The Heirs

CHAPTER 27 - COLLATERAL DAMAGE

Why did he need so much privacy that he had to go to the other room to talk? It was not the king because Xanthos answered the king's phone right in front of her. It couldn't be his friends either because they had still not come around after the fallout. Who else could it be?

As Cyane pondered, she placed the pointed triangle-shaped slices as the ears and then set up a black grape as the snout. She still needed to set up the mane and as she looked at the grocery items that Xanthos brought earlier today, she was pleased to see a box of black dates.

Opening the seal, she picked a couple of them, threw away the seeds and began to thinly slice them.

When she heard the door to the other apartment being opened, she relaxed a little and arranged the now thinly sliced dates as tufts of hair on the tips of the lion's ears all the while waiting for Xanthos to walk in.

He walked straight towards her and she smiled at him, "I have done another. A lion... see" she said with a grin and pushed the plate in front of him.

He stared at the plate and then looked at her with a questioning brow. The grin on her face evaporated when she saw her art on the plate.

"That's not a Lion" Xanthos murmured amusedly as he pulled out his phone and snapped a photo of her latest food art.

"No" Cyane agreed as she stared at the food art. Her heart began to pound in her chest and she felt uncomfortable watching her food art because the eyes of the creature in her art were red.

Blood red.

She had to put the green grapes as the lion's eyes. Why the hell did she use strawberry for eyes?

"It looks like a Lynx" Xanthos mused, "The pointed ears and all. Lynx are common in the foothills of the Sylvan mountains, aren't they?" he asked as Cyane continued to stare at her artwork in horror.

She had seen those creatures before. Not the Lynx but the one she had just unknowingly set up on Xan's plate. Where? She could not remember. But she had seen them.

Flashes came to her then. Of screams and tears. Of blood and fear.

"Are you alright?" she heard Xanthos asking as she continued staring at the eyes.

Those eyes.

She recalled seeing a flash of those blood-red eyes and she tried hard to remember where, but she couldn't.

"Cyane," Xanthos called, his strong arms wrapped around her shoulders to pull her towards him.

"Red eyes" Cyane whispered. "They have red coloured eyes."

"Who?"

"They. They have it" Cyane gasped incoherently, her amethyst eyes lost.

___

A stunned Xanthos cupped her pale cheeks with one hand and forced her to look at him. Her skin was cold and growling, he pressed her against his chest. In the two weeks, she had been with him, he had never seen her like this and it worried him.

"Look at me. Cyane" he called as his wolf howled inside him and paced anxiously, wondering what was happening to his mate. When calling her name didn't help, he brushed aside her dark hair and nuzzled his nose against his mark on her neck.

As his wolf tried to reach out to her, he closed his eyes and tightly wrapped his arms around her waist, so there wasn't even space for air to travel in between them.

He rubbed her back and gently ran his hand on her head until her rigid frame eventually softened in his arms and she came back to the land of the living.