As I struggled back onto my feet, the blurry image of Lucien cutting the ropes of the cultist came into view. The cultist staggered past me and up the stairs— Lucien stood stiffly by the puddle of blood on the stone.
“What did you do?” I roared in fury. All I saw was red. The unbound anger of a wolf coursed through my veins. Lucien was evil for setting a filthy cultist free.
“Whatever you are, Phantom, this is not who you are. I won’t have his blood be on your hands,” Lucien boomed. “No matter what you were planning, you would’ve never forgiven yourself.”
An angry noise erupted from my chest. I left Lucien, fool that he was, and darted up the stairs after the cultist.
Lucien didn’t follow.
The cultist had gotten a head start, but he’d left a blood trail on the carpet. I dashed through the dark halls of Arcanea University, using my wolven scent to track the cultist’s escape route.
I caught up to him somewhere near the cafeteria. He was limping, but still, he was moving fast. He burst out of the palace and against the Malovian night, into the gardens. I steeled my will, pushed myself to go faster, and followed him into the blustery storm.
The blizzard whipped hard and cold past my mask as I gave chase. The snowfall from earlier had turned into a full-on blizzard. Piles of snow, three feet high, coated the pathways on school grounds. The cultist looked behind him and gave a screech as he saw me catching up, increasing his pace to get away.
I felt a throbbing soreness radiate from my hip all the way down to the top of my thigh. I gritted my teeth to keep from crying out. My damn leg. It was slowing me down. The prosthetic dug into my skin— probably on account of me being in a hurry as I’d put it on tonight— and the sharp pain slowed me up. With my ill-fitted prosthetic dragging me down, the cultist was getting away.
The cultist glanced back, and his eyes widened. He saw that he’d put quite a distance between us. He had a chance.
The cultist ahead exploded into a griffin. Feathers went everywhere, and his wings spread wide. I gave a cry of frustration, but the griffin had taken off. The shifter batted his wings against the cold and tried to stay upright as he flew over university grounds. The blizzard almost knocked him out of the sky, until he turned and flew with the wind instead of against it. I increased my speed, but my lungs burned, and no man alive could keep up on two legs against a soaring griffin.
I finally came to a stop and watched the griffin become a dot in the sky before he vanished into the storm.
It was hopeless. I didn’t have my wings, and I couldn’t give chase without them, not to mention the blizzard was too thick to follow his trail. Cursing the Seven Gods and all who belonged to them, I turned my back on the cultist and watched him escape.
Damn Lucien. Damn his sense of morality. Now that sick, twisted individual was allowed to run recklessly on Dolinska’s streets. Who knew what he’d do now that he was loose? What was more, he’d tell his friends I was looking for them. All because Lucien didn’t understand.
What was done was done. There was no reversing the situation. Patrolling Dolinska in this storm would be useless, and if I remained outside too much longer, I’d probably freeze... even as a shifter. We had a high tolerance for cold weather, but the temperature was dropping to an insane level. Malovia’s winters were famous for being brutal, but even I had never seen such weather.
The winters in Malovia had been getting worse and worse every year. This was the harshest yet. Such raw temperatures and vicious storms shouldn’t be possible... it was almost as if the land was under some sort of magic.
Or curse.
The cultist had mentioned my mate... but it was a cheap attempt to intimidate me. He was right as far as every shifter had a mate. He assumed the Phantom had to have one, but he didn’t know it was Emma. He couldn’t. He’d have to know I was Prince Ethan, and though we’d declared ourselves to be mates during the King’s Contest last year, I’d never admitted... not even to my love... that we were fated to be together, and that