Page 68 of Impawssible Magic

She spins, hands raised, dark magic crackling at her fingertips. The spell hits my shoulder like a brand, searing through fur to the muscle beneath. I don’t stop. Pain is information. Pain tells me she’s dangerous, needs to be eliminated fast, can’t be given time to cast again.

I barrel into her at full speed.

We hit the ground hard, her nails raking for my eyes, my jaws closing on empty air where her throat was a half-second ago. She’s quick—magically enhanced, probably trained—but she’s not a shifter. She doesn’t understand that once a tiger’s committed to a kill, nothing short of death will stop him.

Her arm snaps under my paw. She screams. I silence her with a swipe that opens her throat, and then I’m running again.

Two.

Behind me, voices shout. Reinforcements arriving, but I can’t tell if they’re ours or theirs. Doesn’t matter. They’ll deal with each other. My focus narrows to a single point.

Leire.

The awareness sharpens. Closer.

She’s still alive.

I find them at the edge.

The Warding Line shimmers in the evening air, barely visible—a suggestion of boundary more than a barrier. The mist stops here, piling up against the invisible wall like waves against a breakwater. Beyond it, the forest stretches dark and unwelcoming. The Thornback Mountains loom in the distance, their peaks catching the last copper light of sunset.

Three Preservers remain. Two flanking, one holding a knife to Leire’s throat.

And I know that face. Iskra’s second—I recognize her from the battle, the one who escaped when the smoke cleared. Younger than Iskra, with sharp features and colder eyes. The kind of cold that comes from believing utterly in a cause.

“Stop right there.” Her voice carries clearly across the distance. The blade presses closer to Leire’s skin. “One more step and she dies.”

I shift.

The transformation rips through me—bones cracking, muscles reforming, fur receding into skin. I emerge human and naked and breathing hard, blood still wet on my face. Not my blood. Not Leire’s blood. Good enough.

“Let her go.”

My voice comes out wrong. Too low. Too rough. The tiger is still there, riding just beneath the surface, and he doesn’t use human words.

The Preserver laughs. It’s a brittle sound, nothing like Iskra’s calculated performance. This one is a true believer. “Do you have any idea what you’re interfering with? Centuries of work. The stability of the entire magical world. And for what?” She yanks Leire’s head back, exposing more of her throat. “One witch with an anomalous signature?”

Leire’s eyes meet mine.

She’s terrified—I can see it in the tight set of her jaw, the rapid flutter of pulse. But underneath the fear, there’s fury. Defiance. The same stubbornness that made her rebuild her life after exile, that made her open a shop in a strange town, that made her fight Preservers in her own shop with nothing but crystals and spite.

My witch doesn’t surrender.

“You would sacrifice everything for this?” The Preserver sounds genuinely confused. “Your position, your pride, your life—all for a witch you’ve known a few weeks?”

“She is not just a witch.”

The words tear out of me. Not planned. Not calculated. Just truth, raw and bloody as the violence I’ve carved through this forest.

“She is my witch.”

Silence.

The evening wind stirs the mist, sending tendrils curling around our ankles. Somewhere in the forest, an owl calls—and for one breathless moment, I’m caught between past and present, between the woman I lost and the woman I’m claiming. The Warding Line hums with ancient power, responding to the words I’ve just spoken. To the claim I’ve just made.

My witch.

Not protector and assignment. Not reluctant allies forced into proximity by circumstance. Not even friends who’d found an unexpected attraction.