"I want to go home," she said out loud. "I have to wake up. Please, God, let me wake up!"
Vane pulled out of his trance as he realized where his mate was.
Bride was in his mother's homeland. A place where he had sworn to never return.
He'd only been there once. Long ago when he had bartered with Acheron Parthenopaeus to help him find his birth mother.
To this day, Vane didn't know why he'd wanted to find her. Maybe it was all the years of living with a father who hated him and he wanted to see if there was any chance his mother might tolerate him.
Or maybe because he had become human, he thought she might accept him.
Instead, she had tried to kill him.
"I curse the day I bore you."
Her words still resonated deep inside him and now she had struck the final blow.
She had set loose a demon to take his mate. No Were-Hunter could remove a human from their time period without the human's permission. Only demons and gods were exempt from that rule.
But why? Why would his mother have taken Bride back to Dark Age Britain? He didn't trust his mother. Her hatred of him and his father was too great.
Vane trusted no humans.
No, Bride was his responsibility, and the last thing she needed was to be left alone with an Arcadian pack in the past where he'd been born.
He would have to go and claim her and bring her back to her home.
Only this time, he didn't have any backup. He was going in alone.
He only hoped that he survived the encounter. Otherwise, Bride just might find herself trapped in the past for eternity.
As the hours ticked by slowly while Bride was confined to her tiny room, she learned one thing.
This wasn't a dream.
She didn't know how it was real, but she had no choice except to come to terms with the fact that this wasn't the asylum episode of Buffy, or a delusion. All of these people were real and they had the worst-tasting food she'd ever tried to eat.
No wonder they were all so damned skinny.
Her tray of barely touched food was set on the nightstand with the books.
Bride paced the room while Listening to the people in the hall debate what they should do to her.
This was getting scarier by the minute.
Suddenly she sensed a movement behind her. Bride spun around to find a man standing there who reminded her of Vane. He had the same multicolored dark hair and green eyes, and his face was eerily similar. Clean shaven, he wore his hair longer than Vane and was dressed in ancient leather and mail armor pieces.
Like Bryani, he had a sword strapped to his back.
He watched her in a manner that was definitely reminiscent of a wild animal examining its prey.
"Who are you?" she asked him.
He didn't speak. Instead, he moved closer so that he could take her hand into his and look at her marked palm. Hatred blazed in his eyes.
Before she could blink, she found herself somehow taken from her room into the center of the hall where the angriest group of people on the planet were found. She felt like the only hot rock in a nest of vipers.
Their loud voices increased tenfold in volume when she appeared.