Claimed by the scarred Alpha

SÉVERINE

The bullet struck before my mind could even register the danger.

It was not clean, not the way stories promised with their slow-motion warnings. One heartbeat I stood in my room, sentinels crowding the doorway, Étienne’s face twisted in an emotion I could not name, and then the world vanished and I was tumbling through nothing.

Air rushed past. Open sky above. The ground was impossibly far, refusing to meet me where I needed it most.

My familiar coiled around me as we plummeted, his body shielding mine from the jagged earth that rushed up too quickly. I heard the sharp crack of my hand before pain caught up, sound racing ahead of agony, and then the pain crashed in, and I screamed into emptiness, the air swallowing every echo.

The bullet wound throbbed, raw and unhealed. We had teleported too quickly for my wolf’s healing to catch up, and the collision of gunshot, broken hand, and brutal landing sent my body into one long, unstoppable scream.

"Séverine." His voice was close to my ear, and urgent. "Séverine, look at me."

"This hurts," I said, which was the most inadequate sentence I had ever produced.

"I know. Hold still."

He pressed his hands against the bullet wound, and I felt the particular cold of his magic moving through the injury, knitting things back into an order they were not currently in. Around us, birds began dropping from the sky. Twenty of them, maybe more, landed in the grass and among the rocks in a silent, widening circle, their small bodies still.

The pain ebbed just enough for my thoughts to surface again.

"Why did you take me out of there?" I pulled away from him, my functional hand pressing against the ground to push myself upright. "I could have fixed it. I could have talked to him, explained—"

"You would be dead."

"Laurent shot because he sensed you were about to do something. He can sense you even if he cannot see you."

"He wanted to kill you," he said, his voice sharp with something I had never quite heard from him before. "If I had waited another half second, that bullet would not graze your shoulder. It would go through your skull. And unlike your shoulder, it would have been too late to heal."

I could only stare at him, words lost somewhere behind the shock.

"Everything is finished," I said. The words came out flat and certain. "It is all over."

"Forget that. What needs to happen now is that we teleport to your grandfather. We warn him. We take him if he lets us, and we disappear before Valcourt has time to mobilize properly."

"Before we go anywhere." I held his gaze. "Tell me about the destiny swap."

"Séverine—"

"You implied you know what it is. You know more than you said. Tell me before we go anywhere, because if there is a way out of this that is not running for the rest of my life, I want to know what it is."

He held my gaze for a long, silent moment, his face shadowed by something rare for him—something that looked almost like real guilt.

"I let your obsessions go too far," he said. "I accommodated things I should have called you to order on long before they reached this point. That is on me." He shook his head. "But I have to call you to order now. Let this go. Let him go."

"Tell me how—"

"You are an odd familiar spirit."

A voice drifted down from above and behind, unsettling in its calm.

I twisted around, heart pounding.

He stood atop a rock, no more than ten feet distant, dressed in the finery of another era—high collar, embroidered waistcoat, garments that should have looked absurd on a mountainside but somehow fit. His gaze flicked between us, mild curiosity lighting his face as if we were a passing oddity in an otherwise dull day.

I turned to my familiar. "Are you seeing this?"

My familiar had already moved, positioning himself between the stranger and me, his body tense with the instinctive readiness of something that senses danger before it understands it.

"Who are you," he said, "and how can you see me?"

The man strolled forward two steps, lifting his right hand and sweeping it sideways with a gesture so casual it was almost dismissive.

My familiar was yanked off the ground.

There was no grace, no hint of control. He was hurled backward as if struck by something far more powerful than a mere gesture, slamming into jagged rocks thirty feet away with a sickening sound that twisted my stomach.

I unleashed everything I had at the stranger without hesitation.

Unseen hands, fire, both at once, neither of which I had ever needed to use in combination before because neither of which had ever been insufficient on its own.

He caught the fire in his palm.

He literally caught the fire, letting the flames curl in his palm as he examined them with idle curiosity, turning his hand so they danced across his fingers before closing his fist and snuffing them out.

"If those invisible hands of yours make contact with me," he said pleasantly, "I will actually hurt you. I want to be clear about that distinction." He looked at me directly. "I am here to help you."

I stared at him.

My familiar reappeared from the direction of the rocks, moving fast, and hit the man across the jaw with a punch that should have dropped anyone still standing.

The man’s head turned with the impact.

His face shifted in ways no human face should, a subtle distortion in its geometry, as if something wore a face instead of possessing one, the bones beneath obeying rules I could not recognize.

He reached up and adjusted his own jaw with one hand, moving it back into alignment with the same casual attention you gave a collar that had shifted out of place.

My familiar had gone completely still.

So had I.

The man had a tail. Narrow, dark, coiled partially behind him in the careless way of something forgotten.

"You are not human," I said.

"No, darling." He straightened his jacket with both hands. "I am not."

He turned his attention to my familiar, and something in the quality of that attention made my familiar take a step back, which was not something I had ever seen him do in the entire time I had known him.

"A lesser demon functioning as a familiar spirit," the man said, with the tone of someone commenting on a mildly interesting architectural detail. "Light work."

My familiar grabbed my arm and pulled, the teleportation beginning around us, reality starting to fold and then stuttering, flickering, collapsing back into itself like a door swinging open and immediately being pushed shut from the other side.

We were still standing in the same place.

My familiar tried again. The same result. The air shimmered and settled, and we did not move.

I had never witnessed fear in my familiar before.

Now, I saw it plainly.

He shoved me hard, spinning me away from him, and said something that began with the word run and contained something else, something that sounded important, and then his mouth disappeared.

Not as a metaphor. Literally disappeared from his face, the skin closing over where it had been, seamless, and then his body came apart in several directions at once with a silence that was somehow worse than any sound would have been.

I braced for pain that never arrived from our bond tearing.

The man strode past me, surveying the scattered remains of my familiar with a critic’s eye.

"He is not dead," he said. "For the record. It takes considerably more than that, and frankly I am not currently capable of it even if I wanted to, given the limitations I am operating under." He glanced back at me. "You should keep better control of your familiar. It is bad for everyone involved when they develop feelings for their master."

"What?" I said.

"Oh." He looked at me with something that might have been amusement. "You did not know."

I could not respond to that.

"What do you want?" I said instead.

"I told you. I want to help you." He tilted his head slightly. "He will not give you what you want. I can."

"What are you?"

"Does it matter?"

"Yes."

"A demon." He said it simply. "Like him, technically, though the comparison is approximately the same as comparing a puddle to an ocean." He straightened his cuffs. "I cannot give you my name. The dominion that would hand me over to you is not something I am prepared to offer." A pause followed, and then he continued. "For now, you may call me Amine. That is the name of the face I am currently wearing."