Reclaimed (Shadow Beast Shifters Book 2)

Grief was a debilitating and destructive emotion. Tearing through my soul, shredding it into unrecognizable pieces.

I had experienced a true grief with the death of my father, and back then I’d likened it to a temperamental ocean. One minute, I’d been calmly accepting the news of his demise, and the next, a cacophony of fear, anger and pain had engulfed me, until my emotions were a hurricane crashing against the sand.

Eventually, the storm of his betrayal and death had subsided, and I’d been able to mostly drift along. As more time passed, I’d even believed that I’d finally found my peace, only for some event to trigger another storm and send me back into the crashing waves of pain.

Dannie’s death was so new to me that I should have been in stage one: calm denial. But I appeared to have skipped that altogether, and we were in stage two: hurricane season.

I couldn’t bear to feel the pain, so I embraced the anger. Anger I was directing squarely at one person: Shadow Beast.

He stood before me, eight feet plus of ripped and gorgeous god… or more accurately, demon. His dark curls were a little tousled, like he’d been through hell to get to me. In all honesty, the disheveled look only made him sexier.

But that wasn’t going to save him today.

He had betrayed me in the worst kind of way—false promises that had gotten my friend killed. Or even worse, he’d had a direct hand in her death, explaining why he was always brushing off my concerns about her. Shadow hadn’t wanted to piss me off before he’d gotten what he needed from me. He’d kept me prisoner, forced me to touch the Shadow Realm, and stopped me from returning to Torma when I’d known Dannie had been in trouble.

Dannie The Wanderer, who had been more of a mother to me than my own in the last ten years. Ironic in a way that on the same day I’d learned Lucinda Callahan, my actual birth mother, was dead, I’d also found out about Dannie.

One I had mixed feelings about—my mom—and the other was the cause of my current raging state.

The pack had killed her because of me. Because of Shadow. Both of us really, and she had been our responsibility to save.

“You promised me!” I seethed, and the flames that had inexplicably sprung to life across my skin rose higher. My hair followed suit, flying around me in a wave just as red as the flames themselves, power seeping from my pores.

All of the shifters around us slammed into the ground, and I heard the breaking of bones. A pleasant sound in my current state of being.

If this was what rising from the ashes meant for a phoenix, then I was embracing it to the fullest degree. This power… it was mine, and I would destroy any who stood in my way.

Shadow seemed to be almost spellbound by my current appearance, his gold and fire-touched eyes locked on me in their usual manner of complete and total focus. He dissected me with a mere glance, and even though he didn’t speak, we were definitely communicating.

Both of us furious.

Both of us shocked as hell about this new development.

Neither willing to give an inch.

If an outsider was watching me now, they’d never believe that just a mere year ago, I’d been a normal wolf shifter. A year ago I’d never opened a doorway into the locked-away Shadow Realm. Or produced flames across my skin. Or controlled the creatures that I somehow drew from that realm into my world.

The last year had demonstrated that there was more to me than I’d ever known, and while most of the time it freaked me out, today… today I was embracing this change.

A change that had hopefully made me powerful enough to take on Shadow.

At this point the heat was almost pleasant, and I fanned the fire with more pain and anger. He reached out for me, and I waited to see if my flames would burn him.

His arm shot straight through, completely unscathed, and he wrapped one of his big hands around my throat. No doubt he thought that he had me in a vulnerable position, and even as the air was cut off in my lungs, I didn’t struggle. I just smiled, my eyes detailing in no uncertain terms exactly what I had planned.

His demise.

“Sunshine,” he rumbled, warning in his voice.

What the fuck was he warning me about? Losing my shit? Guess he should have thought of that before he got my friend killed.

His hand flexed against my throat, but I had a sense that he knew the fire power I channeled was preventing him from actually hurting me. This reaction was merely a warning to match the rebuke in his voice, but still… His negotiation skills needed as much work as his people skills.

“Mera. Control your power. You can do it.” Reece tried to placate from the side, but neither Shadow nor I turned toward him. Nothing could have broken our gazes.

“What has upset her?” Shadow bellowed into the air. The shifters who had just been climbing to their feet around us hit the deck again. From what I could see anyway; I assumed all of them went down, and not just the ones in my peripherals.

“Dannie The Wanderer is dead.”

I was almost certain those words had choked out of Dean Heathcliffe, former beta, and a shifter high on my murder list. A murder list was a normal twenty-three-year-old chick thing, right? The other names on there was my oldest friend—Jaxson Heathcliffe—and my true mate—Torin Wolfe. I hated them as much as Shadow. Actually, more.

And unlike Shadow, they couldn’t counter my power or fight the fire, and that meant this attack was a wasted opportunity. I should have taken those motherfuckers out first, and then paused for a moment to figure out how to best Shadow.

Although… Torin had said he knew about Shadow’s weakness. They’d used an incapacitating powder on him. A powder Dannie had lost her life to produce, and maybe that meant I could learn some important information before I stole their useless lives from them.

Shadow’s eyes softened. It happened so rarely, but I’d seen it a time or two before. I refused to let it get to me as I would have yesterday. Before I’d found out about his betrayal.

“Mera, listen to me. Dannie is—”

The moment he said her name, my flaming fury surged up, and I embraced it full bodily. With no regard for personal safety or consequences of my actions, I catapulted myself out of his hold. A feat I’d never achieved before, but I was too far gone to even understand the significance of that.

Tilting my head back, my howling scream was deafening, and around us, the already knocked-down wolves cried out. Between Shadow and me, we were breaking these shifters, which was barely the tip of what I was going to do to them.

I let the fire and my wolf rise, and like an inferno hit with a ton of fuel, there was nothing that could have stemmed my pain. My eyes were closed, but I felt the connection to the Shadow Realm. I’d touched it enough times now that when I figured out how to open my link, I could follow the path.

To my vengeance.

Today I needed to assuage the pain in the only way I knew how.

Come to me…

I called them, every shadow creature I could reach, and… whatever else decided to tag along. My arms rose like I could embrace the darkness in this manner, and it was akin to the time I’d touched the spell blocking the doorway to the realm. I opened myself up to a shadowy entity, and it came right home.

My power spun webs around me, and when I finished releasing this new energy that had taken hold of me, my eyes shot open.

It took me a moment to understand what I was seeing.

To understand what I’d just done.

What have I done?

There was no fire now. It had been replaced by a literal wall of smoky darkness, and the sight of that was almost enough to shock me back into my right mind. In my fury I’d called a dark entity filled with synapsing lights, like those I’d often seen in Inky, Shadow’s companion.

Speaking of, Shadow was the only being to remain in my line of sight. His flames a visible light in the otherwise endless darkness, as he attempted to break through whatever the fuck I’d done. For the first time, a new emotion bisected the relentless pain and anger inside me.

Fear.

I tried to backpedal and close the connection I’d carelessly thrown wide open. But it was like stopping a flood with a paper towel. There wasn’t a hope in hell of me reversing what I’d put into place; it was already moving of its own volition.

Despite my current hatred for him, I had to turn to Shadow, hoping he held some answers. From what I could tell, I was truly about to end the world—or multiple worlds—with my selfish actions, and that was not okay. If Dannie knew what I’d set forth tonight in her name, she’d have kicked my ass until I couldn’t sit down for a year. This was not what she would have wanted.

Shadow’s power finally penetrated through the dark wall, and I hurried toward him while keeping a close eye on the synapsing smoke raging like a tropical storm around me.

“Shadow!” I screamed, throwing myself into the darkness. To my surprise, it didn’t block me as it was blocking him, and I fell through like it had no substance at all, right into his arms.

He hauled me up, holding on almost desperately. “What do I do?” I sobbed. “I didn’t mean to bring about the apocalypse.”

As he held me closer than ever, I could have sworn he breathed me in as if he’d never expected to hold me like this again. It was over so fast, though, that maybe I’d misread the moment.

“Sunshine,” he snapped, sounding like his typical asshole of a being, “you have called the mists from the Shadow Realm. You need to send them back before they bring with them every creature that has ever existed in my world.”

I choked down my fear and worry. “I don’t know how to! I’m useless, Shadow. Fucking useless. I couldn’t save my friend. I couldn’t stop the creatures. I couldn’t open the door.”

He shook me, and as my head snapped back, it actually helped to clear my thoughts. Still a bastard move, though.

“Listen to me,” he rumbled, and there was so much command in his voice, I had no choice but to obey. “You’re the least useless being I’ve ever met. The way you adapted to the Solaris System, making friends, helping and learning, is nothing short of admirable. You went to the top of my never to be underestimated list, and I promise, that’s a small list.”

His eyes were just red swirls of lava now, the gold faded out completely. And I could see the truth deep inside them. He meant every word he was saying, and I had no choice but to embrace his confidence in me.

I could do this. I had called them. I knew the pathway, and there had to be a way to return the mists.

“Let your pain go,” he said softly, pulling me even closer. “I promise that it’s not what you think about Dannie. You don’t know everything, and I ask that you wait to hear me out before you try to kill me again.”

The pain—gods, the pain was so intense as he said her name that I wished for death. Just for a brief moment so I could escape the stabbing force of knowing that she had been tortured and murdered because of me. All along, my anger had really been with myself, and while Shadow’s words should have given me hope, I was too far gone for that.

He placed me on my feet, and I returned my focus to the spark-filled smoke. When I reached out and ran my hands over it, it responded almost immediately, curling around me just like… “Is this what Inky is?” I breathed.

“Yes,” Shadow said, still pressed to my side.

Through the dark mists, I couldn’t see any other person in the underground theater room, and I was seriously hoping I hadn’t hurt my best friend, Simone, or Shadow’s best friends, Reece and Lucien. The rest could go to hell, but those three were important.

“You must know how to control it,” I said, a real punch of hope making itself known in my gut. Inky was a part of the mists that created the shadow creatures, and this thing I’d called was a hulked-out Inky. Stood to reason, right?

“No one controls the mists,” Shadow informed me, dashing that hope in an instant, “but a few select beings have been known to bond with a sliver of them. As you’ve seen with Inky and me. A symbiotic relationship—at this point, we can’t live without the other.”

“So, is this one bonded to me?”

I could feel it, but not in a way that made me think we had any sort of freaking symbiotic relationship.

Shadow shook his head. “You could not handle the power of a mist this size. You have to return it, or I have no idea what the worlds will become.”

We both eyed the insanely huge smoke show. “I have to send them back.” A whispered truth. “And I have to do it now.”

I felt the mists building in intensity, and soon they would escape my tenuous hold and wreak havoc across the lands. I could not let that happen, even if it destroyed me to return what I’d brought into this world.

Closing my eyes, I opened the pathway, and with not a freaking clue what I was doing, touched the smoke again, focusing on the tingling energy under my hands. Return home, I begged. Back to the Shadow Realm.

I’d never been bonded with Inky, so I hadn’t truly understood what it was until this moment. The mists were energy like that of pure creation. A living brain with power beyond anything that had ever existed before. All of the Shadow Realm had been formed using this energy… this power blanket that covered their realm.

I might have only brought a small blob of the power to me, but it was still enough to throw all the worlds off-kilter.

Or worse.

The mists resisted, wanting to stay with me, but I persisted in my quest to return them. Their power threaded through my own, and just as I was about to panic, a disembodied, gender-neutral voice sounded in my head. We’ll see each other again soon.

Just as I was about to lose my shit and start panic screaming, the resistance faded, and the mists returned through the path I had opened to the realm, leaving me with a mild sense of dread, and the age-old question that had plagued me more often than not lately: What was I?