AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The rippling colors that I remember pushing through when I entered by the portal stretch behind us, rolling like a creepy rainbow with a whole pot of dimensional awful at the end. The acrid stench of smoke has my nose twitching. The labyrinth walls around us have crumbled to jagged pieces, blocking our way in.
My breath skitters in my lungs like spiders scurrying from an oncoming storm. If Leander couldn’t save this part of the maze, what else couldn’t he protect?
“What happened?” Theo’s demon voice comes out all surly gravel.
My skin crawls with a prickling sensation that’s a perversion of the warm tingling that accompanied Leander’s magic. From the dark remnants of the maze’s entrance, Belaya stumbles and picks her way over shattered rocks. Dirt smudges her blue skin, and blood stains her hands as if she has crawled here from the castle. Her nightgown hangs off one shoulder, ripped at the hems. Her wide eyes shine, and her lips tremble.
“Do you need help?” Mom steps forward, but I push her back.
“Don’t,” I warn. Something’s wrong. When Belaya had accused Leander of betraying her with me, she’d been convincing. But if I’m his mate, she’d manufactured that cunning with a calculation that had nothing to do with being dumped.
Belaya mumbles a chant that sounds nothing like the one Mom said earlier. “Fire bright, fire light. Burn me not when you ignite.”
Time unwinds in the way it did once when a car zipped out in front of me in traffic. I’d had nowhere to go but into the side of that car, and in the instant before impact, I thought of Mom, those long days in the hospital, my friends, a test I had scheduled for the next day, everything in agonizing slow motion. Now, a start-and-stop reel plays out with the same creeping inevitability. Belaya flexes her fingers. The smell of wildfire rushes through the air on invisible smoke, and a crackling booms as loud as firecrackers. When she unleashes a fireball at us, I’m already moving, shielding my mother on instinct.
As thought catches up with impulse, I tense. My brain screams the threat of the incoming pain in all caps across my senses.
Crap on a hocus pocus cracker, I hate magic.
22
LEANDER
Meg. She’s here, and she’s in danger. The moment she entered the realm, I felt her. My mate. My reason to live or die. The one woman worth sacrificing everything for. The labyrinth can fall, the world can end, if only Meg makes it. Why did she come back to me? I’m going to kill Theo and resurrect him, just so I can kill him again for putting her in danger.
My heart pounds, a deafening bass thrum in my chest, and I shake off dizziness to pick up my pace and race after Belaya. That elf has drained me of my magic to the point of near death. Worse, she didn’t reveal herself until the portal opened, and I’ve spent every hour since losing Meg in a constant fight to keep the labyrinth standing. Without my magic, time has zoomed by at a frantic speed. Almost a week has passed since I let my mate go. Never again.
My right hoof drags behind me, scraping on the rubble. Bess tied my left arm to my chest in a sling days ago, and I can no longer feel it. Doesn’t matter. I’ll run myself and my realm into the ground—literally—before I’ll risk my mate. Belaya heads toward the portal which must be where Meg came through.
The stench of a fireball hits my snout, and I toss the heavy stones of the ruins rather than lose time navigating my way around them. Charging through the destruction, I watch Belaya hurl fire at my fragile mate, who fearlessly shields the woman behind her.
No. I won’t make it to her in time. My lungs seize, my heart dives, and I rush forward with a roar.
Time crawls, the same as millennia ago, when I waited for the hunters who had come to slay the monster chained in the maze. The fireball blazes a path toward my mate, the scorching heat and the stench of sulfur overwhelming. Meg lifts a hand, the same as I would if calling powers, as though she summons part of the maze to shield her. Mirroring her, I dredge up the last of my magic to do the same.
Two things happen at once. An enormous chunk of labyrinth wall hurtles toward Belaya, while Oggie launches himself from my mate’s arms. Losing his cute kitten fur, he transforms into a giant demon shield of ugly wrath and ghastly vengeance. His wings deflect the fire in a rush of flames that makes him look like a phoenix for the briefest flash.
A hefty chunk of maze knocks Belaya to the ground, and I’m not sure if I made that happen or if my mate has tapped into her connection with magic. I limp to loom over the damned elf, ready to rip her apart for threatening my mate, for destroying my realm, for almost killing me and everyone else here.
“You can’t murder me in front of your pretty mate,” Belaya says on a laugh. “You would let her see the kind of monster you really are.”
I should. The elf must’ve destroyed her own world before I gave her sanctuary in mine. The pain she has caused would justify her execution, but in front of my mate? If Meg’s even still mine.
“My man’s none of your business, bitch.” Meg plants her booted foot on the elf’s neck. “Move and I’ll kill you myself.” My mate’s never been more fearsome or gorgeous.
Transformed, Oggie pounces next to Meg’s boot, arching his kitten back below little wings. I swear the tiny horns on his head gleam.
My warrior mate. Her clothes cling to her curves as though armor made to fit her with dark pants that hug her hips and showcase her rounded ass. The sweater wraps her the same as a spelled cloak, the front dipping over her cleavage. Her red curls move like living fire around a face so flawless that I’d convinced myself I’d imagined her beauty. No goddess could be more perfect. I want to hold her, love her, lose myself in her strength. Hell, I don’t even mind her fluffy champion hissing at Belaya.
In full demon warrior form, Theo comes toward us. I almost use my fist to punch him in the face, rather than keep hold of Belaya. “Steal my mate away from me,” I tell him, “and I’ll banish you to a hell so hot that not even you will survive.”
“Calm down.” He clamps a cuff on the dark elf’s wrist.
When she mutters something in her dead language, Meg presses harder on her throat, cutting off the elf’s airway. “No more nastiness from you. You can keep those confusion and chaos spells to yourself. We don’t want them.” She leans closer. “That how you tricked Bess? Or Darnell? Maybe it’s why Bess didn’t hear me calling her name in the hall? Or how you convinced me to believe your lies about being Leander’s true mate?”
I jolt with shock at what Meg reveals. “Belaya meant nothing to me. I pitied her for being the end of her realm.” And feared suffering the same fate.
My mate cuts a glance at me, one so sharp that my soul bleeds on its edge. “I shouldn’t have doubted you,” she says. “I won’t make that mistake again.”
