Another second passes. Then he exhales and settles back into the seat. “Well, what are you waiting for?” he questions, gaze forward. “Let’s go.”
I don’t wait another heartbeat. I throw the black Escalade into gear and stomp on the gas.My wolf’s momentary relief is shadowed by the panic eating away at both of us. I try to tell myself that this is overkill, a knee-jerk reaction from being away from my scent match, but I’m so far past seeing any kind of reason.
I need to go back. I need to find her. I need to hold her.
The looping need is a rhythmic mantra in my head as the trees whip by us in green blurs and I break every traffic law between here and Ashvale.
The drive back is a haze.
The urgency raking its claws within me isn’t easing like I thought it would. If anything, it’s only getting worse. You’d think getting closer to her would help, that the narrowing proximity would settle whatever part of me is spiraling, but no. The iron grip on my chest doesn’t loosen. The frenzied panic doesn’t let up.
My wolf battles within me, throwing the entirety of his weight against the chains of my control. Sweat drips down my spine from the excursion it’s taking to keep him at bay. I keep silently promising him that I’m going back, that we’re getting close, but he won’t hear me.
We’re less than ten miles out when it happens.
A voice cleaves through the storm, the sweet sound silencing the chaos wrecking my mind and body for a single moment.
“Rennick. Please help me.”
I lose the ability to breathe, and if I were standing, the fear-soaked desperation in each syllable would have taken me to my knees. Instead, I find myself wrenching the steering wheel to the side again. The SUV fishtails, tires screeching against the asphalt as the vehicle skids to a wide, lurching stop. Crooked, we sit halfway in the lane and the shoulder of the curved road. I don’t care, can’t be bothered to pull forward more.
I don’t question it. Don’t take a single moment to wonder if it was a figment of my imagination or a trick of my anxious mind because Iknowthis voice. It whispered to me in my dreams for months, pleading for me to remember her, to choose her. I foolishly ignored it those times, but I refuse to make that same mistake again. Because I understand the significance of this honeyed voice, and, now, it’s calling to me.
My mateis crying out for me.
I can’t say if my wolf finally overpowers me or if I surrender first, but in the end, it doesn’t matter.
Canaan shouts my name, but it barely registers through the thundering roar between my ears. The shift isn’t smooth and it sure as hell isn’t clean. It’s an eruption. Bones snap and realign in brutal succession. Tendons and muscle tear like frayed rope before reknitting into a new form. There’s no buildup or time to brace for the familiar burn and twisting pain.
My wolf doesn’t ask. It’s a hostile, violent takeover. One that leaves me, for the second time in our shared existence, little more than a passenger in my own body. The usual give and take, the dichotomy of control, is gone. He gives me nothing.
The windshield never stood a chance.
Glass explodes as my wolf launches himself through it, landing in a crouch on the pavement before taking off for the tree line. My second-in-command yells after me. My wolf doesn’t stop or wait. His paws dig into the forest floor, his muscles already burning from yesterday’s long-distance run, but hepushes harder, devouring the space that separates him and his omega.
Behind, Canaan, now also shifted, sprints after me. My wolf doesn’t give him the chance to catch up. Moving like a creature possessed, my surroundings are vague blurs in my peripheral vision as we clear miles faster than I’ve ever moved in my entire life. Adrenaline and desperation giving my body the fuel it needs to keep going, to push down any lingering fatigue.
My wolf has a singular focus as he darts between the foliage and over downed tree trunks, never once stumbling.
Get to Noa.
I’m half a mile away from the outskirts of town when I hear it again.
Rennick, please. I need you.
The broken plea of my mate is a twisting knife between my ribs, and for a few paces, our steady gait falters. Snarl ripping through a tense jaw, my wolf steadies himself and redoubles his efforts. Head down, he pushes himself even harder.
He knows what I know—that I’ve already failed Noa once.
And he’s unwilling to ever do it again.
The first sounds of chaos reach me just as we crest the final stretch to Ashvale. Shouting and screams echo through the air. A pulse of power, dark and malevolent, follows close behind, causing the fur along my wolf’s spine to rise. Something is happening.
The terror flooding me now is worse than anything I’ve ever known. Every scream, every ragged cry echoing from the heart of Noa’s hometown sends a vise around my chest and turns my blood to ice. Because any one of those sounds could be hers. From this distance, I can’t tell. And not knowing is its own kind of torture, one that ushers me closer to the edge of madness with each passing second.
The thought of Noa in pain, of her being the source of one of those screams, ignites something violent in me. A protective impulse—no, it asavage, all-consuming need—to get to her, to shield what’s mine from whatever threat dare lay hands on her. Itblazes through me like hellfire.
With a growl, my wolf breaks free of the tree line, claws digging into the narrow strip of road that leads toward her home just off Ashvale’s main street. Thirty paces behind, Canaan’s follows me into the fray.
