Page 104 of Silver Claw

Either way, he was going to die.

And that was what mattered.

Sam found the blades he’d been using and threw them at my feet. “Fight, Kait. Don’t forget who you are. Don’t forgetwhatyou are.”

Yeah, I could’ve shifted into a bear or a tiger or even Voss again and fought him that way. But I wasn’t doing that. I’d fight him as my woman and as my wolf.

As myalpha.

It was just something I had to do.

Voss lifted his hands, magic swirling. He didn’t smile. He didn’t speak. And in the end, he dropped the magic and came at me as his beast.

Fair fight.

Sam crouched a few yards away to watch.

I scooped the blades off the ground and went to meet the werewolf, coldly raging. He’d murdered Rick. I was free to kill him.

Every time I felt something snap or saw blood hanging in the air or took a hit that would have made a normal person lie down and die, I got madder. The pain fueled me. It fueled my psycho. She needed that push. She liked it.

Already damaged from Voss’s magic and fists, I wasn’t exactly healthy, but I was far from weak. And just like when I’d fought Gavin in Shadowfield, the violence was extreme, and both Gavin and I were suffering. But neither one of us would give up.

And maybe neither one of us would live through the night and what we were doing to each other. Two powerful alphas,both driven by incomprehensible things, both determined to be the one left standing.

Eventually, we both shifted to our wolves—not his wolfman and not my shapeshifter, but just our wolves—so we could continue fighting and still manage to heal a little faster. Just enough to keep going. And then, as though we’d spoken to each other and agreed, we shifted back.

We were equally matched, both of us out of our minds, both of us nearing our ends.

Both of us broken.

And still we fought on. I wasn’t sure that either one of us would ever heal from what we were doing to each other. But we couldn’t stop, not now. I lost my knives but partially shifted, just my hands, to use my claws as my blades.

He did the same.

“Can’t you die?” he shouted once, his face a mask of torn flesh and blood. “Can’t you just die?”

I had a moment to marvel at the fact that my claws were no longer the black of normal claws. Beneath the surface, beneath the dark, was a core of silver.

I had somehow grown silver claws. Now I literally was the Silver Claw alpha.

We fought on. The full moon lit our way, feeding us insanity, savagery, and darkness.

I was lost in that darkness, that bloody darkness, and by the end of it, I wasn’t just fighting Gavin Voss. I was fighting myself. I wanted to stop, to run away to heal, to let Voss go so he could do the same. We could hunt him down eventually, avenge Rick’s death, and rid the world of the blight of the werewolf.

But I could not stop. My psycho was fully in control, and she didn’t think about the fact that my body was giving up. She onlythought about causing pain, feeling pain, and drowning in the blood of her enemy.

Once, I inadvertently shifted into a weakening butterfly, and Voss shifted into his waning werewolf. He grabbed me and crushed my wings, but not before I sliced so deeply into his hand that he might have lost a finger. I couldn’t tell.

And I shifted back, but changing into my shapeshifter when I was so weak had weakened me further. The shapeshifter used up what little energy I had left.

But Voss was just as weak.

In the end, the brutal fight didn’t end because one of us killed the other. It ended because a man strode from the shadows, others spreading out around him, behind him, all of them coming to end a fight I could neither stop nor run from.

Jared, Remy, Joe, Zach, my mother, Anika Draper, Gray Shadow wolves, even Gavin’s beta and some of his wolves. Their fight was over and they were coming to mine.

My alpha hooked an arm around my waist and yanked me from the bloody circle of torn, battered ground, and even as I struggled to finish what I’d started, Detective Rick Moreno slammed a shotgun to the back of Gavin Voss’s head and pulled the trigger.