Page 102 of Silver Claw

Sam would be watching, eager to join the fight, but he wouldn’t unless he saw me dying. If he interfered before then, Voss would kill Rick. He wouldn’t bargain. He’d just murder him, if he hadn’t already.

I’d already had a vicious battle with Gavin Voss that had nearly killed me, but even that was different. He’d lost his magic, and he hadn’t even been able to keep control of his wolfman.

But tonight was the full moon, and he was different. He didn’t lose anything.

So my vicious little wolf was fighting something stronger and way more magical. But he wasn’t meaner than her. Not by a long shot.

I’d shapeshift if my wolf became too damaged, but right now, she wanted to fight. I wasn’t going to deny her.

But the werewolf tore me apart. He was savage, his brain was warped, and he was so very angry. His life had led him to this point. He needed, for whatever reason, to control me. To hurt me.

And he got what he needed.

It wasn’t one-sided. My wolf was angry, too.

I had no idea how long it was before I was forced to let my wolf go so I could shift into something else. Something still damaged, but still able to handle it, because a shapeshifter was always going to be stronger than a wolf.

I shifted into Gavin Voss.

And as it always was when I shifted into another person, it was a mistake. A huge mistake.

Apparently I wasn’t built to take on another person’s pain and be cold enough to ignore it. I wasn’t really Gavin Voss, after all.

I got awful things in my memory, felt things I didn’t want to feel, knew things I wasn’t meant to know. As was almost always the case, Gavin wasn’t born a monster. He was made into one.

I guessed that was why there was so much evil in the world. Monsters were created and they went on to create other monsters.

And oh my god, was it dark in his head. He saw no point to anything, really, since he was only going to die. We all knew we were going to someday die, and then you had to wonder what the hell it was all for. All the struggling, the suffering, even the joy. We all knew that, on a certain level.

But Gavinknewit.

He felt it with every part of him. He did everything he could to find some kind of acceptance, peace, and happiness in life. But his joy came abruptly and was short-lived, and he went on to something else just to try to chase away the awfulness of his existence.

He’d done inexcusable things. Terrible things. Outside of Frederick Axton and his human servant, Avis Vine, Gavin Voss was the worst person I’d ever met.

There was nothing redeemable about him.

I needed to release his pack from his rule.

I couldn’t understand why he didn’t kill himself or get into a fight that would inevitably give him a death that might free him. Only a person more terrified of death than of life would cling to something that hurt them so very badly.

But maybe that was the real reason he’d picked on me and my pack. On Jared. Maybe he knew, deep down, that we would take his choices from him.

All that streaked through my brain in a second, and I knew I’d never really be the same.

Gavin reflexively released me from his magic, shoving me away so violently that I heard something crack in my chest. Then he came for me immediately. “No,” he roared. “No! Get out of me!”

Gavin wasn’t going to be the same, either, though being changed was unlikely to matter to a dead man.

I tried to shift to something else, anything else, as I attempted to breathe, to recover what he’d broken inside of me, but I was too hurt, and I was too slow.

He snapped then, losing whatever control he’d ever managed to maintain, and his wolfman came screaming back over him. He could only see himself, the thing he hated most in the world, lying there on the ground, bloody and beaten, mocking him.

Unable to maintain my shift into Voss, I returned to my woman’s body.

I closed my eyes as he wrapped his enormous fists in magic and punched me, over and over again. I tried to regain my focus, but his magic and his fists were knocking it so far out of me that I wasn’t sure I’d ever find it again.

I saw Nicole, my angel, floating in the darkness. Watching. Waiting. She didn’t just wait for my death. She took the overflow of things my mind couldn’t handle—at least some of it.