Page 47 of Mate of a Monster

He tips his head back and releases a roar that splits the sky, but doesn’t turn back.

“What—where are they going? Beast, where are they going?! I need… I don’t even fucking know what I need! Why did I come here?” I scream, fingers digging into my hair.

The Nightkin presses against my ribs in weighted comfort. “Close your eyes, Hellpet, and I will show you, though I think you already know.”

My spine tingles with awareness, but fog clouds my mind. “And how, exactly, would I know?”

“Because little mate. You’re the one who sent them.”

“What?” I whisper, looking up to the sky once more. “Why would I do that? And sent them where?”

The Nightkin sighs. Fucking sighs. As if he’s the one inconvenienced.

“If only you could call on a portal, let it take you where you wish to go…”

“So fucking helpful, you are.” I scoff. “Don’t you think if I could, I would?”

I would. The thought alone does it, my body answers like it’s been waiting for permission.

My hand snaps out as if it has a mind of its own.

The portal tears open in a splinter of black. Thorned vines bloom outward from the edges, curling and braiding around the frame. Dark flowers split open along the border, petals flat and wide like open palms, like the flowers give the portal life.

The Nightkin goes still inside my chest.

“She’s stunning, Hellpet.”

“Why does it look like that?” I step forward, boots scraping gravel.

Rimmed in fire and not that pretty pearly shit I saw on Rathe. Although, I guess it makes sense—considering I’m not one of those “pretty things.”

There’s something patient about this portal, as if it’s afraid if it moves even an inch, I’ll hesitate walking through.

My feet move before I tell them to, the threshold humming against my skin like a second heartbeat syncing with mine.

The darkness beyond the frame isn’t empty. It’s full. Dense and so thick it’s blinding, pressing against my face. Damp rock and distant smoke drag across my tongue, but something else lingers there, right on the edge.

My shoulder brushes the petals when I move past them, and with one foot in front of the other—

I step through.

The darkness opens its hands and lets me step inside, and the feeling is intoxicating.

The cobblestone comes up fast.

Too fast.

My knee hits first, then my palms, skin shredding across wet stone as the portal snaps shut behind me with the kind of finality that says You’re on your own now, dickhead. Not even a rush of air to mourn its passing. Gone, like it didn’t want to be associated with my disaster of a landing.

I stay there a second, on all fours, hair curtaining my face and my knee screaming. Fire burns through my palms as rain drizzles over the courtyard.

“Graceful,” the Nightkin murmurs somewhere in the dark behind my eyes. As always.

“Shut up,” I breathe.

“I said nothing.”

“You thought it loud.”