mane turned bright orange.
“Magic!” I yelled.
Raphael glanced over his shoulder.
The orange glow around the beast’s mane coalesced and whipped from the creature in twin bolts of bright lightning. Raphael zigzagged, but it was too late. The left bolt caught his ankle, splintering into a dozen small forks that bit into Raphael’s flesh. It jerked him off the ground.
The world stopped. All I could see was Raphael’s face, twisted by pain. Fear clamped onto me and spurred me into a desperate sprint.
For a second he seemed to float weightlessly, suspended a foot above the ground, and then he crashed down, rolling in the dirt.
Please don’t die. Please, please, don’t die.
There were fifty yards between me and the beast. It felt like I was running for an eternity, stuck in some sort of hell, watching the man I loved die in slow motion.
The beast snorted in vicious glee.
I’ll get there, honey. Hang on another half a second.
The giant jaws opened wide, teeth ready to rend.
I smashed into the beast from the side, thrust my claws under it, and sank them into the creature’s gut. Blood drenched me. Slippery innards slid against my fingers. I grabbed them and yanked.
The beast spun, trying to bite me. I sank my claws into the wound and hung on. The orange lightning bit into me, fire and ice wrapped in pain. The moonlight dimmed.
Raphael loomed on the other side of the beast and clawed it. He was alive. I almost cried from the relief.
The magic stung us again.
Oh my God. It hurt.
The magic wouldn’t kill us. It just hurt.
Hurt.
Raphael and I stared at each other over the beast’s spine through the haze of pain and laughed. Our eerie hyena cackles echoed through the ruin.
It wanted to play the hurting game against two boudas. It had no chance.
We mauled the beast.
It raked us with its hind legs and shocked us with its magic, and we clawed it and clawed it, hanging on and laughing through the pain. I tasted blood in my mouth and clawed even harder, digging into the beast’s stomach, wrenching innards and bone out. We carved and gouged, blacking out and coming to, throwing blood and wet entrails.
The beast shuddered.
We ripped into it. It was the creature or us, do or die.
The beast stumbled, careened to the side, and crashed down.
I looked up, breathing hard. Across from me Raphael stood, covered in gore. His muscular furry chest heaved. Between us the beast lay, the bones of its rib cage bare. We had nearly stripped its carcass. It should’ve died ages ago, but the magic must’ve kept it alive.
I sank to the floor. My body was red with blood, some of it the beast’s, some my own. Long scratches marked my side and right leg from the hip down—gouges from the beast’s claws. The cuts burned. If I were human, I’d have needed hundreds of stitches.
We won. Somehow we had won and both of us had survived. It was some sort of miracle. I was bone tired. The floor looked so nice. Maybe if I just lay down here for a minute and closed my eyes…
“Andrea.”
Raphael’s eyes glowed with ruby fire. His face, a meld of human and hyena, didn’t mirror emotions well but his eyes stared at me with a chilling determination.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I’m taking you home.”
My mind chewed on his words, trying to break them into chunks. Take me home? Take me home…Home. With him.
My fatigue evaporated in an instant. “No.”
“Yes. You’re coming home with me. We’ll take a bath and eat and make love, and everything will be fine.”
I got my ass off the floor. “I don’t think so.”
“I’m done doing things your way. Your way means we don’t talk for months. You’re coming home with me.”
“You hurt me, on purpose, but everything is cool now, because you didn’t sleep with Rebecca and we can go home.”
“Yes!”
“It doesn’t work this way. I’m not going home with you. You and I are done.”
“You’re mine,” he snarled.
What the hell. Maybe the fight had knocked some screw loose in his brain.
“You’ll always be mine.” He stepped on the carcass and started toward me. I looked into his eyes and saw bouda insanity glaring back. The fighting had tipped the balance between rational thought and crazy passion. Raphael’s emergency brake was malfunctioning and he and I were on a collision course. “You know it and I know it. We love each other.”
“We’re bad for each other.”
“You’re not leaving me again!” he growled.
The adrenaline still coursing through me surged up. He was challenging me! I marched toward him, put my muzzle as close to his as I could, and said slowly, clearly pronouncing every word, “I am leaving you. You don’t get to play with me. I’m not your pet and you don’t get to hurt me because you think I should be punished.”
Baiting him was stupid. I knew that, but I couldn’t help myself. The crazy cocktail of biochemicals and magic that got me through this fight drove me on. I knew I should stop, but it was as if there were two of me—the rational Andrea and the emotion-crazy beastkin—and right now the rational Andrea was being dragged off by a raging river of hormones, while the beastkin Andrea waved good-bye from a cliff nearby.
I bit off words. “You broke my heart and now I’m walking away from you. Watch me.”
He’d hurt me. He would pay.
“This is me walking away.” I turned and took a couple of steps. “Are you watching?”
He lunged at me, and we went down, rolling in the dirt, arm over leg. My back hit the floor and Raphael pinned me in a classic schoolyard bully mount, sitting on my stomach. One of the worst positions you can be trapped in. Great.
“Not walking away now,” he said.
I bent my knees, planted my heels in the ground, and bridged under him. He pitched forward, his right hand coming down on the ground. Got you. I dropped my hips, caught his right arm, pulling it snug against my chest, stepped my right foot over his, capturing him, and bridged sharply to the right. Raphael pitched over and I rolled up on top of him. He clamped my shoulders with his hands.
“I’m getting up and walking out of here. You’ll have to fight me to stop me. Your call.”
Raphael opened his arms. He was letting me go. I had known he would.
I jumped to my feet and walked away. A part of me was screaming, What are you doing, stupid? Run back. I kept walking, holding on to the memory of Raphael telling me, “I know exactly how much it hurt.” This thing between us was too complicated and it hurt too fucking much. I had nothing left in me now and I couldn’t deal with it.
Behind me Raphael roared, shaking the ruin. I kept walking. The sound of his frustration chased me until I finally broke into a run. My body hurt. Fever heated my face from the inside—the Lyc-V was trying to mend my battered body. If only mending other things were that easy.
I ran faster, scurried up the wall, through the opening, and out into the moonlit night. I leaped onto the nearest roof and ran and ran, the air burning in my lungs, droplets of the beast’s blood falling off my body, leaving a grisly trail.
I kept going until the fatigue built into an ache in my limbs. I was on a roof…somewhere. The buildings around me no longer looked familiar. I slowed, then stopped. Behind me the city stretched, steeping in magic. In front, a river flowed, like a silvery serpent glinting in the moonlight. Tall trees stood guard on the distant bank. Tiny points of light, green and turquoise, drifted gently between their branches. I had run all the way across the city to Sibley Forest, one of the new post-Shift woods, supercharged by magic and filled with hungry things that viewed humans as tasty, fun-to-catch snacks.