Heart's Price (MxM)

Chapter 54

One.

Behind me, from back at the house, I hear a blood-chilling howl.

It's not the howl of a wolf, or a dog, or any animal I've ever heard before.

It's multi-toned, low and long, rising on the air and carrying a promise of death in its unnatural notes.

A demon's howl.

As if Thom wasn't bad enough, now this.

My breath comes quick and shallow, my heart racing fast and light as I sprint at full-tilt along the paved pathway beneath the bare branches of sleeping trees.

Above, the full moon lights the sky behind high tattered clouds that fly like torn rags across its face. The air that fills my nose and lungs carries the scent of this season of decay—of fungal blooms and lush moss, and of rotting wood and layers of fallen leaves, beneath which move the myriad small, creeping things that call the forest floor their home.

It's the sort of fine, mist-laced night that in other times, in better circumstances, I would have liked to turn Wolf and sprint over the open fields, hunt with my brothers and sisters up in the pine-clad mountain slopes, and serenade the moon from atop a bald, stone-capped hill: the delights of a Wolf in top form.

Tonight, though, as Ambrose noted earlier, I am not in top form.

It's nearly four in the morning. I've already been shot by my ex, saved by my Mate, scared half to death by his creepy undying 'father,' and now there's a demon after me. What more could go wrong?

This thought has barely crossed my mind when—of course—my bad luck catches up with me.

My glasses have fogged from my breath in the cold night air and, unable to see, I miss a bend in the path, hurtle over the edge and tumble down a steep embankment of slippery mud and soft, fallen leaves, fetching up hard against a tree. My ribs take the brunt of the impact, and I lie on my back a moment, breathless and stunned.

Above me, the bare, interlaced branches of the trees look like skeletal black fingers against the moonlit sky, and I struggle to fill my lungs with air against the pain seizing the muscles in my chest.

At last, I manage it and gulp down a few deep breaths of damp air while fighting the urge to cough. Not far off, I hear something moving through the brush, snapping twigs and crunching through the frost-stiffened leaves as it comes.

Gaining my feet, I back away, a thrill of fear tingling hot and cold over my skin.

I'm close to the edge of the lake now, my bare feet sinking a few inches into the oozing dark mud, the temperature barely above freezing, and find myself faced with a new dilemma—to run, or to hide, and which of these two terrors would be worse?

Would I rather be run down and taken like prey, or be hunted like a rabbit in a hole, my terror increasing moment by moment as my pursuer nears, step by step?

I wait a heartbeat too long, and just as I make my desperate choice—to break cover and flee along the shore—something moves beyond the screen of brush at the edge of the trees.

Something huge, black, shadowy, and not entirely corporeal.

It's about to emerge from the dense thicket and spot me, when I hear a quiet disturbance in the water at my back—a whisper and a splash—and then something thick and scaly whips around my chest, encircling me in tight coils, pinning my arms to my sides  and covering my mouth before pulling me backwards off my feet and into the lake.

Quick and quiet as a leaping fish, I'm pulled under with barely a ripple. Freezing water rushes over me and darkness closes round, and with my mouth covered, I can't even take a proper breath in my surprise.