Page 27 of WitchBorn
“Not really into sharing,” I said. “You should have sought the original fox.” Kiran, the Spring king, had two mates, and that worked great for them. I wanted a relationship more like the Summer king and his alpha. A yin and yang. “If I’m your mate, how is he yours?”
If Finn belonged to the Autumn king, why did the realm keep trying to kill him?
The dragon towered over us, shadows twisting and dripping. Then it shrank, shifting and churning, darkness splitting and coloring until before me stood the man I’d seen the Summer king callApa. Wolf King, Alpha of Alpha’s, Monster in his own right. The wolves whispered of the terrifying thing he could be. Handsome and sculpted like male flesh in a fantasy novel, he’d left behind his will to hide what he was, not ordinary or in any way mortal. This was fae, power of a king, nightmare and angel all in one.
Too perfect. Wasn’t that what Sebastian thought whenever he encountered the tempting forms of the divine? I could sculpt my glamour to show beauty and perfection like this, but it would be a lie. All glamour hid something, and this man, the wolf king, buried something beneath the perfection.
“Mate,” he said, voice gruff, more like a wolf’s howl than a man used to speaking. He reached for me, fingertips caressing my face, careful, yet rough, as if he’d forgotten what it was to touch another.
I fought to hide my flinch, but his touch brought a warmth of magic, and a pool of quick rising heat to my groin. He could take my will, force me to my knees in submission. I was a simple beast after all. The Stag blood would rise and demand either intimacy or death. My mortal soul could scream and flail in protest all it wanted. The magic made me little more than a slave. I expected him to lean in and overwhelm me with endless waves of lust. An easy way to mate, perhaps, but the swirl of his magic retreated, as Finn’s arms wrapped around me from behind.
“Please don’t hurt him,” Finn asked, his body spooned against my back, cold and shivering from the water. A human shouldn’t have the strength to stand before the power that lapped at me in waves of excruciating need. I longed to sink to my knees and bow in submission despite knowing the pain it would bring. “Don’t make him, please,” Finn begged, holding me up. He shivered at my back, a grounding touch of comfort as we stood before absolute power.
“Mate,” the king said again.
“But does he want that?” Finn asked. “Doesn’t he get a choice?”
The king snarled. His fingers slid over my throat, threatening and pulsing with scorching heat, but Finn held tight. I swallowed, uncertain, body betraying me with physical desire while my mind wove circles to justify my feelings. Fate left few choices. The Summer king made me hope love was necessary for that equation, but faced with fate myself, I suspected, like death, fated love would hardly be kind.
He could have choked me, caused pain, or added fear to his firm grip on my throat, but he caressed my jawline with his thumb as if studying me. His golden gaze blazed as our eyes met, and I sensed his desperation, but couldn’t pinpoint why.
“Mate,” he said again, more a whisper than a growl. His hand slipped away and the water swirled up around him in an enormous splash that carried him and all his darkness back to the depths of darkness.
Everything stilled except my pounding heart. The tiny creek returned, and Finn shivered at my back, holding tight, face pressed into my hair. The fear we shared added a sour unease to the air. I wanted to shove him away and pretend the last few minutes had all been a nightmare, but I knew if he let me go right then, I’d have unraveled.
Twenty
WESLEY
“Finn?” I asked, my heart still pounding, body confused with lingering lust and terror. Never a fun combination. He tugged me away from the creek’s edge, until we stood in the last narrow band of sunlight.
The light blasted away the lingering desire, and the fear faded as the forest settled into familiar, though eerie stillness. I blinked back tears at the brightness as my head gave a warning throb.
Had the bit about the wolf and the child been a Vision? I rarely saw the past, but my mind churned with questions, desperate for answers, yet fearing them at the same time. Finn had shared the nightmare of the realm devoured by shadows, had he seen this Vision as well?
“Did you dream of the child and the shadow wolf, too?”
“Yes,” Finn whispered hesitantly.
“Finn…”
“My moms…” Finn whispered. “Amber and Camille. I don’t remember any of that, but I was adopted by them. They said I’d been wandering in the woods.” He dropped into silence for a few seconds, arms strong around me, clinging as if he needed to hold me to keep himself upright.
I sucked in a narrow breath, heart squeezing. “The shadow wolf protected you from the Hunt.” The familiar and terrifying wail of the icy monsters left a lifetime of bitter memories for any who survived crossing their path. I’d led them away from the Summer king. Ran until I thought I’d die with them chasing me through the unraveling chaos of Underhill, and I’d never forget their howl. “The fae fucking Hunt was after you as a kid?”
“I didn’t know,” he said. “Sometimes I dreamed of the wail, or of something lunging at me in the dark. As a kid, I had an unexplainable fear of the woods. It’s one of the reasons I went into ghost hunting, to face my fears. I thought if I proved to myself none of it was real, I could overcome the trauma.”
And still wound up yanked into a fae realm at the mercy of greater power. He was lucky he hadn’t been caught by the Hunt.Why had the shadow wolf protected him? Why had the Hunt been after him? Thousands of stories of changelings, and I’d never met one. The idea that a fae would leave its child in the mortal realm and take a powerless mortal one in return, sounded crazy to me. Mortals stumbled themselves into slavery to the fae all the time without having to be taken as children. But maybe I was wrong.
And the Hunt didn’t trade kids, they hunted to devour magic.
“They never found your parents? Or why you were in the woods?”
“No one claimed me,” Finn said. “I had a couple of foster homes that lasted a few days, weeks at most. Had night terrors and a lot of other issues as a kid, but it was my moms who took me in the end and raised me. They had to fight for custody, but they loved me and accepted my weirdness.”
“Do you recall what sort of weirdness? Other than the nightmares. Did you see ghosts as a kid?”
He hesitated.