Page 70 of Hunted By Her Demon Wolves

Panting, he handed her the crystal shard. “Let’s get out of here.”

“But Tigress!” she protested.

He cast a worried look over his shoulder. “Just like my brothers, her healing will have to wait.”

Damon shifted into his demon form, grasping her wrist. “He’s right. We can’t help her now. We must go for help.”

She wanted to roar in frustration, though deep down she knew they were right.

She pulled the other half of the crystal from her pocket and thrust it into Cadmus’s hand. “Fine,” she seethed, but she didn’t like his plan. Not one bit.

She didn’t know what she was expecting when Cadmus fused the two pieces together. A jolt? An explosion? A bright, heavenly light to infuse them all?

But nothing happened. Not a damned thing. Cadmus cursed when he turned the crystal over in his hand, revealing a wide crack down one side. A shard was still missing!

“Fuck!” he threw both crystal shards to the ground.

She scooped them up. “Maybe Tigress has the other piece.”

But it was too late to search her body now. The demon cat let out an ear-piercing screech, the sound of her skin ripping apart like a butcher cleaving meat, as she shifted into a giant spider the size of a small car with two white tusks sticking out of her mouth. No, not tusks. Fangs that dripped sizzling venom onto the sand.

Cadmus roughly shoved her behind him, and Damon shifted into a snarling wolf, circling the spider.

She moved back and forth across the sand on spindly legs. “Bring virgin witch to her massster,” the creature hissed while eyeing Phoenix.

“You have the wrong witch.” She visibly swallowed, magic arcing off her fingers as she held up her hands. “There are no virgins here.”

Cadmus raised his hands to strike, but Phoenix struck her first, hitting the spider’s abdomen with a powerful bolt of lightning. The creature let out an ear-splitting screech and toppled to the ground, its legs curling into itself.

Cadmus jumped in front of her, blowing wind into her face. “Stay back!”

Swearing, she brushed her hair out of her face. “I need to heal her.”

“No way in Darkness.” He spoke through gritted teeth, blowing even more wind at her, dirt and grit burning her eyes.

She shielded her face with her hand, screaming against the wind. “Do you know a better way? Who else can tell us what happened to the other shard?”

Cursing, he lowered his hands, his shoulders slumping.I can’t lose you for another three thousand years.

She swore her heart shattered into a million pieces.

Damon howled when the spider knocked him on his back, her fangs driving into his abdomen.

Cadmus blew her off him and Phoenix charged the spider as it rolled away like a tumbleweed.

Wait!Cadmus called to her.

No!she hollered back.You’re not stopping me from saving Damon.She rushed past her injured mate, who had shifted into a demon. Clutching his bloody stomach, he writhed on the ground, a look of agony etched into his features. Big, bulging black veins had already sprouted along his body.

The spider scrambled to her feet, charging her, and she hit her bloated red abdomen with a bolt of magic. The creature lurched forward, and Cadmus knocked her back with a gust of wind. Fatigue weighed down her limbs, but she refused to give up, following the spider on shaky legs and hitting her again and again with white magic until the entire spider lit up like an eight-legged ghost. Shrieking like a possessed cat, the beast’s legs finally buckled beneath her. Phoenix aimed her magic for one fang and struck the target. It snapped, flying off in an arc over a sandy dune. Cadmus shifted into a wolf and ran after it.

Wiping sweat from her brow, Phoenix fell to her knees, exhausted from the exertion of using so much magic. She fell back when a shadow stretched over her, blotting out the sky, and poison sizzled as it splattered on the ground beside her. She gaped up at the giant spider, his fangs extended as he hissed down at her.

“Damon,” she breathed, too fatigued and frightened to fight. “Please. I’m your mate.”

He blinked at her with multi-faceted eyes and made a strange sound, like a cross between a puppy’s whimper and a snake’s hiss. She was vaguely aware of her celaris magic slipping away, the smell of mint replaced by the rancid odor of spider venom.

She fell back, her heart pounding a gong in her ears, when he hovered lower, sniffing her like a hound catching a scent. Her veins turned to icy sludge as she looked into his eyes again and saw what she thought was a portal to another world. A demon with a big, bulbous head, a wicked slash where its mouth should have been, and one giant eye looked back at her. A violent tremor wracked her when that slash of a mouth stretched into a shark-like smile with shards for teeth.

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