No. Alive now. Vitality pulsed through her.
“Wolf?” She snapped her fingers. “Who did you bite? What fire? And what’s a game changer?”
“It’s what I’ve longed for all my life.” He edged between two boulders as the terrain grew hillier.
“Though English is my fifth language, I speak it fluently and read voraciously. Yet I don’t understand you.”
Organizing his thoughts into speech proved difficult. And the harder he concentrated, the more his head ached.
She asked, “How did you get free of their vassal spell?”
“My beast is powerful, more so than they ever anticipated. A Lykae’s beast feeds on emotion, so I gave it a surfeit until it broke free of its bonds.”
“What did you feed it?”
Standing beside the pit, rage coursing through him like that piping acid, Munro gave up control of his beast as never before. Grueling pain surged as the spell splintered around his body. Blood poured from his nose, ears, and eyes, but he and his beast fought to withstand the pain, fought harder than ever before in their life—
“Wolf?”
He jolted back to the present in time to leap over a downed tree. “I fed it rage.” So much that he’d had little hope of regaining control. Only the idea of rescuing Kereny from a treacherous past had pulled him back from the void. “I got free and seized Jels’s son, Ormlo. The coward gave me a vow to the Lore—an unbreakable vow—to serve only my interests. Now he’s as good as vassaled to me.”
Yet the warlock had neglected to mention that Kereny’s people were bloody hunters—and that her aim was remarkable.
Or maybe he had mentioned it. Munro only recalled flashes from that feverish time after he’d shed his vassal spell and captured Ormlo:
Creeping through the dungeon toward the Forgotten’s Temple of Time.
Surprising five warlocks inside.
Munro’s beast happily slaughtering them. . . .
He thought that Ormlo had directed the gateway to open in Transylvania sometime in the nineteen-twenties. But why would he send Munro right back to Kereny’s wedding? There had to be some significance.
She asked, “Is Ormlo waiting for you in the forest?”
“He remains in Quondam. I made him send me to wherever”—and whenever—“my mate was.”
Fueled by the darkest sacrifices, the gateway was similar to a portal, but exponentially more powerful. One could cross space through a portal. One could cross space and time through that gateway.
“Why send you here?” she asked. “How would warlocks know anything about a mortal like me?”
“They have seers. The archwarlock told me Kereny Codrina is my fated one.”
Annoyance filled her expression. “And you believed that villain?”
“Only after I took your scent into me, and my Lykae Instinct confirmed what he’d said. It is infallible.”
“Why would fate bind you to a human who hunts monsters?”
“No’ for me to question.” As he cradled her lovely figure, he easily said, “I’ve no complaints. Other than your occupation.” And her mortal fragility.
“Surely your warlock portal should have appeared directly in front of your ‘mate,’ like the ground opening to swallow me up. So why are we still running through the woods?”
Ormlo had explained that the gateway would only open far away from other dimensional rifts. “We had to avoid other portals. As you yourself said, this forest is filled with them. I followed your scent to the circus.” Across dozens of miles of rough terrain and over one sheer mountain.
“Did you encounter any other Lykae?”
Hadn’t she asked him this before? He shook his aching head. “I’m alone.”
“Wolves are pack animals; they never travel alone.”
“This one did.” He’d been too impatient to wait for Ormlo to free his men from their cells and remove their vassals. And Munro hadn’t exactly expected trouble retrieving a mortal female. “You forget I’m as much man as beast.”
She cast him a look of distaste. “You make that easy to forget.”
He snapped his fangs.
Unfazed, she laughed at him. “Such aggressive behavior toward your fated one?”
He grated, “I have no’ eaten or slept in weeks. Have no’ had a nip of whiskey nor a female beneath me in just as long. All I’ve known is torture. On the heels of that, my mate tried to behead me. If you want my aggressive behavior to change, then fucking incentivize me.”
“Ah, you want me to be polite to my abductor. Be nice to you.” Voice a throaty purr, she said, “Should I cower for you, dragul meu? Will that make you feel strong?”
He growled with frustration. “I took you to save your life. That blade of yours can only help you prevail against immortals for so long. Which means you canna fight them again. Ever.”
Her eyes sparked with fury. “You don’t have the right to control me, you infernal lout.”
“If you’re going to hold your life so cheaply, then aye, I do.”
“Not cheaply. Nobly. I have a noble duty, passed down through my family on both sides, to hunt the monsters—”
“Quiet!” He eased his pace as a foul scent hit him.
She sputtered with outrage and kicked him with a slippered foot. “You did not just order me to be quiet. I will skin you so slowly for that. I’ll tack your wolven hide to the wall of my wagon!”
“Ghouls.” He turned his head from side to side, detecting movement in all directions. Their putrid green glow lightened the woods, their moans echoing. “We’re surrounded.”
SIX
“Give me my knife!” Ren hissed to the wolf. “I can fight.”
“No’ a chance.”
“A single scratch will turn even you. But I have experience with them. Believe me when I tell you this.” She’d decimated their numbers. “Damn it, listen to me!” She pounded her fists on the Lykae’s chest.
Her hits faltered when dozens of ghouls burst through the woods toward them, a green wave of gangling limbs. They loped closer, their toxic fangs and claws bared.
He told her, “Cover your ears.”
After a hesitation, she did as he bade.
He roared—not like before, not crazed—yet the ghouls froze. Then, in a flurry of movement, they fled; their shrieks trumpeted as they tore through the brush to escape a monster that terrified even them.