Fury tears through me like a firestorm. “Flame!” I yell at the room, desperate. “I’m fucking calling you!”

Yes, a soft female voice in my mind says. I feel a chasm open inside me, deep in my being, a dark and endless depth, expanding, deepening.

Silver light arcs through the air toward me, sucked from the bodies of the soldiers, and blasts into my chest, a scorching torrent of power. Screams fill my ears. The wolf wails. I’m blinded by searing light, and agony tears through my mind. I hear my own shriek join the howling cries, my body shaking uncontrollably as the rampant energy forces its way through skin and muscle. I’m overwhelmed by a sudden expansion, the pressure wrenching veins apart. My chest, my brain, my limbs are about to explode.

Then it stops. Silence.

I’m left a gasping wreck.

When I pry open my eyes, time has stilled, and the scene around me stands frozen. Belanger’s soldiers, including the wolf, sprawl like corpses across the ground. Mouths wide, faces fixed into contorted cries of agony, their skin wrinkled and ruined. Unmoving blood seeps in rivulets from ears and noses and pools on the stone. Suspended bolts of silver-white fire arc out from each body toward me. The ground burns with unmoving flame.

Has Alexei frozen time?

This is not me, my beauty. Surprise and humor lighten his voice.

“How are you talking to me?”

Do you wish to take the lives of these Shifters?

I look at the bodies of the soldiers, their faces ashen and withered. They appear half-dead already. “No. No. They’re bastards, but I won’t kill them.” They’re not worth the inevitable angst.

Then you must cease from taking their Flame.

“How?”

You know how. You’ll be in pain, but the Lycan will help you.

Flanagan.

I will come for you soon.

My heart wrenches. “What? Are you going? No, don’t go.” I don’t understand the strength of my reaction, Alexei should be the last person I want with me, but I feel a desperate need to know he’s near.

You are mine, precious one. I will never be far.

When he leaves, like a blink of light before darkness, the strange stillness collapses, and the room erupts into a maelstrom of flashing Flame and screaming agony.

I tense my jaw against the onslaught. “Stop.”

As though my word pulled some plug, the arcing fire snaps back into the prone bodies of the soldiers. The flames flutter and disappear. The room falls silent again. I’m left with an ache in my chest and burning pain. My body convulses as fire rips the length of my spine. Molten lava scorches a path through every vein. The searing heat wrenches a scream from my throat.

As if from a distance, I hear the double doors bang open.