Page 8 of Taming His Vampire Mate
I bit back a moan of agony.
Every part of me rebelled against the pain that tore through my body. My throat closed. My stomach heaved. I thought I might vomit. I wanted to. My vision grayed. For a long, terrible moment, it felt as if my flesh had been flayed from half my body. Exactly what the deer had felt.
Taking its pain into myself transformed it—but that didn’t say much. It wasn’t as intense for me, but it was still bad.
Then came the relief, flooding back through the connection.
The deer let out a long, soft breath—almost a sigh. Its eyes met mine. For an instant, it knew what I had done. I felt its gratitude, mingled with its release.
Moments later, it stopped breathing.
Biting back another moan, I shifted into wolf form.
Just like that, the pain vanished. Banished by the shift. The relief was so complete that, even in wolf form, I could have wept.
I stayed beside the deer for a long time, listening to the forest and letting relief wash over me in waves.
Life and death are an endless dance of nature. But suffering doesn’t need to be. What I’d done was worth it. But it wouldn’t undo my mistakes. Nothing would.
A year ago, I had savagely attacked a human man—James—giving him the wolf bite against his will, with no warning. Without ever speaking to him.
It wasn’t an excuse, but he had reminded me so strongly of Ian, my former mate. The man I had loved so completely, so desperately, with my entire heart and soul, that losing him had shattered something good and bright inside me. Grief had twisted me into a monster—every bit as bad as the kind my former pack hunted in this very forest.
When I’d seen James grieving his father at the shores of Elizabeth Lake, so utterly bereft and alone, I’d recognized my own pain in him. But worse than that—if I had to be honest with myself, and a year of solitude with only the ever-watchful trees for company made it hard to lie in any meaningful way—it had never really been about James at all.
He had been a life raft in a turbulent sea, and I had been drowning in grief. I had clung to him to save myself. That was all there was to it. I had been selfish. Maybe even cruel.
I’d like to say I had acted in the heat of the moment, but that wasn’t true either. I had stalked James, waiting for the right time. I had forced Reed, my second-in-command, and the twins—my best trackers—to help me, even though they had all tried to talk me out of my madness. I had become so convinced this human stranger could be my salvation—so overcome by the idea he was theone—that I had been cold, calm, and calculated in my actions.
And if I hadn’t been stopped—first by the vampire who saved him, who turned out to be James’s true mate, and then by James himself—I would have tried again. I would have done anything to rid myself of my own suffering, even if that meant causing it to an innocent man.
The wolves in my pack were supposed to be guardians shielding humans and other creatures from the unnatural things that slithered into this plane. But that night, I had betrayed my people, my teachings, and the very core of who I was. I had betrayed who I had always been.
Ian wouldn’t have recognized me in the creature who had tried to rip an innocent man’s humanity away from him for no reason other than selfishness. He would never have fallen in love with that man. I knew that too.
James wasn’t the one either. He wasn’t my true mate. Not even close. And I had known that, deep down, from the firstwords out of his mouth. I felt the wrongness of what I had done, even then. I suppose I owed the vampire a debt of gratitude. After all, James would have hated me for as long as one of us lived. And I would have hated myself in time, even worse than I already did.
I did three good things that night. First, I let them both go with no further violence. Second, I declared that Reed—my best friend since childhood—was acting as alpha. Even though he couldn’ttrulybe alpha unless I was dead or defeated, the wolves would look to him for leadership. And that was enough. They weren’t on their own. Reed would probably do a better job with the pack anyway. He was more even-tempered than I. And far less likely to get his people killed.
Last, I left.
I went into the woods, and I didn’t come back. When the sun came up and there was no moonlight to maintain my shift, I slept in human form. When the moon rose again, I spent my time as a wolf.
I might have stayed there, beside the deer, for hours.
But then I felt it. A strange… pull.
Right in the center of my chest, as though an invisible rope was tied directly to my core and pulled taut. A wordless urge gripped me, compelling me to run.
I moved before I even intended to stand. I walked at a quick lope for several steps, then faster and faster, until the dark trees whipped past me in a blur. The urge in my chest pulled me north for miles.
Werewolves run much faster than regular wolves. Any hapless campers who might have foolishly ventured this deep into the forest would have seen a blur, my paws barely making a noise as they bit into the damp soil. But the only witnesses were the trees and the moonlight overhead, patches of which litthe ground silver where the canopy parted enough to allow light through.
Time fell away from me, and for a merciful stretch I didn’t think at all—not even to be alarmed at the strange compulsion gripping me so totally. There was no fear. Only the barest sliver of anticipation that swelled with each passing moment until my chest was full of it.
I stopped at the edge of a clearing, dozens of miles north. Several trees had fallen long ago. The smell of wet earth and bark was stronger here, but there was something else as well.
Another scent, riding the wind. The smell of new growth in the first light of dawn. If a scent could be green, somehow, this one was. It brought back the memory of the first time I shifted, when I was thirteen.
