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  Elyse shook her arm, attempting to dislodge the offending head from her claws. It finally popped off with a wet squishy sound and went rolling away into the night. Elyse roared triumphantly. Man, I loved that woman. I turned my attention back to the last shifter, he was still staring at the gory scene at Elyse's feet. He didn’t even look at me—he just turned tail and ran, at full shifter speed, for what he thought was the relative safety of the villa.

  Lucy blasted his legs with a kinetic spell and he went sprawling face-first into the sand. I made a running jump onto the prone form and performed the neat trick I had taught myself of shifting just enough of my head back into human form so I could speak.

  "Shift! Now, or I'll kill you where you lay." My voice was deep and intimidating.

  Even though he’d been mangled by Lucy's spell, and was in obvious pain, he complied and shifted. I didn't recognize the dark-haired man I was sitting on. I didn't think he was one of the shifters from the compound. "Elyse, do you know him?"

  Elyse chuffed at me—negative, she didn't know him either.

  "How many more does Marcus have inside?" I demanded.

  "And does he have any mages with him?" Lucy added.

  The man was writhing in pain, I wasn't sure he could focus on what we were saying. I was about to ask Maddie for help when a crossbow bolt slammed through the top of the guy’s head, splitting his skull, killing him instantly. I only had time to register what had happened when a second bolt ripped through my shoulder, shattering bone and tearing my muscles to pieces.

  "Ow," I said, right before a third bolt hit my hip, spinning me off the dead shifter. I could tell my pelvis was fractured, so standing was out of the question. It would be great if my super healing would kick in, or even better if Maddie could zap me with some of her amazing heals.

  I was experiencing the worst pain I'd ever felt. What kind of arrows could inflict this kind of damage? It didn't make sense. My eyes found Elyse. Even in beast form she looked terrified. Maddie was standing right beside her and she was sending healing magic my way, but for some unknown reason it didn’t seem to be working.

  Well, that sucked balls.

  Yet another bolt struck me in the back. I felt a lung rupture and it became really hard to breathe. I fell forward, my blood spilling onto the sand. Black spots danced across my vision. I was going to pass out and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. This was not how I imagined the night would end.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Animal form, now.

  What? Who was that? Let me sleep, I’m tired.

  You must shift now, or we will die.

  Oh, it’s you. Hey buddy. Did you know there are arrows in the world that are straight up Ollphiest killers?

  SHIFT!

  I don't know if it was a conscious decision on my part, or if Crazy startled me into it, but I shifted to bear form. The change in my mass expelled the arrows from my body and the relief was immediate. With the pain minimized, my head cleared enough that I realized I was lying splayed out in the open with a clear line of sight from the villa to me, making me a giant bear target. I wobbled to my feet and shuffled backward. Elyse appeared at my side, grabbed handfuls of fur and started pulling me along.

  Thwack.

  Thwack.

  Two more crossbow bolts nailed me in the side, sinking deep. How they were able to penetrate my super-bear skin when I'd shrugged off bullets at point blank range was a mystery to me. The pain returned to outlandish levels and I stumbled, going down on my front legs. Lucy screamed something unintelligible and slammed her hands together. A wall of fire easily fifty feet high erupted from the sand in between the villa and us.

  Yay for magic.

  Elyse shifted to human form. "Orson, you need to stand up and move. I can't carry you, you're too big."

  Too big? I could fix that. I shifted to human form and once again the sudden mass change caused one of the arrows sticking from my side to fall out. Unfortunately the other one stayed lodged in my gut. It felt like someone had stuffed a dozen crushed-up light bulbs in my stomach.

  "How long will the fire hold?" Maddie asked.

  "It depends on if Marcus has a counter spell," said Lucy. "Which we need to assume he does. We maybe have a half a minute."

  Elyse hooked her hands under my arms and dragged me farther down the beach so that even if the fire snuffed out we would be out of the range of Robin Hood and his Ollphiest-killing cross bow.

  The arrow still in me was burning my insides. ”You need to pull it out," I said.

  "It might cause more damage," Elyse said, worried.

  I winced. "There's no way it could hurt more than it does right now."

  "Maddie?"

  Maddie placed her hands on my head. "Do it."

  Elyse yanked the bolt free, tearing out a good chunk of me with it. Maddie's healing power rocketed through my body. The first thing she did was turn off my pain receptors, and I shuddered with pleasure. All the holes in my body were another story.

  "I can't get the wounds to respond," said Maddie. "Maybe I can slow the bleeding." Maddie moved her hands directly over my wrecked shoulder. I could feel the energy as she focused it directly on the torn skin.

  Lucy had a finger to her comm tattoo. "Wyatt, Morgan, get back here now. Orson's been injured."

  “Orson’s been what?" Wyatt's voice blasted through the spell directly into all of our heads.

  "Wyatt, stop—" Lucy began to say through the comm link.

  Wyatt and Morgan popped up behind Maddie

  "Shouting," Lucy finished, as Wyatt fell to his knees next to me.

  "Dude, what happened? You look horrible,” said Wyatt.

  Elyse held up the bolt. "Five of these things took him down."

  Morgan took the deadly projectile from her, holding it up to examine it in the light from Lucy's wall of fire.

  "Ollphiest!" a voice shrieked from behind the blazing barrier. "We've learned, Ollphiest! We know what hurts you."

  The voice wasn't deep enough to be Marcus, but it still sounded familiar. It was on the tip of my brain I should know the screaming maniac.

  Elyse jumped to her feet, staring into the fire. "It can't be," she whispered.

  "It can't be who?" asked Lucy.

  It seemed like a bajillion spotlights clicked on all at once, bathing the beach and the ocean in harsh white light. A half-dozen speedboats, all with several shifters in beast form aboard, clustered around the shoreline. They roared as one and dove into the water just as Lucy's flaming wall winked out.

  The trap had been sprung.

  With the bolt out, Maddie's direct healing of my wounds had proved successful. I was no longer bleeding freely and I was feeling stronger—maybe only sixty percent of normal, but I wasn't going to die, so that was a plus.

  In an attempt to stop the shifters swimming to shore, Lucy let loose with another fire whammy. This one set the actual sea on fire, and it was one of the wildest things I'd ever seen her do. Seriously. Unfortunately some of the shifters were able to jump over the flames and land safely on the wet sand of the shoreline. Maddie momentarily turned her attention from me and slammed a shield down over the burning water, creating a cage of death. Who says healers can't kick butt when they need to.

  Half the shifters burned up in Lucy and Maddie's makeshift oven. The ones who made it to the beach, about ten or so, ran into Elyse, Morgan, Wyatt and me. Elyse was in beast form. Due to my weakened state, I opted for my more durable bear form. And Morgan had chosen the tactical shotgun for this particular fight. He’d added a drum magazine, something I've never seen on a shotgun. Morgan took aim on the lead shifter and squeezed the trigger. The roar of the gun was deafening. With my shifter senses I could see the slug leave the muzzle. Morgan wasn’t using normal shotgun shells, instead opting for solid silver slugs. The weapon was not a shifter killer, it was a shifter disintegrator. It blew the on rushing enemy in half, his entire middle disappeared in a cloud of red mist.

  Elyse chuff
ed at the spectacle.

  "I know, right?" said Wyatt. "The dude is a death-dealing machine. You should see what he did to the front of the house. I hope the villa is insured, because it's going to need a crap-ton of screen doors."

  Morgan's hand-cannon roared two more times, the guy had wasted two more shifters before Elyse and I had even joined the fight. A shifter trained its yellow eyes on me, lip curled at the sight of my wounded body, calculating that I was easy pickings. It rushed me. The thing was big and I readied myself for contact, hoping that Maddie's healing was enough to carry me through. I shouldn't have worried. Wyatt blinked to the side of the shifter, giving it a jolt from his baton as it ran past him, and it fell forward into my waiting jaws. Snap, crackle, pop—one more down.

  The battle raged on. Elyse was taking enemy shifters down two at a time. Wyatt zapped anyone who got close to me and I finished them off, snapping them to pieces with my killer jaws. Morgan was keeping up with the body count, because all the shifters could see when they looked at him was a puny human, so they continued to misjudge his magically enhanced fighting abilities. All the while Morgan's deadly shotgun kept booming, echoing through the night, as shifters fell dead at his feet.

  Lucy was guarding our backs, which turned out to be a lifesaver, because several more shifters came charging out of the villa. "We got incoming from the house!" she shouted.

  "Hey Morgan, we got these last three," said Wyatt, blinking around the beach in a dizzying circle. "Go help Lucy."

  Morgan backpedaled toward Lucy's location, tossing an empty ammo drum and slamming a full one home. He spun and caught a shifter full in the face with one of his silver slugs, and the headless body flopped to the ground. Lucy had her blades out and in-between blasts of kinetic spells, which sent her adversaries careening though the air like rag-dolls, she was slicing off arms and cutting throats. And Maddie was throwing heals like a star quarterback in the NFL.

  Wyatt, Elyse and I finished with all the attackers from the water and we joined the fighting going on behind us. Everyone looked like they could keep fighting indefinitely. Even I was feeling better than when I started, because my own healing had finally kicked back in and that combined with Maddie's mojo had me roaring around the beach tearing bad guys in half.

  Now that I was feeling more like myself, I shifted to beast form, combining my brain-blasting shriek with my new spell slinging ability. I had no idea if I could cast the spell while shifted, but I decided to give it a shot. I targeted two enemy shifters and roared in their direction. They dropped to the ground, their claws rubbing at their injured ears. I concentrated and stripped them both of their animals. They stopped writhing around in the sand, they were done for the night.

  Yes!

  I started shrieking and stripping animals left and right. I immediately noticed a spike in my own power, the wounds on my body finally closed up, and the healing accelerated. It seemed that when I yanked an animal aura from its person, I was absorbing some of the energy needed to bind the two auras together.

  Cool.

  Morgan only understood one style of fighting, balls-to-the-wall all-out carnage. And with Lucy's enhancements and Maddie's healing vibes, he was showing no signs of fatigue. The problem was we were fighting shifters, and it was only a matter of time before Morgan ended up on the wrong side of a set of claws.

  It was just a glancing blow, but the razor-sharp nails ripped through his protective tactical vest like tissue paper, leaving deep, ragged gouges in his chest.

  Morgan dropped.

  Lucy screamed when he went down, hitting the attacking shifter with a fireball and a massive kinetic spell at the same time, the thing exploded in a gooey, fiery mess. Maddie focused all of her magic on Morgan, but with my sight I could see she was running on empty—she didn't have enough to save him. Morgan's chest was pumping way too much blood out of his body and I could hear his pulse slowing. I had another crazy idea. If I was some sort of half-assed spell caster, it was time to cast a new spell. I focused on the extra shifter juju I'd been pulling in—I was brimming with it—and when I had a good hold on it I pushed it toward Maddie.

  I wasn't a healer, so targeting Morgan would have been a waste, but I thought I might be able to lend Maddie some juice. I must have pushed harder than I thought. The energy plowed into Maddie making her stumble, but her aura flared to full power. Maddie's hair blew around her head in an invisible wind. Her eyes went wide when she realized what I had just done, but knowing that Morgan had only seconds, she hit him with the healing whammy of all healing whammies. Morgan's body gave a single twitch. His aura was buzzing oddly, I think the force behind Maddie’s mojo may have overloaded his capacitors a bit. A moment later he was able to sit up, but his eyes wouldn't focus properly and he was having trouble keeping his head from bobbing around.

  I checked his aura once more, just to be overly cautious. Huh? The energy I sent to Maddie and that she then passed to Morgan was easy to spot, because it was a purplish color, versus the normal bright white of a human aura. Morgan's aura hadn't quite absorbed the shifter magic. It was more like it was zipping around it little arcs, creating what looked like—well, a cocoon. I'd have to worry about that later. Right now there was still more fighting to be had. When I looked around I realized we had run out of bad guys to kill. Piles of dead shifters littered the grounds of the villa, and the once white beach now resembled red clay.

  Marcus had still not made an appearance, which had my Ollphiest spidey-sense tingling. Where had he recruited all these shifters, and how come there weren’t any blood-mages tossing their nasty spells around?

  "Ollphiest!" the same familiar voice screamed once more. Whoever he was, he was sounding more and more unhinged. I really couldn't blame him. The six of us had just wiped out all of his henchmen.

  The word henchmen finally helped my brain click open the right neuron. I looked at Elyse, and the sadness on her face devastated me.

  The voice belonged to Kyle French.

  Tommy and Carmen's little hell spawn.

  Kyle stepped out of the villa, a crossbow held loosely in his hands. I registered two things, the first being that Kyle had some kind of crazy-looking robot arm in place of the limb I took from him and unbelievably it appeared to be powered by magic. And second, one of those nasty, anti-Orson bolts was cocked and locked in the crossbow ready to fly. I would need to be vigilant, because Kyle was a couple sandwiches short of a picnic, and this could go sideways fast.

  "Where's Marcus?" I said.

  Kyle laughed, a high-pitched crazy man giggle. "He's not here, Ollphiest, it's just me and my friends." Kyle glanced around at the carnage. "But I see you've already met them."

  "You're lying," I said. "Where is he, circling around maybe to attack us from behind?"

  I saw Lucy take up a position where she could watch for sneak attacks.

  "I'm telling you," said Kyle, his arms open wide. "It's just me."

  Kyle’s aura was doing the psychopath two-step, but he wasn’t lying about Marcus. ”He really isn't here is he?" A thought occurred to me. "Marcus left you and these other poor slobs here as a decoy, didn’t he? But what else would be more important than taking us out?" I glanced at Lucy.

  Kyle spat. "He left us here to kill you."

  "No," said Lucy. "He left you here to die."

  Kyle's hands tightened on the crossbow. "Shut up, witch. This is a private conversation."

  "Hey Kyle," I said, drawing his attention back to me. "Where'd you get the shiny new arm?"

  "Wouldn't you like to know."

  “I’m curious, how exactly do you see this ending?" I asked. "There's six of us and only one of you."

  Kyle giggled again. I was missing something. I scanned the compound with my sight, looking for anything out of place.

  There.

  I saw it, but what the heck was it? Just on the other side of the door that Kyle had walked out of, off to the right and out of sight, there was a box about the size of small suitcase. It had a magic
al signature swirling around it—the only reason I had been able to spot it.

  There is danger.

  Yeah, I'm getting that.

  How did Kyle's casualness in the face of overwhelming odds and a weird magic box connect?

  A bomb.

  "Lucy," I said. "Is there such a thing as a magic suitcase nuke?"

  Kyle laughed and tapped his nose. “Ding. Ding. Ding.” He cackled.

  "There's not supposed to be," said Lucy. "But there aren't supposed to be magic robot arms either."

  "Wyatt," I said.

  "I'm on it," said the kid.

  "Stop talking," said Kyle. "I'm in charge here."

  "I don't think so," I said.

  Wyatt blinked behind Kyle and blasted the crazy man’s lower body to pieces with Morgan's hand-cannon. Kyle's lower legs disappeared and he collapsed to the ground screaming, the crossbow sliding out of his hands.

  “Oops,” said Wyatt. “That’s a lot worse than I expected.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Kyle was tougher than I thought he'd be. After lying in the pieces of his own legs for a moment, he shifted into animal form. His giant wolf with destroyed back legs appeared in front of us and he tried to drag himself toward the magic bomb.

  Nope.

  With shifter speed I reached him in seconds. I grabbed Kyle by his big fluffy tail and yanked him further out on to the lawn. He yipped and tried to bit me, but he was too far gone to put up much of a fight.

  "If you shift back, the bleeding might stop," I said.

  The others walked up to stand behind me. Lucy was supporting Morgan who was shaky, but back on his feet. She passed him off to Maddie and walked inside the villa to inspect the box.

  Elyse squatted down next to the wolf. "Oh, Kyle, you big dummy."

  Kyle shifted back into human form. I was right, his leg stumps stopped gushing blood. The jerk might actually survive having his legs blown off. I scanned his robot arm. Yep, it was not only powered by magic, it was integrated into his body with magic. If there was someone out there selling souped-up Winter Soldier style replacement arms, I didn't doubt that Kyle could score himself some new legs.