“There is a reason why I showed you the past. I was recruited to kill monsters like the one who took your life. I accepted that duty because it’s the only way I could avenge your death, but I cannot escape my vow to continue to fight this war. Where I go, monsters will live and die, because I will kill them. That is the purpose I serve on this Earth. That is what I bring to you, Ivy. That is why I should have walked away the minute our paths crossed again.”

His words from earlier are suddenly in my mind, you had to this damn beautiful. He wanted me to be easy to walk away from, to stay away from. Clearly what’s inside me, what was between us, isn’t fresh in his mind. We are muted by year upon year of him living, fighting, maybe even loving someone else. Maybe I didn’t really want to know the past. Now, I am forced to grieve what is lost, while he just needs it to stay lost.

“I get it,” I say. “You have an important job to do. Please let me pass. I want to go to my room. I won’t go anywhere until you figure out how to keep me off the monsters’ radars. But I’m not giving up my writing. It’s who I am, more so now than ever.” I try to step around him.

His hands grip my waist, his blue eyes simmering with heat. “Whatever you think you figured out, what you know, is wrong.”

It’s not, I think, but I say, “Okay.”

“God, woman, you’re stubborn. I cannot make you a target again.”

“Okay,” I repeat.

He cups my face and stares down at me, a palpable push and pull between us. I want him to touch me. I don’t want to want him to touch me.

“You used to say that to me, Ivy. Okay. It was never okay when you said that.”

“I don’t know what you want me to say.”

“Which is what you said when I said that as well. It was never about what I wanted you to say. It was always about what you felt in your heart.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“It’s as simple as you make it.”

“It’s as simple as you just made it,” I remind him. “You put me back in the moments where we fell in love, where we lived together in love. Those feelings for me are now fresh and new. To you, they’re decades old, just as our relationship is. I get it. You had to keep living, and did so without me. Just give me some space to deal with all of that.”

“That would be the safest and smartest thing for me to do, but this is you and me, Ivy. I’m not going to do that.”

“What does that mean?”

For the second time tonight, he catches my gown and drags it over my head, tossing it away. I gasp and he scoops me up, and turns toward the stairs, but he doesn’t make it any further than where we stand. The glass in the window behind us shatters. Still holding me, he turns toward the sound, where a towering beast—a werewolf—stands in the middle of the room.

Chapter Four

There is a werewolf in the hotel room, glass shattered on the floor around the monstrous creature. He is huge and hairy, his teeth extended, massive, his eyes seeming to glow.

Eli sets me down. “Upstairs, Ivy, and hide,” he orders, placing his body in front of me, between me and the wolf.

I scramble for my gown, quickly covering up, gasping as I watch Eli run at the wolf and the wolf run at him. They collide, body to body, in a fierce blow, a battle erupting. The gown falls over my body, and I have only one thought: I have to help Eli kill the wolf. I don’t really know how to help, and I struggle to find the answer in my mind, but my heart is racing, pounding so loudly it drowns out old memories or whatever my source of knowledge might be. And how did a wolf get here in the first place? We’re on a high floor!

I have a moment when Eli shifts enough that I can see his face, and he’s no longer a man. His teeth extended, the lines of his harsh face, sharper now, unrecognizable, but there no fear in me, not of him. Instead, I’m afraid for him. The wolf, the beast, is monstrous in size and Eli might be a vampire, but he’s still smaller than him, by more than half. Almost as if I’ve willed horrible luck on Eli, the wolf tackles him, and he is thrown onto his back, the wolf towering over him. I don’t think. I just act. I rush forward and scream at the wolf.

“Here! Here! I’m here. Don’t you want to kill me?”

And he does.

I don’t know why, but I know he does. He glares at me with red eyes, blinking a moment, until he does exactly what I expect him to do. He steps off and away from Eli and before I even know what has happened, he starts running toward me, his speed unbelievable. He’s almost on top of me before I’m able to process what is happening.

My heart races and I back up, hitting the stairwell rail, covering my face, and I swear, a silent scream escapes my lips. The wolf is so close I can feel his hot breath, when suddenly he’s yanked away from me, and Eli throws him to the ground, the vampire in him stronger than I’d realized. Air gushes from my lungs, as he straddles the wolf, and starts to punch him, shouting at me, “Run, Ivy! Damn it! Run!”

I don’t want to run.

I can’t run and leave him here.

I won’t.

Instead, my mind travels back to the fiction I thought was fiction when I created it, but none of it was fiction at all. Silver. Silver kills wolves. There has to be knives in the kitchen. Surely one of them has real silver in it. I charge across the room, pass the battle underway, just as Eli ends up on his back again, the wolf snarling over him. But the wolf is focused on me again, and I push myself, running faster, but not fast enough. My gown is captured and I’m yanked backward.

Tags: Lisa Renee Jones Paranormal
Source: readsnovelonline.net