His throat worked, and his body spasmed. “Orion!” I cried out, but his eyes had already fogged. “No, no, damn it.”
I could feel it, as much as I wanted to resist what my senses were telling me. He was gone.
I sat back on my heels, my shoulders slumped. Then I flinched around at a thud behind me.
West had just tackled the fox shifter. From their positions, she’d been about to leap at me. His wolf was twice as big as her form. She squirmed and clawed, but she didn’t stand a chance.
And she clearly knew that too. Like so many of the rogues before, she wasn’t letting herself be taken prisoner. West shifted one of his paws to get a better hold on her, and she rammed her neck into his claws.
He jerked back, but it was already too late. He’d severed her throat. With a snarl of disappointment, he sprang off her sagging body.
West looked around at the dwindling fray and shifted into human form. His gaze caught mine. He jerked his chin toward Orion.
“He’s passed?”
I swallowed hard. “It was just—the cut was too deep—it happened so fast. I tried everything I could think of.” My hands, tacky with the muskrat shifter’s blood, clenched in my lap.
West’s eyes dropped to them and rose back to my face. A shadow passed through his expression, from dark to light. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “You did.” He paused. “Ren—”
“We’ve got a prisoner!” someone shouted. A panting Thomas hunched over a sinewy body he’d managed to hold in place by the wrists. Alice had pinned the guy’s ankles with her talons, still in eagle form.
“And I’ve got another,” Marco announced, sauntering from amid the trees with a bobcat he held by the scruff of its neck and its restrained hind legs. His fingers tensed as the rogue struggled to break free. Nate shifted and moved to help him.
I pushed myself onto my feet. Too quickly. My legs wobbled, my stomach feeling as if I’d left it behind down by the ground.
West caught me by the shoulders. “Hey,” he said, his voice somehow rough and gentle at the same time. He pulled me into a hug, tucking my head under his chin. We were both naked, but with the image of Orion’s dead body lingering in my head, his blood staining my hands, there was nothing sensual about the embrace. I leaned into the heat of West’s body seeking only comfort, from the mate I’d never expected to offer it.
He stroked his hand over my hair, and my hands slipped against his chest. Shit, I was getting blood all over him. I jerked back, not knowing where to put them. West looked down at himself, the smears of blood over the lean muscles, and shook his head.
“It’s okay,” he said. And then, in more the tone I’d have expected from him. “I expect you’ll make plenty more messes than that before you’re done, Sparks.”
As I made a face at him, Aaron came up beside me. He offered me a strip of moss to wipe my hands. “I think we’ll need your help questioning the captives,” he said. “They don’t seem any more inclined to talk than the other rogues have been.”
Of course. I dragged in a breath and took in the results of our ambush. At least a couple dozen bodies littered the forest floor—all of them, as far as I could tell, rogues, other than Orion. A couple of Nate’s other people were sprawled, having their wounds tended to by their kin, but none of the rest of us had taken a fatal injury. There’d been more rogues in the attack party than I could see around me, though.
“Some of the others got away?” I said.
Nate nodded. “A few cowards ran when they saw the way the battle was going and moved too fast for any of us to catch them. But only a few.”
Damn. I looked at the bobcat and then the rogue pinned on the ground. “You’ve got a choice. You can talk to us now or you can talk in my fire.”
The man on the ground glared at me. The bobcat hissed. Well, I guess that answered that.
“Pour down the flames, and we’ll toss them in,” Marco suggested. “I don’t think they’ll be going anywhere once you’re got them in the hot spot.”
“All right.” I glanced at him. “Orion told me there’s an important feline shifter, one of your kin, who’s been calling at least some of the shots. Making plans with the rogues.”
Marco’s eyes darkened. “Interesting,” he said, an edge creeping into his voice. “Let’s see what these two have to say about that, shall we?”
I closed my eyes, reaching back to my sense of my dragon self. The change came over me more slowly this time, lengthening and expanding, nerves twitching. I’d already exhausted a lot of my energy during the fight. But I had enough to make this interrogation count.
I loomed over the others in the middle of the small grove. My kin moved to clear a space. I focused on the burn tingling at the base of my dragon throat. On my anger at Orion’s death and the other deaths the rogues had caused. On my need to know what else they might have in store for us.
Then I opened my jaws and let the violet flames stream down.
Marco threw the bobcat into the fire first. It shuddered and expanded into a woman’s form, huddled in the midst of the flames. “Who among my kin have you been talking to?” Marco snapped immediately.
“I haven’t spoken to anyone,” the bobcat shifter said in a whimper. “No one tells me anything. I just did my best to help.”
“Are you aware of any allies among the feline kin—or any other kin—that the other rogues have been talking to?” Aaron asked, phrasing his question carefully.
She shook her head. “No one except the one on the disparate kin’s estate. And that one.” She pointed toward Orion. “Much good as he did us.”
“What were you going to do if your plan to ambush us here didn’t work?” Nate said.
“I’m not sure.”
West cleared his throat. “What do you know about the other rogues’ plans?” he put in.
She shivered again, jerking her head away from the blast of my flames, but she couldn’t resist their burn. “There were plans being made around the feline estate,” she gasped out. “I don’t know what. But they were preparing for something big if we failed here.”
Something big. Orion has said the rest of the rogues were prepared to launch a heavy assault. How many of them were left now?
I heaved another stream of flames over the bobcat shifter, ignoring the pinching sensation that was starting to work through my muscles.
“Specifics,” Marco said. “Tell us everything you know about those plans.”
“That is all I know.” Her voice turned into a whimper.
Aaron made a gesture to Nate, maybe realizing that my strength was waning. The bear shifter grabbed the rogue woman and hauled her out of the truth-searing fire.
Thomas and Alice were ready with their captive. The gawky albatross shifter flinched beneath the flames, but he didn’t have any more answers to the alpha’s questions than the bobcat shifter had. My throat started to throb. I gestured to my mates, and West shot out one last inquiry.
“Your allies who ran away from this attack—where would they have gone?”