“Where did you grow up?” She began braiding the length of her hair, entrancing him.
What had she asked? Ah! “I was raised at Conall, my family’s ancestral home in the Highlands. It borders the Woods of Murk, a forest rife with creatures and portals, much like your Cursed Forest.”
In the distance, thunder rolled over the mountains, the rain intensifying. If it kept up, there’d be no field trip tomorrow.
Kereny asked him, “What was your childhood like?”
Idyllic, then tragic. All extremes. Keeping his tone as light as possible, he said, “As young lads, my twin and I made much mischief for two loving parents. Will and I are the last of the Sentinels, a line of Lykae tasked with making sure those creatures in the Murk never invaded the neighboring peaceful lands. Once we grew older, we assumed those responsibilities.” Munro and his mate had little in common, but he would draw on their few similarities. “You patrolled your forest, and I patrolled mine.”
“Uh-huh.” With an arch look, she asked, “And when was the last time you patrolled?”
The last Accession. “I admit it’s been a minute. But in the end, we waged a full-out war against the malevolent beings that had gathered.” Among them were evil succubae. Munro had suggested clearing the woods as a means of catharsis for Will, who’d been raped by one as a boy.
The catharsis hadn’t worked. But Munro had found Tàmhas in those woods. Some Pravus creature must’ve stolen and then abandoned the infant.
Munro had been determined to locate the birth family—to no avail. Despite how attached he’d grown to the wee babe with his tuft of red hair and toothless grin, he’d placed Tàmhas with adoptive humans. Yet each situation had been worse than the last—drink, dissolution, sickness. Finally, Munro had taken Tàmhas in to raise as his own.
A mistake. He debated telling Kereny about his son, but the tale was a sad one, and she’d already experienced far too much sadness with him. They had time.
“What happened in your war?” she asked.
“We wiped out our enemies, and the woods grew light once more.”
“And then what did you do? What were you doing a hundred years ago?”
Wallowing in the past. Drinking. Tupping. Anything to break up his and Will’s interminable lives. He’d had no drive other than to keep his twin from self-destructing. “I wish I’d been in Transylvania finding you.”
“But you weren’t. If the warlocks hadn’t taken me, you never would have known about me,” she pointed out. “I would have skipped right by you, with you none the wiser.”
For all his years, he’d believed that if he existed long enough, he would catch his mate’s scent from afar, as Will had with Chloe.
Shock stole through him as it sank in that he’d missed her. He’d lived for a century with false hope, never knowing she’d been cold in the ground.
Munro had been born for one purpose: to find and protect his mate. And he’d failed. Now he was to get a second chance—courtesy of the warlocks—but she remained vulnerable as a human.
Kereny said, “From what I’ve heard, I’d say you’ve been enjoying a feckless and debauched life for some time.” She’d sidled far too close to the truth.
He was just frustrated enough to give it to her. “My brother has been nigh suicidal for centuries. Two things got him through the night: sex and violence. So for all these years, he and I undertook dangerous missions for our king and battled threats to our clan. When we believed vampires had assassinated our ruler, we founded Bheinnrose, a settlement in Nova Scotia, to get Lykae families away from the Horde. But after that, we had no more missions. No more danger. So we prowled for women and hoped for war. You likely would have found me verra debauched.”
Instead of being scandalized, she casually asked, “How many have you been with?”
He shrugged. “More than a few. Are you jealous?”
She shrugged right back at him. “How do I compare to more than a few?”
“There is no comparison.” They were mates; their experiences should mirror each other. Did she not feel the same raw bliss when they kissed and touched?
“How many of them have you loved?”
“Love? You canna pledge your heart when it’s been fated to another,” he said, baffled by her question. “Lykae revere matehood. We believe each of us is unfinished, half of a greater whole, awaiting the right partner. Every second of my existence, I’ve been aware of how incomplete I am.”
She murmured, “Incomplete.”
“Aye. But now everything is different.”
“I find it hard to understand how you’d give up all those lovers for one.”
Then she was not feeling the same as he was. He sat back, troubled. “As I said, wolves mate for life.” What if she was his, but he wasn’t hers? Such a thing only happened if two beings were of different species.