Page 10 of Sinful Shifters

I urgently tell him what's going on, describing the spell, how it showed me where she is, and I can even feel the distance still. "She's in the enemy camps."

"I'll go to her immediately," he says, summoning a great gust of wind. "The others will join."

"No—you can't!" Cassandra paces over to him with her sister constance, both of them alarmed. "There are spells in the war camps."

Constance warns him, "They'll flay any werewolf alive."

"Morgan got through," I tell them, frowning. "We all saw it."

"Morgan wasallowedthrough," Cassandra says, shaking her head woefully. "They wanted to let him through so he could be killed in front of us."

"If you go," Constance tells Lucian, "you'll be turned into mince meat. Even a god of werewolves still has the body of a werewolf, and your physical form will never survive those spells."

Lucian snarls, and I feel his frustration and rage. I share it too, being on the front lines with my useless magic. All I want to do is race into battle and save everyone, but for every dozen vampires I kill with a slow-moving battle spell, twenty more seem to pop up. I'd be more useful as cannon fodder than as a so-called battle witch.

Which is how an idea comes to me.

"I'll go," I tell them, raising my chin. "I'm not a werewolf, and I know exactly where she is. It'll be faster for me."

"You'll never get through the shields," Rhea says, joining the conversation even as she pauses to throw a battle spell at the vampires.

Hers, unlike mine, burns through dozens of them at once, spreading through the lines to kill even the human soldiers with their strange weapons.

Until, at least, the spell hits the enemy's shields. Once it does, it stops abruptly, cut off unnaturally. The vampires who made it through in time jeer at us, then rush through the shield to attack one of our warriors. The howling scream of rage the warrior lets loose is cut off as they disembowel her and drink her blood.

The sight of it sickens me. I loathe those shields.

Looking at them, I feel a twist of panicked inspiration.

We may not be able to disassemble them completey, but maybe we can make a human-sized hole through them. One big enough for a young, clever witch looking for her best friend.

So much of magic has never come naturally to me. Potions are about the only thing I can pull off, and half the time, they do weird things, like turn into puffs of smoke or harden into unusable goo. The coven leaders have been frustrated with me my whole life, because every spell they do indicates I have a great deal of magic ability, yet somehow I'm unable to do anything with it.

Looking at the shields, I feel a kinship. An instinctive pull.

If I don't tell the coven witches what I'm about to try doing, they can't stop me.

And it's not like I'm doing anything useful with my skills. If I burn out, I'll still be able to do most of the work of potion making. Bitterly, I realize that I might even bemoreuseful that way. At least the coven wouldn't have to keep trying—and failing—to train a witch like me.

So I reach for the ancient magic that feeds the shields and bring it into myself.

Chapter8

Everett

The coven watches the young, little witch do it with wide eyes. Somehow, she's able to channel the ancient magic being fed to the shields. She holds it inside her, burning bright, visible in my eyes as wellspring magic.

"I can do it," Ali says, her eyes glowing white with magic. "I can make a hole in the shields."

I feel a surge of protectiveness. Not for the girl—though I would do anything to protect Rina's best friend from harm, if it meant keeping her from heartache. The protectiveness I feel is for Rina herself.

I want to be the one to save her. To wrap her in my arms, and to mercilessly slaughter the one who took her and hurt her.

We should go in there ourselves,Adar says, lifting his red lips back from white fangs in distress.There's a whole human army, two psycho ancient werewolves, and an impossibly strong male witch on the other side of those shields. No herb witch can fight them.

But she can go in undetected,Thale points out.No soldiers will rally to attack one little witch trying to save her friend. And we can all feel the power she's drawing on, as if the wellspring itself were right here beside us.

I hate the idea, but I can feel the magic spells that will tear us apart. They stretch between the shields, laser-like webs of power ready to target any werewolf who approaches. The bits of warrior wolves strewn on the ground make it clear what will happen to us if we try.

---