Desire Unchained

Runa couldn’t spare a single tear for the bitch, but she did spare a second to feel for a pulse. Nothing. Why would Shade want the Bathag alive? Wiping her bloodied hands on her jeans, she looked toward him, but he was fully engaged in battle again. She raced to the crest of the hill, found two dead demons, and Shade, taking down the last Keeper. Behind him, the smoke-creature snarled, but it floated back and forth, unwilling—or unable—to attack.

It was shocking, seeing Shade fight like that, a mass of hard muscle and tats spinning like a tornado. Her impression a minute ago was right; he was built for battle. Battle and danger and trouble all in one powerful package. He crunched a kick into the Darquethoth’s back. It went down, a boneless puddle.

Shade didn’t miss a beat as he turned to her. “The Bathag’s dead?” She nodded, a weird sense of foreboding falling over her when his expression turned grim. “Damn. You ready?”

“For what?”

He took her hand. “We’re going to make a run for it. The vapor wraith is bound to the Harrowgate, and it’s male, so I can’t seduce it.”

She eyed the thing, straining to get to them but pulling up short, as though it was tethered to an invisible leash. “I thought you said that since we’re bonded, you can’t do that anymore.”

“I can’t go all the way with another female, but I still have an excess of incubus charm.”

“Charm?” He had to be kidding.

“Fuck-me pheromones.”

Now, that she believed. “Why would the vapor wraith be bound to the Harrowgate? Are all gates protected?”

“No. This is Roag’s handiwork. To prevent his captives from escaping, and to prevent enemies from finding him.” He squeezed her hand. “How are you doing?”

She knew what he meant, and almost as if his words reminded her inner werewolf that it should be starting to shift, her joints began to pop in excruciating bursts of pain.

“We have to go,” she gasped. “But how?”

“We run right through it.”

Voices rang out in the fog. They were out of time. She was out of time. She might think that running headlong into one of the scariest-looking demons she’d ever seen was a bad idea, but she’d have to trust Shade if she wanted to live.

“Whatever you say,” she breathed.

He cocked an eyebrow at her, and then they were running. Shade threw out his arm as though to push the thing out of the way, and his dermoire began to glow. They hit the beast, and the sensation of a million jellyfish stings exploded all over Runa’s body. She fought the urge to scream in both terror and agony. Tears burned her eyes, and she stumbled. Shade caught her, held her upright against the solid wall of his body.

The vapor wraith screeched, and suddenly they were past it. Shade dragged her inside the Harrowgate. Darkness closed on them, the pitch black broken by glowing symbols and maps etched into the smooth obsidian walls surrounding them.

Pain still rolled through her body, and beneath her skin, her muscles stretched tight, tugging on her joints as her body began to morph into her beast form. Hurry, Shade.

“What happened to the demon?” Her voice sounded rough, guttural, and she knew she was speaking through a half-formed muzzle.

“I used my gift to scramble its insides. Didn’t kill it, but it stunned the creature enough to get us through.” He cast her a sideways glance. “Oh, hey … let’s not do that yet. Sit. Stay.”

Oh, he was hilarious. She was going to bite him as soon as the transformation was complete.

Shade tapped some etchings. A heartbeat later, the gate opened, and they stepped into a wall of heat and humidity. A jungle. Instantly, the sense that she was going to explode out of her skin faded. Her blood tingled with the upcoming full moon event, but the immediacy of the change had vanished. Best of all, her body parts had popped back into place.

“Um, where are we?” A cacophony of sounds surrounded them, bird calls and insect buzzing, as well as unidentifiable creatures screaming in the treetops.

“Costa Rica.”

“Central America?”

“You know of another Costa Rica?”

Smartass. She jumped at the sound of something hissing. This place was going to give her a heart attack. Bad enough that demons were after her. Now she had to worry about poisonous snakes and hungry jaguars.

“Will those demons follow us?”

Shade shook his head and started moving through the brush.

She hurried after him. “What about Roag?”

He halted, his dark eyes scanning the surrounding jungle. “It’s difficult to track someone through Harrowgates unless you can sense them. You need a hellhound.”

“Okay, so why here?”

“You’ll have a few extra hours of daylight. And,” he added, “my second home is here. Roag doesn’t know about this one.”

Well, color her stunned. “You never told me you had a second home.”

“It’s not someplace I take humans.”

Lovely. She pictured him bringing his demon sex partners here, to this steamy jungle where they probably rolled around like wild animals. All the reasons she hated him came roaring back, along with hackle-raising anger. That, combined with the premoon jitters, made for one caustic mood.

“It’s not someplace you’re taking me, either,” she snapped.

“You have a better idea?”

“You can do what you want. I’ll move in with my brother until this thing with Roag blows over.”

Displeasure wafted off him in waves. “Out of the question. You stay with me.”

“Think again.” She crossed her arms over her chest, trying to ignore the trickle of sweat running down her back as the tension between them grew thicker than the sticky air. “I’m not the naïve, spineless little twit I was when we were dating.”

“I liked you a lot more when you were spineless,” he muttered.

“Yeah, well, I liked you more then, too.”

“Dammit, Runa. The thing with Roag won’t blow over. You killed his female. He will stop at nothing to get at you. And once he has you …” Shade’s hands fisted at his sides, and he swallowed hard.

Her imagination took what he hadn’t said and went to all kinds of horrific places as she cast a worried glance back at the Harrowgate. The shimmering arch hung between two rocks, identical to the one they’d entered in Ireland. Except this gate didn’t have a creepy demon guarding it.

“Why can’t I sense it?” she asked, more to get her mind off the reality of what Roag would do to her than to satisfy her curiosity.

“Newly turned werewolves are still too human. As your humanity fades with time, your nonhuman instincts will sharpen.”

“How long? I mean, it’s been almost a year.”

He shrugged, a tense roll of one shoulder. “We have a warg paramedic on staff at the hospital who can sense them, and he’s a hundred years old, was turned in his twenties. So he started sensing Harrowgates somewhere in that eighty-year time frame.”

She shot him an irritated glare. “How helpful.”

“Come on.” He grabbed her hand, the one that had been shredded by the Bathag’s teeth, and she winced. “You’re hurt.” He drew her knuckles closer to his face, bringing her body in as well.

“It’s nothing.”

Shade ignored her, running his fingers lightly over the raw, torn skin. A breeze rattled the trees, bringing with it Shade’s scent, a potent mix of earth and sweat, battle and sex. Dirt and blood streaked his chest, and a bruise darkened one cheek, but he was all the more gorgeous for it. She hated her primitive response to the way he’d fought for her, hated him, in fact. But she couldn’t stop staring any more than she could stop her heart from beating.

“Let go of me.” She bit the words out viciously, desperate to get away from him, but he held her with his hypnotic gaze and slow, soothing passes of his thumb across her knuckles. When a low-level buzz shot through her hand, she gasped. “What are you doing?”

“Speeding up the healing process. I can’t do what Eidolon does and heal you on the spot, but I can nudge your body’s natural curative abilities into high gear.” His voice was husky, reminding her of the way he sounded when he was inside her, murmuring sexy, naughty things in her ear.

He must have been reminded of the same thing, because he cursed and dropped her hand. “Follow me.” He moved off without another word.

Frustrated by both her mercurial feelings for him and his unpredictable behavior, she watched him go, tempted to try the Harrowgate on her own.

“You won’t be able to work it,” he called out, and dammit, how had he known what she was thinking?

He led her along an overgrown trail, his movements swift and sure. Leaves sliced at his skin and branches clawed at him, but he didn’t seem to notice.

She didn’t know how far they’d walked with her jumping at every noise, but she sensed at least an hour had passed when he began to slow. The sound of rushing water reached her ears about the same time as a swarm of mosquitoes attacked her.

“God, I need a shower.” She slapped her neck, squishing one of the bloodsuckers. “How can you stand living here?”

“The native wildlife doesn’t bother me, and only the most extreme temperatures affect me.”

She remembered how, in the cold dungeon, he hadn’t so much as shivered after he’d been stripped of his clothes. She, on the other hand, had thought she’d freeze to death at times.

The thick weave of mossy trees and lush plants thinned, opening into a clearing bordered on one side by a sheer rocky cliff and a massively tall waterfall, a sparkling paradise in the middle of hell.

“Let me guess, the entrance to your cave is behind the fall?” Too cliché.

He said nothing, merely kept walking. She followed, slapping mosquitoes and brushing aside branches that snagged her sweater and tugged at her hair. They passed between the cliff and a giant rectangular stone, the path angling sharply upward for about thirty feet, until they ran into a dead-end tangle of brush and vines. Shade reached into a section of vegetation, fumbled with something until she heard a click, and a large chunk of rock slid sideways, revealing a narrow opening.

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