Claimed by the scarred Alpha

PRIM

I hit the demon first, and I hit him hard.

My claws, if I could even call them that anymore, as they were more like extensions of rage given shape, raked across what should have been his shoulder, and I felt them connect with something solid enough to tear. Black ichor sprayed in a wide arc, hissing where it hit the linoleum, and for one triumphant second I thought I’d actually wounded him.

But he didn’t even stumble.

He turned into the strike instead of away from it, using the momentum of my own attack to grab me by whatever passed for my throat and fling me clean across the store. I slammed into a rack of chips, plastic bags bursting open around me, and by the time I’d reformed enough to move again, he had already turned his back on me entirely.

He wanted Ophelia.

I watched him cross the distance between them in three long strides, faster than anything that size should have been able to move, and Ophelia barely got her hands up in time. Light bloomed from her palms, raw and desperate, catching him square in the chest, and this time he did stagger, a guttural snarl tearing out of him as smoke curled off his skin where the light had touched.

"Bitch!" he said, voice dropping into something almost admiring, "That actually hurts."

He came at her again anyway.

Arania cut across his path before he closed the last few feet, her small wings blurring so fast they’d gone nearly invisible, and she threw something at him that looked like a net woven entirely out of moonlight. It caught around his forearm mid swing, yanking his strike wide, and his fist punched clean through a display case instead of through Ophelia’s skull. Glass exploded outward in a glittering spray, chunks of it embedding themselves in the ceiling tiles above us.

He rounded on Arania with something between fury and genuine curiosity.

"A union between a fairy and a whisperer," he said, circling her now, careful in a way he hadn’t bothered being with the rest of us. "How unique. My kind makes very certain no whisperer slips through untouched. And yet here you stand with one of your very own. Bonded. Protected. How did that happen, I wonder."

It then glanced at Ophelia.

Ophelia’s face went pale enough that I noticed it even mid fight, even with everything else demanding my attention.

The demon smiled at that reaction like he’d found exactly the wound he wanted.

Then he split.

I watched it happen in real time, his body peeling apart down some invisible seam, flesh and shadow dividing until two identical shapes stood where one had been a heartbeat earlier, both turning in perfect, terrible unison toward Arania and Ophelia.

He didn’t spare me a second glance.

I understood the insult buried in that, the casual dismissal of me as a threat worth splitting his focus over, and some part of me wanted to scream at the unfairness of it even as the more practical part of me recognized the opening it created.

Arania couldn’t fight two of him and shield Ophelia at the same time. I could see the strain of it already, her spells coming faster and faster, sweat beading along her tiny brow as she wove barrier after barrier between Ophelia and the twin threats bearing down on them. One half of the demon lunged low, and Arania’s shield caught the blow, the whole structure of light shuddering under the impact. The other half swept in from the side.

I threw myself into the gap.

I hit the second demon shoulder first, using every ounce of wraith strength I had left, and managed to knock him sideways into a rack of motor oil bottles, as the plastics cracked and proceeded to spill dark fluid across the floor. It bought Arania half a second. Half a second was apparently all she needed, because she used it to fully collapse her attention onto the first demon, her magic sharpening from defense into something far more aggressive.

The demon I’d tackled recovered fast.

He grabbed my throat again, this time lifting me entirely off the ground, and I felt something inside my own form begin to unravel under the pressure of his grip, threads of myself pulling loose like fabric coming apart at the seams.

"I’m surprised you left my belly," he said, almost conversational despite the violence of what his hand was currently doing to me. "You should have stayed there. Sunk into the dark where you belonged instead of buzzing around like this."

"Let go of me," I managed, though the words came out warped, barely words at all anymore.

"You’re finished," he said, ignoring my demands entirely. "Because I’m tired of you being a pesky fly."

He immediately squeezed harder.

I felt myself tear. Not metaphorically, and not some abstract sensation either. This was something real and specific ripping loose from wherever the core of me lived now, and my body started flickering violently in and out of visibility, the edges of myself dissolving faster than I could will them back together.

I thought, with a strange, distant clarity, that this might actually be it. That after everything, the wraith form, the reformation, the promise I’d made to Margaux in that field of forget-me-nots, I might simply cease to exist in this gas station surrounded by shattered glass and spilled motor oil.

But it would be fine. I got what I wanted. Séverine and her grandfather were dead and I went out doing a good deed.

"Before you die," he said, leaning close enough that I could feel whatever passed for his breath, "know that I already got what I wanted. I won."

Across the room, past the chaos, I caught one flickering glimpse of Étienne slamming into a shelf hard enough to crack the metal frame, of Margaux standing over him with a spear held aloft in her mind’s grip, her face a mask of cold intent that didn’t belong to the woman I’d sworn myself to.

Then everything went white.