“Gods, Cam, I’m so sorry. You shouldn’t be touching me—”
She drew back just enough to look him in the eye. Away from the fire and tucked into the shadows between the boulder and the sandstone wall of the cliff, her beautiful face was wrought in deep blues and violets. He had no trouble seeing her clearly in the dark, and didn’t miss the way her pupils had expanded to nearly eclipse her irises, nor the deep flush that settled into her cheeks.
Camille might have looked dazed, even a little drunk, if she wasn’t also wearing a wild-eyed scowl. “Shutup!We are beingshot at!Do you think I care?” A bolt whistled overhead and slammed into the cliff wall, sending chunks of red hot sandstone raining down around them, but she didn’t seem to notice. A snarl curled her plump upper lip over her fangs when she brought her face close to his. “After I rip the head off of the man who shot you, I’m going to bite every inch of you. Got that?”
Viktor blinked. The pain made thinking difficult, and although he was pretty sure he wasn’t losing any blood, his mind felt sluggish, uncoordinated. A cold sweat drenched his skin as his body began to slide into shock. That had to be why he thought he heard her say she wanted tobitehim. Certainly, if he’d been in his right mind, he would have heard her scathing condemnation for stealing her choice from her.
“Cam,” he rasped, “what are you—”
A gloved hand curled around the back of his neck. Claws tickled the skin of his jugular as she yanked his head down for a kiss that turned his world upside down.
Camille tasted like wild honey — sweet, with a tart, earthy bite. It was a taste he remembered with perfect clarity from the single kiss they’d shared just moments before she asked him to run away with her.
The taste of that kiss had haunted him for twenty years.
Her lips were smooth and plush, her tongue sleek and hot as it slid hungrily against his own. Viktor sucked in a shuddering breath through his nose and took in the wildflower scent of her overlaid with the delicious warmth of her desire.
For a single, breathless moment, he felt no pain, heard no shots, knew no fear. There was only Camille and the howl of victory that rose up from his very soul.
My mate,his coyote howled.My mate!
Just as he was lifting his hand to bury it in her hair, determined to bring her closer, she pulled away with a low, terrifying growl. “Don’t you fucking die on me while I’m gone,” she hissed, pressing another hard, fast kiss to his lips.
Fear returned, bigger and colder than before. The coyote went perfectly still inside him before, with a yowl of outrage, he lunged against the cage of his mind. “Cam,no!”
It was too late. Camille was as sleek and graceful as a cat. His only chance of holding her in one place involved two arms and brute strength. Injured and taken by surprise, he didn’t stand a chance of pinning her down.
He lurched forward, but his good arm only caught cold air and sand. In one graceful roll, she was out from behind the boulder and sprinting toward the opposite cliff wall —towardthe shooter.
* * *
Camille didn’t think. She didn’t doubt. She was an elf, and that meant sheacted.
In the moment between watching Viktor fly back into the sand, his shoulder and upper chest obliterated by a plasma bolt, and her next breath, Camille decided that there was no going back.
Presented with the possibility that Viktor may simply cease to exist in the world, every fiber of her being balked.
That was not right. That was notpossible.He was hers. When he left Burden’s Earth for the Underworld, it would be in lockstep with her. No other outcome was acceptable.
He washerconsort. His life, his future, belonged toher.
And someone tried to take him from me.
Camille was familiar with anger. Elves tended to run hot, and she could nurse a grudge better than anyone she knew, butthis—this was a fury she had never felt before. It was all-consuming. It was bigger than her, wilder and smarter than her.
It was so, so cold.
Alongside the flood of endorphins that came with touching Viktor, tasting him, a deadly, adrenaline-laced calm settled over her. Every sense sharpened, and every thought was clear, precise. Camille had never been a particularly violent person, but she was anelf.
And all elves were predators.
They were fast, graceful, and almost impossible to kill. Taught from childhood to manage their immense strength through intensive martial training, there was not a single elf who could not kill if necessary.
It’s really fucking necessary now,she thought, darting across the narrow gap between one wall of the alcove to the other. The sandstone was craggy and uneven, jutting out around her in places to provide partial cover from the bolts that sporadically aimed her way.
That alone told her everything she needed to know.
The shooter was not even really aiming for her. Almost all of his focus, even when she made herself a clear target, was on her consort.
