But suddenly, Serafina felt Uriah’s body shaking beneath her, like he’d become possessed by a horrible spirit. His chest expanded with new strength and he began to rise to his feet. He kicked Gidean away from him, sending the dog somersaulting across the ground. Then he grabbed Waysa, tore his claws out of his skin, and hurled the catamount away like an empty sack.
Uriah kicked the wolves off his legs and threw them off his arms. The wolves fell away from him with blazing eyes as he stood to his full height. Then a black, dirty wind began to rip into the wolves around him.
“Now!” Braeden shouted. “Attack him!” A massive bear charged in and slammed into Uriah. Serafina’s body swung hard with the force of the blow, her legs and tail dangling now. It took all her strength to hold on as her enemy struck desperately at her side and tore at her head and tried to pull her away.
Yes, pull! she urged him in her mind. Pull! Yank me away and rip out your own throat!
And through all this, Serafina held on. No matter what happened, she wasn’t going to let go.
But then Uriah burst forth with a deafening explosion that shocked everything around them.
Braeden and the wolves were thrown to the ground. Even the bear went down.
Waysa was hurled through the air, hit a tree, and collapsed, his limp body dangling in the branches, his eyes closed.
Gidean tumbled away, his body dragging through the dirt, biting and twisting, until he finally lay still.
With a terrible new strength, Uriah grabbed Serafina’s head and fangs with his hands, and began prying her teeth slowly out of his neck, his fingers dripping with his own blood.
“I told you, you can never kill me!” he spat at her.
She growled and bit harder and tried to stop him from dislodging her teeth, but there was nothing she could do. He tore her off him and slammed her to the ground so hard that it knocked the wind out of her. Then he burst away in an explosion of black air, leaving great flares of orange flame rising all around them.
They had ambushed him with their fiercest allies and all their strength, but he had escaped their attack.
Serafina lay on the ground, stunned. She lifted her head, her eyes looking frantically through the smoke, trying to make sense of the destruction. Was Waysa still alive? Was Braeden still fighting?
The dead and wounded wolves lay strewn across the clearing, their bodies burned and broken.
She glimpsed the bear barreling away through the burning forest, his fur singed by the flames as he ran.
Her heart lurched when she saw Waysa’s long lion body hanging in the tree, dangling down from the branches. She still couldn’t see if he was alive or dead, but he wasn’t moving.
She had to get herself up. Through all the shock and pain of it, through all the strikes and bruises, she had to rise. But as she began to move and breathe again, the blazing-hot air of the burning trees around her scorched her throat and lungs. The forest was on fire.
She gazed through the orange, hazy, firelit clearing. A jolt of fear ripped through her when she spotted Braeden’s body lying on the ground, crumpled and still.
Powered by a new surge of energy, she shifted into human form and scrambled toward him, pushing her way through the swirling smoke and embers. When she finally reached him, his eyes were closed. His wounded dog lay beside him. Piles of dead crows and wolves lay all around him.
She dropped to her knees at Braeden’s side.
“Braeden, wake up!” she shouted as she grabbed him by his coat and pulled him up.
Finally, he started awake with a violent gasp, and looked around at his fallen friends in horror.
“So many of them are dead!” Braeden said in despair, overwhelmed and disoriented.
“We’ve got to move, Braeden!” Serafina shouted, trying to shake him out of it as she coughed from the smoke. “We’ve got to help who we can and get out of here!”
Her chest filled with new hope when Braeden came to his senses and started pulling wolves up onto their feet.
She scanned back through the smoke toward Waysa. Where the fire was burning across the flat ground, it moved slowly, but on the steep slopes around them, the flames tore through the thick vegetation in blinding blazes, sparks and flames swirling upward into the glowing orange sky. She heard the sharp crackling of burning branches all around them, and as the sap within the trees boiled, the tree trunks exploded. Her heart was racing with fear, but there was no time to lose.
She ran over to the tree where Waysa’s body was hanging and started climbing. Its trunk was so hot that the sap was popping and steaming, dripping out of it like blood. She knew the tree was going to explode, but she had to keep going.
She climbed frantically out onto the branches. She held Waysa’s catamount head in her hands. The concussion of the blast had knocked him unconscious.
“Waysa!” she shouted, pushing hard at his body. “We’ve got to go!”
She felt a sudden flare of intense heat below her. Flames were spiraling up the trunk of the tree. There was no way to climb down. The sap-filled branches around her began to hiss and boil. Every breath she took from the hot, smoky air felt like she was sucking fire down her throat.
She had no choice. As the flames burned into the creaking, collapsing branches, she wrapped her arms around Waysa’s body and jumped.
A sledgehammer of pain thundered through her shoulder and ribs when she hit the ground with a heavy grunt. But she scrambled to her feet. She grabbed Waysa by the shoulders and tried to drag him, pulling and heaving, as the burning tree collapsed around them. She fell to the ground as Waysa finally woke and looked around him in confusion.
“We’ve got to go!” she shouted at him, and Waysa rose to his feet.
On her way back to Braeden, she pulled Gidean up onto his unsteady legs. “Come on, boy, let’s go, come on!” And the wounded dog sluggishly, obediently, tried to follow her.
“Everyone get up!” she shouted at the surviving wolves as the flames burned around them and the clearing filled with hot choking smoke.
But they had only moments to live before the fire engulfed them. The trees that surrounded them were all aflame and there was no way out.
She wanted to use the wind to blow the flames away, but sensed that it would just make the fire burn faster. She thought about trying to draw water out of the rocky ground, but she knew it wouldn’t work. She looked up at the clouds, but she had no idea how to reach up there and make them pour down with rain.
It seemed so hopeless. She looked all around her at the walls of orange fire. The smoke choked her throat. Her eyes stung. The heat burned her skin. They were completely surrounded by flames.
“If we don’t find a way out of this, we’re going to die here,” she shouted to Braeden as she peered through the burning forest looking for a path through.
“No we’re not,” Braeden said fiercely.
Serafina turned in the direction he was looking. The night sky above them was suddenly full of birds. Hawks and eagles and ospreys.
“Lie down,” Braeden said.
“What?” she said in confusion.
“Lie down!” he ordered her. “Waysa, you too. Lie down!”