Magic Claims (Kate Daniels: Wilmington Years, #2; Kate Daniels, #10.6)

The fear brought the world into crystal clear focus. Another massive orange shapeshifter dappled with rosettes bore down on me, her mouth gaping. Her fangs were enormous, at least nine inches long. Sarrat was already in my hand. I twisted out of the way and sank my saber between her ribs, ripping through her liver. She spun away as I withdrew and leaped on me, trying to pin me with her bulk. I stabbed up as she came down, driving my blade through her upper abdomen, past her sternum into her heart.

Her weight drove me back into a tree. She clamped her huge beast hands on my shoulders. Her heart was impaled by Sarrat’s blade. She should be dead or dying. Even a shapeshifter couldn’t shrug off a ruptured heart.

Claws tore at my shoulders. My bones groaned. She was trying to rip me in half.

I shoved Sarrat deeper, twisting the blade. Her heart had to be a popped balloon at this point. Ruined beyond even the strongest shapeshifter’s ability to repair.

Her jaws gaped open, way beyond the normal point. She bit at me, trying to catch my head and sink her fangs into my skull. I tucked my chin in and headbutted her lower jaw. My blood and her spit wet my face. I hit her with my head again. Teeth scraped my scalp, cutting through the skin. I pulsed magic through my wounds and let it rip.

A forest of blood spikes exploded in the shapeshifter’s mouth, puncturing her tongue, her cheeks, and digging into her sinuses.

She dropped me. I stomped on her knee, kicking her leg out from under her. She went down, and I sliced her head off with a single horizontal cut.

Heal that.

The battlefield blossomed in front of me like a flower. In a fraction of a second, I saw everything.

Keelan to my right, claymore discarded, ripping at his orange opponent, both covered in blood.

Owen, a massive werebison, gripping a werewolf’s head with his hand and pounding it into a tree, while another shapeshifter tore at him from the side. Owen’s back was a raw, bloody mess.

Hakeem and Troy, back-to-back, fighting off three shapeshifters. Hakeem’s stomach was ripped open. Troy’s left arm hung limp.

Every enemy had the same gold collar.

I charged at Owen’s group. The power word burst from my lips, packing a wallop of magic. “Aarh Saar!” All Stop.

My power splayed out in a wide semicircle.

The shapeshifters froze, petrified by my magic. Five seconds.

One. I beheaded the one attacking Owen from the side.

Two. I drove Sarrat across Keelan’s opponent’s spine, severing the spinal cord in two places with a crunch.

Three and four. I reached Hakeem and Troy.

Five. I decapitated a shapeshifter to my left.

Time restarted.

The two remaining collared shapeshifters in front of me spun away from Hakeem and Troy and lunged at me.

I opened my mouth for another power word.

A gray werelion tore out of the woods, his eyes filled with golden fire, and roared. The blast of sound hit me like thunder.

Curran grabbed the shapeshifter to his left and snapped his spine like a twig. Leonine jaws gaped open. Curran bit down on the shapeshifter’s neck just above the collar. Blood poured. The remaining shapeshifter turned to flee. My husband tore his opponent’s head off and hurled it at the escaping enemy. The bloody head smashed into the shapeshifter between his shoulder blades. He stumbled and then Curran was on him. The shapeshifter collapsed with Curran on top of him. Bones crunched. An arm flew by me.

Across the clearing Keelan pulled handfuls of entrails out of his opponent’s stomach and dug up, into the collared shapeshifter’s chest. The air was a mist of blood and bile.

Owen dropped the bloody stump of a body to the ground.

It was over.





We walked through the woods smeared in blood and carrying seven bodies. The dead had reverted to their human form, but my team was too beat up, so Curran’s shapeshifters got the hauling duty. Except for Owen, who carried one in spite of everyone’s advice, and Keelan, who insisted on dragging the biggest shapeshifter, the one he had killed, all by himself. My husband, the overachiever, was carrying two, one on each shoulder.

I had insisted on decapitating every corpse, just in case. Originally, the shapeshifters planned on impaling the heads on sticks and transporting them that way; however, I pointed out that approaching Penderton waving around gory, blood-dripping skull sticks was not the best idea. Curran and I had both brought our backpacks with waterproof bags in each, and now Da-Eun carried two sacks filled with shapeshifter heads. At eleven pounds each head, she was hauling seventy-seven pounds and she did it with a pep in her step.

It was good to be a shapeshifter.

Clotting my blood on command was one of the first skills my aunt had taught me, so I’d sealed the cuts and wounds, but the injuries were still there. My shoulders hurt, the flesh raw where the claws had pierced the muscle. Those claws hadn’t looked that clean. I’d pushed some blood out to purge the contamination, but I would need a visit to the medmage before some enterprising infection decided to make itself at home. My head hurt less than my shoulders, but I felt it.

The rest of our crew fared about as well. Keelan was hurt, but he stoically kept it to himself. Owen’s back had been sliced to ribbons. His wounds knitted themselves closed, but the muscle fibers would take longer to fix themselves, so right now his back looked strangely bumpy and uneven. We had to reset Troy’s broken arm on the spot, or it would heal badly and would need to be rebroken. Hakeem got the worst of it. His stomach was a mess, and Troy had chanted over him for a good twenty minutes, pushing the body into regeneration past the typical shapeshifter healing.

I glanced at Hakeem. He looked a little green, and he was walking in that slow deliberate way that meant every step was sending a fresh stab of pain through his body. A lacerated liver was a bitch.

The fight kept replaying in my mind, all thirty gory seconds of it. The shapeshifter’s momentum as she drove me back, the pressure against Sarrat as it pierced her heart, the fangs scraping my skull as she gnawed on my head, the hedgehog of my blood spikes in her mouth, her head falling off her shoulders, the power word, the mad dash of the pressurized five seconds, the slicing, the stabbing, the blood...

Ahead the trees thinned, hinting at the sunlit killing ground around Penderton.

I’d do it again. In a heartbeat. It had made me feel alive. More, it had made me feel…like myself.

I was a killer. Magic provided a barrier between me and the enemy. It insulated me from the visceral immediacy of direct violence, but in the end, I lived or died by my sword. I’d been taught to kill, encouraged to do it, praised when I did it well, and in the end, I liked it. It was in my nature, like breathing.

I’d all but given it up for the past seven years. I had focused on being a mother, on building a safe life, and now… Now I had some things to think about, and I wasn’t sure where I stood.

We cleared the tree line. I squinted against the sunlight.

The bell on the closest guard tower began to ring, striking a rapid, almost hysterical rhythm.

“Game faces on,” Curran said.

Everyone walked a little straighter. On my left, Jynx adjusted a collared shapeshifter’s body on her shoulders and raised her chin. This was our victory parade. The town didn’t need to know just how badly we got our asses kicked.

It wasn’t that Curran’s plan was bad or his tactics had been unsound. A team of four shapeshifters—one render, two renders-in-training, and one experienced alpha—should’ve cut their way through seven ordinary shapeshifters like they were butter, even without my or Curran’s help. It was just that the caliber of our enemy was far beyond what we expected and there was no way to know that until we fought them. Now we knew. We won but it was expensive. We’d need to adjust.

We kept walking.

The gates of Penderton swung out, and the first responders spilled into the open, two teams of three people each. Archers flooded the wall above the gate. The archers and the wall looked medieval, while the paramedics and EMTs looked decidedly modern in their reflective orange vests, and the contrast was jarring.

“Consort,” Hakeem said, his voice a little hoarse.

“Yes?” This was the first time he had called me Consort.

“Thank you.”

“No need. We’re a pack. You are one of ours, and you would do the same for me.”

He swallowed.

“Who are we?” Keelan asked.