Page 2 of Forsaking His Mate (The Wolves of Black Mountain #1)

Chapter 2

Tessa

H ester sets a grueling pace and my legs are burning by the time we reach the edge of the woodlands.

I stare at her back, still convinced she’s a spirit who might disappear at any moment.

My wolf is uneasy, pacing inside the confines of my mind. She’s an awareness, rather than a physical thing I can touch, but I sense her movements and her feelings as if they are my own.

If I could shift, she would gain control, and I would be the passenger, just along for the ride.

My wolf wants to defend me, to protect us both, and I hate that I can’t let her free.

“You have questions,” Hester states.

“About a hundred,” I admit, urging my wolf to calm down.

“Then ask them.”

I don’t know where to start. There are so many things I want to know.

“How were you able to talk to me in my vision? That’s never happened before.”

She keeps trekking through the trees and I struggle to keep pace with her long strides. “Because I’m a vision walker. So are you.”

I raise my brows. “A vision what?”

“You see snapshots of things that are going to happen right before they happen, don’t you?”

I think back to the forest and how I saw my father before he appeared to save my life. “I can also leave my body,” I admit.

I expect her to laugh at me, but she doesn’t. She nods her head in understanding.

“Astral projection,” she says. “The two are often linked.”

I stare at her profile, thinking I’ve never met anyone like me. I have no idea how old she is.

Her skin shows no signs of age and her hair doesn’t look like it has even a hint of gray, but she’s over thirty, at least.

I can smell her wolf half, but I can also smell something else, something that calls to me in a way I haven’t felt before. I feel connected to her and I don’t understand it. It’s as if I know her, even though we’ve never met.

“So… you can just walk into anyone’s mind?” I ask, curiosity making me bolder.

Her lips tug into curves at the edges, but she doesn’t pull her gaze from the road.

“Are you scared because I walked so easily into yours?” she says.

“No.” I frown. “Maybe. Is it dangerous?”

“Depends on who’s doing the walking.”

A shiver runs through me at the double-edged meaning in her words. Are there people who can hurt us that way?

I’m so focused on what she's saying that I stumble over a branch, lurching forward before I find my footing again. I do not have the grace of my shifter side.

I mumble a curse, wiping my hands on my jeans before I continue after her.

My sneakers are soaking wet, and my socks are too. I feel miserable and cold.

I hope there’s a hot shower and a warm meal wherever she’s leading me.

“Can I control who just decides to stroll through my mind?” I don’t like the idea of having someone invade my private space. It’s weird enough that she’s done it.

“With time and patience, yes.”

The trees thin out and we step off the leaf-covered ground and onto asphalt.

I’m grateful to get out of the mud. My clothes are ruined, caked in dirt that no amount of cleaning is going to remove.

The road winds through the forest, the trees cleared to lay the two lanes side by side. It disappears around a bend that is hidden by large trunks and canopies of leaves.

I tip my face toward the inky sky, soaking in the moon, which is in its waxing gibbous phase.

It bathes everything in a white light, making it easy to see what dangers might be lurking ahead, but the trees behind us are shadowed and feel dangerous.

I peer around, trying to get my bearings, but I have no idea where we are. I’ve never been this far from home before and I don’t recognize anything.

“Where are we?” I ask.

“About forty miles from your pack lands.”

I peer back at the trees, wondering if I will ever see my father again. My heart hurts at that thought. I know I can never return. I can’t risk any more lives because of what I am… whatever that is.

“Come on,” Hester says, breaking through the dark turn my thoughts have taken. “We need to get out of here.”

There is a truck parked at the side of the road in a small rest stop. I stare at it, my heart thudding.

I pause, suddenly feeling anxious.

What if this is a trap?

What if she’s with the hunters?

“Come, we don’t have much time,” Hester urges, but I don’t move.

“How do I know I can trust you?” I demand, finally asking the question I should have asked before trailing through the woods after her.

I let myself get swept up both in my father’s words and in my visions.

Hester forces out a breath that sounds frustrated. “We don’t have time for this. If we stay, we’ll be attacked. There are still wolves on our trail.”

There are?

I turn, peering into the trees, my heart suddenly pounding.

Are we still being hunted? I can't scent or sense anything at first, but then I get a whiff of wolf.

It smells powerful, strong, and dangerous.

Not alpha, but maybe deltas—usually the enforcers in any pack.

“How many?” I ask, unable to pinpoint exactly what we’re facing.

“Two, maybe three,” she says. “Their scents are mixed. ”

“Can you shift?”

I can’t, but if she can, we at least have a fighting chance. In our human forms, we’re screwed. There is no way we can beat two, possibly three, powerful wolf shifters.

“I don’t need to shift, Tessa.” The confidence in those words shocks me. Is she crazy? She wants to take on delta wolves in her human form?

“We can’t fight them,” I counter.

I may be unable to let my wolf out of her cage, but I’ve seen my share of wolf fighting. Even in play, it can be fierce. In a fight to the death, the rules don’t exist. “They’ll make short work of us if they catch us.”

Hester laughs and I don’t know if that makes me feel better or worse. “I don’t fear the wolves, but we do need to keep moving.”

She jogs over to the truck, drags the door open, and climbs inside. I glance in the direction of the trees, still hesitant, even though I know staying will mean my death.

It’s not really a choice, but I decide to put my trust in Hester and my father that this is the only way to stay safe. I hope neither will let me down.

I rush over to the truck and slide onto the bench seat, shutting the door behind me. The clang of metal meeting metal is loud in the otherwise silence of the mountains and trees.

Quickly, I pull on my seatbelt, suspecting I’m going to need it for whatever is about to happen. Safety first, right?

Hester starts the engine, which roars to life immediately.

I laugh nervously .

In the movies I watched with my pack mates the truck never starts the first time.

Hester turns to me.

“I know you’re scared, but I promise I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”

I hope that is an oath she can keep, because these hunters are determined. They found me in the middle of nowhere and they had no objection to cutting through pure-blood wolves to get to me.

I swallow my fear as she hits the gas, putting her foot to the floor. My hand presses against the window to stop from sliding in my seat as she takes to the road at speed.

If the hunters don’t kill us, Hester’s driving might.

When the road straightens out, I peel myself away from the door.

“Where are we going?” I ask. The big wide world can feel huge and terrifying if you’ve stayed in one place all your life.

“I have a place. It’s warded against hunters. We’ll be safe there, provided we reach it.”

That doesn’t fill me with happy thoughts. “Let’s make sure we do,” I mutter.

Her lack of fear surprises me. Discretely, I sniff the air, trying to catch her scent.

There is wolf there, a hint of it, but something else, like the air after a storm.

She smells like me.

“You’re smelling my magic,” Hester says. So much for being discreet. “You don’t need to be afraid, Tessa. I really don’t mean you any harm.”

“No offense, but I don’t know you,” I say. “And I’m starting to think I’m crazy for getting into a truck with someone who charged through my mind without so much as a ‘hi, mind if I come in?’ ”

“No, you don’t know me, but I am a friend. Your father didn’t want to admit what you are and what your life would be if others knew about you, but you should never have been out here exposed like this.”

I frown, staring out of the windshield at the path cut by the headlights.

It is remote out here, far from civilization. I don’t see any house, farmsteads or any sign of life in fact.

I can understand why my father chose the area for our pack. We have the freedom to run without being caught by humans, to hunt, and to live in peace.

Or at least we did.

That peace will never be recovered. My pack will always feel the trauma of what happened today.

I won’t be there to mourn our losses and grieve for the wolves who sacrificed their lives for me.

My wolf whines, wanting us to go back and comfort our pack. I haven’t dared to turn on the pack bond yet, scared of what I may hear.

“I don’t understand any of this,” I admit, my voice cracking. “I know I’m different. I’ve always known that. I could never shift, and I didn't smell the same as my pack members, but what am I?”

Hester focuses on the road, her fingers tight around the steering wheel. “Your father never told you?”

“He told me I was special, but nothing else. I thought he was trying to comfort me after my failed first-moon ceremony.”

“We’re cut from the same cloth, you and I, born from the same bloodline.”

I don’t know what that means. “What bloodline?”

“Revna and Torsten.”

I sit up straighter at the name. I recognize it from the stories our pack elders would tell us about how our kind came to be.

It is a nice story, one of my favorites in fact, but it is just that—a story. “Torsten? The same guy who was given the wolf pelts?”

“That’s the one.”

“But Torsten and his pelts are not real.”

“Oh, it’s very real. It’s part of wolf history—your history too. Your mother—and you—are from Revna and Torsten’s line.”

I sit up straighter, wanting answers, even as I fear them. My father told me very little about my mother while I was growing up.

She was never part of my life. I don’t remember a single thing about her, and my father didn’t have any pictures or keepsakes to help me feel connected to her.

I always got the impression it hurt him to talk about her, but I wasn’t sure why.

The only thing I knew for sure was that she wasn’t from our pack, though no one could tell me anything about her, not even the elder wolves, which always struck me as odd.

My mom had a child with their alpha and no one knew shit about it.

But Hester is talking about Mom as if she knew her.

Does she… did she?

“Do you know my mom?” I can’t keep the hope from my voice.

Hester gives me a sad smile. “No, I’m sorry, Tessa. I don’t, but you are a tau wolf, which means your mother carried those genes too. Likely she will have been one as well.”

What the hell is a tau wolf?

I have heard of many wolf ranks and names— alphas, betas, deltas, gammas, omegas—but never that. That phrase has never once been uttered in my presence. “I’m feeling a little lost here,” I admit. “I’ve never heard of a tau wolf.”

The car rumbles as it descends the mountain pass. I watch the side windows for movement, splitting my gaze between the landscape outside the truck and Hester, but see nothing.

If the wolves I scented are following, I can only hope they have lost our trail when we got into the truck.

“Most shifters haven’t. It’s not something that is widely discussed among wolves or witches.” She leans against the door, resting one hand idly on the steering wheel. “Revna isn’t talked about as much as Torsten, though her role in our existence and the existence of wolf shifters is the only one that matters.” Hester glances at me before returning her attention to the front window. “She was a Seidr in Denmark, born around 700 AD. We’d call her a seeress, a witch in our day, and back then she was feared even by her own kind.” I listen, unsure what to make of it. I’ve never heard about Revna. “We are of her line. We carry her DNA in our blood, making us part wolf, part witch.”

“If she’s a witch, how did we get the wolf part?”

“The story goes that Revna loved Jarl Leif’s son, Torsten. She gifted him a pelt, which enabled him and other wearers to become beasts while they had it on their backs. They could run, scent, and fight like wolves. Torsten used the pelt and over time became more wolf than human. At first, he could only change with the pelt, but eventually, he didn’t need that either.”

I have so many questions about how a pelt could change a human into an animal.

I’ve seen so many of my pack members change into beasts in front of me that I don’t doubt that it’s possible, but it still sounds weird.

“How?”

“Magic, honey. Revna was powerful and she was in love. Torsten didn’t feel the same. He used her for what she could give him. He rejected her advances, but it was already too late by then. Revna was pregnant, and the babe in her belly was a wolf infused with witch magic—a tau wolf. Torsten didn’t know about the baby until she was born, but that line flourished despite his efforts to end—”

Hester slams on the brakes, her body stiffening. The seatbelt around my body is all that prevents me from being thrown through the windshield. It tightens over my chest, stopping the air in my lungs for a moment before the truck stops abruptly, and I’m flung back into my seat.

My gaze goes to the windshield. Standing in the road, illuminated by the headlights, is a wolf. His head is low, the hackles on his back are raised, and his teeth are showing.

“Do you know that wolf?” Hester asks, her voice shaking.

I don’t recognize him as one of my pack, so I shake my head. Bile coats the back of my throat as we stare at him, waiting for his move.

“What’s he doing?” I whisper.

“Waiting for backup,” Hester says.

Two more wolves pad out of the undergrowth at the side of the road.

They are huge beasts.

My skin prickles as I stare at them, my pulse starting to race. We can’t fight wolves this big. The ooze strength and something else, something far more terrifying: hate .

Their eyes glow strangely as they catch the light from the headlights and the moon.

I swallow audibly. This isn’t going to end well for us.

“What do we do?” I ask, my voice barely a whisper.

Hester’s mouth pulls into a snarl. “Survive.”

She hits the gas and the back tires scream as the rubber struggles to gain traction on the asphalt.

I grip the dashboard as the truck hurtles toward the wolves. They hold their ground, as if they’re not going to move aside, and my heart races.

The wolves are big enough to damage the vehicle, and without the safety of the truck, we’re screwed.

Hester doesn’t seem to care about that.

She keeps driving right at them.

At the last second, the wolves dart aside, and we go through without touching them.

Hester's chest heaves as her eyes go to the rearview mirror. “They’re persistent. We need to get off the mountain.”

“They’re going to keep following us.” I hate how much my voice wobbles. I don’t want to sound weak, but I’m scared.

“I told you—they can’t get to us if we make it to the sanctuary.”

“And how far is this sanctuary?”

“An hour away.”

I wince. There’s no chance in hell we can outrun three wolf hunters for an hour. “Have a little faith,” Hester says as if she has read my mind.

I want to, but I’m also realistic. “They tracked us this far.”

“As soon as we get on the highway, I can really hit the gas. These winding roads are slowing us down. ”

I hold the dashboard as she takes a corner so fast, I’m sure we’re on two wheels instead of four.

I close my eyes, wondering if this is how I'll die, not at the jaws of three hunter wolves.

Hester mutters under her breath, and I’m pretty sure whatever she’s saying isn’t English. It sounds like some kind of incantation. “What are you doing?”

She doesn’t answer me but keeps mumbling. The air around us is charged with electricity, and I can feel something starting to surge and grow.

Magic, I realize. She’s calling on magic.

I didn’t know we could do that.

When she finishes speaking, it is as if something slams against my awareness.

My wolf whimpers and lies down, her head on her paws.

“That was magic, right?”

Hester nods. “A cloaking spell. I don’t know if it will work while we’re moving so fast, but I don’t know what else to try. I hoped they’d lose our scent once we got in the truck.”

“Then let’s hope it holds,” I say.

I keep my gaze locked on the windshield, the side window, and behind us as Hester drives in the direction of this sanctuary she’s trying to get us to.

We’ve been traveling for about ten minutes with no sign of danger when I get a vision. It slams through me, taking me by surprise.

One of the wolves in front of the truck, his teeth snapping and his snout covered in blood.

As I come out of it, I know I only have seconds to react. I see a junction up ahead. “Turn left,” I order.

Hester glances at me, but she does as I ask.

While we’re moving up the new road, I twist in my seat, peering through the back window into the soupy darkness. I don’t see anything moving, but I know they are still on our trail.

We need to get to wherever we’re going and fast.

“You had a vision?” Hester guesses. I nod, gripping the edge of the seat. “Let me know if you have another.”

Neither of us speaks until we make it out of the mountains and onto the highway.

I feel like I can breathe again, even though we’re no safer than we were before.

Hester starts to relax too, though she keeps glancing between the mirror and the road. The journey feels like it takes forever, but eventually, small towns give way to rural, empty landscapes once more.

We’re driving back through trees, passing lakes and mountains. Civilization fades away again as we cruise down an empty road.

My heart continues to race until we turn up on a dirt track. I sit straighter, my gaze everywhere, trying to see everything. I can see the magic wards, meant to keep our enemies out, as we go through the gates.

The track goes through trees, so I can’t see what lies at the end of it until we’re nearly on top of it—a huge farmstead, with a wraparound porch and white wood cladding. It’s set back from the track, a double garage to the side.

Behind it, I can see lights and what looks like cabins. There are at least five or six, maybe more.

Hester stops the truck in front of the garage and cuts the engine, right before leaning her head against the steering wheel. “That was tense.”

Tense? It was terrifying .

“We’re safe here?” I ask, looking around dubiously. There’s not even a wall around the property.

But the magic…

I’d felt its power as we drove through the gates.

“Yeah. We’re safe.” Hester turns to me. “You need to sever your pack bond. They know where you are.”

“No!” I rebuke. “I’m not doing that!”

She winces, and a sympathetic look crosses her face. “You have to. If you keep the pack link, you’ll be drawn back to them, or the hunters will come for you again. I know it’s hard, but you have to leave them behind.”

It hurts. I don’t want to give up my connection to my family, to my father, but I know I have to.

“I can’t,” I whisper, unable to hide the pain in my voice.

“You can. You must. No one else needs to die.”

Her statement makes me realize I have no choice.

I close my eyes and my wolf whines as I tear apart the bond I shared with my pack. It makes me groan and fold over, holding my chest as pain slices through me. Fuck. I can’t breathe.

“Easy, Tessa,” Hester soothes me as I remove all links to my past.

I gasp. “I didn’t know that would hurt.”

“I’m sorry. I hate that you had to do that. Most of us here don’t have family or a pack, so I didn’t consider it might hurt you to do that.”

“It’s okay,” I say, rubbing my sternum, trying to disperse the pain. “I know it had to be done.”

Hester sighs. “You’re a strong bitch, Tessa Williams.” She tucks her hair behind her ear as the front door to the main house opens, and a girl about my age steps out, pulling her cardigan around her body as if to ward off the cold. “You want to meet some tau wolves? ”

My brows draw together. “There are more of us?”

“A few.” She points through the windshield. “That’s Apryle. She’s been here for six months.”

My lips tug into a grin. “Then let’s go and meet her.”