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They’d be great for killing a fourteen-year-old mage girl.

Surely it’d be swifter than burning her.

Wouldn’t that be the greatest favor that Deirdre could offer Marion? A death as swift as Gage’s and more merciful than her father’s?

“Your rage is beautiful,” Melchior said. “Don’t forget it. You’ll be able to change again if you hold it close.”

Deirdre reached toward the Ethereal Blade.

Vidya stopped her. “I’ll do this.” She dropped beside the dragon, taking the hilt in hand. “You go to Valhalla now, Melchior.”

“I’ll meet you there,” he said.

She drew the blade from his chest.

It slid free with a slick sound, like a knife carving uncooked meat.

Melchior groaned. His body arched over the ground. It wasn’t because of muscle spasms: the instant that the sword was drawn from his back, vines thrust from the rear of the wound. They pushed him off of the ground. Leaves curled around his ribs and blossoms bled down his stomach.

Everyone else that Deirdre had seen killed by the Ethereal Blade had gone like this. Their bodies had become a fertile bed for new life as their lives ended.

That wasn’t where Melchior stopped, though.

The last breath whispered over his lips. His eyes unfocused.

And then he dissolved.

He turned to nothing but ash and scales, gathered in a glittering pile on the floor where he had rested. There was no bone or blood. Just scales.

The dragon was dead.

Deirdre picked up one of the scales with her cruel talons. The scale’s edge was as sharp as Vidya’s feathers, and just as beautiful in its own way. She clenched it in her foot. The way that it bit into her leathery flesh was satisfying.

She wouldn’t forget Melchior. She would remember the dragon who had treasured the daughters of his enemies above any other riches.

And she would honor his memory by saving Alona and Calla.

Vidya extended the Ethereal Blade to Deirdre. Her eyes glistened.

“We fly,” the valkyrie said.

“To where?” Niamh asked, jerking her feathers over her shoulders.

Deirdre couldn’t respond, but she filled her mind with her memories of the werewolf sanctuary: that oasis in the Appalachians. It was just outside of Northgate. There was a waterfall there, a lake, the academy.

Paradise.

That was where they would hold the inauguration, and most likely where Marion would be waiting.

“We’ll follow you,” Vidya said.

Deirdre took the hilt in one of her three-toed feet, flapping her wings to lift herself from the ground. It was effortless. She was lifted by magic, bearing the most incredible weapon on the face of the Earth.

Marion needed to die.

And then Stark needed to follow.

She flew.

It only took them a moment to find the portal. Deirdre’s flames lit the emptiness in the sky that indicated a hole leading back to Earth. She painted the clouds crimson. The path was a swirling blackness.

Phoenix, valkyrie, and harpy plunged inside.

The ley lines let her out distant from the shore, high over the ocean.

Deirdre blazed a path through the night, streaking through the clouds like a comet. She had all the momentum of it, too. She leaned to the left, letting the tip of her wing drop into the wind, sending her wheeling toward her target.

Vidya and Niamh popped into the sky a few hundred feet behind her. Deirdre made sure that they were following before returning her attention where it really mattered. To the job to come.

Melchior had once told her to embrace her rage.

She embraced it all right.

Deirdre was more than a phoenix. She was a fireball, devastation rained upon the earth, a mass hurtling from the depths of space to set fire to everything that Rylie Gresham cared about.

Niamh and Vidya were carried in the wake of her animal. They didn’t even have to flap their wings. They simply stretched their limbs out wide and did their best to ride along the currents.

Ocean turned to shore. Deirdre’s keen eyesight made it easy to see when people spotted her—getting out of cars, shading their eyes, tilting their heads to the sky. They looked afraid. Worried. She wondered if they were afraid that a new death, one brighter and hotter than Genesis, was coming upon the world.

They should have been afraid. Everyone should have been afraid of her.

She was going to burn the world down.

The mountains were hundreds of miles away. At that distance, they would have been invisible to Deirdre in her human form, but now she could see them as though they were directly below. She could pick out the shapes of the individual trees, their branches scraping at the sky, the fog clinging to their roots. She could see owls hunting for nighttime prey. She could see roaming deer.

She could even see wolves.

When she began to see wolves that were much too large to be natural, she knew she had spotted the sanctuary’s perimeter.

The shifters who lived with Rylie had privileges that ordinary shifters did not. They were permitted to hunt the carefully controlled deer population that was cultivated in the nearby mountains, the rabbits and the mice. They were allowed to embrace their animals.

Everyone else was forced to live an existence as human as possible.

It was wrong. It made Deirdre angry.

The anger fueled her flames.

Melchior was right. It was all she needed—this anger, this rage, this devastation.

Magic sizzled when she entered the airspace over the sanctuary, trying to rebuff her entrance. Deirdre punched through it. The warding spells crackled as they broke down, leaving a ring of fire behind her that illuminated the whole forest.

Her approach brought premature sunrise upon the sanctuary.

It also brought a thousand jangling alarms, magical and mechanical.

Sirens shrieked. Guard posts illuminated, peppered throughout the mountains and valley.

They knew she was coming.

It didn’t matter. They wouldn’t be ready for her.

The cottages spread out below, arranged along the beach of the lake, opposite the academy where the most privileged young shifters were educated. Rylie Gresham and Abel Wilder’s cottage was indistinguishable from the others. Deirdre had taken that for humility before, but now she saw how it was practical in another way: she couldn’t tell where they lived from above, so she couldn’t attack.

She wasn’t going after them anyway. They weren’t the threat now.

Deirdre needed to find Marion.

Pulling the Ethereal Blade tight against her feathery underbelly so that it would create no additional drag, she folded her wings.

Beak angled toward the earth, tail of flame trailing behind her, she plummeted.

Vidya let out a battle cry as she followed.

Only Niamh was silent, eyes wide with fear in the darkness of night.

Deirdre swooped low over the sanctuary’s downtown region. She allowed her tail to dip, flicking the feathers by instinct. Flame gushed from her body. It poured molten over the rooftops. Sparks showered over the road.

Only a few shifters in their human forms were out that night, but those who were fled at the sight of her, racing on the sidewalks and taking cover between buildings.

They didn’t run fast enough. It wasn’t possible.

Her fire consumed it all.

The buildings must have been built to be fire retardant, but they weren’t able to withstand Deirdre. She wasn’t any kind of natural fire. She was elemental, magical, and so hot that she ignited the wood. The flames were instantly white, dancing blue in the night. The smoke stank of artificial chemicals. It choked out the buildings. Choked everyone inside. Deirdre could hear them struggling to breathe.

The smoke was far deadlier than the fire. Deirdre would suffocate the pack before she could melt any of them.

Even werewolves couldn’t heal if they couldn’t breathe.

She threw a glance back at Vidya. The valkyrie’s expression was blank, obeying her drive to kill without question, without doubt.

Niamh wasn’t the same. The human face mounted on her eagle body was terrified.

But they followed her with equal readiness.

They only needed to find Marion.

Find Marion, kill Marion, end the oath.

Kill Stark
.

He had laughed when she’d burned him, laughed and embraced her and started planning the rest of their lives together. He was sick. Crazier than she ever could have imagined.

If Stark wanted to raise the stakes like that, then that was fine. She’d raise them even higher.

Deirdre wouldn’t win the game. She’d change the rules.

She watched the burning pack running away from her, fleeing in waves. They were faceless gaeans. The privileged shifters fatted on Rylie Gresham’s indulgence.

They deserved to burn.

If Stark had been the man she believed him to be, he would have burned them already.

She flew in a methodical grid over the cottages, watching them ignite. Marion would be in there somewhere. Marion, and probably children, and innocents, and—
no, none of them are innocent.

Deirdre flew too low.

Icy pain spiked through her right leg. She let out a musical shriek of pain, flapping harder to try to escape.

But something heavy was pulling on her. She couldn’t break free. Couldn’t gain altitude.

Deirdre curved her swanlike neck around to see a wolf hanging from her foot.

The beast was sleek and gold, almost more feline than canine.

Rylie.

The liquid flame of Deirdre’s blood poured over her muzzle, but the Alpha didn’t release even though it must have burned terribly. She swiped a paw toward Deirdre’s underbelly. Her claws opened another gash, and the pain was unlike anything she had experienced before.

An Alpha could injure other shifters in such a way that their bodies couldn’t heal at super-speed.

Apparently that applied to phoenixes, too.

Deirdre panicked. She tried to throw up more flames, tried to incinerate Rylie the way that she had incinerated Chadwick Hawfinch, destroying the Alpha in an instant. It was the only thing that could save her.

But the harder she tried to channel her anger, her fear, the dimmer her flames grew.

She felt her body changing.

No, no, no!

They dropped to the field like a rock skipped into the lake.

Deirdre struck. The world flipped and spun around her. The surrounding grass ignited.

She tried to sit up. Deirdre ran her hands over her arms. Everything hurt, like she was one giant bruise. Where were her feathers? Her wings? Her clawed feet? She had two human legs, two human arms, a vulnerable human body.

No longer a phoenix.

And without Melchior, never again a phoenix.

She shook her head, denying the change back. “No,” she said. “Damn!”

Fear rocked through her, immeasurably powerful, choking her. She rolled onto her hands and knees. She scrambled toward the nearest cottage.

As a werewolf, Rylie Gresham was a thousand times faster than Deirdre.

She didn’t even hear the Alpha coming.

Massive paws shoved Deirdre to her back on the ground. Rocks dug into her spine. She stared up at the starry sky filled with smoke and golden werewolf eyes that loomed only inches away. The Alpha, who was such a matronly woman in her human form, was a monster rippling with cruel muscle. Her claws sliced into Deirdre’s body as though her skin gave no more resistance than putty.

Rylie snarled, ropes of saliva dripping from her teeth. Their fight had gotten her worked up, and she was slathering, panting. Every breath growled through her chest. Deirdre’s molten phoenix blood scalded her fur, making it curl the way Stark’s beard had curled when she incinerated him.

She wasn’t going to die crying. She would die facing down the woman who had ruined her life, knowing that at least she had followed her principles until the very end.

“Do it,” Deirdre said. “Finish me!”

Rylie hovered there, just inches away.

Her breath smelled like Deirdre’s blood.

She didn’t kill.

Rylie stepped back, lifting her weight from Deirdre’s chest, and shifted into her human form. Bones popped as she shed all that beautiful golden fur, exposing pale white human skin, fine blonde hair, and a slender body that showed little indication of the many babies it had grown.

She stooped to pick up the Ethereal Blade. Rylie held it with obvious respect. She had seen how it killed. She knew what it could do. And she knew that even she, an Alpha werewolf, wouldn’t be invulnerable to its blade.

Rylie stood over Deirdre, the blessed sword hanging at her side.

Yet she didn’t bring it down for a kill.

“God, Deirdre,” Rylie said. The horrible pity on her face made Deirdre’s eyes burn—not with fire, but with tears.

“I told you to finish me!”

“No, honey.
No
.” She dropped to her knees beside Deirdre, touching the deep gashes on her chest, stomach, and legs where the Alpha’s claws had effortlessly cut into her. For the first time, Deirdre dared to glance down. The bone was exposed in a few places. It hurt so much that she almost couldn’t feel anymore. “What were you trying to do?”

Hot tears slid down her cheeks. “I have to kill Marion. I can’t let her finish the oath and inaugurate Rhiannon.” Her chest hitched. She started crying, and she wasn’t sure if it was pain or disappointment or fear or something else she didn’t even have a word for. “I burned your sanctuary. Kill me!”

Rylie bowed her back, pressing her forehead to Deirdre’s. “No,” she said softly, stroking her hair. “I won’t kill you. I wouldn’t even hurt you if I didn’t have to stop you.”

Deirdre had tried to burn down the sanctuary and kill a teenager in Rylie’s care, yet the Alpha still had nothing but compassion for her.

“Why not?” Deirdre whispered.

“You’ve already hurt yourself enough,” Rylie said.

It was too much for her.

Stark leaving. Melchior dying. Failing to stop Marion.

Deirdre sobbed right there on the street in the center of the burning sanctuary, and Rylie held her.