Lord of the Wolfyn - By Jessica Andersen Page 0,53
golden dorsal stripe stand out like a visual shout. And when he drew back his lips to snarl at Kenar, his canines were longer than those of any of the others, and wickedly pointed. A vampire trapped, temporarily at least, in a wolf’s body.
“Noooo.” The word escaped from Reda on a low, anguished moan as the structure of her unreal reality crashed to pieces around her and she saw the past few days for what they had been.
Dayn’s brilliant eyes—emerald green, not the amber of the others’—flicked to her at the noise, but she couldn’t find any human emotion in them. His words rang inside her: I’m sorry for everything.
He wasn’t just talking about her being caught up in his family’s magic, or even about him having kept yet another huge secret from her. He was apologizing for what he had done to her over the past two days.
The bastard had enthralled her.
Shame. Rage. Heartbreak. She didn’t know what to feel, what to focus on within the huge wave of emotion that slammed through her as the pack struggled to deal with this new shift in the balance of power.
Kenar recovered quickly from the surprise. He might have paled, but his sneer didn’t lose any of its oily, predatory nature. It made her think of the wolfyn in the book, the villain… And that made her see how Dayn wasn’t the woodsman, after all.
He was the wolf.
He was the seducer, the tempter. And she had fallen hard for the temptation.
“A challenge?” Kenar waved the others back, and the pack members cleared out. Within seconds, he and Dayn were facing each other in the middle of a cleared circle. “You think the pack will accept you as their leader now? I don’t think so. And don’t look to Keely for any help this time. She was outcast for helping you. Last I saw, she was hauling ass away from a big silver loner.” Kenar’s sneer turned even nastier. “He’s probably caught up to her by now. Wonder if she’s having fun? Those loners don’t get a chance at many bitches.”
Dayn growled low in his throat and began circling toward Kenar, trying to flank him.
The alpha, still in human form, moved to stay opposite him, openly taunting now. “Were you planning on handing things over to my weak slut of a sister? You think that’s going to be any—” He morphed abruptly, dropped to a crouch and leaped with a feral roar as Dayn did the same.
The two huge creatures thudded together midair and went down snarling in a flurry of fur, raking claws and snapping jaws. Blood sprayed and one of the combatants yowled, and then they were surging to their feet, up onto their hind legs to come together again, smashing into each other like fighting rams going for a head butt, only with gaping jaws and wickedly sharp teeth.
Growls and excited yips came from the crowd, and more than one of the human forms went wolf, as if the experience was better in fur.
Reda’s stomach roiled; she had to breathe through her mouth to stem the surging nausea that came from the potent mix of fear, disgust and upset rocketing through her.
Enthralled. God.
That explained why she had fallen so hard so fast, didn’t it? And even now that she knew the truth, she wasn’t free of his spell. She couldn’t be, because her eyes were fixed on the fight and her heart was lodged in her throat.
She hated the sight of blood wetting his thick, dark coat when he and Kenar next parted. She hated the thought of his lean, beautiful body taking on new scars. And she hated how the other wolfyn were watching him with cold, hard eyes that suggested that even if he won his fight, he wouldn’t live to claim his prize. She wanted to put herself between Dayn and the others, warding them off with her body while snarling, Mine.
Even more, some part of her drank in the sight of him in his wolf form: how his thick black coat shimmered over his muscles and caught the light as he reared up and lunged for his enemy; and how his eyes flashed like emerald-green flame when the combatants came together chest to chest, snapping and snarling. The sight of curving, elongated and wickedly pointed canines stirred her deep inside, and the way he moved so elegantly, like a fighter, like the largest of predators, brought the same whisper of, Mine.