Despite his battered condition, his tongue flicked in his mouth for those tips, and his shaft stirred.
She tensed in his arms. “Are you quite done ogling me?”
He had to clear his throat to say, “No’ by a league.”
“You need to watch where you’re going. Spring-trap portals lurk everywhere.”
“I scent them.” This forest, with its creatures and portals, reminded him of the Woods of Murk near his family’s ancestral home in the Highlands.
“Other monsters roam about,” she said. “I need my knife back.”
Other monsters? Still pissed that she’d nearly beheaded him, he had to bite back harsh words. Instead, he asked, “How’d you come by a bespelled blade?” And how had she learned to throw like that?
She gazed at his slowly regenerating chest wound. The flash of pride in her sultry eyes only made his shaft harder. “Circus secret.” With her accent, those words sounded like sayer-kiss sacrett.
His lids went heavy. Her voice was as sexy as every other thing about her!
“Where have you come from, wolf?” she asked. “When you interrupted my wedding, you were covered with blood.”
So much for a first impression. He’d crashed her nuptials with slashed pants and no shirt, fresh from several kills. “Why should I answer your questions? Mayhap I should say Lykae secret?”
“If you answer some of mine, I will answer some of yours, but not about my knife.”
Itching with curiosity about the female, he played along. “I wore warlock blood. I’ve just escaped from Quondam.”
“What were you doing in the warlocks’ realm?” she asked, sounding familiar with the place. As a hunter, this human would know much about the Lore.
Should he tell her that he was a time-traveler and try to explain the logistics? The splitting pain in his head said, Fuck nooo. “The Forgotten captured me and my men. Jels the Conniver, the archwarlock, wanted me to surrender to their vassal spell.”
“What is that?”
“It turns a Lykae into a mindless slave, one forced to obey every warlock order.”
“I’d rather die.”
I am abundantly aware. “I felt the same. No torture could break me. Until they brought a game changer into my cell.” He held her gaze. “I surrendered my will, but my bite dinna work. The fire dinna take hold. . . .” As he stared into her eyes, the night grew dreamlike. He’d just come from a place of madness and magic, and then she’d used magic on him anew.
What if this wasn’t real? Maybe he had indeed lost his sanity when he’d lost her the first time. He could still feel her cold, stiffening body in his arms. My female is dead.
No. Alive now. Vitality pulsed through her.
“Wolf?” She snapped her fingers. “Who did you bite? What fire? And what’s a game changer?”
“It’s what I’ve longed for all my life.” He edged between two boulders as the terrain grew hillier.
“Though English is my fifth language, I speak it fluently and read voraciously. Yet I don’t understand you.”
Organizing his thoughts into speech proved difficult. And the harder he concentrated, the more his head ached.
She asked, “How did you get free of their vassal spell?”
“My beast is powerful, more so than they ever anticipated. A Lykae’s beast feeds on emotion, so I gave it a surfeit until it broke free of its bonds.”
“What did you feed it?”
Standing beside the pit, rage coursing through him like that piping acid, Munro gave up control of his beast as never before. Grueling pain surged as the spell splintered around his body. Blood poured from his nose, ears, and eyes, but he and his beast fought to withstand the pain, fought harder than ever before in their life—
“Wolf?”
He jolted back to the present in time to leap over a downed tree. “I fed it rage.” So much that he’d had little hope of regaining control. Only the idea of rescuing Kereny from a treacherous past had pulled him back from the void. “I got free and seized Jels’s son, Ormlo. The coward gave me a vow to the Lore—an unbreakable vow—to serve only my interests. Now he’s as good as vassaled to me.”
Yet the warlock had neglected to mention that Kereny’s people were bloody hunters—and that her aim was remarkable.
Or maybe he had mentioned it. Munro only recalled flashes from that feverish time after he’d shed his vassal spell and captured Ormlo:
Creeping through the dungeon toward the Forgotten’s Temple of Time.
Surprising five warlocks inside.
Munro’s beast happily slaughtering them. . . .
He thought that Ormlo had directed the gateway to open in Transylvania sometime in the nineteen-twenties. But why would he send Munro right back to Kereny’s wedding? There had to be some significance.
She asked, “Is Ormlo waiting for you in the forest?”
“He remains in Quondam. I made him send me to wherever”—and whenever—“my mate was.”
Fueled by the darkest sacrifices, the gateway was similar to a portal, but exponentially more powerful. One could cross space through a portal. One could cross space and time through that gateway.