Page 78 of Rejected Exile

I have to close my eyes and turn my head away, but my neck only moves a few millimeters before it freezes up.

Even that small movement gives me hope.

The venom's paralysis isn't complete. It's made my legs and arms useless, but I can still breathe, swallow, and direct my eyes. That must meansomething.

With my eyes closed, my other senses heighten. I can smell it all: the sharp tang of blood, the mellow rot of leaf litter on the ground, flesh rotting beneath pale vampire skin, and intertwined with it all four distinct scents of four very different males.

One who welcomed me when I got to town with protectiveness and steady comfort. One whose flirtations made me feel more alive, his sweet charming words bringing a blush to my skin. One who I thought I knew as a child, only to discover he'd turned into a man while I was gone.

One who broke my heart, and has yet to piece it together, but breaks it anew every day—because I see the shell of a man he's become, and I wish there was a way to undo it all, for both our sakes.

The ache I feel at the sound of their cries is overwhelming. It makes my fingertips tingle and my pulse quicken. Fills me with something that's like strength, but a little different, as if I'm flexing a different muscle.

"Fuck!" Ambrosia shifts her arms under my shoulders, getting a better grip on my limp body. "You just gained a whole twenty pounds in one second, wolf. Whatever you're doing—if this is you trying to shift—stop it right now or I'll drain twenty pounds of blood from your body."

I can sense it. The heaviness inside me. It's not a literal twenty pounds; that's just Ambrosia feeling me go limp as a different kind of numbness fills my body.

Beneath my feet, the earth is quiet and cold. Its powers have slept for years. No one has tended to the magic that courses through it, running alongside the clay, silt, sand, and water. But the magic is still there—buried deep, beneath a kind of permafrost, just waiting for the sun to warm its surface and bring it up.

I am the sun.

I warm its surface.

Twenty-Seven

Finn

As I sink my teeth into a vampire's fleshy calf, I have to force myself not to retch. The taste of him is like rotted meat and spoiled eggs on my tongue.Vampires.Dead things should stay dead, and that's the rule of it.

But even the chunk I take out of him and spit onto the ground isn't enough to stop him from slashing my side with those pointed claws of theirs. I jerk away and twist around, severing the hand that did it. Too late, though; the fucker just laughs, his wound barely seeping blood, as vampire venom makes my legs twitch and my head tremble.

I knew one day the vampires at the edge of town would make us regret not tearing all their throats out. When William was alive, I tried to convince him to get a hunting party together just forthem.I'd gotten him all the way to the planning stages when his mate, Queenie, suddenly started bleeding from the eyes.

After that, he was a shadow of his former self, like a man walking with a six-inch hole blown through his chest. You could see him, but you could also see through the hole to the other side, and you knew there was no saving him. No mate can replace one who died like that, the horror of it seeping through the mate bond. And she was his second mate to die, so it nearly killed him. He forgot all about the coven of bloodsucking monsters.

Now the vamps have gotten greedy and fat. They've feasted on far too much werewolf blood—Kieran isn't the only pack member looking for oblivion—and they're stuffed with the strength of it. That power,ourstolen power, flows through them as they slash and claw at us like demons.

There shouldn't be so many of them. I swear, this is two or three covens at least. As I tear through limbs and leap onto them to snap at their throats, I feel the futility of it. Even the ones who go limp beneath my teeth will only rise again in a day or two to fuck with us some more.

It isn't enough. It never will be.

Maybe Roarke is right.

Maybe there is no use in keeping Glass Pack going. Not like this, with blood on our fur and rotten flesh in our mouths, while the land beneath us stays still and silent, refusing to do its job.

We have failed our mates, watched our females die, and now we suffer for it.

A vampire blurs past me. Another throws me off him as I leap onto his chest. A third, as if sensing my weakness, grabs onto my injured leg and twists it.

The pain makes me twist around to snarl at him.

Just as he grabs the upper part of my leg with his other hand andsnapsthe bone in two.

White-hot pain lances me. I scream, going down, my muzzle hitting the cold earth. Laughter greets my ears. Surging to my front feet, I dart out to bite off the mouth of the vamp who laughs the loudest—but even the sweet release of silencing him doesn't make the pain go away.

They're going to kill us.

Slowly, and with as much pain as possible, but clearly the end goal here is not to fight another day.

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