Page 101 of Feral Keep

He has horns, but they’re asymmetrical. One curves up from the temple in a shape that echoes Red’s. The other grows sideways from the same spot, jutting at an angle that looks like it hurts. He has wings, but the membranes are thin to the point of transparent, threaded with dark veins I can see from twenty feet away. In places they’re worn so fine they’re more window than wing.

His eyes are what’s wrong.

They’re gold like Red’s, but the pupils jitter, a constant rapid tremor, the focus shifting even when his head is still. He’s venom-sick. His body makes a poison it can’t regulate and it has been eating his nerves for years. Whatever mind was behind those eyes once — the kind that makes Red a teacher, a reader, a man — has been eaten out of him.

The almost is what makes my skin crawl. If I let my vision blur I can catch the Shade he should have been. The protector. The mate someone’s body would have recognized. He was built for what Red was built for — claim, bond, provide. His body just couldn’t hold the shape. The venom went sour and took the rest of him with it. What’s left of him still wants things. It doesn’t know what for anymore.

In front of me, Red’s wings snap wider, cutting a harder line against the dawn light. His weight shifts forward onto the balls of his feet.

The Stained sees him.

The sound it makes isn’t a roar. It’s a whine, high and keening, the sound of something in pain that doesn’t understand pain. The jittering eyes fix on Red’s spread wings, on the crimson body standing between it and the scent it’s followed for miles.

Then the eyes slide past Red. To me.

The whine drops. It goes guttural and desperate, the sound of a body that has found what it needs. This is hunger, not the clean recognition that sent the freed Shade south. It wants what’s in my blood — the mated scent running through my veins and milk and sweat, the only relief its burning nerves will ever find.

Red doesn’t wait for it to come.

He hits the Stained at full speed.

42

RED

The Stained doesn’t dodge. Corrosion ate whatever should live behind those jittering eyes and left blind hunger in its place. My shoulder catches it mid-chest. The impact throws us both into the dirt, my claws already raking for purchase, for anything that ends this before it turns toward her again.

Its scent floods my throat, venom soured past use, sweetness curdled into rot. My body wants to gag on it and fight through the gagging at the same time.

It gets a claw into the forearm the caged male already opened. The pain sits distant and unimportant. Nothing matters more than keeping this thing pointed away from Maeve.

I roar into its face. Not challenge. Warning. Stop. You will not reach her.

It doesn’t stop. The sickness in it leaves no room for reason, and hunger can’t hear a warning. Its jaw snaps toward my throat. I get a forearm under its chin and force the head back, feel the tendons strain against my grip.

Thirteen years feral taught my hands what my mind forgot how to say. They remember this. The angle. The pressure. The moment a spine gives if I commit the weight behind the twist.

I commit.

The Stained goes limp under me all at once. The jittering eyes finally still.

I stay crouched over the body one more breath, my chest heaving. The stink of its ruined venom clings to my claws and my skin and the inside of my throat. I want to be away from it. I want to be at her side more.

I find her against the barracks wall where I left her, hands laced over her belly, her whole body held upright by will instead of ease. Alive. Whole. The twins still inside her, safe.

I cross the compound in four strides.

She doesn’t flinch from the blood on me. She never does anymore.

“It’s dead.” My voice comes rough, scraped raw by the roar. “You’re safe.”

Her hand finds the gash on my forearm and presses careful fingers to the edge of it, like she could close it by touch alone. I let her. The arm doesn’t need the tending. I need the hand.

The compound has gone quiet. Lisa’s voice carries from the tree line, counting heads, herding women deeper into the canopy. Shayla stands apart from all of it, watching me. Whatever is in her face, I don’t need to read it.

I press my palm flat against Maeve’s belly. Both heartbeats are there, quick and steady, undisturbed by everything that happened six feet from them.

Mine. Still mine. Still here.