“Always.” The warlock spat on the ground, a hint of sadistic satisfaction breaking through his terror. “How do you think he ever found you in the first place, as a child? Your beast burns so bright, he could see you on the other side of the world. Run all you want. You can’t hide from him. You or your bitch.”
“No, Blaze!” Rose grabbed his arm, digging her fingernails into his rock-hard muscles. “His shifter, remember?”
Blaze’s hand unclenched, the fire around it fading. He stared down at the cowering ocelot for a second, then turned to her, his face bleak. “I can’t let him live, Rose.”
“But she helped me,” Rose said again, throat closing up. “She’s innocent.”
She knelt, holding out her hands. The warlock glared, but didn’t stop the little cat from creeping forward. Rose stroked it, her tears dappling the soft, spotted fur. The ocelot’s shivering body relaxed a little.
“Can’t we make him release her?” she asked Blaze.
The warlock spat again. “I’m dead anyway. If I’m going down, might as well take the mangy beast with me.” He bared his teeth at her, eyes glittering with malice. “Since it hurts you.”
Sirens sounded in the distance, getting closer. Fire engines, or police, responding to the disturbance. Rose knew they didn’t have much time.
“There must be something we can do,” Rose said, hopelessly.
Blaze stared down at the ocelot in her hands. It looked back at him, and something passed between them. Not telepathy. Just understanding, between two souls who’d shared the same torment.
“Are you sure?” he asked it, very quietly.
The ocelot’s thin flanks rose and fell in a long sigh. It turned its head, exposing its throat in submission.
Blaze leaned down and touched its head.
Fire flared.
“No,” Rose sobbed—and then realized that she could feel bare human skin.
The woman sat up, her long, tangled hair her only cover. She turned her hands over in front of her own face, looking at them in wonder.
“No!” howled the warlock—and was gone, in a flash of heat.
“Thank you,” whispered the woman. She seized Blaze’s hand, pressing it to her forehead. “Thank you.”
Blaze nodded. His own face had gone stark white. He swallowed, hard, before he spoke. “We have to go. Will you be all right?”
“Yes.” The woman turned toward the direction of the approaching sirens. “Hurry. I won’t tell them you were here.”
Rose cast a last backward glance over her shoulder at the woman as they hastened away. She didn’t seem hurt…and yet Rose couldn’t shake the feeling that she was.
She is, her swan whispered. It hadn’t been frightened during the fight, but now it was cowering in her heart, frozen as a mouse in the shadow of a hawk.
“What did you do?” Rose asked Blaze in a low voice. “How did you free her?”
He stared straight ahead, his mouth set in a sick, flat line. “I burned away her animal.”
Chapter 11
“My mate?” It was so far from anything she’d expected Ash to say that for a moment Rose wasn’t sure she’d heard him correctly. “What about him?”
“Your mate is the reason I never said anything about…my feelings.” Ash’s head made the tiniest jerk, as though he’d started to look down but then forced himself to keep holding her gaze. “And he is the reason why I cannot be with you.”
“Ash, we’ve already been over this. I refuse to let my life be dictated by a man I never met. It doesn’t matter to me that you aren’t him.”
“He is the reason I cannot be with you,” Ash repeated, more forcefully. “Not why no one can be with you.”
His face was utterly unreadable, as closed and expressionless as she’d ever seen. She looked at his hands instead. That was how Ash betrayed emotion, she knew.