Those gentle, fathomless brown eyes spoke of eons of wisdom.
And something more elusive that Phaedra yearned to understand.
“Why are you here?” She stroked her fingertips over the doe’s smooth brow and delicate snout. “I wish you could tell me wh—”
Phaedra’s words stuck in her throat. Somewhere behind her, the stillness of the wasteland forest shifted. Itbreathed.
Only the smallest change in the air, imperceptible, except to someone with her inhumanly acute senses. Her skin prickled at the feeling of unease that washed over her. She let her hand fall away from the white doe, slowly pivoting her head to listen closer, to scan the skeletal landscape for the intruders she instinctively knew were there.
Men.
She didn’t see them yet; she felt them.
But that couldn’t be right.
Why would anyone be in this forsaken place? What could they want?
Whatever their reasons, their presence here wasn’t good. They moved on silent feet, carrying the scent of violence and weaponry on them. And they were coming closer every second.
Phaedra now caught a glimpse of their dark shapes moving between the scorched trees in the distance behind her. At least four of them, maybe more. The group began to split up and fan out with military precision.
With a whisper of warning at the tip of her tongue, Phaedra turned back to the gentle white doe to urge it to run with her for safety.
It was gone.
Vanished without a sound or a trace.
She only wished she could disappear too. Glancing behind her, she gauged the oncoming danger. The largest of the soldiers, the one in the lead, abruptly halted the others with a sharp upward slash of his black-gloved hand as he peered in her direction.
Oh, no.
He’d spotted her.
Although she couldn’t see his face beneath the black head covering and smudges of grease meant to further camouflage him in the dark, she felt the clash of his gaze as it slammed into hers across the distance. The force of that connection pushed her back on her heels. It zinged through her veins like a lick of lightning, making the fine hairs on her arms and at her nape stand on end.
He wasn’t human. Not Atlantean, either.
Breed. The longtime enemy of her people. The blood-drinking, lethal offspring of the savage otherworlders who nearly succeeded in wiping out all of Atlantis many millennia ago.
That unerring stare locked on to her, the immense warrior broke away from the rest of his group and started for her through the bracken.
Phaedra started running.
Without her amulet to fly her home, she had no other choice but to flee and pray she might be faster than the heavily armed soldier at her heels.
His boots crunched in the cinders and dead foliage on the ground behind her. Brittle branches snapped like gunfire as he crashed through them.
He was going to catch her; she had no doubt about that. What he meant to do with her once he had, she didn’t want to guess.
She ran harder, drawing on all the preternatural speed she could muster.
And still he kept coming. The chase pushed them deeper into the wasteland, the rest of the warrior’s companions far behind them now.
“Stop,” he called out to her, his deep voice tight with urgency.
Phaedra kept running. She didn’t know where she was headed, nor how long she could manage to go before the dangerous Breed male caught her. The only thing she knew for certain was the need to get as far away from this place as she possibly could.
She heard him gaining on her. She felt the sheer strength and power of the male as his booted feet chewed up the distance between them.
