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My ears almost explode, and I swear my heart erupts in my rib cage as though it already combusted as I crumble to the ground, grasping the agonizing pain in my skull as even my vision begins to vibrate. I forgot how painful Carmen’s scream could be, guessing earlier she had gone lightly, and by god it’s so much worse when her emotions kick in.

I feel like my eardrums are bleeding as I force myself to clutch my ears and struggle to look up to see Colton has dropped his prey long enough for it to crawl away. Every single wolf around us is cowering in pain, at the god-awful noise coming from that girl. It’s effective to say the least but it’s really not directional and all of us are being wounded in a bid to save one.

If I thought I could deal with this pain for the long term, it would be a great weapon in keeping everyone here from killing each other, but as soon as it’s stretched into long seconds, my vision begins to blur and blacken and the pain in my head threatens to knock me out. It’s that moment before glass shatters with high frequency, and even though I know she isn’t trying to hurt me, my nose starts to flood and a trickle of blood runs over my top lip.

Thankfully she stops. Before my mind and heart give out, but I’m left with a woozy sensation and all my senses seemed to be knocked sideways and I’m back to dizzy and disorientated. Feeling surreal, like I’m caught in a dream where this isn’t happening in reality. I impulsively lift my hands to the wet warmth rolling over my mouth, knowing it’s blood but startled to find it’s also coming from my ears as it makes way down my neck. I shover with the sudden dampening on the clothes inside my body shield aware Carmen has ruptured something.

Oh my god. I’m sorry.

Her voice comes at me but I shake my head and push away the furry body that moves to help hold me up, suddenly attentive to my fragile movements.

“I’m fine, it’s okay.” I soothe, my voice sounding alien and detached from my own head and fake a show of stability. Pushing myself to my feet and ignoring the sway of my limbs.

I’m too weak like this, too vulnerable and I can’t keep screaming on Sierra to heal me every five minutes.

Talking of which I stagger on my feet, trying to pull my brain back together and click on the fact I can’t see her. Carmen is between Colton and I, as he’s now also heading this way and other wolves roll into view too. They seem to distract him long enough that Carmen pushes me bodily backwards, so we fall into a gulley, flanked by fallen logs and I collapse in a hazy mess with the sudden vertigo of her fast shove.

Shit. I didn’t think … I’m sorry… I didn’t mean to hurt you. I forgot that humans can’t take it for long and that you can’t heal…. I’ll find Sierra, she was there a second ago…. Hide, stay low. Don’t move while I get her. Carmen’s panicking, appraising my face and the continued blood flow down my mouth and from my inner ears. The rising sickening nausea in my body has all my senses swirling, and I feel like I’ve had a blow to the head. I can’t see straight, the ground waving up and down and little stars of glittering lights start coloring my vision. I’m in a bad way, just from a sound.

“No, it’s okay, I’m just dizzy… I’m good.” I lie to her, feeling worse than I want to admit but I can still get up and still fight if I take a moment. I don’t want her to blame herself for anything more in this life than she already does, and I don’t want to prove Meadow right in being the useless deadweight in this.

I pull myself to my knees and then gasp, painful inhalation, and grunt, as I’m winded by a backward kick to the head that sends me reeling as a wolf jumping over knocks me for six and fastens onto Carmen with a ferocious bite. We didn’t see them coming.

She howls out in rage, and pain, and claws at it latched onto her back, trying to dislodge it as I muster enough energy to help. I throw the last ball of pure energy I can pull together, and it sends it cascading off into a groaning heap, mere feet away. It’s long enough for Carmen to get the better of it and she hauls it across the leaf strewn basin and throws it hard, and furiously, out of our hideaway.

We have to move. Now!

She catches my arm in her mouth, that commanding snidey tone on show once more, and tugs me hard as she can to get me going. I know she wants to put distance between me and Colton and I don’t blame her for choosing me over the plan.

It’s only then, when I have to fight gravity and momentum of moving, that it dawns on me I’m doing so much worse than I thought. My vision is all over the place, and I’m struggling to walk straight, my head spinning. I stumble and fall onto all fours after only a few steps forward, letting out an exasperated noise, unable to hide how much I’m suffering. Carmen hesitates, looks out into the chaos and seems to struggle to decide what to do.

I’ll find Sierra, stay. Look, behind you, in the log. Get in and lay down. Hide. I’ll be fast, please…I beg of you…stay concealed.

This time I don’t argue. I know this is bad and I’m losing use of my limbs and even the sensation of my fingers and toes. I can hear a soft high pitch tone rattling inside my brain and the bleeding hasn’t eased up at all. My head’s aching, my sight’s completely out of whack and I know something is really wrong with my mind. My wolf is writhing and whining to let her come out to help me and I have to grip on with every ounce of willpower to stop the self-preservation kicking in to make me turn. It’s a battle in itself and it drains me as fast as this new injury is doing.

Despite the sun rising high enough to warm my bones there’s a coldness seeping through me as I struggle to take control, and I barely manage to crawl into a fallen log Carmen guides me to. I feel like a coward having to hide but I have no choice. The witch was right and like this I’m weak, no match for a wolf, especially not Colton.

I either have to accept fate and lose the lives within to save my pack, live on to keep fighting for them, or succumb to the fact that I can’t do this, and I need to retreat and hide to save my children. My pack or my babies…. that’s what this comes down to and I can’t choose to let go of my own blood.

My heart breaks open and the internal wracking guilt gnaws at my sanity. I’m instantly so consumed with sudden grief that when I slump into my hiding place, failing to check around me before seeing Carmen shoot off in pursuit of my healing mother-in-law. My entire focus on the damp earth under my flat palms, as I lay on my front and shallowly breath through the mist of my own broken eyesight.

The log is ripped from around me, so sudden, like the blink of an eye that I can’t react. I grip the fallen debris below my fingers in haste to cling on, as I’m trundled out like a floppy rag onto the ground into a disheveled heap and discarded. The huge black silhouette of my worst nightmare, and best dream, towers over me and snarls in satisfaction that he found his prey once more. I lift my frail hand in an attempt to muster what power I have left and it dies on me completely, ebbing away like a flickering flame that’s been caught in an airless room.

I’m seeing two of him, my head aching, my throat dry and my limbs no longer functioning. Heaped in an awkward position on uneven ground, because I’m so fatigued, I can’t move myself. My gift even as a wolf has given up on me, the will to turn is all that claws inside, and I need to choose how this goes.

Save myself…. Kill them.

Let him take me, we die anyway and yet the pack may yet survive.

Could I live on with the knowledge I took my babies lives? Could I look him in the eye and watch him destroy himself with the guilt that he did this, when the spell finally breaks.

No. I can’t. I’d rather die than live with his pain, and mine, and the loss of them.

Colton lifts me up by the throat, choking me with his sheer pulsating strength, even without gripping hard, pulling my lifeless form to him as though I’m a mere scrap of rubbish. My eyes mist over as emotions consume me and I stare helplessly into the dead and empty eyes of the man I love more than anything in the world. It’s his body, his wolf, but he’s not in there anymore and nothing I do will change it. Physically he’s hurting me as he presses just a little, but emotionally he’s destroying the last ounces of my soul and I begin to sob like a broken child. Pain coursing through every nerve ending.

I know this is it…. My life, or theirs, and the way this is looking, they will die anyway if I don’t turn. Because Colton isn’t about to stop. My wolf can’t defeat him either. I have to face the reality of this.

I weakly grab at his wrists, hating his familiar warmth, the feel of his fur and the expanse of muscle beneath. Aching and yearning for him, while being petrified of who he is in front of me. It’s like he senses I have nothing left to fight with and that snarl turns to a toothy smug growl, showing his satisfaction that I’m not fighting him anymore. He takes pleasure from seeing my tears, mingled with my own blood, spreading across my mouth and chin and the pitiful sodden expression of lost hope.

Colton, please…. It’s me… Lorey…. Your mate. Don’t.” I know begging is futile, but my body is too weak to try, my heart refuses to give up on him and as he starts to choke the life out of me a little more, he holds me up to admire what he’s about to kill. My voice is all I have left, even while the claws constrict around my neck, closing my airways and disable my ability to breath. I grasp at his fingers with both hands, to try and hold him back and gasp when he tightens with a flex, to show how easy this will be.