Carefully, slowly, she crouched down in front of the big animal and reached for the trap. The moment she touched it, the creature stopped chewing and glared at her, a low, warning growl rising in its furry throat.
“Okay, it’s okay,” Christine murmured gently. “I know you’re scared—I know it hurts. Gonna get you out of there in just a minute, okay?”
The creature kept growling but it made no move to pounce as she set her hands lightly on either side of the trap and began to put pressure on the long silver wings. At least the trap wasn’t an old rusty one, she reflected as she applied steady pressure. So the wound should heal cleanly, as long as the leg wasn’t broken.
The volume of the growling increased as she pushed on the trap.
“It’s okay,” Christine assured it—no, him. She didn’t know why, but the animal seemed male to her. “It’s okay, big fella,” she assured him again. “Gonna be all right. Gonna get you free.”
Suddenly the growling rose to a crescendo and creature lunged forward, pushing its face into hers. Christine gasped and flinched as she found herself staring into golden-green eyes like a cat’s. The creature’s fangs were bared and she knew it was half a second from ripping her throat out.
Holy crap—what am I going to do? Am I going to die here?
But she’d worked with big, dangerous animals before. True, most of them had been dogs, but Christine knew how to handle herself. She stared into those gorgeous, alien eyes and kept up the slow, steady pressure on the trap. It was a big one and it was taking all her strength to open but if she let it go now, it would spring back on the animal’s foot, causing even more agony and ruining whatever trust she’d managed to build with the strange creature.
“Okay,” she murmured softly as she pressed the metal wings outward, her muscles straining. “Everything is going to be okay, big fella. You’ll see…”
At last, with an audible click, the trap snapped open.
The strange, striped animal withdrew its foot and sprang over Christine’s head in a fluid, graceful leap. Then it darted off into the darkening woods, leaving her to look over her shoulder as its striped hide disappeared in the twilight.
SEVEN
“Well, that was freaking weird,” Christine muttered to herself. She let the trap snap shut again—on empty air this time.
She would have liked to take it back to the cabin with her and take it down to the Sheriff’s office to show them tomorrow. The Fensters had no right to put the ugly, lethal traps on her land. It was a genuine grievance and Sheriff Wainright would have to file a report on it.
However, the trap was anchored into the frozen ground with a chain and there was no way Christine could see to dig it out in the darkness. Plus, she was half frozen from being out in the cold for so long. She still hadn’t even built a fire and the temperature was dropping rapidly as it got darker.
She hoped the strange creature she had freed would be all right in the woods alone. It was so odd—for a moment, when she’d been face to face with it, it had almost looked human. It had even seemed to have a kind of mane of long, black hair that matched the stripes on its fur.
But that was nonsense—it had been covered in fur and completely nonverbal. Of course it was an animal, Christine told herself. And it would hopefully be all right, even in the cold woods. The way it had jumped right over her head seemed to indicate that its leg wasn’t broken. And it had its fur to keep warm.
So thinking, she picked up the plate with the last little scrap of steak still on it. After a moment of thought, she dumped the steak on the frozen ground and then headed back towards the cabin. She wondered again what kind of creature she had freed and wished she could have seen it better.
She had no idea that she would get a much better look very soon…
EIGHT
Roarn stopped when he felt safe and crouched down to clean his injuries. His kind healed quickly but the shiny silver teeth had bitten deep—the wounds were tender. He licked them with his tongue, lapping away the blood and then pressing snow to the punctures to ease the pain.
For a moment, the Fury had almost overcome him and he had started to spring at the female. But at the last moment, an instinct inside him too strong to deny had taken over—the instinct of all Kindred to protect and preserve female life.
This instinct was hardwired into every Kindred warrior—it came from the fact that their race was 95% male, which meant that every female life was rare—both sacred and precious. So instead of springing on the female and ripping out her throat, Roarn had jumped over her head and run away, into the forest.