It wasn’t enough to kill it, but it made it stumble. I ran forward without thinking, throwing my body weight into it in tandem with Phoenix, so we both took it to the ground.
This time, when he lifted his axe and swung, it took the beast in the face. And when it tried to raise its paw to swipe at him again, my boot slammed down on those massive claws to hold it still.
The wetthunkof metal cleaving a skull, hacking into sticky fur and thicker things, filled the air. It carried on past the sound of gurgling coming from the beast’s lungs.
It carried on until the animal beneath us had nothing but a pile of so much blood and bone and meat where its head had been.
Phoenix only stopped hacking when my hand landed on his shoulder.
“It’s dead.”
He turned to me—his eyes were wide, his breath coming in heaving gasps. When he opened his mouth like he was going to say something, the words were cut off with another shout.
One of the others in his group.
“Shit, Cora has a broken arm.”
That meant that she was still breathing, and I wondered if they realized she was luckier than she should have been.
She should havedied, but Phoenix had run at the bear like he’d known he could win the fight all along.
“We should—” His hand catching me by the throat as I tried to turn stopped me. My eyes widened in shock as he pulled me closer. I thought he meant to kiss me, but he tilted my face up to look at me instead. I knew I was probably a mess—soaked in blood and sweat, but he didn’t seem to care.
He brought his hand up and ran his palm across the curve of my jaw, and his pupils dilated at whatever he saw.
“There you are,” he murmured. I didn’t realize what he meant until he drifted his hand across my cheek, painting my skin with the blood of our kill.
The beast we’d taken downtogether.
The possessiveness in his gaze as he slid his fingers through the blood and pressed it over my brow, my temple, my eye was almost too much. He was like a man possessed, a man seeing his favorite toy for the first time. I watched him in half horror, half fascination as he carefully drew a line across my collarbone and dropped his hand, coating his palm with blood from the wound on his chest so he could wrap his fingers around my throat.
He was painting me. Like a raider. Like a monster.
Like him. Likehis.
It almost felt right—I was here. I was acting like the monster those scientists had made me…
And I was ready to live a life where I never had to beAubreyagain.
Good dog was fine.
Killer felt almost familiar.
But I was through with Aubrey Malcolm. I couldn’t be in this place and remember all the waysAubreywanted to hope—the ways I’d thought I’d settle down here with…
No, I couldn’t bethatAubrey anymore.
I could feel something strange drifting through me—I’d worked with him perfectly, like we were two halves of a whole. I’d saved him.
I’d let him paint me.
It felt like something in me was changing, and I didn’t know what to do with it.
That sensation spread as the rest of his group spilled into the plaza, and one of the men stepped forward. He had red tinged water in a container, and he used it to soak a cloth so we could wipe ourselves clean.
I didn’t try to wipe the blood off my face, and I knew Phoenix noticed.
“I’ve never seen you fight like that with someone else,” the man said, and Phoenix’s lips twitched up into a grin.
