Page 66 of Isabel and the Werewolf Beast

My long legs leaped up the stairs with ease and I ran to the library. Silas wasn’t inside. Where was he? Had he found the secret passageway? I couldn’t hear Isabel, Lucian, or Maximus. Were they all dead? But that would defeat Silas’s plan. He wanted Isabel alive for himself.

He wouldn’t get her.

I sneaked back out of the library and checked the next room then the next but I couldn’t find Silas anywhere in the castle and I’d wasted a lot of time searching for him. Time away from Isabel. I walked back to the library and opened the secret passageway. Isabel rushed out and slapped my face. I deserved that.

“Did you kill him?”

“I can’t find him.”

“Then why did you open the door?”Lucian asked.

“So I’d find Isabel, of course,” Silas said, his body slithering from the curtain in an incorporeal form and then solidifying into his body.

I stepped in front of Isabel. Lucian stepped to her right side and Maximus to her left.

“You won’t get her,” Lucian said. “Not with three of us and one of you.”

“Ah, yes.” He waved his hands and his body turned incorporeal again, but this time he duplicated himself until there were twenty ghost Silas lined between us and the door.

The passageway was still at our backs, but we wouldn’t all make it inside in time and how secure would we be inside there against an army of ghosts?

“Shit,” Maximus mumbled under his breath.

If Silas was a ghost the way Isabel had been during the curse, did that mean we couldn’t touch him? Couldn’t kill him? I picked up the nearest book and threw it at him. One of his ghost shapes stood in front of him and absorbed the blow but then his ghost extra disappeared. One down, nineteen to go.

Maximus and Lucian picked up the nearest objects, a book, and a vase, and threw them at Silas too. Two more ghost warlocks disappeared on contact. Whatever magic Silas was using, it wasn’t permanent, and we’d beat him. As though sensing we would best him, the real Silas turned corporeal again. His hands glowed as he built his magic. I raced forward to tackle him, knowing Lucian or Maximus would take my place. Silas shot off his magic. The two closest ghost forms grabbed me so I couldn’t dodge the flying ball of magic coming for me. I didn’t even have time to regret my decision.

This was the moment of my death. I saw it in the glowing orb coming for my face.

“Dante,” Isabel screamed.

I couldn’t even tell her goodbye.

I suppose our love was never meant to be.

A body slammed into mine knocking me and the ghost forms to the floor. A scream of pain tore through the air then silence.

“Asher!” I rolled him over, but his face had frozen in pain.

Rage like I’d never experienced before surged through every vein in my body. My body grew. The rage grew. My head touched the ceiling. I swiped my claws the size of swords across the ghosts and killed them all in one swoop. Silas slapped his hands together and grew a magic ball larger than himself.

I shoved my hand through the ball. It flickered over my skin, piercing me in painful ways, but it kept feeding my rage. Building it so large that all I cared about was this warlock’s death. He’d killed my little brother. I sliced his head from his body. His ball of magic fell on top of him, and he burst into flames. His arms and legs twitched as though he suffered every one of those flames licking his body. I hoped he did.

I hoped he paid in the afterlife for all his sins.

Pain. Loss. The emotions slammed into me. I threw my head back and howled my pain.

“Dante,” Isabel whispered.

I snapped my rage-filled gaze to her. She stepped from behind Lucian and Maximus and held out a placating hand.

“You killed him.”

I was too far gone in my animal form to talk. My claws retracted into my fingertips, and I scooped her up by the waist in one hand, and in the other, I lifted Asher’s body, then I kicked the window out and launched us to the ground outside. I ran and ran. Where I was going, I didn’t know. Neither did the animal I’d become who kept howling his pain to the sky.

Chapter thirty-four

Isabel

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