The river tried to kill them.
Icy water clawed at Selene's legs as she hauled Cyrus through the rapids, his unconscious body slamming against jagged rocks. Behind them, the howls of Orric's hunters cut through the storm...closer every second.
Move. Faster.
Her shadows thrashed beneath her skin, still sluggish from the ghost-blade's poison. The tether in her chest pulled taut...Kael's rage and pain bleeding through the bond like an open wound. Something was happening to him. Something is wrong.
Cyrus choked as water filled his mouth. Selene dragged him onto a half-submerged boulder, her arms shaking with exhaustion. His eyelashes fluttered, the eerie blue glow in his right eye reduced to faint embers.
"T-the cave..." he rasped, blood threading through his teeth. "Downstream... hides scents..."
A howl answered from thirty yards upstream.
Selene didn't hesitate. She rolled them both off the boulder just as an arrow embedded itself where Cyrus's head had been. The current swallowed them whole.
Blood Moon Dungeon
Kael's chains rattled as Roran backhanded him. The blow split his lip, blood spraying across the damp stones.
"Pathetic." Roran's voice echoed with that unnatural chorus, his blue-lit eyes burning in the torchlight. "The great Alpha heir, brought low by a shadow bitch."
Orric watched from the corner, arms crossed. "Last chance, boy. Renounce her."
Kael spat blood at Roran's boots. "Go to hell."
Roran's grin widened. Then he moved...too fast, too fluid...his hand plunging into Kael's chest like smoke through iron.
Agony.
White-hot and all-consuming as Roran's fingers closed around something inside him. Not his heart. Something deeper. The essence of his Alpha power.
Kael's scream shook the dungeon.
Roran leaned in, his breath reeking of graves. "Let's see how she loves you... hollow."
He yanked.
The Cave
Selene's knees gave out the moment they reached the stone shelf. Cyrus collapsed beside her, his breathing ragged. The cave smelled of mildew and old bones, the ceiling dripping with stalactites like fangs.
Then the tether screamed.
Selene convulsed as Kael's agony became hers. Her back arched off the stone, shadows exploding from her mouth and eyes in a black torrent. The bond between them frayed...not breaking, but warping, as if something vital had been carved from Kael's soul.
Cyrus grabbed her shoulders. "Selene! What's..."
She vomited shadows.
When the fit passed, the tether felt... wrong. Thin and frayed, pulsing with a sickly rhythm. Kael was alive, but something fundamental had been stolen.
And through the bond's dying echoes, she heard Roran's voice:
"Come find him, shadow wolf. Before the Blood Moon does."
Cyrus's fingers dug into her arm. "Your eyes..."
Selene blinked. The cave walls shimmered with new clarity...every crack, every droplet of water thrown into sharp relief. She could see the heat radiating from Cyrus's wounds, taste the iron in his blood on her tongue.
Her shadows hissed, writhing with new hunger.
The realization struck like lightning:
Whatever Roran had taken from Kael...
...had been given to her.