Page 105 of Their Mate
Five, ten, twenty—bodies were boiling up the cliff side like ants. Their howls rose, a chorus of madness that rattled the stone under my paws.
We closed tighter around the women, but Sera was the reason I tore into the next lycan that cleared the edge, ripping its arm clean off and hurling it back into the surf.
Jamie was everywhere all at once, faster than the lycans could track, slashing, taunting, and leading them directly into our jaws and claws. Declan was pure fury, golden eyes wild, his clawscarving through one throat after another. Logan was a wall of shadow, unmovable, cutting down anything that tried to push past us. Edward fought like a tactician, making each efficient kill count.
Behind us, Tamsin and her men fired their pistols, shots cracking loudly into the roar, every bullet finding a skull. Crouching defensively, Sera clutched a blade scavenged from somewhere inside, landing cut after cut, her fierce confidence burning bright even as the world fell to chaos.
They kept climbing and we kept tearing into them. The cliffs shook with the madness of it.
Everywhere I turned, there were claws, snapping jaws, bodies black and slick from the sea. The lycans swarmed over one another to climb, heedless of their own dead. I tore one’s throat out and hurled the corpse down only for three more to scramble over it. My jaws dripped gore, my paws slipped in blood, and still they came.
Declan’s eyes blazed like fire through the blood spray, his fangs buried in the chest of a brute twice his size. Logan’s black wolf slammed shoulder-first into two at once, his weight alone breaking bones. Edward used his whole body like a weapon, silent, exact, each kill a soldier’s strike. Jamie was a darting streak of death, sandy fur blurring in and out, hitting the pack’s blind spots, keeping them off Sera and Tamsin.
We held the circle tight, teeth snapping, claws raking. Behind us, Sera’s blade hissed through the air, her face set hard even as her body trembled with exhaustion. Tamsin fired shot after shot, every bullet finding its mark, her expression cold and steady even as the magazine ran dry and she pushed in a new one without a flinch.
And still they came.
The howling suddenly stilled into a guttural thrum that vibrated through my bones. The lycans peeled back, their yellow eyes gleaming rabidly, forming a ragged corridor down the cliff side.
And he stepped into view.
The Elder Lycan.
Bigger than the rest by a head and a half, his fur was shot through with silver streaks that caught the sunlight. His body was all wrong, hulking, sinew and scar, yet too human in the way he moved, in the way his eyes burned with devious intelligence.
The other lycans shrank back from him, snarling low, but yielding.
Tamsin’s breath caught, sharp in the roar of battle. “God help us. He’s here.”
Sera’s hand tightened on her blade, her voice breaking. “That’s him. That’s the Elder Lycan.”
The Elder Lycan straightened. His gaze swept toward the cliffs where we stood our ground, over me, over Logan, Declan, Edward, Jamie, and then it lingered on Sera. His lips curled upward, baring teeth too white, and far too sharp.
The pack bristled as one, fur raised, snarls ripping from our throats.
You will not have her.
The Elder Lycan tilted his head, like he understood. Then he smiled. A human smile. Cold and knowing.
And with a united roar that sounded like thunder, the lycans surged again.
CHAPTER 37
Sera
The world exploded.
It seemed that the Elder had somehow signaled all his lycans simultaneously, and the battle took on a new level of intensity.
The crack of rifle fire came from the southern beach. Then the deeper thump of heavier artillery, charges, mortars, I didn’t know what, answering out over the water. The sea threw spray high enough to catch the light like shards of glass.
The British hit the sand fast, a horde of men spilling off a line of boats in a rush. Helicopters carved through the air in tight circles, doors open, gunners swinging their barrels toward the black smear boiling out of the surf. The first burst chewed spray and meat together, bodies tumbling back into the churn. The lycans screamed like metal tearing apart and kept coming.
The Watch had braced the cliffs with so many guns that I couldn’t even begin to count them all. They fired down intothe fray, spraying hundreds of bullets through the line of approaching lycans.
And into that mess: my wolves.
Logan slammed past me first, a black wall of fur and muscle moving at full speed, hitting a lycan that leaped over the lip of the cliff and shoving it back into the face of its pack. The thing pin-wheeled, claws scrabbling for purchase, and Logan was already on the next, jaws chomping on its throat. Aidan crashed into a knot of them to my left and simply threw three off the ridge like he was emptying a sack. Declan tore through fur and sinew with a joy that should have frightened me, but just made me proud. Edward moved like a knife on a hinge with no wasted motion; everything he bit stayed down. And Jamie was a streak of fury, cutting through where the line thinned, leaping off shoulders and back again like the laws of physics had decided to give him a pass for a day.
