Page 5 of Forsaken By Night

“Fine.” She pouted playfully and dropped her hands to her sides. “I guess I should let you build up your strength for tomorrow anyway.”

Tomorrow? Oh, right... tomorrow was the new moon, the night when female vampires needed to feed from males.

He hadn’t fed a female in months. Tehya’s jealousy made it too difficult, so he usually avoided it until around the year mark when the headaches started. He wasn’t sure why that happened, and no doubt Nicole could answer that question; but whatever the reason, he always felt better after donating a little vein juice to a hungry female.

“Oh.” Aylin reached out and grasped his wrist, and he nearly jumped out of his skin. He wasn’t used to being touched, and he certainly didn’t know how Hunter would react. “I have to tell you what I did today.”

Lobo glanced around, on alert for anyone who might be approaching. Clear so far, but MoonBound was an active clan, and he doubted it would be long before someone came along. “What did you do?”

“I opened a portal to Wallowa Lake, and I held it open for fifteen full minutes.”

He whipped his head around and stared. To his horror, he was unable to stop staring. Gaping, really. Surely she wasn’t talking about aportal. A method of traveling from one location to another distant location in a matter of seconds.

“You... wait.What?”

“I know!” She bounced on her toes. “That’s the longest I’ve held one open, and it’s the farthest away I’ve been able to get. Well, aside from Samnult’s realm, of course. Riker wouldn’t let me go through it because he’s still on that kick about wanting me to be able to hold a portal open without it flickering before we start using them for long-distance travel, but we’re close. Really close.”

Sweet Maker, he’d thought the ability to swiftwalk was nothing but legend. Then again, most people thought skinwalkers were fiction as well. But swiftwalking... holy shit, with Aylin as his mate, Hunter could rule the damned world. Suddenly the battle among three clans and the humans a few months ago made sense. MoonBound had fought against two large vampire clans and a human army, and had somehow won, while dozens of humans, maybe as many as a couple of hundred, had disappeared off the face of the earth. Had they used one of Aylin’s portals to send the humans somewhere? Like, say, to this Samnult’s realm she’d mentioned?

“You know,” she said in a hushed voice, “if I open a portal for you, you could be at the GraveBorn meeting in seconds, and Riker will never have to know.”

Still rattled by the fact that they were casually talking about something he’d thought was impossible, he stammered out a lame, “Ah, thanks, but you know Riker will find out.”

In reality, he had no idea if the guy would find out or not. Riker, Hunter’s second in command, hadn’t been at MoonBound back when Lobo had been a member, and Lobo had only spoken to the guy a handful of times to share information about human movement in the forests.

Aylin sighed. “You’re probably right. He’s like a drill sergeant in those military movies you make me watch.” She went up on her toes and surprised him with a lingering, tender kiss so full of affection that his heart ached. Hunter was one lucky bastard. When she broke it off, he was almost disappointed. “Now get going,” she said brightly. “The sooner you take care of business, the sooner you can come back to me.”

She gave him a swat on the ass and a naughty smile; as he walked away, he rubbed his chest, but it did nothing to assuage the jealousy and longing that throbbed just under his breastbone.

He’d been alone for so long, with only Tehya as company, and as much as he loved the wolf, snuggling with her by the fire wasn’t the same as snuggling with a female of the same species. When Hunter kicked him out of the clan, Lobo had lost everything, including the hope that one of the clan females would become his mate.

Mentally giving himself a kick—feeling sorry for himself wasn’t acceptable—he headed back to his cabin to pray to whatever god would listen that Tehya pulled through.

3

Whatever Tehya was sleeping on was soft. At least, it was softer than the cabin floor she was used to when it was too warm to curl up at the foot of Lobo’s bed.

Yawning, she lifted her hind leg to scratch her ear... but something was wrong with it.

Her gritty eyes stung as she peeled them open, and then she hastily shut them again when bright light nearly blinded her. Did Lobo haveallthe lights on?

She tried again, blinking to focus her blurry vision. As the haze faded, a million colors assaulted her vision, and she realized she wasn’t stretched out in front of the fire in Lobo’s cabin. She was lying on a pile of blankets on the floor of... a hospital? Or laboratory? IV supplies and bandages were scattered around, as if she’d ripped them away in a struggle. Would Lobo have brought her to a veterinarian for some reason? Maybe that would explain why her leg wasn’t working right—oh, Jesus!

Her leg... it wasn’t covered in fur. It was the wrong shape. The wrong size. It was ahumanleg.

Panicked, her heart racing and her breath coming in panting puffs, she held her hand in front of her face. Herhand, not her paw. Every coherent thought scattered as she scanned her naked body over and over, unable to believe she was looking at herself no matter how many times she counted her fingers and toes.

Could it really be that after twelve winters of living as a wolf, she was human again?

She licked her lips, catching her tongue on sharp fang tips. Right... not human.

Vampire.

Her mind spun as she tried to corral the memories that had grown distant over the years. She’d been human once, working as a dental assistant while attending college to become a dentist. And then her mom had died, and she’d been bitten by a vampire. She’d gotten sick, had spent weeks in a haze of nausea and fever as she transitioned into a vampire and then, shockingly, into a wolf.

After that... She shook her head, hating how clear her memories were now that she was no longer canine. It was as if someone had remastered an old, staticky black-and-white movie to make it ultra-high-def, with hypervibrant color. There was so much pain in her past, and without the filter of her wolf-brain to tone it down, it was nearly overwhelming.

But she supposed that at the moment her past was the least of her concerns. Right now she was in a strange place, she was naked, and she was freezing her bare butt off.

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