Blood Moon queen

FIRST BLOOD

Chapter Five

The power surged and died in the same second the thing lunged, plunging the apartment into a darkness broken only by the streetlight through the shattered window, and Selena's scream turned into something else halfway out of her throat not fear anymore, or not only fear. Heat. A tearing pressure under her skin, like something too big had been folded into too small a space for eighteen years and had just, finally, run out of room.

She didn't decide to move. Her body decided for her, twisting away from the counter a half-second before claws raked through where she'd been crouched, and the sound they made against the cabinet deep gouges through solid wood like it was wet paper told her exactly what would have happened to her if she'd been a half-second slower.

Pain lit up her spine, sharp and total, and for one disorienting heartbeat she thought she'd been hit. Then she understood it wasn't an injury. It was pressure finally breaking. Something under her ribs cracked open like a held breath let out after eighteen years, and heat poured through her down her arms, into her hands, until her vision sharpened so fast the dark apartment went bright and edged and terrifyingly clear, every shape in it suddenly readable in a way it had never been before.

The wolf-thing turned back toward her, and this time it didn't smile. It hesitated.

Selena didn't have time to wonder why. It came at her again, faster, and she threw her hands up on pure animal instinct the same gesture she'd have made her whole ordinary human life, useless, hopeless, the kind of thing you did right before you died

Except this time, something answered.

Light tore out of her palms, not fire exactly, not anything she had a word for, a deep red-black shimmer like moonlight bent wrong, and it caught the creature mid-leap and threw it bodily into the wall hard enough to crack plaster. It hit the ground and scrambled up again, snarling, but there was something different in the sound now not confidence, Confusion or Fear.

Selena stared at her own hands like they belonged to a stranger.

The front door came off its hinges.

She flinched, already bracing for a second attacker, and then Kael was through the doorway, faster than a man had any right to move, already mid-motion, already changing

She caught only a fragmented impression of it, dark fur and a shape too large for the room, gone before her mind could hold onto it and then he hit the wolf-thing broadside and the fight that followed lasted perhaps four seconds and was the most violent thing Selena had ever witnessed in her life.

It ended with the creature pinned, then still, then simply gone not dead in any way she understood death, but unraveling, its edges smoking into nothing like a photograph held to flame, until there was nothing on her apartment floor but a scorched patch of carpet and silence.

Kael was human again before she'd finished processing that he hadn't been a second ago. He crossed the room in three strides and dropped to his knees in front of her, hands hovering just short of touching her, like he wasn't sure he was allowed.

"Are you hurt." It wasn't really a question. His voice was raw in a way she'd never heard from him.

"I don't—" Selena looked down at her own hands, still faintly limned in that impossible red-black light, fading now, the way a coal fades when you stop breathing on it. "What did I just do?"

Kael went very still.

"Kael." Her voice cracked on his name. "What was that thing. What did I just do."

He didn't answer. He was looking at her hands the way a man looks at a door he's spent his whole life bracing shut, watching it finally give.

"We need to go," he said instead, standing, pulling her up with a grip that was careful even now, even with his knuckles still stained dark from the fight. "Now. This apartment isn't safe. You aren't safe here anymore."

"That's not an answer!" It came out louder than she meant, cracked open, eighteen days ago no eighteen years — of not being given answers finally breaking loose.

"Something just came through my window and tried to kill me and I did something with my hands that I have never done in my entire life and you are going to tell me what is happening or I swear"

"I will tell you everything." He said it fast, low, urgent, his hands settling on her shoulders like he needed the contact as much as she did. "I will. I swear it. But not here, and not now, because that was not the only one, and I need you somewhere I can actually protect you before I say another word. Please, Selena."

The please undid her more than anything else had. She'd never once heard him ask for something. She'd only ever heard him command it.

She nodded, because her legs had started shaking and she didn't trust her voice anymore, and let him steer her past the ruined window, down the stairs, out into a black car idling at the curb with Damon already at the wheel, engine running, door open before they reached it.p

"Talk," Damon said the second they were inside, pulling out fast. "What was it."

"Manufactured. Not born." Kael's jaw was tight, his eyes flicking constantly to the mirrors, to the street, to Selena, back to the street. "Someone built that thing and sent it after her specifically. That's not opportunistic. That's targeted."

"After eighteen years?" Damon's eyes found Selena's in the rearview for just a second, something careful and assessing in them. "Why now?"

Kael didn't answer, but Selena, sitting rigid between them with her hands still faintly warm, watched something pass over his face that looked almost like grief.

"Because she woke up," he said quietly. "Tonight. I felt it happen from four blocks away."

"Woke up." Selena's voice was very small. "You mean—my wolf. I have a wolf."

"You have considerably more than a wolf," Kael said, and for the first time since she'd met him, he looked at her without any of the careful, contemptuous distance he'd built between them for two weeks. He looked at her like she was something he'd been dreading and praying for in equal measure.

"And there are people who have spent eighteen years hoping you'd never find that out."

The car took a hard turn, tires protesting, and outside the window Manhattan blurred past, indifferent as ever to the fact that everything Selena Hart had believed about herself had just come apart in one violent, blinding hour.

"Where are we going," she managed.

"Somewhere they can't reach you." Kael's hand found hers in the dark of the back seat not asking permission, not this time and the warmth of it steadied something in her chest that had been shaking since the window broke. "And somewhere I finally have no more excuses left not to tell you the truth."

Behind them, unnoticed by any of them, a second car pulled away from the curb a full block back, headlights dark, and matched their speed turn for turn.