I Will Be Your End

I Will Be Your End
Ayla

Eric tried to come at me again, but his body no longer moved the way he wanted it to.
His left knee gave beneath him while the other leg locked straight, pitching him sideways before his spine wrenched him upright with a crack I heard across the cavern. He caught himself on one hand, dragged the bad leg forward, and kept coming. His left arm hung twisted at the elbow, the fingers curled backward far enough that his knuckles scraped over the stone.
Every part of him seemed to be healing toward a different version of his body.
Blood followed him in thick drops. The dark trail should have bothered me more than it did, but I couldn’t stop watching his movements. The male who had crossed the cavern fast enough to nearly catch me behind my shield was gone. Eric was still dangerous, but now every step depended on a body that might betray him before I had to.
He reached my shield and hooked his damaged hand against the curve of blue power instead of striking it. His claws scraped across the surface while he pulled himself sideways, contorting around the barrier until his face appeared much too close to mine.
His jaw had healed badly again. One side sagged lower than the other, and torn muscle pulled his mouth into a smile he probably intended to look confident.
“You can’t win,” he rasped. Fluid caught in his throat and made the last word bubble. “Not when I can’t die.”
I looked at the hand gripping my shield.
“I don’t need you dead yet.”
I tightened the field beneath his fingers.
The surface hardened around the points where he touched it, and the blue pressure stripped flesh from his knuckles as he tried to pull away. Eric roared and stumbled backward, staring at the exposed bones while his healing rushed to cover them.
It failed on the first attempt.
Too much tissue formed between two fingers, webbing them together before splitting apart. The next surge closed skin over a knuckle at the wrong angle. His fingers jerked while the healing corrected itself again.
I stepped toward him.
“Running out of tricks?” he snarled.
“No. I stopped wasting them.”
I started to thin the shield in front of us. Eric saw an opening, lunged for my throat with his good arm, and I reached for the trace of blue already buried inside him.
The power in his forearm answered mine. I constricted around it, causing his arm to buckle in the middle.
Eric screamed as the bones compressed inward instead of snapping. I held the pressure there while his stolen healing rushed toward the damage, throwing new bone and muscle into a space I refused to give back.
The arm began swelling. Muscle thickened beneath his skin, packed around bone that no longer had enough room to form correctly. A ridge pushed upward along his forearm until the skin split from the inside and blood sprayed across my shield.
Eric tore himself away from me.
I released my hold and watched him clutch the ruined arm against his chest while the muscles spasmed beneath his fingers. Bone tried to straighten. The new muscle held it crooked. Another surge of healing thickened the joint until his wrist bent farther out of alignment.
He stared at it. The fear came heavier than before. He was unable to hide it. I had spent the entire fight breaking him and giving his healing exactly what it wanted: damage with an obvious answer.
Now I was giving it nowhere to go. “You feel it now,” I said. “Don’t you?”
He snarled and threw himself at me again. I reached into his shoulder. My power buried inside him reacted so quickly that I barely needed to push. I wrapped pressure around the joint and held it in place while Eric tried to drive through my shield.
Then I compressed. His shoulder crushed inward with a dense crunch. Eric screamed and grabbed for the joint, but the healing had already begun. Bone surged toward the destroyed socket while I kept the space around it tight. The new growth met resistance, thickened and fused until the entire shoulder locked.
His arm stopped moving.
Eric stared at it, then he tried to lift his hand, but nothing happened.
“No.” His voice was garbled and desperate. It was the first word he had spoken without trying to make it hurt me.
I moved to his hip.
The response inside him was easier to find now. My power no longer felt like a faint trace hidden beneath his healing. Every time I reached for it, the blue answered faster.
I locked the joint and compressed until his hip gave way. His healing rushed in immediately, building bone into the space I kept confined. The joint fused half-bent, wrenching his leg permanently out of line.
Eric fell sideways with a howl.
“You can’t—” He planted his remaining good hand and tried to rise. “You don’t get to—”
His arm swung toward me in a desperate, uncoordinated swipe, but I caught the elbow.
The joint folded beneath my pressure, and I held it there until the healing filled the collapsed space. His forearm drew toward his upper arm as new bone thickened between them, fusing the joint into a rigid angle beneath stretched skin.
Eric screamed until his voice cracked. “Stop.” He dragged the word through clenched teeth. “Stop, you’re—”
I watched his arm twitch uselessly. For years, wolves had decided what happened to my body while I begged them to stop.
I didn’t need that memory explained to me now. I only needed to know I was the one standing, and I needed to believe it as I started to feel myself growing weaker.
“I will be your end.”
Pain tore low through my abdomen.
It came so suddenly that my power vanished from Eric before I made the decision to release him. My stomach tightened hard enough to bend me forward, and the pain spread through my back and pelvis until breathing became work.
No.
The pups shifted together.
They felt too low. I pressed a hand beneath my stomach as another deep pressure followed the first, and warmth spilled between my thighs. I couldn’t make myself look down; Aramana forced me.
Blood streaked the inside of my legs.
My water had broken.
“No.”
Aramana surged toward the pups. A war cry of a howl went off in my head.
They weren’t ready.
My shield wavered around me.
Eric saw it. His ruined mouth pulled upward.
“Your pups are going to die from the power,” he panted. “You feel it.... Thane will finally....feel—”
I closed a band of blue power around his throat. His was immediately cut off.
“Move.”
Eric fought the restraint instinctively. His healing surged through his neck while he tried to force his head sideways, and I felt the cervical bones strain against the pressure.
I strangled with my power and watched his neck shorten as the vertebrae collapsed together. Healing power flooded the damage before I released it, thickening bone through the confined space until the joints fused.
Eric’s head stopped halfway through the turn. His eyes widened as he tried to move again. Nothing below his jaw obeyed. “No,” he forced through a thin breath.

Another contraction took me, and I staggered hard enough that the shield flickered. Pain dragged through my back and pelvis while a crack split somewhere overhead. Dust sifted down around us, followed by the sudden rush of water through a fracture in the far wall.
I looked up.
The cavern was failing.
I needed out, but Eric was still breathing and still capable of healing. If I left him enough movement to follow me, everything I had done meant nothing.
“One more.”
Aramana wanted me gone badly enough that her protest crowded against my own thoughts, but I reached for the power threaded through Eric’s spine anyway.
It answered instantly.
I wrapped his torso in pressure and compressed slowly enough to feel his back give beneath it. His healing surged through every damaged vertebra at once, trying to rebuild bone into space I refused to return. New growth spread sideways through the confined joints until separate vertebrae began welding into one uneven column.
Eric convulsed, trapped by the hip, shoulder, elbow, and neck I had already fused.
When I released him, he remained caught in a crooked half-crouch. He couldn’t straighten, turn or properly move his arms. Only his eyes followed me.
A slab of ceiling broke loose behind him and shattered across the cavern floor.
That was enough.
I backed away.
Eric forced air through his damaged throat, but whatever he tried to say never became words.
Another contraction tightened through me as I turned toward the tunnel.
“You lost.”
I made it only a few steps before the pressure bore down hard enough to fold me over my stomach. Blood ran warm between my legs, and the pups shifted lower with it.
“Oh, no. No, no.”
Aramana surged against me.
Move.
“I’m trying.”
I forced myself toward the tunnel while the pain eased just enough to walk. One pup kicked sharply beneath my palm when I covered my stomach. The second answered more softly.
Both moving.
“Please, my loves. Just give me a little more time.”
The mountain answered with a violent crack.
I looked up in time to see the rock above the tunnel shear loose.
My shield expanded as the passage disappeared beneath falling stone. The impact drove dust and broken rock through the cavern hard enough to knock me onto my hands and knees, and pain tore through my pelvis when I hit.
I screamed.
When the dust thinned enough for me to see again, there was no tunnel.
Boulders had buried the opening completely.
“No.”
I pushed myself upright, but another contraction came before I had managed more than a few steps along the debris. My knees struck the stone again.
The shield around me had thinned to a faint blue shimmer.
Ayla, stay awake.
“I’m awake.”
Barely.
Aramana pressed harder.
Thane is coming.
“He doesn’t know where I am.”
He will feel you.
I wanted that to be true badly enough that I didn’t argue.
I could almost see him when he realized something was wrong—Ronan tearing at him from inside, Thane furious and terrified and perfectly willing to dismantle the mountain with his hands if that was what reaching me required.
It gave me enough to move again.
I searched along the edge of the collapse for any opening between the rocks, but another deep groan rolled through the cavern before I found one.
This time I knew what it meant.
The pups moved beneath my hands.
“I’m right here,” I whispered. “Mama’s right here. I’ve got you.”
The ceiling broke above me.
There wasn’t enough time to run and nowhere left to go, so I pulled the shield inward until the blue field wrapped tightly around my body. Everything I had left went into the space between the falling mountain and the pups.
The impact drove me flat.
White filled my vision as rock crashed against the shield and the force tore through my shoulders and spine.
The barrier flickered.
I gave it everything I had.
Then the blue disappeared.