Page 37 of The Wolf’s Appetite (The Lycans #8)

KANE

Months later

T he night air was brittle, the kind that stung your lungs and burnt your skin.

The forest stretched wide and black around me, every shadow a potential threat. I’d been walking this perimeter for hours, boots crunching over frost-hardened earth, the cold gnawing at my exposed skin.

The Guard, vampire covens, witches and warlocks, and other Otherworld factions had been taking shifts here for months now, ever since we’d located the exact spot of the ripped portal.

The breach itself wasn’t visible anymore—at least, not to the naked eye—but you could feel it if you stood too close.

It was a tingling on your skin, like you toucheda live wire and felt the electricity humming through you.

There was a low hum that rang in the wards and a light smell of sulfur lingering in the air.

And it felt like you were being watched by something unseen.

The witches said the wards were holding, but we all knew they were temporary, and we didn’t know what the fuck we were dealing with. How could you fight an enemy when you didn’t know what the hell they looked like and what weapon they used to combat it?

A bandage over a wound didn’t mean it would heal. I stopped in front of where the rip was. I couldn’t see the tear, but I sure as fuck felt it. I closed my eyes, feeling the dark magic seeping out from it.

“You’re a real motherfucker, you know that?” I said under my breath, opened my eyes, and gave the space in front of me both middle fingers.

I started my patrol again, sensing the other males also on patrol. Some were miles away; others were close enough that I smelled their scents as if they stood right beside me. I continued to move in a slow circuit, eyes tracking every tree line and taking in even the small shift in the wind.

The silence of evil and danger and everyone getting back to their normal routines made me uneasy as fuck. It was unnatural. I felt it under my skin .

Because things were too quiet.

It was moments like this I was glad as fuck I wasn’t mated. I had to worry only about myself and those closest to me. Having a female of my own meant I wouldn’t be able to focus on anything else. Protecting her would be the only thing I could focus on, and emotion fucked up a male.

My brother Sebastian and cousin Adryan were proof of that.

So yeah, I was glad I was mate-less. It made things really fucking easy for me.

Evil didn’t just stop. It waited. And the last thing I wanted was to have to worry about my fated mate being put in harm’s way.

All I needed to worry about was taking down whatever the fuck this was, even if it killed me.