Page 30 of Mate of a Monster

“Wait,” he starts, adjusting his footing. “Haide, hang on—”

I don’t. I feint left, twist right, and thrust.

The resistance gives beneath my hands in a way it never has before, and for a heartbeat I don’t understand what I’m feeling when I meet the panic in his pretty eyes.

Why is his breath stuttering instead of airy cackles working up his throat?

His fingers wrap around my bloody palm and I look down slowly to the branch buried in his chest, deep enough that my knuckles brush bone when I try to pull it free.

“Zev,” I say. “What’s wrong?”

“Haide…” he murmurs, but his voice is wrong.

It trembles with fear instead of the promise of vengeance on the next round.

“You’re fine,” I insist, dropping with him, my hands pressing against the wound. Soon he’ll die, and this fucked-up island will stitch him back together. But the look in his eyes… My pulse pounds heavy in my ears. “Why do you look scared, Zev? I’ve done much worse to you.”

“Things changed,” he rasps, and I hate how thin his voice sounds. “Luda…we don’t come back.”

My mind rejects it instantly.

“No,” I breathe, because that’s impossible. Because that’s the rule. Because this place may be cursed and rotten and violent, but it has always given us that one mercy. Sometimes curse. “That’s not how this works.”

His fingers tighten once more around my wrist, weaker now.

“It is now,” he says, and the word lands somewhere deep in my spine, splintering up through my ribs. “Be careful, Luda. I’ll be waiting for you.”

Then his grip loosens, his weight shifts, and his breath leaves him without returning.

For a second, I just kneel there, hands pressed to his chest, waiting for the twitch, for the jerk, for the curse he’s about to throw at me when he pops back up and calls me an idiot for panicking.

He doesn’t move.

Rage rises fast, violent and blinding, burning hotter than grief ever could. It tears through my veins, answered by a different piece of me altogether.

The scream that rips out of me is not a plea. It is a threat. The force of it slams into the trees, loosened leaves cascading around me as the birds scatter from the canopy. But all I can focus on is the blood coating Zev’s chest. Not red—darker. Almost black. It clings to my fingers as I keep pressure on the wound. But—my fingers.

They aren’t fingers anymore.

Curved claws extend from my hands, sleek and lethal and very much not human, slicing the air when I flex them in disbelief. I don’t remember summoning them. I don’t remember deciding I wanted them. They are simply there, as natural as breathing.

I jump when the ground beneath his body starts to cave. The dirt swallows him whole before I can move to grab him, leaving no trace except for the blood staining the soil.

The air shifts behind me.

I turn slowly, blood still dripping from the tips of my fingers.

The Nightkin stands at the edge of the clearing, composed as if he has been watching the entire time, as if none of this unsettles him in the slightest.

I cross the distance between us before I consciously choose to move, claws slamming into his chest and tearing downward, ripping through fabric and skin alike. If we’re calling it skin. He staggers back a step under the force, more surprised than anything, dark eyes flashing as he looks down at the black blooming across his shirt.

Tar.

He bleeds the tar he’s made of.

“You let me kill him,” I breathe, and the words come out jagged, ripping through my throat on their way out. “You knew what would happen and you let me!”

His hands curl weakly around my wrists, not to stop me, not to pry me off, but to steady me.