Page 57 of Kidnapped Rejected Mate
Together, we run toward it and realize what’s going on.
Maeve is unconscious on the ground, Phina leaning over her, Valerie straining with her hands up over her head, desperately trying to keep a protective barrier up over the three of them. The three women are sweating profusely, and when Valerie sees us, her concentration slips, her hands faltering and dropping closer to her head.
“Valerie!” Lachlan bellows, shifting beside me, running as fast as he can.
We all follow suit, shifting and racing through the space, jumping over the crevices and through the fire. The smell of burning fur joins the others in the air, the scent reminding me of when the fire hit Lachlan’s house. When Tara nearly burned Felix alive, his coat and skin turning black from the trauma.
Tara…Aurela.
Kalen, Xeran, and Lachlan go toward their mates and Maeve, but I veer to the left, heading for the cliff’s edge, some of the smoke clearing so I can see the wide open air beyond it. The lake is in the distance, gray and tumultuous, churning behind the girls.
Obviously, I’m aware of magic, and I’ve seen several displays of it that have rewired my attitude toward it. Phina and Nora are plenty powerful. In fact, Nora saved herself on this very ridge by catching herself with magic to keep from falling.
But this is something else. I can feel the magic cracking in the air, the raw energy like just before a thunderstorm when you can taste the potential for lightning, the hair standing up on the backs of your arms.
My mate is suspended in the air, her golden hair blowing in the wind. She’s shouting something at the ball of blue flames across from her, but I can’t hear a word they’re saying.
I feel helpless, useless, standing on the edge of the cliff, unable to do anything to help her. I reach back for the nozzle, wondering if I could get some of it on Tara like I did last time. If it got her down, that would give Aurela enough time to escape.
For what feels like an eternity but is likely only seconds, I watch them, heart thundering, shouting into the din for Aurela to come back down.
It doesn’t even register; my voice whipped away by the wind, the roar of noises behind me. Logically, I know that if there’s nothing I can do to help Aurela, I should go back to the others, help them fight the fire daemons. But staring at her in the sky is like staring at the pot, waiting for it to boil. It’s as if I keep my eye on her, I can stop anything from happening to her.
If I look away from her, I have the certainty that she’s going to fall, crash into the lake below. That Tara will find a way to hurt her.
“Aurela!”
Despite the noise, I hear a voice rip through the space that I recognize instantly. I spin around to see Shae and Frederic racing through the flames, their clothes tattered and torn.
“No,” Shae whispers, but as she gets close, I put an arm out, worried she might run right over the edge of the cliff. She turns to me, her gaze panicked, her eyes wet, likely stinging from the fire. “Can you get her down here?”
“I…” A few days ago, I was at Shae’s place, hearing how I wasn’t good enough, and now we’re standing here together, watching her daughter take on the woman who’s been starting the fires and destroying our town. “I think we have to trust her.”
“I knew this would happen!” Frederic shouts, pacing, his hands shaking in a way I recognize—he’ll shift any second from the emotions. “That damned magic! I knew it would come to something like this!”
“Soren, watch out!”
I spin with the Cambiases to find three fire daemons approaching, trapping us between them and the cliff’s edge, their massive arms waving like tentacles crafted from the blaze.
Lachlan comes flying in, turning and sliding in front of the three of us, then launching into one of the daemons without preamble. With the thing knocked back, Kalen arrives, spraying his extinguisher up and over the creature.
Frederic looks at me, then shifts into his wolf form. He launches himself at the daemon, even as Shae screams for him to stop, and I blast the thing with an extinguisher, the thick muck coating it and putting it out in a great, heaving gasp of smoke.
I hate them. At least, I thought I hated them. But as more fire daemons rise from the ground, shifting mightily in thedirection of Tara and Aurela, I realize we’re all going to have to work together to save the girl we love.
Chapter 30 - Aurela
When Tara sends the first bolt of magic toward me, it moves fast, rippling through the air, a raw burst of energy that could melt the flesh off a human’s bones.
I was a little kid the first time I realized I was a wielder. All shifters contain a tiny bit of magic in them—it’s what allows us to shift, to keep our clothes and belongings when we move between forms. But nobody ever calls that magic for what it is—it’s seen as natural, inherent, while additional magic-wielding is more controversial. Some people call it a curse.
I think there are many alphas in our packs who don’t like the fact that it’s more often than not omegas who have magic-wielding ability. I don’t think they like the way it flies in the face of the hierarchy. A natural order they like to claim should be upheld because it’s what nature intended for us.
The moment my parents realized I was a wielder, I was given lectures on why it was bad. Why it was shameful. How I was never to use it, even in secret, even in private.
I’d experienced that kind of shame before. I carried it with me from the moment I was born, my parents making it clear that being an omega was a failure. That they’d had one success with Lachlan, an alpha, and one stumble with me. They wanted to be a powerful family, but apparently, money would not be enough to do that.
Apparently, I needed to be perfect as well. And I never, ever was. Not from the moment I was born, from the second I entered this world, and my parents were disappointed that I’d had the gall to be one cog in the machine rather than something else. Something better.
