Page 68 of Fate Unchained

Kyril ran his hand over his head. “Yeah …” He’d wanted to keep himself busy and stay away. Push away the clawing need to stay with Lilah, but he hadn’t made it through the night. He needed to see her. To make sure she was all right.

Finn grinned. “You’re smitten. Making moon eyes.”

Kyril growled and swatted at him. “We’re not staying together long.” He placed a palm on his chest. “We don’t have a rune any longer.”

“Juri said the runes are only here to return our souls.” Finn shrugged. “He said you don’t need a rune to take a mate. You need a soul.”

“Yeah, he mentioned that to me, too, after Hans told us about seeing the vision of the past.” Hans had found the original vulk den in the Kuls, and inside, he watched a vision in which Wulf, the first vulk leader, chose for all the vulk to give up their souls in exchange for becoming nearly invincible. They’d always known the cost of their strength was the inability to shift back into their human form, but when Hans watched the vision, he’d also learned it meant the vulk could never find or bond with their mate either.

He rubbed his mouth. No soul meant the vulk were stronger. Tougher. Focused. Right?

His mother had treated him as if he had no soul. As if he were a machine who would leave to protect Ulterra, and he’d hated it. But he’d done his best to become that kind of vulk. To become the most vicious killer walking Ulterra. Unfeeling, and solely focused on doing his job.

He’d succeeded.

Except Lilah treated him completely different. She treated him like he mattered in ways that had nothing to do with protecting Ulterra.

“What else did Juri say?” Kyril asked.

“He said the vulk are like many of the heroes in the stories he tells. You know, too proud and too stubborn to see what they need. You’re one of the oldest of all of us, what do you think?”

“Some of us are worse than others.”

Down near Stok, in southern Ulterra, he lived a half-day’s walk from Finn and Blazh and a day’s walk from Thane. Blazh, Thane, and Kyril were the oldest vulk alive. Blazh was the oldest, at two hundred and fifty-one, and he and Thane were a few years younger. Like Zann, the three of them believed in the old ways.

Finn, however, was about seventy-five years younger, around the same age as the rest of the vulk in the pack. They hadn’t fought in the Territory Wars, and they weren’t raised quite as strictly in the ways of the vulk. They all seemed a little more interested in Hans and Juri finding mates.

As a rule, Kyril didn’t invite intimate conversation with his vulk brothers, but he eyed Finn and asked, “What do you think? Do you think the vulk should take mates?”

Finn crossed his arms and looked away. “I’m the wrong one to ask. Don’t you remember what happened right after I turned vulk and joined the pack?”

Kyril frowned. “No. I think you joined us when I was doing a sweep of the Zuby Mountains. That took me a few years.”

“Oh. Well, I met someone I thought was my mate during the last year of my human form. I kept seeing her after I turned vulk.” He laughed a hollow, bitter laugh. “She was half-vae and half-succubus, so let’s just say it ended badly. Really badly. The kind of bad the pack had to help with.”

Kyril vaguely remembered hearing about a scuffle in the northern Kuls during that time, but the details were fuzzy. Succubi were demons, and most belonged in Peklo because they preyed on humans. “Messing with a vae is bad news. A succubus is even worse.”

Finn bared his teeth. “Gee, you think?”

Kyril scrubbed his hand across his mouth. “What did she do?”

“The usual. Deception. Betrayal. Broken heart. Let’s just say I don’t trust myself to know anything about mates. Or love.”

“The rune might find someone for you, anyway.”

Finn rubbed his mouth. “I trusted someone once. I let her in.” His eyes blazed red. “They say we have no souls, and we can’t feel. What bullshit. I was—” his hands clenched into fists— “Never again. I will never feel that way again.”

Kyril thought of his mother and all the things she said to him. “We feel. Soul or no soul, we feel.”

Finn sighed. “Well, I try not to now. I don’t want to hurt anyone else, so it’s best the rune doesn’t find anyone for me. I won’t take a mate.” Finn brushed his palms against each other. “Well, I’d better head off and help Zann patrol.” He jerked his chin toward the door. “You staying out here or going in there?” He waggled his eyebrows suggestively. “She’s come out here three times asking about you.”

And this was why he wasn’t chatty with his pack brothers. Although he suspected this time Finn was annoying him to change the subject.

Kyril growled. “You better have stayed far away from her.”

Finn grinned. “She’s a pretty one.” Kyril lunged, and Finn leaped up onto the wall, climbing until he stood on the top.

Kyril shook his head. “Get out of here.”

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