Page 11 of Eternal

Farren did try to be brave. She held her head high, but nothing could dilute the terror she knew was reigning in her eyes.

It took everything she had not to have a complete mental breakdown there and then.

The instant drop in the stillness around her magnified with every passing moment.Nothing moved, not a leaf, nor did a bird chirp. The once frosty breeze seemed to have died midair in the growing deafening silence.

Farren yanked at the rope keeping her restrained, causing the bark behind her to scrape against the flesh of her back, her velvet coat providing zero protection against her anguished attempts to be free.

Something was coming. And innately and terrifyingly, she knew it wasn’t anything corporeal.

Vapors rose from the earth in swirls of silver and black. A suffocating fragrance latched on to the air, stinging her eyes, and making her breath catch in her throat. Then a blanket of darkness enveloped the sky and, in the next instant, a full moon shone directly above her. Yet nothing seemed natural.

Feral growling pierced the silence. Whatever was shadowed by the night was coming for her and she was in a helpless situation, unable to defend herself, bound to a tree where the rope keeping her imprisoned seemed to be strangling her whole body.

The ground beneath her feet shook. The fog thickened and the smell grew in intensity around her.

The incoherent though tear-filled sounds she managed scraped agonizingly past her throat only to die on her lips. She jerked and pulled at the ropes. Tears rained down her face in an outpouring of trepidation.

The growling turned scarily intimidating and the pungent air she struggled to inhale seemed laced with poison. Her breath froze, all her thoughts immobilized by anxiety and apprehension—when, from the clouds cultivated from the ground up—a beast, grotesque in its very nature, leaped into the air and landed inches from her face. The paw of one of its legs was nonexistent, and in its place, it sported one made of twisted metal.

Taller than her, the snorting monster with thick streams of saliva leaking from its fang-filled mouth, snarled at her. She couldn’t help but notice that one of the wolflike beast’s eyes appeared so lifeless it could have been a stone lodged into the socket on its face.

Oh, God.

Her father had told her tales about a wolf with a stone eye and an iron paw that emerged from the earth when he was offered young flesh to feed on. The disturbing thought that she was projecting the stories her father had told her from her childhood trampled all over her again.

She found herself back at the fully installed and private laboratory in the basement of the Maximillian mansion where she had been tending a wolf Ashton and her had rescued. And then that moment when the wolf had turned into a man before her eyes. Was this just a continuationof that hallucination? Had nothing been real? Not even Ashton and Duncan? How could any of the tales her father regaled her with be true? How did he know them? How did he know about any of it?

This was a wolf-shifter ritual, as old as time, she had been told. Also known as the seeding ceremony. She would be prepped and pampered and made to smell like roses. She’d be brought into a forest in the heart of nowhere, so obscure it didn’t exist on a map. There she’d be tied to a tree in the cold night under an ominous full moon and sacrificed to a wolf so bizarre in appearance, its sheer existence proved impossibly hard to accept as real for any normal levelheaded person.

But then another thought struck. What if every new fantastically strange thing that happened to her and around her had been real, and maybe in some warped reverse psychological tactic, she hadassigned those happenings to tales her father had told her. But what if he never told her anything and it was just her mind that led her to believe he had furnished her with those stories. That maybe she did it as a means to prolong her connection with him. But this was her new normal now. This was her reality. She was living it here and now.

Her delayed reaction due to being utterly stunned and terrified ended when her voice, raw and agonized, finally ripped from the depths of her soul in an earth-shatteringscream.The wolf-beast was so close to her, the balminess of its breath fanned her face.

“The most beautiful of the land, Isidora Graves. I never knew I would be presented with an opportunity to end your life.”

Farren stilled and daren’t so much as release her breath. The words, delivered in a voice thick with gravel and hoarse with thirst, erupted into her head as if the beast had spoken to her directly.

“But perhaps there is merit in patience,” he sneered. “A millennium of patience to finally get my vengeance on you, witch.”

She couldn’t decipher a single word he said, and the result was disordered chatter in her head. How could the disfigured beast be talking to her? How could she hear his voice in her head? What was he even saying?

But then his snarls transformed into vicious grunts and growls as he grew more ominous before her. She screamed even louder, this time, pressing into the tree trunk, hoping she would be swallowed into the trunk instead of facing the end of her life, asthe monstrous creature opened its mouth, fangs elongated, and reached for her throat.

When the wolf-beast bit her, when he severed her skin and sucked her blood, her scent would drive him to eat her alive. Unless her mates were there to fight him off and unless they beat him.

She closed her eyes. Was this the way it would end for her?

Ashton and Duncan were nowhere to be seen.

And she had wasted the last seven days not being allowed to see them for nothing.

Now it would be forever.

Chapter Five

It had been seven days since they last saw her, touched her, heard her voice and her sweet laughter, and Ashton and his twin alpha, Duncan, were just about ready to raze the earth to have her in their arms again.

But after seeing her tear-stained face the night of the engagement had driven them to try everything within their power to make it right. They weren’t prepared to give her up but if they lost their pack leader status because of her, they knew she would never forgive herself. They couldn’t allow that to happen. Which meant they had to find a way to get her pregnant.

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