Page 7

Fokkinshitandhell.

The missile was almost on her.

The stranger took another impossible jump, arms outstretched, and caught it.

Hefokkin’ snatched it.

Savvine’s jaw dropped as her HUD stuttered with inconceivable readings, and an energy bloom coalesced around his frame.

She swore, as he appeared to transform.

Intoa giant, snarling wolf.

She blinked and confirmed she was indeed looking at a spectral lycan creature that materialized mid-air, fur crackling with aetheric flames.

Its eyes glowed in a wild violet and brass, and its gilded fangs bared as if about to tear down its prey.

Her heart lurched as the vision before her matched that of her dreams.

The form shifted again, coalescing into a ball of purple and gilded fire.

She thought the man dead, but in seconds, the flames died and he re-emerged, unscathed. Hovering midair as if he’d somehow absorbed the missile’s momentum.

He appeared to growl, and she gasped when she caught sight of aureate-tipped fangs. As he snarled, his body lit up in an amethyst corona of a lightning storm.

Twisting midair, he hurled the weapon back.

The Lombardi stealth fighter hunting her attempted to veer, but it was too late.

The payload struck home.

The explosion was silent but brilliant, swallowed by the dark like a collapsing star. Radiation flared across the void in shimmering bands, casting molten reflections on her cockpit glass.

She blinked, rocked to her core, not only by the blast, but by the impossible sight.

Her savior, the man who’d intercepted death with nothing but his body and will, hovered before her, untethered to ship or suit, and burning with spectral fire.

Savvine’s breath caught as he glimmered back into human form.

She had never, ever, seen anything like it.

Mouth parted, her eyes tracked the stranger gliding back toward her at high speed.

He landed again in a rippling thigh power squat on the nose of her racer.

He gave her a casual two-fingered salute.

She shook her head, stunned, in disbelief as adrenaline crashed in her bloodstream.

Pressing her lips together to stop from gaping, Savvine freakin’ saluted him back.

Their eyes locked through the reinforced glass of her canopy.

Without warning, a searing, scorching heat rocked her.

Not from the explosion, but from him.

A wild, surging energy hit her hard, as though his essence passed through her, through every cell, and lit a fuse she didn’t know she had.