Page 56 of Beautiful Madness

I didn’t fling power into it ortry to break it with magic. I simply touched it. I touched it, and the wall crumbled.It shattered into shards of glass, and it made a sound like quiet screams as itrained upon the floor.

There were no thoughts orworries about the bite I’d received. Not then. There was only the purpose. Therewas only the alpha and getting to him before the monsters took my purpose away.

And finally, for the first timein what seemed like decades, I was touching my alpha. My heart flooded with emotionthen, but strangely enough, that emotion did not cast away the cruel darknessof my birth mother’s legacy.

“Jared,” I whispered, andreached for the first of the silver spikes. It came out but not easily, as theflesh into which it had been buried for too long did not want to give it up. Ithad grown around the silver and held on greedily, and I was thankful he wasn’tconscious to feel it when I tugged and wiggled and then ripped the spikes free.

I’d pulled out two of them whena daywalker attacked my unprotected back. And almost absently I pivotedslightly, slammed my hand against his chest, and then blinked to rid my eyes ofthe gritty dust that flew into my face when he expired.

Then Joe was there, broken armin a cast, his free hand holding a wooden, bloody stake as long as his forearm.“I’ll watch your back,” he said, his voice raised to cut through the roars ofboth deadly daywalkers and irate wolves. “Fix the alpha.”

I didn’t take a single secondto argue. I shut out the sounds of the battle and returned my attention toJared. I began ripping out the spikes that held him, and he came toconsciousness before I was halfway done.

There was the barest whisper ofa moment when we simply stared at each other, where he understood what was happening,that I was really there, and then his eyes changed.

Pure love was devoured bycomplete darkness.

That darkness wasn’t for me,and though I understood that, my heart stuttered with terror. It didn’t matterthat I was filled with deadly magic and could kill with a touch. It onlymattered that I loved the alpha…

But the alpha was a fuckingnightmare.

His trials with the capture,the silver, and the magic had twisted him up in ways I certainly understood,and all I could do was whisper, “I love you, Jared,” and give him some space todo what he needed to do.

I stood so suddenly that mybody slammed into Joe’s, but he only grunted and put his casted left arm aroundme and held his stake in front of us both. It didn’t matter to him that I wasthe powerful one. It only mattered that he protect me.

Iwas Joe’s purpose.

Jared roared and began yankingout the remaining spikes, the agony fueling his rage. Fury poured from him, sothick I could almost see it. Despite the blackness of his mind, his body wasstill weak. Still hurt. He needed to shift to heal, but even as his wolf,healing would take a while.

He didn’t care.

He was the alpha, and he wasgoing to fight. He was going to kill. He burst into his shift, somehow, evenwith three of the spikes still in his body. When he did, the remaining spikeswere forced out.

And even his wolf was changed.His fur was darker and thick enough to be a shield, and his eyes werecompletely black, changed by a magic that should never have touched him tobegin with. He was warped.

Magic would do that to aperson.

He threw himself into thefight, ripping through daywalkers like he hadn’t just been kicking down death’sdoor. His wolves renewed their fight after pausing for just a second to let itsoak in that their alpha was alive. He was free.

But as vicious and violent asthey were, their teeth and claws couldn’t kill the daywalkers. Those mutantbastards were alive because of magic, and they would die only with a woodenstake through the heart, or by being killed by me.

So after watching Jared for afew seconds, joy in my heart, I went to work. I left the still fightingdaywalkers to the wolves and Jared. Joe and I made sure the ones they put downstayed down.

We weren’t the only ones. Remyand Zach understood what needed to be done, as well, with something extra addedto their workload—watching the detective’s back. Still, Rick shocked me withhis fight. He should have died the moment he strode into the cave, hisvulnerable human hands full of stakes and his heart full of determination.

But he didn’t die. He swung hisstakes like he’d been training all his life, and right before my eyes, a hunterwas born.

Toward the end, we both wentfor the same downed but still struggling daywalker and for the first time sincehe’d entered the caves, we were close enough to touch.

He slammed his stake into thedaywalker’s chest even as I lifted my hand to make the same kill, and for aheartbeat, we stared across the swirling dust at each other, both of ussmiling.

And as I looked into his eyes,I realized something that very nearly stunned the darkness from my angry blackheart.

Detective Rick Moreno was nolonger fully human.

ChapterThirty

Did he even realize it? Did heknow that sometime during his capture, Axton had taken pains to alter him? Ididn’t know what the former county master had done to Rick, but I knew hehadn’t made the detective a vampire. It was fully dark, and Rick wasn’t adaywalker. Which begged the question…