Two of the enforcers were dead, and the lone survivor hadn’t made it far.

His hands on the metal pipe pinning him to the brick wall, the man snarled a curse at me. The abandoned factory around us was nearly empty, barring the bodies on the floor and the decrepit machinery no one had bothered to take with them. The sound of traffic carried from the streets of Vancouver outside, but none of the occasional police sirens seemed particularly interested in heading our way.

“Where is she?” I growled.

The enforcer shoved at the pipe. My grip on it didn’t budge. I only barely looked human at this point, and most of it was for show, just to give the bastard something to talk to. Storm clouds made up the shape of my body. More extended through the cavernous building, churning along the ceiling and amid the open space of the factory floor. A twist of shadow held the pipe in place, shifting on it when the enforcer’s hands did but pinning him nonetheless.

“Go to hell,” the man spat.

I drove the metal pipe harder against his throat.

“Go on, kill me,” he rasped. “You’re already too late to stop what the masters have planned.”

A scowl twisted the darkness of my face. The masters. Their plan. I was sick of hearing that—not that I’d heard it much. This guy and his friends were the first enforcers I’d seen in days, and they’d each said the same thing. Before that, the others I’d found hadn’t been much help either. Each group proclaimed their allegiance to their masters and then killed themselves rather than talk to me. It’d been horrible.

I remembered a time when it’d been horrible.

A shudder ran through me. Eight weeks. Eight weeks of searching the coast and the ocean for any sign of Ari. Of tracing every reported “dehaian” attack only to find no sign of dehaians or strakirin at all. Of fearing the longer she spent with those bastards, the less chance I had of reclaiming the girl I’d known.

If I had any chance at all.

Desperation was a funny thing. The Beast side of me wasn’t familiar with it. In all these centuries, there’d never been anything it cared about besides itself. Not until Ari, the girl who was like me but not like me, and who had come to matter so much more than I ever could have imagined. The Beast side of me wasn’t sure how to handle the frantic, consuming fear of losing her that had gripped it whole.

And the greliaran part of me was beside itself at the thought of being here again. Of having psychos want to destroy someone I cared about again. I’d lived this nightmare once already, and now, only a year later, here it was a second time like nothing had changed. Hell, it’d only gotten worse. My stepsister had been shot. She was still in a coma that no one could bring to an end, much less explain. And the girl I cared about had been taken.

Again.

My body sped through the water after Logan.

My mind was under siege.

In the darkness, I trembled, holding up my walls with all my might. I had no idea how long it had been. The twilight world of the ocean wasn’t that different from the windowless hell of the judges’ white room; there wasn’t a hint of time in either of them. But with every mile of gray limbo that swept past, the drone grew louder. The ocean seemed to be feeding it, helping it, strengthening it. Magic from the horrible water all around me flicked through the cracks in my walls like a vicious snake’s tongue, sending shocks through me while it eroded every defense between me and oblivion.

Endless, soothing oblivion where nothing would matter, not ever again…

Desperate rage filled me. I wouldn’t end like this. I’d see my family again. I’d survive.

My God, I had to survive.

Vague figures floating in the distance registered on my strange echolocation ability. We were closer to the ocean floor now, and hills with pockmarks like caves prickled at the edge of my senses too.

Logan slowed, but continued onward, and my body did the same. The figures came into view.

All of them.

I stared. Strakirin. Hundreds upon hundreds. Maybe even a thousand.

How many had the judges made?

The creatures hovered in the gray twilight water, their sinuous tails rippling slowly. Their bioluminescent fins glowed like a shifting fabric of glittering gold, and their yellow-green eyes shone, unblinking, unwavering, locked on Logan.

On me.

A jolt went through me again, followed by the lull of peace through surrender, as the ocean cracked my mental defenses and then the drone slipped through the gap. My world blurred with the desire to join, to obey the masters. To do as the masters commanded, whatever they commanded, because that was my purpose.

It would be so easy…

So easy…

I whimpered in the dark, trying to fight it. Slowly, painfully, I bolstered my walls again, but not before I heard a whisper weave through the drone, fading in and out like it was carried on a shifting breeze.

They’d been waiting for me.