Total pages in book: 83
Estimated words: 79927 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 400(@200wpm)___ 320(@250wpm)___ 266(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 79927 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 400(@200wpm)___ 320(@250wpm)___ 266(@300wpm)
Buck stayed glued to her leg as they began searching but the sanctuary suddenly felt very different now.
No longer was it her beautiful, carefully tended refuge. Now every stand of chiming trees and every fold in the rolling red hills looked like a place something could be hiding. Every rustle in the meadow grass made her jump. The wind moving through the cinnamon trunks sounded too much like stealthy breathing.
Kiera followed the signs as best she could—broken brush…churned earth…the occasional smear of blood.
At one point she found one of the Vorn’s tentacular jaw—fronds snagged on a low branch and her stomach turned over.
The huge beast was close–too close.
The trail led toward a dense little copse of the chiming trees where the ground dipped into a shallow hollow full of reddish scrub and long silver grass.
Kiera slowed, her eyes scanning the landscape for the slightest hint of motion.
“Buck,” she whispered. “Stay close.”
The big wolf was already doing that–every muscle in his huge body was tight as wire. Kiera was glad all over that he was with her.
She took one careful step forward…then another. The chiming leaves whispered overhead, eerie and delicate. The morning seemed to hold its breath.
And then the Vorn charged.
It exploded out of the trees in a blur of dark muscle and red—smeared jaws, its massive body moving with horrifying speed for something so big. Its tentacles flared on either side of its mouth and its three concentric rows of teeth flashed wet and bright as it came straight for her.
Kiera screamed and fired.
The stun gun gave a sick metallic click. No blast. No charge. No nothing.
It was jammed.
“Oh God!” she gasped, throwing herself sideways as the Vorn barreled past, hitting the ground hard enough to knock the breath out of her. The stun gun flew from her hands and landed several feet away in the scrub.
The Vorn skidded, turned, and came at her again with a low snarling hum that made her blood freeze. Kiera scrambled backward on her hands and knees, panic hitting her in one huge suffocating wave. Oh God–was this how she died? Mauled to death on her own sanctuary?
The Vorn advanced again. It was blood—gorged and furious now–its bright red gullet gleaming behind those awful teeth. One of its jaw—tentacles twitched, tasting the air, and fixed on her.
But before it could charge again, Buck launched himself between them.
He stood braced and snarling, hackles high, lips peeled back from his fangs.
For one terrible instant, Kiera felt pure despair–not even her wonderful wolf was a match for an enraged Vorn, and she didn’t want to watch him die.
“Buck—no!” she cried…and then something happened.
His skin rippled.
There was no other way to describe it–it seemed to shiver and roll over his huge body like water disturbed by a sudden wind. His spine arched and then his limbs lengthened and twisted. Fur drew back even as muscle surged and reshaped beneath it.
The whole thing happened faster than she could truly follow—as though the world had blurred for half a second and then snapped back into focus.
Where Buck had stood, there was now a huge humanoid male.
He was at least seven feet tall, naked, broad—shouldered, and powerfully built, with wild black hair falling around a face that was startlingly human. Short dark fur still covered much of his body—thickest over his chest and forearms and down his powerful legs—but he was no beast now.
He was a man…a man with strange, vivid blue eyes.
Kiera stared at him in shock. What the hell was happening?
But explanations would have to wait. The man didn’t even look at her. In one impossibly swift motion he snatched up the fallen stun gun, slapped the side panel open, cleared the jam with a sharp twist of his fingers, and brought the weapon up to his shoulder.
The Vorn which had seemed momentarily startled by his change, lunged.
Without hesitation, the man fired.
The blast caught the beast square between the eyes, and it dropped like a ton of bricks, crashing to the ground so close to them that the earth shuddered under Kiera’s palms.
Silence crashed down after it.
The big male lowered the stun gun and turned to face her. His voice, when he spoke, was deep and rough and rusty as though he hadn’t used it in a very long time.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
18
KIERA
Kiera stared at him, still on her hands and knees in the red—stained grass, her heart pounding so hard she thought it might come out of her chest.
For a long moment, she couldn’t seem to do anything else. She couldn’t look away…couldn’t quite make her mind accept what her eyes were telling it.
Because standing in front of her—naked as the day he was born and holding her stun rifle as though he’d used one a thousand times before—was not a wolf but a man.
A really huge man.