Hyacinth (24 page)

“You’ve given us
a lot to think about,” he acknowledged. “But we are—”

WHAM!

The blast of an
explosion coming from the direction of the castle ripped through their ranks.

In an
instinctual move of self-preservation, Selene and all the other Vyusher
instantly shifted into their wolf forms. As soon as their link to the pack mind
kicked in, they could all hear what was happening in the castle where the rest
of their pack was under attack.

A horrible growl
arose from the wolves, the fur on their withers standing to attention. Marcus
and his team stumbled back from them.

Selene ignored
them and looked right at Desmond. “
Go
!”

All of the
wolves took off for the castle at a full sprint.

Selene turned
her stormy gaze back to Marcus and his clan. A snarl ripped from her as she
bared her teeth.

Marcus held up
his hands. “We had nothing to do with whatever is happening,” he insisted.

Reigning in her
wolf, Selene shifted back to human. “We are under attack in there. If you have
nothing to do with it, then help us.” Her voice was a low growl, her wolf still
fighting for control.

Marcus glanced
behind her to where Griffin and his family still stood.

“Decide,” Selene
commanded.

Marcus’s face
hardened with resolve. “We’ll help you,” he said. “Only about ten of us have
any kind of power that’s worth a damn in a fight. But those ten are with you.”

Selene nodded. “Link
up.” She turned toward her friends and placed her hand in Griffin’s.

“Charlotte, the
Council’s chamber please,” she directed.

As soon as
Marcus and his clan joined their hands, Charlotte wasted no time. Selene barely
blinked, and suddenly they were all standing in the large meeting hall inside
the castle.

Selene shifted
into her wolf form so she could hear the pack. Screaming and growling bombarded
her mind from the link, and she swiftly picked out the most important
information.

“Griffin—”
she thought.

“I saw it. So
did Ellie. We’re on it.”

“Charlotte,”
Griffin directed aloud, “Start getting people outta here.”

With that, Ellie
and Griffin rushed out of the room, followed by everyone else. Only Charlotte
and Selene remained.

Charlotte
initially turned to Selene, a question in her eyes. Selene just shook her head.
Charlotte only briefly hesitated before nodding and vanishing from the room.

Still in wolf
form, Selene lay down on the floor and closed her eyes. Listening to her pack
through their link, she started picking out who was in the most trouble and
intervening where she could.

*****

Griffin ran
through the castle, following Selene’s thoughts of where the worst of the
fighting was taking place. Ellie, Alex, Nate, and several of the Louisiana clan
followed behind him.

When he reached one
of the common areas off the corridor, Griffin ducked as a wolf lunged at him,
only to be frozen in mid-air. In fact, the entire room, overflowing with
battling wolves and men, had frozen in place.

“I’ve got these.
Keep going,” Alex called.

Griffin didn’t
have to be told twice, and he quickly made his way around the frozen bodies.

“Any mental
powers in here I need to be worried about?”
he asked Selene.

“Nope. Keep
going,”
was her curt reply.

Once back in the
corridor off the other side of the room, Griffin stopped suddenly and searched
through Selene’s thoughts for directions. He saw the door she was picturing and
pulled it open, only to be confronted by a wall of solid ice.

He used his
telepathy to search for Ramsey but found his friend’s mind completely occupied
with guarding the people Charlotte had teleported out of the castle. His next
thought was Ellie’s dragon, but it was too large to try to unleash inside the
castle corridors. Before he could come up with another option, he heard Nate
behind him.

“Whoa! I’ve
totally got this one, Griff. Move outta the way.”

Griffin turned
to face Nate as he stepped back from the doorway. He didn’t see the younger boy
but felt the breeze of his passing. Suddenly the frozen mass exploded,
showering him with shards of ice. Griffin threw his hands up to cover his face,
and when he lowered them again, he saw Nate swinging from the frame of the
door, a pleased grin smeared across his boyish face.

“Ouch, Nate.
Warn me next time.”

Nate’s smile
widened.

“Watch out!”
Selene yelled
in Griffin’s mind just a second before a blur of fur tackled Nate from behind.

Griffin went to
use his shield to physically push the wolf off Nate. Before he could form it, however,
one of the Louisiana clan - the immense grizzly bear - pounced first. He ripped
the wolf off Nate, who quickly hopped up unscathed and unfazed.

“Go, dude. We’ll
hold them off here!” Nate waved him on.

“Ellie!” Griffin
called his sister to his side. Together, they raced down the spiral staircase
that’d been waiting for them behind the door.

As they turned a
corner, once again the terrible sounds of a struggle – growls and yelps of the
wolves, yelling of men, explosions and blasts – reached his ears.

“We’re getting
close,” he called over his shoulder to Ellie. They pushed their way through a
pair of double doors and then stopped dead in their tracks. They’d entered a
massive room teaming with battling wolves and men.

Griffin turned
to Ellie. “I know you can’t go dragon. You’ll have to go—”

The scream of a
jaguar interrupted him, and he saw his sister in the form of a massive black
cat bound past him and hurl herself into the fray. She sank her steel-trap jaws
into the haunches of the closest wolf. Throwing her body back so that she stood
up on her back haunches, Ellie yanked the huge timber wolf off its feet. The
beast yowled in pain and thrashed back and forth trying to escape. Ellie flung
the animal away from her and into a wooden door, causing it to splinter under
the force.

Confident his
sister could handle herself, Griffin scanned the room and found three large
wolves advancing on a small brown one.

Oh, jeez,
he thought to
himself as realization struck.
“Ellie, make sure you’re attacking the right wolves.
These must be Maddox’s forces.”

“Got it!”

Griffin slammed
his shield into place between the smaller wolf and her attackers and waited for
them to make a move.

“Griffin!”

 Ellie’s warning
came just in time. Griffin turned his head slightly and saw a huge dark grey
wolf leap for him, teeth bared. Holding his one shield where it was already
raised, Griffin threw up another shield and rammed it into his attacker mid-air
with such force he knocked the creature out cold.

He returned his
attention to the little brown wolf he was protecting. Then he rammed his
invisible shield across the room and bashed the three attacking wolves into the
wall behind them. Two of the wolves got up, limping slightly, and then suddenly
disappeared.

“What the –?”
Griffin exclaimed, searching for them with his telepathy.

He looked around
for Ellie and found her just as she swiped her massive claws across the snout
of another wolf. The animal fell back with a loud yelp of pain and then suddenly
disappeared as well. Ellie, now on all fours, stood and sniffed at where it had
just been lying.

Griffin tapped
into her thoughts
. “They’re being pulled out once they can’t fight. Why
would they…?”

With a shake of
her massive head, Ellie turned her violet-blue eyes on her brother.
“They’re
here as a distraction.”

Griffin nodded
grimly in agreement.

“Selene!”
he called.

“Hold on…”

He watched
telepathically as Selene turned off someone’s power. The assailant she had stopped
had been fighting several levels up from where Griffin now stood. They’d been using
a fearful ability to physically crush people on a group of Selene’s more
helpless Vyusher.

Griffin almost
felt Selene’s small mental sigh.
“Okay.”

“The attackers
are a distraction. Where are they pushing us away from?”

Selene left her
mental shields down so Griffin could watch as she searched through the pattern
of attacks based on the level of fighting. She was picturing the glows of each
power in use.

“Further down
from where you are. About two levels. The original dungeons.”
She gave him a
mental picture of where to go. Griffin took off at a sprint, Ellie fast on his
heels.

“Tell me what to
do.”

Selene opened
her eyes and looked behind her to see both Lila and Charlotte standing there.
Charlotte gave her an apologetic shrug before disappearing again.

Selene returned
to human, appearing to shimmer with the shift. “I’ll have to stay in wolf form
to maintain the link with the pack,” she told Lila. “Stay with me. Keep anyone
or anything from distracting me. And if you’re able to apply some of that
calming ability to me or anyone else, do it.”

She didn’t wait
for Lila’s acknowledgement before returning to wolf form and concentrating. She
did, however, immediately notice when Lila’s hand came down on her back, and a
sense of calmness and empowerment washed through her. With the resulting
clarity, she swiftly determined the order in which she needed to intervene in
various fights happening throughout the castle.

“I’m in the
dungeons. I can’t hear anyone’s thoughts down here. Are you sure?”
Griffin’s question
filtered through the chaos of the sounds of combat in her mind.

“It’s the
furthest point from the fighting, and the attackers are driving us away from
there. Keep looking.”

A horrendous
boom sounded just outside the large double doors to the Council chamber where
she and Lila were ensconced. The only thing that kept Selene focused at that moment
was Lila’s soothing influence.

BOOM
!

The sound was
getting closer.

“Remember that
scene in Lord of the Rings? The one with the cave troll?” Lila muttered under
her breath. Selene would’ve laughed if she weren’t concentrating so hard.

BOOM!

“Why don’t they
just open the doors?” Lila asked no one in particular.

BOOM!

Selene turned
her focus on what was trying to get in. Based on the sound alone, they should’ve
destroyed the doorway with that first round.

Then she caught
it. The pale glow of a power was hovering just in front of the doors, on the
inside where she and Lila were located.

“Desmond? Is
that you?”

“Can’t talk,
Queenie. Hiding this entire room from whatever is out there,”
his voice
growled back at her. The strain on him was obvious.

CRACK
!

The door finally
splintered under the relentless onslaught. Desmond appeared instantly as his
body flew across the room and whacked into the opposite wall. Unconscious, he
dropped to the floor with a sickening thud.

Selene held
herself in wolf form, half her mind watching the doorway and the other half
still concentrating on turning off powers where she could.

She felt Lila’s
hand tense in her fur as a figure entered the room. But instead of the colossus
she was expecting, it was a grey wolf.

“Maddox.”
She let out a
disgusted growl.

“You should have
joined me when I gave you the opportunity,”
he growled back at her.
“Now
I’m afraid I’ll just have to kill you.”

“That would be a
shame,”
she replied. Something was niggling in the back of her mind. Something to do
with where Griffin was.

Maddox prowled
further into the room, his head low, his beady eyes trained on his quarry.

“Uh, Selene,”
Lila mumbled out of the side of her mouth, her grip tightening in Selene’s fur.

But Selene
wasn’t paying attention to her. Her mind was with Griffin… Something was off.

Maddox stalked
closer.

The cacophony of
sounds inside her head from the battles still being waged was distracting her.
She needed silence to concentrate. Selene quickly shifted to human and Lila
hopped up with her, placing her hand on Selene’s arm.

Maddox also shifted
to human and drew closer… within arm’s length now. Lila’s grip on her arm had
tightened to near painful.