Page 57 of The Arcane God

He lingered like that for a minute before he started to feel silly and turned away. There was nothing there.

Then, something charged at him. It was all white fur and vicious teeth—lunging for him. Instinctively, he raised his arms, flooding his hands with heat from his incendia as he readied himself for the attack, when all of a sudden the creature yelped in pain and fell to the ground in a heap before him, an arrow sticking out of its side.

What the fuck?!

Turner looked up, breathing heavily, his body flooded with adrenaline from the no-longer-imminent attack, and saw a dark figure emerge from the woods into the moonlight.

It was a stryx woman, and she held her bow aloft, still aiming at the white wolf that lay dead on the ground.

“Wow, thanks,” he said, relief flooding him at what he’d just bypassed. He probably would have been fine—not his first tussle with a wolf—but would have definitely ended up with more bites and scratches than he’d preferred.

The woman didn’t say anything though, just lowered her bow. Evidently, she was confident the wolf no longer posed a threat, and now she turned her full attention on him.

She had dark-as-night hair, just like all the stryx, and pale, creamy skin, but as she looked at him, he noticed that her eyes…they were different. One was dark black, just like the others’, but the other one was green.

He hadn’t met this stryx before.

Her gaze was predatory—assessing—as she watched him, and something about her made him feel vulnerable. Exposed.

Turner swallowed. “We haven’t met yet, I don’t think,” he said, trying to dispel the overly vulnerable feeling with chitchat. “I’m one of the newcomers from the other side of the Chasm Mountains. My name is Turner.”

“I know who you are,” she said, her voice silky as she accentuated her vowels in the novel way the stryx did, only she made it seem incredibly alluring.

“Oh, good,” Turner said, feeling like he sounded nervous. Why was he nervous? “And you? What’s your name?”

She began to circle him slightly—like a cat hunting a mouse—even though he was easily twice her size. Her body was covered in furs, and she wore a quiver of arrows attached to her back, so he couldn’t really tell what she looked like underneath, but she was about Ena’s height, give or take an inch or two.

“Xena,” she said as she stepped closer to him.

Fuck him.

Now that she was closer in the moonlight, it was undeniable…she was extremely beautiful. Her bone structure was feminine yet strong, and her mismatched eyes were mesmerizing, to say the least. He suddenly found himself swallowing an excess of saliva in his mouth.

He cleared his throat. “Strange about the wolf, huh?” he said, gesturing down at it as he changed the subject. The arrow had gone directly into its heart—an incredibly skilled shot—and blood now leaked from the wound, a harsh contrast to its bone-white fur. “Don’t know why it chose to attack me alone.”

“Game has been scarce,” Xena responded, shrugging. “Scarcity makes animals do drastic things.”

Turner nodded. He supposed that made sense, but that was twice now an animal had tried to attack him under strange circumstances, and he remembered what Max had said about the weather and animals acting strangely…this would certainly be direct evidence of that.

Xena leaned over, pulling the arrow out of the wolf before wiping it off on its fur and restoring it to her quiver. Then, crouching down, she reached for it and braced herself as if she were going to sling it over her shoulder. Was she going to carry that all the way back to camp on her own?

“Can I help?” he asked, squatting down beside her and gesturing at the animal.

She stopped and turned her assessing gaze on him once more. She looked suspicious, as if unsure if he was a threat or not. But then, after a few seconds, she evidently decided that he was not, and gave him a single sharp nod.

“How is it that we haven’t met yet?” he asked, as he lifted the wolf easily over his shoulder. “There aren’t that many of you, and I thought I’d seen everyone by now,” he asked, trying and failing to make good small talk with this intimidating woman.

“I was away scouting for game,” she said as the two of them began to walk back towards camp. “And then I found your companion.”

“You found Ty?” he asked, turning to look at her. Of course that made sense that a stryx had found Ty, just as Max and Kaya had found them, but Turner hadn’t had the chance to get all the details yet. “You rescued him from the water?”

“Not from the water itself, no,” she explained, shrugging it away. “But from death, yes.”

Turner swallowed. The thought of the fate Ty had almost faced hitting him anew. “Thank you,” he said sincerely. “For helping him.”

Xena simply nodded at him, accepting his gratitude without a word, and continued to stare at him some more.

“What?” Turner asked, feeling a bit self-conscious now as he shifted the wolf’s weight on his shoulder.