Page 103 of Silver Claw

At last, I managed to shift to my wolf, but she wasn’t in much better shape than I was. I was a shapeshifter, true, but not like Sam. Sam had his shapeshifter strength with him all the time. It was built into the man. But mine wasn’t quite as powerful andintense as his when I wasn’t shifted. It made me stronger all the time, but not strong enough.

Maybe because it was diluted by my wolf and by the fact that I could shift into animals as well as humans. All I knew for sure was that I needed to be shifted into something to be more powerful than an enemy like Gavin Voss.

Voss jumped to his feet, finally, tearing at his flesh, his stare on the moon as he screamed words I couldn’t understand.

And while his attention was on the sky, Sam slid in beside me, lifted my weak wolf’s body into his arms, and ran into the woods, crouched low over me, his body his own. He didn’t carry me far before he placed me gently down behind a massive tree.

“Get away when you can,” he murmured, then shifted back into me.

Just in time, because the wolfman was coming.

He didn’t seem to even remember that he’d beaten me nearly to death with his fists and his magic, because there was no shock on his face that I was standing, facing him down, ready to fight.

Strong as ever.

“I can’t let you live,” he said calmly, though there was only madness in his eyes. “Not like that.”

Sam nodded. “Once more unto the breach,” he murmured. Then he threw a glance my way. “When you’re ready, Kait, join us. You have to finish this.”

I needed to finish it.

Sam understood that.

Voss might have thought the Kait he was staring at had lost her mind, but he didn’t seem to care. But then he said something that finally did what his fists couldn’t.

“Killed him,” he said. “I killed your detective, Kait Silver. You had to know I was never going to let him live.”

Then he and Sam began to fight, and I curled up on the ground, shattered.

My human world man was dead.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

It was as though Voss’s insanity had made him invincible. Even Sam was having trouble with both his defense and his attack. I let myself wallow in the horror and grief for maybe five minutes before it became unbearable.

Then, before I was healed, before I was physically ready, I shifted from my wolf to my woman.

And I called my psycho. I called her like she was a wolf, and I physically felt her slam into me.

I didn’t care about the pain. I embraced it. It made me angrier. Crazier.

It was a night to be crazy.

I looked up at the moon. “Look what you birthed,” I whispered. “Look at your fucking children.”

And I stood, bloody and broken and naked, my hair as wild as my heart, and stepped out into the moonlight. Voss saw me immediately, and when he stopped slinging magic, his eyes wide, Sam turned to look at me.

“Sam,” I murmured. “Take off my face. I want to be the only Kait Silver in this fight.”

He was happy to do it. “Yes,” he said.“Yes,Kait.”

He didn’t doubt me.

Gavin Voss continued to stare at me, quiet and grim, even as Sam shifted to his own body.

It didn’t occur to me that I should ask Sam to go tell the others that Rick was dead. They were still fighting. I heard them. I felt them.

They had their hands full. And it didn’t matter. I would either kill Gavin Voss, or he would kill me, and then someone else would kill him.