Chapter 232

Helen’s POV

My nails had lengthened into my claws, and I tucked my hands behind my back, shaking, holding myself together. Juden was so unbelievably insulting; Joy and I wanted nothing more than to rip him apart.

But I was pregnant enough to be showing. The last thing I wanted was to hurt the pups. And the last time I had tried anything against Juden, I was helpless.

“That was before . . .” A little voice whispered in my ears. “You’ve mated with a lycan and a demon. You’re stronger now.”

I shook my head.

Judan snorted. “You disagree with me on your value? Then you think your motley heritage and my son’s own mixed breeding makes you worthy of any kind of throne?”

“You’re not,” Juden snarled. “The only thing you are fit for is exactly what happened to you. You’re worth nothing more than being a half demon’s fucking whore.”

I lost control, shifting instantaneously into Joy. Where the shift had once taken effort, it now happened without even thinking about it.

I turned so fast it even caught Judge off guard, and I sent a line of gashes across his chest before he managed to switch into a wolf, his shaggy fur protecting him.

He snarled and bared his teeth at me. “You dumb slut. I have plans for taking you down along with everybody else, but I guess it doesn’t matter. I’ll just rip your throat out now. The end result will be the same.”

With that, he launched himself at me.

I rolled underneath him, knocking into his chest with my shoulder so that he hit the ground. Like lightning, I clamped my jaws around his throat, my teeth lengthening, hardening, and piercing through the fur and into his flesh.

He let out a yelp of pain, but I didn’t let go. Instead, I shook my head.

He pawed at me, scratching, leaving gashes across my chest, neck, and shoulders. But I didn’t care. I refuse to let go of his throat.

To my disgust, I could feel the tendon and muscle snapping between the knife edges of my teeth. While the sensation sickened me, my rage at him doubled. Now even dealing with him was disgusting to me.

With one last wrench, I ripped his throat out, leaving him bleeding with a gaping hole where his jugular should be. I spat the chunk of flesh and fur to the ground, standing over him. I searched for satisfaction but found none.

Juden gurgled up at me, the life bleeding from his eyes. And I caught just a few last words before his ripped throat wouldn’t allow any more air to pass. His death rattle was, “Not the last.”

With a startled cry, I shifted back into Joy. Gasping, I looked at the damage that I’d done to him. The gashes that I had initially left on his chest were so deep and flayed open that even through his wolf fur, they were still clearly visible, like tiger stripes across the span of his shoulders in bloody red.

I choked, the taste of his blood still hot and tangy in my mouth. It nearly burned me.

“What was that?” I asked Joy.

Inside me, she seethed and roiled in a way that I’ve never experienced before. I knew she had a shorter temper than my human form, but I’d never seen her this worked up.

“what’s wrong with us?” I gasped, falling back into a tree and bracing myself against the shudders which wanted to change me back.

She wanted to shred Juden’s body until nothing was left but bits of fur and strips of meat.

She panted on a single word. “Magic.”

My brain rolled this around through the shock of having killed my mate’s father, the terror of what Joy was doing, and the aftershocks of adrenaline. It wasn’t until I tried to move my hands and actually had to yank my nails out of the tree that I looked at them in horror and realized that they weren’t just the claws of a wolf.

They looked like the talons of a demon.

That’s what she meant by magic. This is what I had become, this raging creature that had so brutally massacred my mate’s father.

That’s what happened to Joy when she blended werewolf, lycan, and demon together. I looked down at my dress. Before I entered the woods following Judas, the frock had been fit for a garden party wedding. It was a lovely combination of flowery, frilly, floating, and feminine. Now it was a wreck, ripped and covered in blood. Though, none of the blood seemed to be my own.

For all of the scratching Juden’s claws had done at my chest and shoulders, I didn’t see any marks on me. I wondered if that was because the blend of being all three had somehow thickened my coat, and he hadn’t gotten through. But I swore I felt the sting of nails on flesh.

Did I now have some sort of sped-up healing? If so, it would be thanks to either the lycan or the demon power or both.

Not knowing what sort of monster I was, frightened me. What if I lost my temper with somebody that I cared about?

Once the bloodlust had taken over, once Juden pushed me too far, there was no way I was going to call Joy back from doing this to him. I was barely holding her back from desecrating his corpse.

Another horrible thought raced through my mind. What if they tried to exorcise me to separate this new power from my regular body makeup, however, I’d managed to absorb it. Or worse, what if they decided I was some sort of monster that needed to be put down?

What if I birthed my lycan pup just to have them kill the part-demon baby and me to be rid of us?

Justin would have his life and legacy with the other twin. He didn’t need the Huntsman’s twin or me, not really. I had to cover up everything that had happened here in the woods with Juden. I couldn’t let anyone know about my loss of control or my strange new strength.

And I couldn’t tell Justin that I’d killed his father. On the surface, the loss of Juden might be a relief, but I honestly couldn’t say how it would affect the way he saw me if I were the murderer of his father, no matter how much he hated the man.

Besides, if anyone knew I’d killed Juden, they would also know something was wrong with me. I wasn’t skilled enough before mating with the Huntsman to have done something like this.

I scanned the area where we had just fought, feeling more helpless as my eyes passed across the mess. There was no way to hide this.

I’d splashed blood everywhere. The werewolf sense of smell wasn’t something where I could just rake up the leaves and bury the body and call it good. I would have to get a huge quantity of scent blocker or do some sort of magic to get rid of the smell.

But to do either of those, I had to go back into town, and anyone would question me buying that much scent blocker. Not to mention, I couldn’t do magic without asking one of the only two witches that I knew, either Lisa on her wedding day or the doctor. I might have had doctor-patient confidentiality with Dr. Peterson, but did that really go far enough into hiding something like this? Especially since it had nothing to do with my condition.