I felt as if I'd been in a deep sleep and my alarm had blasted me awake leaving me groggy, slow-moving and dazed. Strangely dazed, to the point that my muscles didn't want to cooperate and I couldn't get my legs under me.

A sharp slap on my face woke me up faster. Bits and pieces were slowly coming back to me.

Leaving the Den.

Walking into the house.

Something else, something sinister teased the edge of my consciousness...

Raevyn and Lindsay Morgan.

Another sharp slap and a kick to my stomach made the rest of my brain fog dissipate, and I struggled to sit up. Before I could, Lindsay Morgan kicked me in the chest so hard I couldn't breathe right, and I desperately tried to pull air into my lungs, gasping and choking, as I tried to recall that last piece of the puzzle --

Lindsay Morgan blowing powder in our faces and Raevyn telling us to sleep.

And then, nothing.

Aymeric! My gaze searched for and found him on the floor, across the room from me.

Unlike me, he'd been bound with heavy chains, tightly, like a mummy, so I knew he wasn't going anywhere soon. Worrying about the puddle of blood slowly and steadily spreading beneath his head, I tried to gather my wits...until the tip of Lindsay Morgan's shoe caught me under the chin, throwing me back down onto the floor.

Looking up, she stood over me, smiling such a sweet smile that I knew she was completely fucking psychotic and was going to kill us.

And enjoy it.

"If you shift, we'll kill Aymeric and then we'll kill you. Now, call him to you," she demanded.

There was no doubt him was referring to Night. "Give me a phone and I will," I lied, trying to buy more time. Trying to think.

BAM!

Wrong thing to say and she caught me in the stomach that time with her foot. Then for good measure, she grabbed a handful of my hair and slammed my face into the floor.

"I see your bite mark," she hissed into my face. "He Took your Blood, which means he can hear your thoughts so do not fuck with me," she warned.

Little did she know that I probably had already revealed too much when I'd awakened and was scrambling to figure out what was going on and pull my thoughts together. His name had been in my mind.

Night.

Then when I'd seen Aymeric bleeding on the floor, I'd thought, Help.

Wanting to warn him, I'd told him that Lindsay and Raevyn were at the prison house, as I thought of the place. He'd know. He'd told me what he suspected, and I hoped and prayed to the Forces he could figure out a way to stop them before we lost any more of the pack.

Maybe my thoughts would be enough to warn him, to help him formulate a plan to save the pack. I had a chilling feeling it was too late for Aymeric and me. The puddle of blood under the Alpha's Teeth continued to pool at an alarming rate.

Raevyn lifted her head, watching out the window. "He's a fool, just like his father, thinking he can save his Howl. This should be entertaining."

Before I could warn him not to come in, Night and Néron burst through the door of the house and came to a stop, just after Lindsay Morgan had pulled me to my feet and pressed a wicked-looking knife to my neck. I forced my mind to be quiet, to not panic, to go blank so Night wouldn't get any distracting thoughts from me.

I knew, Alpha that he was, he was already working on how to get us out of this, and he'd be more than willing to die trying if it meant saving me.

"Shut the door," Raevyn ordered him, and Night did as she asked, buying himself, all of us, time.

"Lovely to finally meet you on the day you're going to die," Raevyn taunted him. "This day has been a long time coming, since four hundred years ago when a wolf killed a magick simply because he'd killed the wolf's mate, and that began an all-out war between the magicks and the wolves. Your kind eventually figured out how to destroy us, and my sister and I were the last ones left alive, about to be killed, when we saved ourselves."

Lindsay continued the story none of us knew. "We had to wait for the memories to fade, to lay low until it was time to rise and finish the work we'd begun all those centuries ago. Since your pack and the Luniere pack began it all, we thought we'd start with you."

"That's fine," Night said, though his voice was guttural. That meant his wolf was near the surface and Night was fighting his instinct to shift, but he was managing to sound as agreeable as an Alpha wolf could when his Howl was threatened. "Start with me, but let Neera go. We'll do a trade."

Lindsay laughed, digging the knife a little deeper into my neck, and I could feel the blood flowing from the cut. "I think not. You wolves aren't getting out of here alive. It just depends on the order you go out in."

"Oh, Ifrita, I just can't decide how this should go," Raevyn pretended to enjoy contemplating her choices.

"I want to start with the bitch. The only question is, should I hack Neera into pieces as a human or a wolf?" Ifrita asked.

Then she spoke directly to Night, and what she said broke my heart, making it almost impossible to not shift in my rage.

"Killing your parents as wolves was fun, but I'm thinking carving up a human might be even more fun because that way we can all hear her begging. Unfortunately, with your parents they could only whine and howl in pain since we spelled them to prevent them from shifting back into humans. Sometimes they whimpered, poor, pathetic pooches. I must say, watching your father trying to get to your mother as we ripped her apart was so very entertaining," Ifrita said as calmly as if she'd been discussing a new recipe.

Night had held his body perfectly still as Lindsay Morgan -- Ifrita -- taunted him about killing his parents, but he showed no outward sign of emotion.

Raevyn looked at Néron and Night.

"Now, make sure you don't shift for the next part of the story, or we'll be forced to end things much more quickly than planned. Just think of it as telling you a bedtime story. We know you always wondered how we got your mother and it was actually quite simple. We set a trap for her in the woods, saying we had captured her sons and if she wanted to see you alive ever again, she would come immediately. On the note was a special powder that blocked her bond with your father. She ran to save you boys while your father was taking care of pack war business with his Alpha's Teeth. We followed your mother into the woods and used the sleeping powder on her, then took her to a special little house we had, not too far from here," Raevyn explained.

Ifrita continued the horrible narrative. "We spelled your mother to prevent her from shifting and chained her to the ground so she could barely move. Then we used some more of that wonderful sleeping powder on her so she couldn't reach out to your father before we bagged his ass. The next day, we came back for your father and lured him to us by pretending to be members of the Luniere pack with information about his Howl. Well, we did have information about his Howl, so that part was true. A little bit of the sleeping powder and...he was sleeping like a baby. Big fucking wolf, just like you two. It was hard to wrap him in chains and get him in the trunk. But we managed, you'll be relieved to know, and we spelled him, too, to make sure he couldn't shift to human."

Night still had shown no reaction, and I wondered if he was tuning her out so he could focus on trying to get us out of this mess. I could tell his lack of reaction infuriated both Ifrita and Raevyn, so they continued hammering at him with the horrifying details of his parents' deaths. At this point, I was more concerned with Néron shifting; I could see him vibrating with rage, his fingers twitching, but so far, he was holding back his wolf.

"Once we got your father into the house," Raevyn said, "we chained him inside so he could watch through the window while we...played with your mother, so to speak."

"Such fun to watch her writhe and howl in pain -- and when we started dismantling her...well, I don't know if it was more fun watching your father's useless, frantic attempts to get to her or watching her agony until we finally took her head," Ifrita added happily.

The sisters laughed in delight at the shared memory, proving their crazy went deep, all the way to the bone.

"It was a good day, sister, and now we get to have the same kind of fun again," Ifrita said to Raevyn. "Maybe I'll start hacking pieces off Neera's pretty little neck to start."

With that, she began sawing the knife deeper into my neck, and it went deep.

Pressing my lips together, I refused to whimper or acknowledge the pain, realizing we were running out of time. I was going to die, and it wouldn't be pretty or painless, but I refused to let these bitches see me cower or beg for mercy.

With Ifrita's words and actions, Night's body tensed, his muscles straining though he wasn't moving one bit, the veins standing out on his arms, in his neck. His face was composed, almost as if he was bored, separated from the things happening right in front of him, distant from the words they were throwing at him, hoping to spark a reaction.

And suddenly, without warning, Night bellowed the loudest, strongest, most commanding Alpha Decree I'd ever heard in my life to shift. So forceful, I wouldn't be surprised if pack members all over Aibek lands suddenly started shifting without knowing why.

My wolf came forward instantly and fucking launched herself at Night's shoulder where she bit him, finally Taking his Blood, then he yelled, "As One!" and for the first time ever, Night and I merged to form our massive Bonded Wolf.

I'd heard a Bonded Wolf was enormous, but our wolf was beyond huge. We dwarfed Néron's wolf by a good two feet at the shoulder, our paws practically the size of dinner plates.

Now we were facing Ifrita, who was obviously fighting Lindsay Morgan's wolf for control. The poor wolf was trying to come forward and obey the Alpha Decree. Raevyn was likewise fighting to suppress Blaisall's wolf.

Néron had shifted and his normally giant wolf seemed dwarfed beside us as he waited to act.

They need to shift for this to work. Everything depends on them shifting. Everything. They must shift!

I could hear Night's thoughts now. Then we gave a sharp, deep bark -- the wolf version of the Alpha Decree to

For a few seconds, the longest seconds of my life, I watched as the battle between the magicks and the wolves was fought.

And won by the wolves.

The wolves stood before us, which meant the magicks were suppressed, and oddly, the two wolves immediately lifted their heads up, as if they were going to howl, exposing their necks.

At once, Néron leapt for Blaisall's wolf and we threw ourself at Lindsay Morgan's wolf.

Our teeth gripped the wolf's throat and we bit down as we yanked our head back, tearing the wolf's throat out in one sharp, swift movement. Néron did the same thing to Blaisall's wolf's throat.

The two wolves dropped to the floor where they stood.

The magicks inside them as dead as the wolves.

In ten seconds, start to finish, it had ended.

Four hundred years after it began, the wolves had finished the war with the magicks.