And I saw him.
I’d seen plenty of pictures of shifted werewolves before, but none of them came even close to the real thing. He was huge, over seven feet tall, with large shoulders and deadly curved claws extending from his fingers. Rich brown and golden fur wrapped around most of his body, but it wasn’t as dense on his chest, neck and face. His head was transformed completely, and two large pointy ears were on top of it, perked up. His nose was smaller, rounder, completely black, and his jaw had protruded out, his mouth enormous, filled with razor sharp teeth.
But his eyes were almost exactly the same—swollen almost completely shut and made out of liquid gold.
Dominic.
My instincts recognized him long before my eyes did. It was a miracle I held off from pulling those triggers because if I shot him dead now, I knew for a fact that I wasn’t going to be able to live with myself.
I lowered my arms as a new wave of tears attacked me, and relief covered me like a warm, fuzzy blanket. He was alive. That stupid high fae had lied through his teeth—they didn’t have him at all. He was alive and he was hungry, and…
He wasn’t stopping.
“Dominic,” I said, terrified for a second that he didn’t recognize me. But werewolves recognized everyone. They didn’t lose their senses when they shifted—only loups did that.
“Dominic, stop!” I called and moved back a step, then two.
But he kept on running on all fours, coming at me with his jaws wide open, howling like the beast that he was.
“Dominic!” I shouted, and when he was close enough to slam onto me, I fell on my knees and wrapped my arms around my head, waiting for the impact.
It never came.
He jumped right over me and continued to run. It took me a moment to convince myself that he hadn’t, in fact, devoured me with one bite, and I made it to my shaking legs again only to realize that he had collided with two other people behind me.
One of them was David Reynolds—the vampire we had met at the restaurant the night before.
Was he the same one who bit me?
I started running before I realized it, my eyes on Dominic’s strong body, his back legs shorter than his front, covered in long, thick fur. The vampire was fast, and he kept trying to jump on his back and bite him, but Dominic was huge. He clawed the side of the vampire’s face so hard, I was surprised he was still standing.
And the other guy—Freddie Olsen himself—was fighting him on the other side. Every time Dominic clawed at his body, his skin fell off, leaving way for pitch black fur, and the closer to them I got, the better I saw how his eyes had turned completely red. But that wasn’t all—there were two spiraling horns protruding out of his forehead, too. He most definitely didn’t have those the night before.
Thoughts left me again, and I stopped five feet away from them, raising my guns. The vampire had latched onto Dominic’s arm, and when he turned to grab him with the other, Freddie, who was a minotaur wearing a man’s skin, lowered his head and aimed his horns at Dominic’s chest. I shot my guns at the side of his face three times within two seconds.
Freddie hit the ground on his knees before his face fell on Dominic’s paws.
Behind me, I heard the footsteps and the shouts, and I turned to see a lot more guards—at least fifteen of them—coming my way. But the vampire flew off Dominic’s hands, and he hit the back of the building where I’d been held captive, breaking a window in the process. Guns fired and Dominic was in front of me the next second, fur coated with blood, his throat vibrating with a growl.
“Last ones,” I said, hoping that I was right, and I turned to the oncoming guards with my guns raised.
But I never managed to pull a trigger.
Suddenly, I was grabbed from behind, and my legs no longer touched the ground. The world turned upside down and fur was in my mouth. My guns slipped from my fingers as Dominic ran so fast, I was instantly dizzy because I was literally hanging over his shoulder. I could feel his claws on the back of my thighs as he held me, and I grabbed fistfuls of his fur to try to keep from falling. I saw nothing but his strange legs covered in fur, his paws tipped with more of those claws, and the wind blowing my hair aside.
Within seconds, the sound of the gunshots faded. Trees around me, and every time a branch tangled in my hair, it ripped out a good chunk of it.
“Dominic, put me down!” I complained, slamming my fists on his back that could have very well been made of steel, but he didn’t listen.
I screamed and I cursed him a thousand ways. He didn’t stop for what must have been five minutes but felt like five hours to me.
When he eventually put me down on my feet, I had no chance of keeping my balance. My brain was mushy, my insides ready to come right out of my mouth—all of them together. I hit the ground on my ass and held onto the thin trunk of a tree to my side, eyes squeezed shut and a hand over my mouth. Everything in me was spinning still, but when I heard him moving, I opened my eyes to see what he was doing.
We were up a mountain somewhere, or maybe even a hill, with thin leafless trees here and there and a large building at the bottom of it.
“Holy hell,” I breathed when I saw the sheer size of what must have been the same building I’d been held in. It was massive, two stories high, and the concrete of the thick wall looked like a white snake surrounding the whole area.
Dominic was moving lower and lower, getting closer to it slowly. I shot to my feet immediately, but before I could call out to him, tell him to get back, I saw a shadow running up the mountain in the distance.