The scent of burning silver pierced my nose. Sharp, metallic, and carrying the heavy tang of death. In Kaelan's embrace, I could feel every fiber of the young man's muscles tense as hard as steel. The Alpha blood that usually carried masculine warmth now felt like it was boiling, searing my skin. It was a terrifying biological reaction. His wolf's body was waging a fierce battle against the silver poison trying to paralyze his cell regeneration.
"Release her, Alpha Draken," the voice from beneath the black cloak crept out again, cold and emotionless as a knife scraping across a gravestone. "The girl belongs to us. We can smell a past that should have rotted in the ground by now."
Kaelan slowly released me, but he didn't let me move away. He stood tall, positioning his massive body as the only shield between me and them. His eyes had now changed completely. No longer ice blue, they were an electric blue blazing wildly in the darkness of night. I heard a horrifying crack as his bones shifted and the muscles in his arms swelled, tearing through the seams of his expensive uniform. A partial transformation. His claws lengthened, black and sharp, ready to tear apart anything standing in his way.
"I don't care who you are or what kind of trash you're looking for," Kaelan snarled. His voice was no longer human, but the growl of an apex predator that made the air tremble. "But in Silverwood, under my watch... not a single life gets to lay a hand on anything I've claimed as mine!"
"Yours?" One of the hunters let out a dry laugh, his hoarse voice rasping like sandpaper. "Be careful what you claim, Young One. The blood running through your family's veins may be the reason this girl keeps a dagger behind her eyes."
Those words struck me harder than any physical attack. Kaelan's family were slaughterers. That truth choked me all over again. Yet, seeing Kaelan's broad back drenched in blood as he protected me, something inside my soul rebelled. Kaelan's pain traveled through the invisible bond between us, triggering a painful pulse in my chest.
"Alea, run!" Kaelan whispered without turning even slightly.
"But you're hurt, Kaelan! The silver..."
"NOW!" Kaelan roared, just as three hunters leaped forward at once with speed far beyond human limits.
They weren't wolves, but neither were they ordinary humans. They were Half-Breeds. Hunters who had modified their bodies with dark magic to match the strength of shifters. One of them swung a barbed silver chain that whistled through the air, aiming for Kaelan's neck.
Kaelan groaned, then leaped up and caught the chain with his bare hand! White smoke billowed from his palm as his skin blistered instantly from contact with pure silver. But Kaelan ignored the pain with savage ferocity. He yanked the chain, dragging the hunter off his feet, then drove his fist into the man's chest until the sound of breaking ribs rang clearly through the silence of the night.
The other two hunters attacked from his blind side. I saw the flash of short daggers coated in a thick green liquid. Wolfsbane.
"Kael, behind you!" I screamed.
Without thinking, I slammed my foot into the ground. I wasn't using muscle. I was using will. A razor-thin wave of silver energy, nearly invisible, spread through the grass. The ground beneath the hunter's feet suddenly softened and became unnaturally slick. He slipped for a moment, giving Kaelan an opening to twist around and deliver a killing kick that shattered his opponent's jaw.
But the leader of the hunters in the darkness did not remain idle. He raised a massive crossbow. The bolt inside gleamed with malice, coated in silver and soaked in a concentration of pure wolfsbane capable of killing ten Alphas at once.
"Die, you arrogant Alpha," he hissed.
The bolt shot forward faster than the blink of an eye. Kaelan, already weakening from the silver burns on his hand, wouldn't have time to dodge. Time seemed to slow. I watched the tip of the bolt aim straight for his heart.
No! If he died, half my soul would die with him!
I threw out my hands on instinct. Break, seal! Let the moon speak!
An extraordinarily dense pressure formed in the air before us. The bolt slammed into an invisible glass wall, shuddered violently, then ricocheted to the ground as if it had just crashed into a mountain of steel. That wasn't elemental magic. It was The Luna's Decree. An absolute command over the universe.
Kaelan flinched. He glanced over, catching the remnants of silver light fading from my fingers and the mystical glow in my pupils. But he had no time to ask questions.
"Damn it! That power..." The hunter leader cried out in horror. "She's really the lost Luna!"
"ENOUGH!" Kaelan growled. His anger reached its boiling point. His blue aura exploded outward, creating a localized snowstorm that froze the grass within a thirty-foot radius. The air temperature plummeted until our breaths turned to ice crystals.
With lightning speed, Kaelan lunged at the leader. He seized the hunter by the throat and slammed him against a birch tree, cracking the trunk wide open.
"Who sent you?!" Kaelan snarled, his fangs nearly touching his opponent's throat.
"We're only... the first pawns," the hunter chuckled, even as black blood spilled from his mouth. Suddenly, black smoke began pouring from his body, reeking of sulfur.
"Our master... already knows you're hiding her..."
"Kael, get away!" I screamed when I sensed a surge of destructive energy.
Kaelan leaped backward just as the hunters' bodies exploded into foul black ash. There were no corpses. No evidence. Only the remnants of their burned cloaks and a suffocating scent of death.
Silence seized us once more. Kaelan's icy storm subsided, leaving the garden looking like a crystal graveyard. Kaelan stood motionless with his back to me. His body trembled violently, the remnants of his partial transformation fading, but the wound on his arm looked horrifying. Black, pus-filled, and throbbing with something sinister.
His knees buckled. He fell.
"Kaelan!" I ran forward, catching his athletic body before he hit the ground.
We both sank onto the frozen grass. I frantically examined his wound. The silver poison had already spread through his bloodstream, forming black veins creeping toward his heart.
"Don't... don't touch me," Kaelan whispered, his voice breaking. "My blood... it's hot... you'll get hurt..."
"Shut up, idiot! You'll die if I don't do something!" I tore a strip from my uniform, ignoring every rule of concealment I had clung to all these years.
I placed my palm directly over the pus-filled wound. Closing my eyes, I called forth a drop of pure power from the core of my soul. Soft silver light, as warm as the spring moon, radiated from my hand.
Kaelan let out a long groan. Not from pain, but from the deeply soothing cold beginning to flow through his veins, snuffing out the silver fire burning through him. He opened his eyes a sliver and looked at me from a few inches away. Beneath the moonlight, my skin glowed translucent, and my eyes... my eyes were flawless pure silver.
He no longer saw a village Omega. He saw something far more ancient. Something capable of subjugating his world.
"Who..." Kaelan touched my face with his still-trembling fingers. "Who are you really, Alea?"
I didn't answer. I focused on drawing the black poison out of his body through my fingertips, then flicking it onto the ground, where the grass immediately withered and blackened.
Kaelan's breathing began to steady. Although his wound was not completely healed, the poison was gone. My energy had become an antidote to the death inside him.
Suddenly, Kaelan pulled me into his strong embrace. He rested his head on my shoulder, inhaling the scent of my neck, which now smelled like wild lilies again because the sweat had worn away my masking potion.
"Don't run away again," Kaelan whispered, his hoarse voice filled with vulnerability. "Don't ever try to disappear from me."
I froze. His wild heartbeat collided with mine. The scent of pine forest and storms now mingled with the smell of his blood, but to me, this was the safest place I had ever felt during these dozen years on the run.
"You should have handed me over to them," I whispered bitterly as tears began to fall.
"I'll only bring destruction down on you and your clan, Kaelan."
Kaelan slowly released me, staring at me with an intensity that stole my breath. "I'm the future Alpha of the Blackwood family. I was born to embrace the storm, not run from it. And if you are that destruction... then I'll hold you until we both crumble into dust together."
Kaelan brought his face closer until our noses touched. "Tell me everything tomorrow. Not a single lie."
I nodded weakly. I knew my seal had shattered in front of Kaelan. My secret had spilled into the hands of my own enemy's son.
Yet, as we walked back to the dormitory, I didn't realize that beneath the hunter's cloak that had turned to ash, a small mechanical device was still blinking red. In a dark room far from the academy, a man in a gold-embroidered cloak stared at a monitor displaying the exact coordinates where we stood.