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I wished I could believe there was a chance Dex or the others wouldn’t do the same. After all, they were good and noble, the best people I’d ever known. But I’d spent too many years roaming the wilds alone, chased from every scrap of civilization I found, to risk what little I had now on the fantasy that anyone who knew the truth about me would ever let me stay.
Ever let me have a home.
Because the actual truth was, I was an abomination, unfit for civilization, let alone friendship or love. It was only by keeping what I was a secret, by pretending to be an Erenlian, that I could have a home at all. But if the truth came out, that would shatter.
Any sane person who saw my beast would know they had to kill me. They sure as hell wouldn’t risk me staying anywhere near someone as rare and incredible as Gwyneira.
And I knew they would be right.
I stretched out my magic, scanning the earth even as I searched the air to find her scent again. But there was nothing. No hint of her on the ground or in the air any longer, as if she’d just vanished from?—
The bright sense of her touching the earth flared to life in my mind like a star peeking past clouds only to be swallowed by them again.
Gwyneira.
No one else shone like that to me, and as long as she was touching the earth, I’d always find her. But she was there only for an instant before vanishing, like she’d hit the ground and then left it again, becoming human only long enough for her presence to reach me.
A fanged snarl twisted my face. I veered right, leaping past fallen logs and gnarled underbrush. We were still outside the edge of the Wild Lands. But I was moving fast, and gods, she was too.
In her current state, would she make the mistake of heading back into that cursed territory?
I fought for more speed, flying through bushes and branches with none of my usual care for not leaving a trace of my passage. Boulders the size of houses barely managed to slow my pace. A ravine passed beneath me in a blur, the gap bridged by a fallen log, here and then gone. My claws tore gashes in the rough dirt and ripped through tangled branches that blocked my path, shredding the obstacles at high speed.
Gradually, Gwyneira’s scent returned on the breeze ahead, weaving through the forest and leading me onward like fragments of an invisible ribbon scattered over the terrain. Had she returned to human form even in the air? Perhaps. But the details didn’t matter.
Only finding her did.
More endless minutes ticked past as I bounded up slopes and over broken boulders, speeding past small creatures so quickly, they didn’t have time to bolt away. Forever, Gwyneira remained ahead of me, but with each passing moment her scent grew stronger. I was closing the distance between us.
And gods, somewhere past my fear, my beast was starting to love this chase.
Shame came on the heels of the realization, but my monstrous side had more control now. It pushed back against the pain, breathing deep of the crisp air and altering course instinctively to continue after her. That part of me had always wanted this—to chase my mate, bring her down, and pin her as I rutted her. That side of me was pure predator.
Hunting my mate felt as natural as breathing.
Of course, my Erenlian side knew exactly how contemptible that made me. When I was nothing more than a young teen, I’d seen a man chasing after a woman, pursuing her as she fled from him across the open field that bordered the forest where I lived at the time. Gods, I thought I’d never seen anything so erotic. Need and desire had overwhelmed me, and my cock grew hard in an instant, everything in me so aroused that I nearly came just watching them.
Until I realized how wrong I’d been about it all.
I thought it had been natural and welcome to chase a mate like that. That she was running, yes, and maybe afraid of being claimed by him in a way, but not that the woman was truly an unwilling participant. Yet when he grabbed her and threw her down, and she started shrieking with such terror and desperation in her voice, pleading in broken sobs for him to stop or for someone to save her…
I just reacted.
She hadn’t thanked me.
But she’d gotten away. And he never got up again, his blood on my fangs and his gurgling breaths falling silent even as the woman ran.
From the monster.
A sharp huff left me, a protest from my beast side. It still couldn’t fathom why we’d been wrong that day—about wanting to chase and claim a mate, if nothing else. But I knew this was the closest I’d ever get to running after the one I wanted. There was no one who would enjoy joining me in such a thing, no mate who would ever welcome being hunted. And after I found Gwyneira… after I shifted back before she could see me in this form and thereby kept her from ever knowing what I truly was…
That would be the end of it.
The beast threw indignation at me, along with the memory of her blushing face and the taste of her arousal on the air after Casimir had whispered to her in the cave this morning, his words so impossible they couldn’t even make me outraged.
He’d hurt her.
She’d liked it.
