Page 27 of Denying Her Mate (The Wolves of Black Mountain #3)

Chapter 27

Roux

T he amount of energy it takes for all of us to heal Sawyer makes my legs shake. I sit close to him, my hand gripping his as he tries to get his bearings. I am fully aware of how close I came to losing yet another mate, and it makes my gut churn savagely.

I try not to look in the direction of Edward’s body. I don’t regret what I did, but I wish there had been another way. Killing him again has opened old wounds that I had just begun to stitch closed. I have so many questions, and answers to none. He was not the Edward I remember, the one that I loved at one point in my life. I don’t know what his time with the Order did to him, but the Edward I knew would never have harmed me. When he was on top of me, his fingers wrapped around my throat, I had little doubt of his intentions. He wanted me dead. He meant what he said. If he couldn’t have me, no one could.

I block that from my mind, focusing on sending as much as love as I can through the mating bond. Sawyer hasn’t attempted to move yet, even though he is healed. There are dark smudges under his eyes, and blood stains every inch of him, despite being healed.

Tessa appears, wrapping a blanket around my shoulders. I barely noticed the cold, my adrenaline and concern masking any of my own needs. She hands me another, which I start to unfold, but Sawyer sits up before I can. His movements are slow, but he is moving under his own steam and that loosens the rubber bands tightening my chest.

Once he’s sitting, I wrap the other blanket around his shoulders to ward off the cold, but he grabs the side of my neck, dragging me closer to him. “Are you okay?” The words crack and sound hoarse as he says them.

“I’m more worried about you than me,” I counter. He was the one who collapsed.

He pulls me against him, so our foreheads touch, and I feel the relief work through our bond. My wolf stops pacing and lies down, content in the knowledge our mate still breathes. “The terror I felt when I couldn’t find you…”

I silence him with a kiss, my mouth moving over his lips in slow, languid brushes. I don’t care that we have an audience. I need to feel him against me, because we had come close to losing that fight.

“That was a close call.” Wyatt sounds annoyed as he shifts his blanket around his shoulders, but he is right.

I was certain I was going to die in the snow at the hands of a wolf I thought I knew.

I knew nothing. Edward is like me, a hybrid with the power of both wolf and witch, but I have no idea how that is possible. As far as I know, tau males do not exist.

“Dove saved us,” Tessa says.

My gaze slides toward the blue-haired woman pressed against Jackson’s side. Her milky eyes stare, unseeing, and I wonder how she saved us when she seems barely cognitive of anything happening around her.

“Let’s get into the house and out of the cold,” Hester says, walking toward the main house without waiting for a response.

I help Sawyer up, but before we can trail after the others, he wraps his arms around me, our naked flesh pressing against each other. I breathe in his scent, that alone is enough to calm the adrenaline still coursing through me as he wraps his blanket around us both, cocooning me against his chest.

“I love you so much,” he tells me, and it is easy for me to give him these same words back.

“I love you too. There is no world that makes sense for me without you in it.”

His nose nuzzles into my hair as he pulls me tighter against him. I can feel his relief and the heightened emotions he is experiencing through our bond. It makes tears prick my eyes. No one has ever cared this deeply for me, not even Edward.

“Nor for me,” he says, pressing kisses to every inch of me he can reach.

We are alone by the time he has soothed the beast within him. He tucks me against his side, and we make our way into the house. The warmth seeps into my bones the moment we step into the kitchen. Wolves run hotter than humans but we are still susceptible to the cold, and my teeth chatter as we go into the living room.

I want desperately to shower the blood off me, to change into clean clothes. Only the men and me are naked, a side effect of shifting into our wolf forms. The rest of my coven are unable to release their wolves, their magic making most tau latent.

I hadn’t held mine long, but it had been long enough to keep me alive. I thank the animal I share space with for keeping us safe, giving us the opportunity to see our mate again, but she does not understand gratitude. Defense is a natural thing to her, and all she had done was fight for survival.

“We need to replace the wards,” Tessa says. She looks exhausted, her hair trailing around her face where it has come loose from her tie.

“For what purpose?” Hester says from the window.

I don’t look out, but I know there are bodies, blood staining the snow, just as Edward’s did around the back of the house.

Tessa glances at me and the others before her brows come together. “To protect ourselves.”

“I think it’s clear that our wards are no match for these… things .” I don’t miss the derision in her words.

Jackson sits Dove on the couch, fussing around her for a moment, before he turns to face Hester. “So what do we do? Sit around and wait for them to come back?”

“They were male tau,” Apryle says, clutching an ice pack. She has a bruise forming on her head, but at least she is conscious. “I could smell their wolves.”

Was she out for the entire fight, or did she catch some of it?

“How is that possible?” I ask, pushing Sawyer onto the couch as well.

He is walking under his own steam, but I can see how tired he is, feel it through our bond. Now that the fear has started to wear off, I feel a new terror clutching my throat at how close I had come to potentially losing him.

“Isn’t it passed only through the female line?” Tessa isn’t addressing anyone in particular when she says this, but it is Halle that answers.

“I don’t know as much as you guys about this hybrid stuff.”

“They had power, but it didn’t feel right.”

Tessa’s right. When I was battling with Edward and he was flinging magic at me, it felt different to the magic I use.

“Because it is corrupted.”

Hester doesn’t look at anyone, her eyes locked on the window and the macabre scene in front of the house.

“Corrupted how?” Apryle demands the answer we all want.

“They were born wrong.” It’s not Hester who says this, but Dove. Her milky eyes staring at nothing and everything. It’s creepy, even though we caused it.

Jackson grabs her face, pulling her attention to him. “Dove?”

“Mother never wanted them to live. She saw the darkness inside them.” Dove’s head tilts to the side as she says this. “But she couldn’t kill them. They came from her, even if they were born in the shadow.”

Cold fingers trail up my spine and I reach behind me for Sawyer’s hand. He slips his fingers into mine, offering reassurance and comfort.

“What does that mean?” Jackson hasn’t released his hold on her face, but she doesn’t try to pry his fingers away. It is as if she is alone in the room. “Dove?” He says her name when she stops answering.

“You all know the story of Revna and Torsten,” Hester says.

I have heard it more times than I can count over the years, but I never took anything from it seriously. Tales of a witch infusing a wolf pelt with magic that then turned the wearer into a wolf seems ludicrous, which is saying a lot considering the things we can do. I don’t know where magic or the ability to shift into an animal comes from, but I refuse to believe tales of magical clothes.

“Everyone has heard that story,” Tessa says. “It’s told to pups everywhere, but it’s just that—a story.”

Hester shakes her head. “I wish that were true, but it is so much more than that. Revna did exist, Torsten too. She was a seidr, someone at one with the natural world around her and the energies that flow between different planes of existence. She made the pelt and gave it to Torsten.” Her lips kick up into a smile, as if she is remembering something fondly. “She loved him, she thought it would make him love her back. But he was the son of a Jarl, an important man back then, and he thought she was only good to use and discard. The sons of Jarls don’t marry seidr women. But he kept up the pretense that he felt something for her because he understood her power, coveted it for himself. The more he used the pelt, the more wolf Torsten became, until he was nearly all animal.”

I glance at Sawyer and the look he gives me suggests he thinks she’s lost her mind, but then I think of the things we can do and maybe, just maybe, this isn’t a lie.

“When he was nearly driven mad by the wolf beginning to take over his mind and body, Revna became pregnant. She went to tell him, excited and happy to give him children. By this point, his father died and he was Jarl. He was furious, as if he did not have anything to do with creating that child. He tried to kill her, to cut the child out of her belly, but Revna ran. Under a full moon, she gave birth to not one child but two, a boy and a girl.”

As I’m listening, all I can think is how ludicrous this story is. Magical pelts and highborn men becoming wolves sounds insane. I know wolf shifters had to come from somewhere, but everyone always assumed this story was just that, a story. Hester is telling it as if it was truth.

“The twins possessed the powers of their parents—the strength and ability to change into a wolf from their father and the ability to manipulate nature and its energies from their mother.” Hester wraps her arms around herself, as if what she’s saying is painful, but if there is any truth in this story, it happened millennia ago, long before Hester existed.

“Revna stayed in hiding, while her lover hunted her down with his men, searching for her and the children. She taught them both how to use their magic and how to shift into the wolf to hunt and track. But the boy… The magic within him was different. It didn’t flow the same or feel the same. All magic has a price, and the price for what Revna did with the pelt was that. Boys born from her line are wired wrong. The things he could do were terrifying. She knew she needed to kill him, but before she could, he was taken away and hidden. The male line, for generations, has destroyed themselves. There was never any need to worry about them, until now.”

“Because the Order have them,” Tessa says, a grim expression on her face.

Hester blows out a breath. “If they are using them then we should be worried. Tau males are uncontrollable and extremely dangerous, which means the Order is desperate, and that worries me.”

It worries me too, because I can’t imagine why this organization is collecting so many different supernatural creatures.

“Edward, the mate I killed, he was tau,” I say. “I had no idea, neither did he until he died. How did he not know?”

“The same way you didn’t until you accidentally used your magic. There is no one to teach tau how to tap into their power. That’s what makes it so dangerous. Killing him probably triggered his magic, opened him to the power.”

Sawyer’s awareness brushes through my mind, calming the racing thoughts I have and the guilt. I have become what I feared—a murderer. It does not matter that Edward forced my hand with his unrelenting attacks. There had been a part of me that was relieved when I saw him alive, but it also shocked me that I had easily taken his life with no thought to protect myself and my mate. I conjured that knife, and I stuck it into him over and over until my hand and my arm ached. He said he looked for me, that he wanted to pick up where we left off, but that could never happen. My heart belongs to Sawyer and there is no going back.

“Are there just legions of us out there waiting to be activated?” Halle asks in a small voice, tension rattling her words.

The stillness in the room is suffocating as silence descends, before Hester says three words that scare me more than anything she could have said. “I don’t know.”

Since I came to the Sanctuary, Hester has always been the one who knew everything, who led us through danger and to safety, but all of that is gone, because there is nowhere safe for any of us anymore.