Its mouth opened wider, and the mismatched teeth caught the gray light.
“You’re a feisty mate.” The wet, scraping voice was filled with a terrible hunger.
But just as I drew breath to snarl a reply, a voice came from the entrance to the lair.
“She already has a mate.”
CHAPTER 11
Katie
The skinwalker’s head swiveled toward the voice.
That was the moment I drove my elbow into the junction of its inverted knee with everything I had left.
The joint buckled sideways. The creature’s weight shifted off me and I rolled hard to the right, scraping bare skin across the rock, putting several feet between us before looking around.
Silas stood at the entrance of the lair. The real Silas.
His dark hair was loose and his jaw was set and his amber eyes were doing the thing they did when he was operating beyond the reach of patience, the gold in them burning flat and steady.
He didn’t look at me. His gaze was fixed on the skinwalker with absolute, undivided attention.
The skinwalker rose from the slope with those horrible, inverted joints unfolding, the skin across its ribs tightening as it drew itself to full height. The arm I’d bitten was dark and oozing.
It turned to face him.
The shift began before it could lunge.
This wasn’t the somewhat slower version I’d seen in the cabin. This was faster, more violent, driven by rage. In the space of a single breath the man was gone and the wolf stood in his place.
The skinwalker lunged.
So did the wolf.
The creature shrieked as the wolf’s weight drove it into the rock, its inverted legs scrabbling for purchase but failing to find any. Then the wolf’s jaws closed on its neck and I turned away.
The shrieking lasted for another moment, then everything went silent.
I sat on the slope, still naked, with the cold mountain air moving over me and my hands shaking from the adrenaline of the last hour. Blood from the gash on my right flank had dried to a dark smear across my hip. The gravel underneath me was thoroughly unpleasant to sit on.
I turned at the sound of paws on rock.
Silas stood a few feet from me in wolf form, breathing hard, blood on his muzzle that was not his. His amber eyes found mine, and he dropped his nose to my shoulder and drew a long breath, then exhaled against my skin.
Alive. You’re alive.
I pressed my forehead against the broad plane of his skull.
We stayed like that for a moment.
“Okay,” I said eventually, into his fur. “I need you to be a person now.”
He pulled back and looked at me, and then he shifted.
The change moved through him and the man knelt on the slope in the cold, naked and blood-streaked and breathing hard.
His eyes moved over me immediately, his gaze taking in my injured side.
