Lexa
Kaleb adjusts the loops and straps keeping my shifting dress in place, his fingers biting through the damp, rainy cold. There was a shift in the air last night, after a day spent mostly in solitude at Silas’s house. I’d spent most of the day looking out of the window, watching the trees sway between manor houses and in the small parks, all of them tinged with gold–the first signs of autumn.
I missed the harvest.
Kaleb’s touch is firm as he moves down my body to my sandals, checking my frame from my neck to the very tips of my toes. I’m allowed a weapon of choice tonight but only as long as I can carry it. I doubt the king knows about my use of a shifting halter, which Lis was able to craft in a matter of hours. I sent Kaleb with a sketch and measurements when he returned to the Glade without me yesterday morning.
I eye the weapons laid out on a table across the room. We’re not in the city anymore. We’re far outside the walls cutting off the capital from the endless woods and plains beyond. This building looks and feels like an old warehouse. It’s wide and cavernous, empty save for rows and rows of massive shelving units. I can taste sea air, but I didn’t get a glimpse of my surroundings before I was brought here. I believe we’re near–or at–a port. Kaleb came to fetch me just before sunset and brought me to the arena, where a bag was fixed over my head, and an hour later, I was here.
Condensation drips down massive pipes directly behind Kaleb’s head, falling into his hair. I inhale deeply again, trying to catch a taste of what’s beyond the stale confines of the warehouse. The sea, for sure. All I can smell is salt air.
“Don’t worry about the sandals,” I whisper, reaching discreetly to run my fingers through his hair. My eyes dart to the guards situated on the far side of the room, their backs to a large, sliding metal door. I’m the only victor here. Meg and the other guy must be somewhere else.
“You’ll be able to feel your wolf until sunrise,” Kaleb says almost absently, untying the leather straps that hold my sandals in place. He weaves them back up my calves like he just needs something to do with his hands. “Or until the king calls an end to the game, whichever comes first.”
He rises, and my fingers fall from his hair. Kaleb’s eyes meet mine, a muted hazel-gold in the dim fluorescent light. He adjusts the loops running down the center of my dress, tightening them. When I shift, they’ll pull open down my sides and belly, creating a web of thin, but generally effective, armor that I can tighten again the second I shift back to my human form. It will keep me clothed as long as I don’t lose it.
“How do people watch the games when they’re not in the arena?” I ask just to fill the void of silence.
Kaleb moves on to my hair, brushing the loose curls away from my shoulders, twisting the small braids back to hold my hair away from my face. “The king has eyes everywhere. There will be projections all over the city and in homes.”
“Will you watch me?” I ask, meeting his eyes.
Just like the autumn shift, something has changed between us. An impasse. A quiet, gentle resolution. There’s no point in fighting this anymore–what’s budding between us. We’ll deal with the heartbreak later. For now, we’re here. Two bodies in the same place at the same time, bonded.
But his skin is still free of my mark, and I regret it. I should have marked him by now.
I will when I make it out of this game and come home to him.
I swear I will.
“I likely won’t have a choice in the matter.”
“If you could choose–”
“I wouldn’t watch.”
He doesn’t need to elaborate. His eyes say everything. Watching his mate fight out in the open, in an unfamiliar wilderness, is not something he would willingly put himself through. When he grips my upper arm, I feel it in his touch as well. He’s holding himself back right now, practically thrumming with the need to cut through every guard waiting for the start of the games to free me, to stop this from happening, but he can’t.
They would kill us both. Slowly, I gather. A public execution if we so much as step out of line.
A horn sounds somewhere in the distance. Kaleb continues his thorough examination of me, his face set in grim determination. He’s never seen me hunt. He wouldn’t be this high-strung if he had. It’s my favorite thing to do.
“My mother taught me how to hunt. The moment I was steady enough on my feet, I had a bow in my hand. Knife work came next. I was maybe ten when I went on my first real hunt with her, the only person in the group unable to shift. I got a deer. It was my first kill. My dad walked around with me on his shoulders that night while the pack blessed me and celebrated the moment. I feel like that moment made it clear who I’d be in the future.”
Another horn blares, and the guards shuffle–not toward us, yet. It becomes clear we’re being staggered–released a few minutes apart, and based on the way the sound traveled, we’re being let out of these warehouses at different points of entry to whatever’s beyond the steel beams and rusted pipes.
“Your parents will be proud of you when you return,” he says, but his voice wavers, tightening.
I grip his forearm. “You’ll meet them soon.”
I don’t give any stock to the grim look in his eyes. I focus on his mouth, which twitches into the curve of the only smile he can manage. It’s gone before I can blink.
“Come,” one of the guards bellows from the far side of the warehouse over the sudden grate of a wide, industrial door rolling up to the ceiling. The sound rakes through me, foreign compared to the hammers and rolling conversation of the Glade and the silence of the manor. Kaleb takes my arm and walks me to the weapons cache, then lets go and steps back, putting several feet of distance between us.
A fae guard replaces his position, and I realize with a start this is it. The last game has begun.
I look back at Kaleb as a sweeping, ethereal pull yanks at my subconscious before blooming into raw power that thrums through my body and settles deep in the marrow of my bones. My chest tightens to the point of pain as my wolf groggily claws to life, and the mate bond settles around my heart once more. It’s not the snap I experienced last time. It’s settled, a warm presence in my chest, filling a void I hadn’t realized was there.
Kaleb feels it, too. He holds my gaze, his fingers curling into fists at his sides, but the second the fae guard grabs me and drags me closer to the cache, his pupils expand so rapidly his eyes go black as pitch, his body going so rigid I can see every line of muscle beneath his clothing.
“Don’t,” I say down the bond. “Please, be safe.”
I can feel his fury through the delicate strings wrapped around my heart, but Kaleb is the most controlled person I’ve ever met, even for an Alpha, the most powerful wolves of all.
There’s a shuffling behind me. I stare at the weapons. Kaleb grunts in pain, but footsteps cover his obvious attempts to break free. I know he’s being herded out of the warehouse. I know the second I look over my shoulder again he’ll be gone, and this will all be far too real.
So I choose a weapon. A spear. In his honor.
A spear I will use to get my kill, which will not be an animal or beast of the woods now visible beyond the warehouse, the first trees cloaked in fog under the spray of dim, gray light.
I will be hunting Meg.
I assume she’s also hunting me.
I grip the spear. The smooth metal tip sings as I artfully swing it over my back and into the halter. It’s shorter than the spears Kaleb used to train me, which will work to my advantage. It’s still lighter than I’d like, but my other options are swords and short blades. I wasn’t offered a bow, which was likely the king’s doing.
The second the weapon is secured, more guards step forward, and I’m thrust into the sliver of moonlight dusting over the wide, gravel driveway of what is indeed a warehouse situated roughly a quarter mile from a port. The sea stretches as far as the eye can see, the water calm and glassy. I watch the horizon, noticing small islands, their lights like muted stars. Not Eastonia. Not even close. I have no idea what direction I’m facing, but it doesn’t matter. Before I can even get my bearings, I’m shoved forward until I’m tucked in the trees, and a strange feeling sweeps through me when an archway appears in the woods, ancient stone coated in moss and vines creating a kind of vortex into the shadows.
I’m supposed to go through it. I feel that in my bones.
“You’re meant to kill something,” one of the guards says in broken Dead Tongue.
“Does it matter what it is?” I ask, doubting it’s as simple as a rabbit, but he stares at me quizzically, not understanding the language.
Another horn blares nearby, and I’m shoved forward until my toes are caught in the shadow of the archway to hell, and the guards immediately step back like they’re afraid to come any closer.
I look back at them, wondering if I could just kill them all instead and make a run for the port, for a boat and…
I won’t leave Kaleb and his people behind. I have vengeance to enact. Meg is in these woods somewhere, and if I’m taking a life tonight, it’ll be hers. One of my own.
The tragedy of it rocks me to my center. It shouldn’t have come to this.
I move toward the archway and step through it. When I turn around to face the guards again, they’re replaced by endless dark woods, the archway nothing but an archaic structure decaying with time. The port is gone. The lights are gone. The warehouse is nowhere to be seen.
I step back through the archway, testing it, running back in the direction I came, which gives way to just… trees. Nothing else.
I don’t think finding my way out of here is part of the game.
A rustling to my left catches my attention. I nearly draw the spear then remember I have my wolf back. I shift, and it’s… horrible. Pain guts me to the core as my body folds. My shifting dress, halter, and spear stay intact, but my limbs feel like they’re broken in several places. It takes me several aching minutes to feel normal again, but my head throbs as I stretch my front legs, my talons digging into the soft forest ground. New scents rush at me, temporarily taking over my other senses. I wonder how long it’s been since I was in my wolf form because it doesn’t feel right. It feels utterly wrong, actually, like I’m weaker this way when it should be the other way around.
It’s probably the king’s doing.
Something large barrels out of the woods in my direction before I have a chance to catch it with sight and scent. A gaping black void funnels through the trees directly in front of me, moaning and shrieking.
I rear back, shaken to awareness, as a beast of mist appears. The same creature that killed so many on the beach in Teshka. My blood runs cold, my heart leaping in my throat and dying from fear.
I run.