Shadow Kissed (Magic Side: Wolf Bound Book 4)

Savannah

I stared into the emptiness where the inside of the family crypt should be. Instead of a burial space, it was a swirling, milky gray void. Another portal.

“Is this always here?” I asked.

Jaxson’s sister stepped to the threshold. “No. The Opener of Ways created it for you two alone. You may enter the Deadlands through it, and you may leave again.”

My mind spun. “Who is the Opener of Ways? A god?”

She gave me a sly smile. “A god who governs the boundaries between life and death. Let’s just say he doesn’t wish to see the Dark God free. You don’t need to know more than that.”

Her tone had a sense of finality. Mysteries we’re not supposed to pry into.

And to think I used to enjoy a good mystery.

With my heart straining in apprehension, I crossed my arms for some sense of security. “You promise that this is a round-trip ticket, right? I don’t want to just walk into some deadly field of magic, get killed, and then—voila, we’re stuck in the Deadlands because we’re dead.”

“You may leave the Deadlands again through this doorway. But once you do, it will close forever.”

Well, that was a relief, frankly. The last thing I needed was a doorway for more ghosts to get into my life.

I turned to Jaxson, who had a determined expression etched on his face. “Are we really doing this?”

Though the set of his jaw and the hardness of his features persisted, his eyes softened. “Not if you don’t wish to. We can find another way.”

I glanced at Stephanie, who waited patiently but expectantly beside the portal. “I don’t know that we have another way. I need my wolf, and I trust your sister.”

He held out his hand. “Then we go together.”

I uncrossed my arms and clasped his hand. A shiver ran along my spine, like stepping out of the snow and wind and into the warmth of a firelit cabin. Heat and a deep sense of belonging washed away my fear. “Let’s do it.”

Wordlessly, Stephanie slipped into the portal and disappeared. Hand in hand, we followed.

A wave of cold rushed over us, and my stomach dropped. Rather than the tumbling sensation of traveling by portal between places in our world, this felt like breaking through the surface of a frozen lake and plunging into the icy water below.

I shivered with relief as we emerged into a clearing enclosed by misty gray woods. Enormous pines stretched above us into the sky, and a low fog hung about the base of the trees.

I turned to look behind us. The mausoleum was there, though in this place, it was rundown and covered with moss. There were no other signs of the garden or of Magic Side.

I squeezed Jaxson’s hand and let go, although I didn’t want to, and inspected the portal. “This is our way back?”

Stephanie nodded. “Once you have the missing shard of your wolf, you may return to the land of the living through here.”

I surveyed the woods around us. Nothing was quite right. The place gave off a disconcertingly eerie feeling, and it almost seemed like the trees themselves were growing from the mist.

Jaxson sucked in a sharp beath, and I turned. Stephanie had her hand on his shoulder.

“I can feel you,” he whispered.

“I exist in this world, not yours,” she said.

With that, he embraced her in his strong arms. A lump formed in my throat, and I looked away to give them a moment of privacy. Yet I felt his emotions pulsing through me, as if our hearts were connected—and his was full to breaking.

“I miss you so much,” he choked.

“I’m sorry, Jaxson.”

And while they said nothing more for a long while, I was certain their own hearts were speaking in the silent language of wolves.

After several minutes, Stephanie finally pushed back and looked between us. “Your time here is short. You must find Savannah’s shard and get out.”

“How do we locate it?” I asked.

“I can feel it,” Jaxson said. “It pulls on me in the same way I can feel you pulling on me.”

A deep and twisting sense of betrayal strangled my throat. I couldn’t feel anything.

Was it because I’d chained my wolf? Was I so completely cut off that I couldn’t feel a fragment of my own soul, even while Jaxson could?

“Which direction?” I croaked out, unable to hide the hurt in my voice.

He gestured into the featureless woods. “That way.”

“Your shard will be roaming with the ghost packs,” said Stephanie. “There are many, but in this place, they’re mostly wolves from Magic Side and nearby. She’s part of my pack.”

Trying to put on a brave face, I adjusted my jacket and zipped it against the chill. “Okay, let’s go get her, then.”

“We must proceed cautiously,” Stephanie said. “Wolves aren’t the only creatures that roam these woods. Your life force will attract many things that lurk here.”

Great. Lots of monsters in the underworld, and we were the only snack for miles around.

There were no landmarks to measure our progress, only endless pines rising from the mist. It flowed around us as we walked, hanging thick and low around our legs.

“Is the whole underworld like this?” I asked Stephanie.

“No. It’s as diverse as the land of the living.”

Fantastic. We wound up in the extremely creepy part.

After twenty minutes, a loose stone broke from the roots beneath my feet, and I stumbled.

Something didn’t feel right about the stone—it was too angular. I bent over and fanned my hand to brush away the unnaturally thick mist.

Half a brick. I picked it up. It was yellow and crumbling, bearing a diamond-shaped maker’s mark with the letters CHI above BRI.

A Chicago brick?

Were we walking through ruins of a building? I tried to fan away more of the haze, but that wasn’t effective—it just curled back around.

“Was there something here once?” I asked Stephanie, who was patiently waiting for me to get my ass in gear and stop playing in the mist.

She looked back without emotion. “A building. Perhaps a home or workshop. When the building died, it chose to come here.”

“Buildings die?”

“All things die, even places. Once, it was full of life, people, hopes and dreams and morning work routines. You two are the only things here that haven’t died. The trees, the animals, even the mist—all are dead.”

The mist?

I imagined the way that the fog in the woods around Belmont burned off as the sun rose. I’d never thought about it being a thing that died.

“You said that the building chose to come here?”

“There are many afterlives. We all choose one way or another.”

That left me with a burning question: why had my soul chosen this place?

Eventually, the mist began to thin as we moved into rolling, forested hills. I wasn’t sure how long we’d been traveling. Time was as formless as the fog around us. There was little sunlight punching through the gray sky, but it was impossible to tell if it was changing its position or if we were.

The loremaster’s warnings echoed in my mind:

Time is not the same there.

Do not sleep, and do not stay more than a day.

You’ll begin to forget the land of the living and seek only to join the dead.

If time wasn’t the same, how would I know when a day had passed? And would time pass differently in Magic Side?

I was about to ask Stephanie when she held her finger to her mouth, then pointed ahead.

We froze, and I silently cursed the loss of my keen wolf senses. What the hell was it?

I watched the point she had indicated for a minute. There was nothing at first, and then something large moved between the trees—a dark shadow, like a massive cat. For a second, a pair of red eyes stared back at us, and then, with a blink, they disappeared in a swirl of mist.

I glanced at Jaxson and mouthed, Is it gone?

He nodded but put his finger to his lips, then whispered, “There’s something else.”

My muscles tightened, and I scanned the woods. I couldn’t catch any scent, but I sensed a signature. Evil.

Familiar.

An impact drove the air from my lungs, and I hurtled backward. My shoulder slammed into a tree, and my jaw cracked shut with the force. I dropped to my knees in the thinning mist and sucked in a painful lungful of air as I looked up.

A massive, hairless man had Jaxson by the throat. The Crusher—the murderer Dragan had possessed at Bentham.

I’d cut out his soul atop the roof of the prison.

Jaxson rammed his foot into the brute’s gut. The Crusher gasped and hurled my mate aside.

A wolf leapt forward and bit the Crusher’s arm, but he swung her away.

Stephanie? I hadn’t even seen her transform.

With no claws to rip the murderous bastard apart, I called my magic. My skin went cold, and energy crackled along my arms.

He spun on me. “You bitch! I could feel you ten miles away, the moment you entered the Deadlands. You cut out my fucking soul!”

With that, he charged.

I darted left and released a blast of dark energy.

He staggered but didn’t stop. My pulse thudded in my ears, and my breath came in short and ragged gasps.

Jaxson was on him then, tearing at him with his claws.

The Crusher spun and rammed my mate into the ground with a single blow, then kicked him in the ribs, sending him flying.

Faster than I’d ever seen someone move, the beast of a man was on me, with his hands pressing the area around my ears.

Pain exploded through my head, and my knees went limp.

“I told you I’d haunt you, that I wanted to feel the slick pieces of your skull slip between my fingers. I just never thought I’d have a chance like this.”

I screamed—and then the pressure released, and I dropped to the ground.

Jaxson ripped into the Crusher’s side with his bloodied claws, while Stephanie sank her teeth into his leg. But the glint of madness in the brute’s eyes told me he didn’t feel it at all.

With a gasp of pain, I staggered deliriously to my feet and unleashed my magic. This time, I shaped the shadows with my mind, forming them into black chains that wrapped around him. Like a black serpent, they looped around his arms and body and began to constrict. He bellowed, but I let the rage and anger take me, and I tightened the chains.

He’d caved in the skulls of at least three innocent women in Magic Side and two prison guards. He’d almost done the same thing to me on the roof of Bentham, and he’d wounded Jaxson so badly that it had taken all the magic I’d had left to bring him back.

My skull still throbbed from where his hands had been. He wouldn’t be my personal poltergeist through this life and the next.

He would never hurt my mate again.

With my own shout of rage, I pulled the chains tight, and just like the stone lions, I crushed him.

The sound of it made my gut churn, but I didn’t relent. When it was all over and there were no more haunting gasps, I released the spell of shadows.

His lifeless body dropped to the forest floor, and the red drained from my vision.

My thoughts immediately went to Jaxson. He was standing to the side, watching me with a dark expression, and he nodded.

I didn’t know what that meant, but I ran to him. “You’re hurt.”

The shadows on his face vanished, and he gave me a weak smile. “A few broken ribs, but I’ll heal quickly. I got off much better than last time—except for my ego. The question is, are you alright? You can’t heal anymore.”

Relief surged through me, and I pressed my cheek against his chest, listening to the beat of his heart. “Luckily, I’ve got a thick skull.”

To our left, Stephanie shifted back to human form. “Who the hell was that?”

I didn’t take my head off Jaxson’s chest. “A blast from the past, looking for revenge. He nearly killed us both once, but I killed him.”

Her expression didn’t waver. “Death binds us all together. Those who you’ve killed in life, if they are here, will be drawn to you. And you to them.”

Uh-oh.

A month ago, I’d been a waitress. Now…now there would be many in the Deadlands who would be looking for revenge, and I was certain that would be true for Jaxson as well.

I disentangled myself from Jaxson’s arms. “We’d better get going.”

“Yes,” he said, his voice totally flat, but I detected the hidden concern.

I stopped at the Crusher’s corpse but jumped back with a start.

He’d begun to change—as if he were decaying, but faster. His skin turned to mist and started to blow away like sand from the top of a dune. In a matter of seconds, he’d completely disappeared.

“He’s gone,” Jaxson muttered.

“What happens when you die here?” I asked.

Stephanie gave me a hard look. “The end. There is nowhere else to go.”

I blinked in surprise. “Oh.”

Nowhere else to go. So the Crusher was gone forever? From our world, and now the next? Not only had I killed him with the Soul Knife, but I’d eradicated him from the afterlife as well. A dark sense of satisfaction swelled within me. “Good.”

I began to walk away, but Jaxson grabbed my arm. “We’re being watched.”

I snapped my head up. A gray wolf stood on the crest of a hill, tracking our movements. The moment our eyes met, it bolted.

For a second, the sight of a wolf brought hope welling up in my chest, but it died instantly. It wasn’t her—my wolf—nor any wolf I recognized.

Stephanie frowned, and I asked, “Did you know that wolf?”

“No, but I’m certain it was a sentry. We’re in his domain now,” she whispered.

“Whose?”

She turned and gave me a blank, emotionless look. “The ghost wolf alpha. He rules over all the ghost packs.”

“Ghost wolf alpha? Did he send you to us?”

She shook her head. “No. He doesn’t know about this. I came to you on my own, with the help of the Opener of Ways. There was no time to seek the alpha’s permission.”

That didn’t bode well.

We continued through the rolling hills, moving more cautiously than we had before, but it wasn’t long before Stephanie stopped us. “He’s here. I can feel him.”

Focusing my senses, I strained to catch any scent. The limits of my human perception betrayed me again.

“I have his scent—a powerful alpha,” Jaxson said. “And I can sense his anger. What should we do?”

Stephanie backed up. “I don’t know if he’ll help us, but whatever we do, we mustn’t aggravate him. He’s quick to anger.”

Great.

I waited, listening. For a moment, there was nothing, and then a strong signature washed over me—the scent of falling leaves and the taste of dark molasses, the sound of crackling flames and the feeling of cold stone on my skin.

And the rumbling of anger.

I opened my mouth, but before I could speak, an enormous shadow crested the hill. A white wolf the size of a truck appeared among the trees. His power was overwhelming, like the presence of an alpha, but grounded in a way I’d never felt before. It vibrated all around us in the earth, the trees, and the sky.

For a second, he glared at us with vicious golden-yellow eyes. Then words echoed in my mind like a landslide: Only I may take life and death in my lands. You have violated and profaned my domain. You will leave.

With that, the great beast charged.