Kiss of Snow

It was time.

Abandoning any attempt at secrecy, she walked out onto the night-cloaked battlefield bathed in the crimson and gold shimmer of cold fire. The enemy might have been Silent, but they went pale at the sight of her. An instant later, they began to shoot. She would’ve taken evasive action . . . except the flames around her repelled everything, melting the bullets down to nothing, reflecting the lasers back at the shooters.

It was then that she realized Judd couldn’t have acted as the failsafe. No bullet would’ve gotten through. That wasn’t the scariest part—her link to the LaurenNet was shielded by cold fire even Sienna wouldn’t be able to breach, the ultimate defensive measure from a martial mind. But that was no longer an issue. She knew what to do now, and she would do it after the battle was done and her pack was safe.

Angry and sickened at the sight of the broken and hurt SnowDancers around her, Sienna spread out her arms, palms facing the sky. And the fire with the cold, cold heart touched the enemy, and they weren’t there anymore. She aimed the most powerful wave at Henry Scott, knowing he’d try to get his men to teleport him out.

The bastard screamed high and shrill before he disappeared. She didn’t know if he was dead, but she did know the attacking force should’ve retreated at the sight of her. Yet bullets continued to fly, now aimed at the fallen changelings.

No.

Something arctic and dark and deadly rose up inside of her as the X-fire emerged in a straight line on either side of her body, cutting the enemy in the way in half and cauterizing the massive wounds with such flawlessness, it appeared the men had fallen into two neat pieces. The rest of them were trapped beyond the wall of voracious flame, but they continued to shoot. And then her mind, a huge, vast endless thing that saw and heard every sigh, every heartbeat, caught the whisper of more of them coming down through the mountains. They’d slipped in past the defenses when the sonic weapon took out the changelings as well as the feral wolves, and now they thought to flank them from behind.

“Traitor!” The word came from the throats of those in front of her and she knew them then. Pure Psy. Zealots. They would not back down.

Very well.

The cold, dark thing inside of her shoved aside all else . . . and the flames began to feed. Screams filled the air, filled her consciousness, filled the sky. The monster inside of her, she thought with a small part of the endless vastness that was her mind, had seized control.

The problem was . . . the Psy weren’t the only targets in the vicinity.





HAWKE pulled his injured out of range of those Pure Psy operatives who’d been trapped on this side of the divide when Sienna created that bladelike wall of X-fire. It was clear the enemy would not surrender, but trapped as they were, he offered them one final chance. The response was a hail of bullets, so he gave the order. When it was done, he checked on his people. Most were staring shell-shocked at Sienna as she blazed in a storm of crimson and gold, her hair flying in a terrible breeze, her eyes caverns of pure, raw power.

At first the wall of cold fire, it had touched the enemy alone, but now it changed shape, became a wave that rippled outward in both directions, growing ever closer to the injured and bleeding SnowDancers.

Ignoring the pain of shattered eardrums barely begun to heal thanks to his strength as alpha, he screamed, “Sienna!” as he ran to her, even knowing she couldn’t hear him inside the inferno that consumed her, until it poured out of her eyes, her mouth, her every pore and every cell. The cold burn of it hit him a meter from the quickly creeping edge.

He knew she’d told him not to do it, that the X-fire would kill him the same as anyone else if she wasn’t in conscious control. But he had to stop her, had to save her. If she took the life of even one SnowDancer and survived to witness what she’d done, it would break her.

“Baby, you better be in there!” Running back, he got a racing start and jumped through the flames, expecting to fry. Instead, he slammed into her body, his arms going around her, but she didn’t go down—as if the cold fire had rooted her to the earth.

Her eyes, those eyes filled with red and gold, so stunning, so lethal, seemed to see him for a second, and he was almost certain he heard, Forgive me, deep inside his head before a dark, endless something grabbed his mind, punching through with such savage force that it brought him to his knees.

Shoving aside the throbbing pain as the shock of the impact vibrated through his body, he raised his head and looked out through the wall of X-fire, saw the flames lick out and over his people at a speed not even a wolf could outrun.