When Jaxor returned to his base, something squeezed in his chest as he realized that the female was nowhere to be seen.
“Vrax,” he rasped, hauling himself out of the tunneled pit and throwing the sack of fire fuel onto the ground, some of the freshly dug-up contents spilling out. “Erin!”
He’d been gone a couple hours, at least. The twin suns had already descended and he was in a foul mood, considering all of his traps had been empty and one of the shield links he used to hide his base from prying eyes above needed replacing with parts he didn’t have.
Now, his female was nowhere to be seen and—
His eyes caught on something near the fire pit. A dribble of something red. Blood?Herblood.
Panic and fear shot through him, his Instinct roaring inside him that his mate was injured—hurt andgone. That sheer panic twisted in his chest, making it difficult to breathe, and when he saw another patch of blood, he damn near lost what little he possessed of his mind. His vision went dark, his claws curling into his flesh, and he tracked the trail all the way to his sleeping quarters.
“Erin!” he bellowed, tugging on the door. It was bolted from the inside, but he easily tore the heavy metal away. He heard a gasp and his nostrils flared when he scented her.
When his dilated pupils adjusted to the darkened space, relief made him dizzy as he saw Erin, blinking, dazed. She’d been sleeping, he realized, his heart pounding in his chest, his breath ragged, the door still hanging from his grip.
He scanned the cave. He saw nothing, no threat. A weird sense of disbelief went through him. A part of him had believed that he could dull his Instinct when it came to her. That he could fight the Fates’ pull, that he could fightherwhen the time came.
Dread pooled in his belly next, even as he dropped the door and approached her, still scenting the faint trace of metallic blood in his nostrils.
“Jaxor?” she questioned, her eyes going from the door, which he would now have to fix before nightfall, to him. “What in the world—”
She was laying underneath the furs, though she’d pushed up onto her elbow in alarm the moment he’d charged inside.
“Hey!” she cried in surprise when his hands delved underneath the furs, ripping them away from her body. “What are youdoing?”
He lifted her tunic until she snatched it down, fighting him. He ignored her, pressing his hands to her, inspecting her. Where had the blood come from? Was she hurt? He flipped her over on her stomach, the tunic riding up until it displayed the bottom curve of her buttocks.
He growled, but ignored the way the sight of her bared flesh made him feel. His gaze ran down her legs and then, peeking up from the furs that bundled around her feet, he saw cloth wrapped around her left foot.
Jaxor moved closer and bent her leg up, bringing her impossibly small foot closer. She was still struggling to turn over, making little sounds of frustration, but he held her down with his other hand easily.
Unwrapping the bandage, he gritted his teeth when he saw a cut adorning the sole. It wasn’t deep enough to need stitching, but there was still blood. When he prodded the area around it gently, his female hissed and stilled on the furs.
“There was blood,” came Jaxor’s voice, deep from his chest, unrecognizable. Dark and changed. His own voice threaded with the beast’s inside him.
He heard Erin swallow. “I cut my foot by the fire. I didn’t realize I’d left a trail.”
Jaxor’s lips pressed together. His eyes flitted to the two chests he kept inside his sleeping quarters. One that had contained weapons until that morning when he’d removed them, the other with food and water rations and supplies for wound care. Every now and then, akekevirhad made it past the tunnel and into his base. Sometimes, it would catch him by surprise before he managed to get a weapon. He kept the bandages and healing salve as a precaution. Now that Erin was here, he would need to begin work on a gate to ensure her safety.
Rising away from her briefly, he rummaged through one of the chests and took out the last clean cloth—he’d have to boil more later—and a bottle of healing salve he’d traded a fur for inLopixalast rotation.
In his absence, Erin had rolled over, pressing her back to the wall of the cave and watching him warily as he approached her. When her gaze went to what he had in his hands, she said quietly, “I can do it.”
When she reached out a hand for the cloth and salve, he ignored it and knelt before her. It took him a moment to realize he was growling. It was a rumbling deep in his throat and he pressed the palm of his hand to his eyes in an attempt to calm the beast inside him. As if Jaxor wasn’t mad enough as it was, his Instinct felt like another being’s will had burrowed deep into his mind, tearing at it, clashing with it,changingit.
He made a concerted effort to stop growling and only when it was silent did he take his hand away. Erin, surprisingly, let him take her left foot in his hand. He slid it onto his lap and her foot twitched when it brushed against the furs of the pants he’d pulled on that day.
That small twitch made his brows furrow. He looked down at her foot and for the first timemarveledat the strangeness of it, how small it was, how delicately the bones sloped and arched, how soft the sole was, obviously without callouses to help with the hardness of walking on the roughfacevfloor of his base.
Strangely, it was the first true realization that she was of a different species. That he didn’t truly know a single thing about her race, except for what he’d gathered from theMevirax, who’d gathered it from the Jetutians, who’d gathered it from the Krevorags.
Jaxor felt frozen as he looked down at her foot, nestled against his thigh. When he looked up at her, she was watching him. She was neither frowning nor smiling. Her lips were parted slightly, as if she’d come to a similar realization…thatthisshould never have happened. That the Fates should have never given Jaxor something so precious, so valuable to protect and care for.
He swallowed. The growling started again and Erin jolted, beginning to pull her injured foot away.
Jaxor kept it in place, pushing those thoughts from his mind. He felt unsettled. Something in him feltwrong. It had felt wrong since the moment he’d seen her, when, for the better part of five rotations, he’d been so certain in his destiny.
Almost methodically, as if it were his own wound, he washed it, brushed a thick layer of healing salve over it—ignoring the way her first toe, the largest of them all, twitched when he did—and wound the clean cloth over it, securing it tightly.
