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Tamaska
I don’t trustyou or your kind.
Tamaska’s words reverberated in her head as she backed away from Kodiak.
Pain ricocheted from her knee. The fall when fleeing the vampire in the bushland left her body hurting. But it was the image of him as a wolf that scared her the most.
Kodiak moved closer to her. She shook her head, everything shrieking in protest as she staggered away.
“You don’t mean any of that,” said Kodiak.
“I do,” replied Tamaska.
Kodiak wasn’t just something she didn’t believe in: a shifter. No. It was worse. A dog…wolf…in her brain canines were the same. Something to be feared, hated. Creatures who wanted to destroy her, almost as much as the vampire.
A laugh, hysterical and wild, bubbled up, but she swallowed it down. Vampires. Shifters. What was next? Things that went bump in the night? No, if she let herself laugh, scream, or cry, she’d lose her very mind.
“I do. Now leave me be. I never want to see you again.”
This time she turned. His stare burned into her back. An unexplainable need to stop and go to him grew inside of her. But there was no going back. She had to get somewhere safe, whatever that meant.
Somewhere safe, somewhere she could lick her wounds and formulate a plan.
The noise of Sydney’s inner-city called to her, as if it could take her away from her living nightmare, take her into the hands of safety where reality was as it always had been.
Boring, safe, mundane.
“Tamaska.”
She closed her eyes at the quiet command, the plea to hear him out.
But how could she do that? Her entire life had spun out of control the moment he’d stepped into it as part of the team hired to protect that cursed Blood Opal.
Since then the opal had been stolen, someone had stalked her, and—
And she’d slept with this man, given him something, a piece of herself she’d never wanted to give.
Only to discover he wasn’t a man at all. Kodiak was a monster, a reviled thing, and—
She was losing her mind.
How could any of this be real?
She limped across the scrub to the openness of the grassed area of the park, the boundary before the rising apartments and busy roads. Sydney’s landscape erupted into high-rise buildings and congested roads with thousands of cars. The scene sent a sense of relief through her.
She rubbed her wrist as it throbbed from the impact of her earlier fall. What had she seen? It couldn’t have been real. But it had been. Real as she was. Hadn’t it?
The further she walked away from it all, the more it wavered in her mind. The real world, the grass, trees. Planes overhead, the high rises and the Harbor Bridge, the traffic, and the people. Normal, regular folks.
Her head throbbed as reality took a beating. She’d witnessed fur turning to skin, paws morphing to hands, bones cracking, and so much more she wished she could unsee.
A couple strolled past, and their gazes caught on her. Christ, she probably looked like a mess.
Tamaska raised a hand to brush her hair back, to smooth it, and to her horror it shook. Dirt and something dark like blood was smeared over the back, the scratches a vivid red. Averting her gaze from the staring couple, she limped along the path before they could say a word.
What could she say if they asked if she was all right?
