Page 56 of Binding His Fated Mates

Daniel walked between us, the compass held out in front of him. His heartbeat was steady but elevated.

He was scared, probably. But he was doing it anyway.

Another thing I’d noticed but never really let myself acknowledge over the last two years: Daniel was extraordinarily brave. More than I’d realized.

The compass led us deeper into the forest. Past the stream where I’d thrown up the shield days ago. It seemed like a lifetime ago now. And then past the clearing of old-growth trees, where the pack sometimes gathered for runs. And into a tangle of trees that were so close together we had to go slowly to navigate between the trunks—me in the front, Lee in the back, and Daniel in the middle.

There was a wrongness in the air here. Something that pinged against a sense beyond the normal five—a pressure building against my skin mixed with a crawling sensation at the base of my skull, as if something was watching us from the darkness.

I heard the compass needle whirl again, then click firmly into place.

“We’re close,” Daniel breathed. “Whatever attacked Robert is nearby.”

My gaze darted around the forest. The trees were so thick here that I wouldn’t have been able to see anything until it was almost upon us.

I didn’t like that at all.

The forest had grown completely silent, except for the sound of our breathing and the rapid and reassuring beat of Daniel’s heart. There was no sound of insects or birds or small animals in the brush around us, the way there ought to have been. Even the breeze had died.

The total stillness was profound and unnatural. A telltale sign that something Otherworldly was nearby.

Unsettled, I continued forward, weaving between the trees.

Then a clearing opened before us without warning, and I saw them.

Plural, because there were two of them.

They crouched at the center of the clearing, motionless and waiting, their forms flickering between solid and translucent like a signal cutting in and out, the way monsters from the Otherworld sometimes did. They might’ve been sleeping or in some sort of… stasis.

Or maybe they knew we were coming and they were just conserving their energy as they waited for us to put ourselves in front of them.

They were both vaguely humanoid. They had two arms, two legs, and a head. But their proportions were all off. They were both too long and too thin. Their limbs bent backward, like a spider or a praying mantis.

Seeing it—the wrongness of them both—made my stomach heave instinctively. Their skin, if it even was skin, was a sickly grayish-white that seemed to emit its own faint luminescence.

And they had no faces.

Where faces should have been, there was smooth, featureless flesh, pulled taut over the suggestion of an almost horse-like skull. They had no eyes, no nose, and no mouth. Just a blank, terrible absence where a face should’ve been.

And yet, they turned toward us as we piled into the clearing and I could feel them looking at us.

The attention was like a physical weight, cold and predatory.

Every hair on my body stood on end.

Then, without warning, they moved.

The monsters ignored Lee and me, going right for Daniel, surging across the clearing with unnatural speed.

Daniel’s reaction was instantaneous. He incanted two words in a language that might’ve been Welsh and then a cone of vivid green light erupted from his hands.

The first creature slammed into it, letting out a shriek that sounded like tearing metal.

It flickered out of reality, appearing a split second later on the opposite side of the clearing. Like the Algea we’d faced months ago, these creatures were impossibly fast.

I threw myself between Daniel and the second creature, just before it reached out to snatch him with its unnaturally jointed limbs. Belatedly, I noticed it had sharp talons several inches long, tipped with wicked points.

The creature slammed into my body like a brick wall, knocking the breath from my lungs. The ground slammed up to meet me, and I rolled in a tangle of limbs, the trees around the clearing whipping past my field of vision in a blur.