Page 23 of The Alpha's Pregnant Mate

Rhietta shook her head stubbornly. “I sent word to the other packs a week ago. None of them had seen hide nor hair of him; Seff asked on every island. He checked on Kurivon, too, and there’s no sign anyone’s been through the portal back to Halforst in the last month. Laurent can’t—" she heard her voice break, felt tears well up in her eyes and squeezed them shut. “He can’t be gone, Reade. He just can’t.”

The older man sighed, and she felt him move around the table to put a comforting hand on her shoulder. She leaned against the reassuring warmth of him and cried. For a moment, with her eyes closed, she could almost imagine that it was her father standing there. He’d always known just how to comfort her when she felt like the whole world was crashing down around her.

“We won’t stop searching,” Reade said softly. “Every patrol that goes out will be on double duty—looking out for demons and lost Alphas.”

“Great compromise,” she sniffled, gently removing herself from the embrace. “Should’ve given Laurent some lessons.”

She sat for a long time after he’d left her, staring at the tent wall without seeing it, her mind drifting miserably through the possibilities. Was it possible, what Reade had suggested? Could Laurent really have left the island altogether? There was plenty of uncharted territory beyond even this large island, and she had to admit, it would be very like Laurent to take a decision like leaving the pack to its absolute extreme. Just because nobody could remember seeing him didn’t mean he hadn’t passed through secretly; he could be very stealthy when he wanted.

No, she realized with a sigh. She could try to be logical about all this as much as she wanted, but at the end of the day, it was going to come back down to her gut. Her instinct was what told her that he was still here. Her instinct was what insisted that he could be found, that it was still possible to drag him back here, kicking and screaming. Her instinct was what told her, despite all the mounting evidence to the contrary, that there was still hope for them. That somewhere, deep down inside him, was the spark that had drawn her to him in the first place, the spark that had engulfed both of them in flames that night. The spark that had given life to the child inside her. Their child.

There had to be a future for them. There simply had to be. And she was tired of trying to find any other justification for that conviction. For as long as she could remember, she’d trusted her intuition. It had never steered her wrong before. So why was she allowing herself to doubt her signature strength now, when the stakes were higher than they’d ever been?

The hardest part was knowing that she couldn’t tell anyone what she was doing, where she was going. Sneaking out after dark for an hour or two was one thing, easy enough to hide from the pack, and unlikely to worry them too much even if they did know…but something told her that she was going to be gone a lot longer this time. Her previous trips had been tiny, unambitious. She’d been following the map, trying to cover ground in a logical pattern, playing by the kind of rules that Laurent liked best. No wonder he’d been able to evade them so easily. It was time she made herself a little less predictable.

And so that night, Rhietta slipped away from the camp, sparing one last glance over her shoulder for the distant glow of the lights. It was wrenching to leave them like this, and she hated the thought of them waking to find her gone, but unlike Laurent, she’d left a note explaining her absence. It was hidden just well enough that they shouldn’t find it until she was too far from camp for them to follow her, slid into the tangled mess of her perpetually unmade bed. Silea, at least, would eventually think to look there. And then they’d know that she’d gone to find Laurent, and that she would not be returning until the task was done.

She knew they’d be safe without her. There was no shortage of wisdom in that pack, of leadership potential—even if the worst happened and she never came back at all, she knew they’d be okay. But her intuition was burning in her chest, low and fierce like a flame, whispering to her that she had nothing to fear from the darkness out there. She was going to find her soulmate, and she was going to drag him out of hiding and show him just how beautiful the future could be if he was only brave enough to face it.

And so, smiling more widely than she had since Laurent’s disappearance, Rhietta struck out into the depths of the jungle. She had brought no source of light, no map, no compass…only the sword at her hip, a canteen of water and a small backpack of dried meat, just in case. Her heart thudded strong and confident against her chest, and it seemed the most obvious thing in the world to let the shift move through her, paws dropping heavily against the soft earth. In this body, too, she could feel the steady flame of her intuition guiding her, burning even brighter without quite so much chatter from her thoughts. She could feel, too, that she wasn’t alone as she walked, the low flutter in her belly reminding her that she wasn’t the only one with a strong interest in tracking down Laurent. Her child wanted to know their father. And she wasn’t going to rest until she made that happen.

It was easy to lose track of time out here, pacing through the jungle. Rhietta paid no mind to where exactly she was going, choosing instead to follow whichever path felt most like it was taking her in the right direction. Before too long, she knew she wouldn’t be able to find her way back to camp if she tried, but that wasn’t a problem, was it? She had no interest in finding her way back to camp. Not until she’d found Laurent. The two of them could work it out later, once they’d had the conversation they needed to have. The possibility that she wouldn’t find Laurent—that he would escape her somehow, or worse, that he was gone for good—simply didn’t enter into her thinking.

Demons did, though. She was deep in the jungle when she had her first near-miss; a sudden hissing sound drew her attention straight up, and she was just in time to dodge out of the way of the tangle of limbs and teeth that was falling from a branch extending above the path. Not dissuaded, the creature lunged at her, strange, lopsided legs propelling it with surprising speed along the narrow path, but she dodged again before darting in to tear it limb from limb with a few deft snaps of her powerful jaws. The acrid scent of demon blood made her blink hard, lips wrinkling with disgust at the taste of the dying demon. But the encounter made her more alert as she continued through the jungle, and the next time one of wolfkind’s ancient enemies came creeping out of the trees, she was ready for it.

As she traveled, she kept Dasha’s words of advice clear in her mind. As tempted as she might have been to be reckless, to charge on at double her speed or to take greater risks of being discovered by demons, she knew that to do so would be endangering her own safety as well as her child’s. There would be no point to any of this if she got herself killed or incapacitated before she found Laurent. And so when she began to tire, she forced herself to rest by the path for a while, though a more impatient part of her itched to push herself onward instead. Human-shaped again, she forced herself to catch her breath, sipping at the water in her canteen and nibbling on a few pieces of dried meat, though she was anything but hungry. Only once she felt rested and strong again did she shift again and keep moving, still following the light of intuition. Part of her had worried that pausing to rest would dull that light, but if anything it shone all the brighter now that she’d rested a little.

And so she went on, resting when she needed to, pushing on when her body and not her ego told her she’d rested enough. Eventually the sun rose, and a little of her vigilance eased, knowing that the demons that made this jungle their home would be dormant while the sun shone. Sometime around midmorning, she lay down for a short rest and woke later than she’d expected, the sun already well on its way toward the opposite horizon. But she was closer. Something in her sensed that she was closer to her goal, to her destination at the side of the man she loved. So she rose and stretched her limbs one by one, then set off again, heading in the direction that every beat of her heart confirmed was the right one.

Night fell again eventually, and she could hear the jungle growing noisy again as its demonic population grew more active. It was hard to think of something like a demon as being capable of sleep, and she’d certainly never encountered one doing so before, but there were definitely more of them when darkness fell. She moved as quietly as she could as the darkness gathered, trying to avoid fights wherever she could. She wasn’t here for demons, she was here to find her mate. And part of her knew that it would be in her best interests to approach him as quietly as possible, knowing that he was likely to run from her if he could.

That was alright. He’d been running from her for years. It hadn’t worked then, and it wasn’t going to work now.

When she finally found him, there wasn’t a flicker of surprise—just a warm glow of recognition and a sense of satisfaction that her long journey was finally at an end. She’d emerged from the trees into a reasonably sized clearing, a wide stretch of starry sky visible above where the trees parted around an oval-shaped pool at the clearing’s center. The ground around the pool was rocky for quite some distance, with only a few stunted pieces of vegetation able to find enough purchase to grow. But it wasn’t the plants or even the fresh water that held Rhietta’s attention. It wasn’t even the familiar figure of a wolf by the water, fur ragged and frame a little skinnier than she remembered, but still recognizably Laurent.

What Rhietta was focused on was the misshapen figure that was lurching out of the water, all limbs and glowing red eyes, far and away the biggest demon she’d seen in years—twice the size of even the largest among the numbers who’d attacked their settlement. The creature simply kept pulling itself out of the water, seeming to make a mockery of the pool’s proportions—how was it possible that such a large creature could have been hiding in such a small place, unless the pool was a lot deeper than it seemed? The demon roared, one of its awkward, lumpen legs swiping at Laurent, and as she watched, he dodged nimbly out of its way. He hadn’t seen Rhietta, and for good reason; his gaze was fixed on the demon before him, and she quickly realized what about it fascinated him.

Atop what a generous person might call the monster’s head was a strange, shifting light that made her take a few steps forward, blinking hard a few times before she could recognize it. Flames, she thought, not understanding. It was for all the world as though the demon wore a crown of fire. It was an awful perversion of everything she’d ever learned about the creatures; fire was supposed to be their biggest weakness, one of a wolf’s most valuable weapons against their kind. But nevertheless, that was what she was looking at. The creature roared again, setting down one of its limbs onto the rock. It lowered itself, twisting its ugly, misshapen body. Laurent danced away from it, clearly unwilling to get any closer to the flames atop its head, and for good reason—even from here, Rhietta could see the shimmer of heat in the air. Slowly, the demon was lowering itself toward one of the stunted bushes that was struggling to grow from the rocky soil.

Before the flames even made contact with the plant, she saw it ignite. With terrifying speed, the flames took hold, devouring the plant entirely and reducing it to ash in a matter of seconds. Seemingly satisfied with this moment of destruction, the demon dragged its body further along the rocky ground. There were plants burning left and right, ignited whenever the flames on its head got anywhere near them. There was something odd about the way they burned, though, something not quite like the cheerful fires she’d cooked her meals on for more than a year. The flames that devoured each little plant were darker somehow, as though they were made of a thicker, denser stuff…and Rhietta felt her breath catch as she finally realized why they looked so strangely familiar.

The fires this monstrous creature was setting looked like the wildfires that had destroyed her pack’s home and set all of these events in motion. No wonder the demons had come so quickly on the heels of the disaster, she thought, heart pounding against her chest with the dizzy rush of this revelation. They hadn’t been following the fire—they’d been following the creature that had caused it. And Rhietta didn’t doubt, as she watched this monster make its slow, deliberate way towards the tree line, that it wouldn’t be long before yet another wildfire swept through the home her pack had built for themselves. Well, she wasn’t going to stand by and let that happen. Rhietta broke into a run, purpose burning within her. Those wolves were her family, and she was their Alpha. If it killed her, she was going to take this demon down.

But she wasn’t the only Alpha here. And when she lunged at the demon, startling it into swinging its great mass around to face her, she saw Laurent leaping into battle beside her. If he was surprised to see her there, he showed no sign of it. There would be time for that later. For now, the two of them had to protect their pack.

And together, Rhietta and Laurent turned to put a stop to the creature that had destroyed their homes.

Chapter 18 - Laurent

It became rapidly clear that neither of them had faced a foe like this before. After a couple of near-misses had left patches of Laurent’s hair singed, the two of them dropped back to a slightly safer distance, circling the demon warily as it swayed alarmingly from side to side. He’d managed to get a couple of strikes in, and he could see the creature’s blood oozing down its side from the bites he’d left in its side; still, based on its enormous size, it was going to take considerably more damage than that to take it down. Rhietta kept its attention on her, darting in to snap and bite at whatever piece of demon flesh she could reach before skittering back, impossibly quick.

Impossible was the word for it, he thought faintly. How the hell was she here? But he couldn’t afford to let himself get distracted by that line of thinking, not now. Not when the monster before him was clearly determined to burn the whole jungle down if that was what it took to eradicate the wolves that were its ancient enemy.

He’d stumbled upon the creature entirely by accident earlier that evening after he’d made the tactical decision to flee from a trio of demons who seemed a little too tough for a wolf to take on alone. They’d chased him for what had felt like miles, only seeming to hesitate when the soil beneath his paws had given way to stone. They hadn’t pursued him into this clearing; grateful for the reprieve from running, he’d simply assumed their hesitation had something to do with the moonlight shining down, and he’d headed for the pool of water at the center of the clearing.

The metallic taste of the water had been his first warning. His second had been the way even a taste of the water made him feel sick to his stomach. And then…well, then the first of the evening’s impossible events had occurred. The very stone at the bottom of the pool had shifted and warped, and before he knew it, he was watching, utterly flabbergasted, as the largest demon he’d ever seen dragged itself out of the pool, seeming to materialize from the very stone itself.

But compared to what had happened next, the flame-crowned demon was nothing. When he’d seen Rhietta tearing across the clearing with the exultation of battle vivid in her shining eyes, Laurent had concluded that he must be dead or dreaming. Perhaps the trio of demons had caught him after all, and this was a fantasy invented by his dying mind. Perhaps the disgusting water he’d sipped had hallucinogenic properties, like some of the rarer herbs back home on Halforst, and he was seeing a manifestation of his deepest and most desperate desire. But then the demon had struck him, and despite the pain that had washed over him, the vision of Rhietta had not wavered. If anything, she grew more concrete, more real, her silver eyes glinting against her dark brown pelt, her low, threatening growl buzzing against his ears.

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