Page 12 of Brutally Mated
“So good,” Skor praises me, pressing his lips to my temple. “You’re going to come so much and so often for me, aren’t you? You’re going to take our cocks and you’re going to swell with our seed. You’re going to have our pups.”
“Yes,” I moan, because there is no other kind of answer to give.
While I am distracted, while the others surround me and watch me with a sort of intense fascination dictated by lust, we are seconds away from disaster.
I see it first, its movement low to the ground. My wolf mates don’t recognize it at first. Their brains are telling them it’s something harmless, a lizard or a rat, some other scuttling creature. They’re wrong.
Something is crawling toward the fire. Something that was human once, but couldn’t quite die. It was smart enough to come up from downwind. The stench of it would have made it detectable for miles if not for that.
I didn’t put up wards or sigils. I didn’t do anything to protect the camp. And now I’m going to watch these men die.
It comes into the circle of light cast by the fire. Wild animals stay away from fire, but dark things are always drawn to the light.
“Fuck!” Thorn curses, leaping back from the grasping clawed hands of the zombie. “What the fuck is that?”
The three males leap into action, trying to kill the thing. But they don’t know that a single bite from those sharp yellowed teeth will infect them and make them so sick they do not see daylight. There are a lot of ways to die in these mountains.
I was planning on just letting this happen.
I thought I’d be able to watch and not feel anything.
I was wrong.
I breathe in deep and I feel the power of the mountains and of my mother, and her mother before her, and all the mothers who made daughters stretching back into a time before anybody has any memory.
Power moves through me. Not sunlight, but fire. It’s easier, because the fire is burning brightly next to me. I don’t have to conjure anything. Very little energy is necessary to move the flame from the fire to the creature.
It burns like dead things burn, bright and fast. When it finds fetid flesh it hisses and pops, but the thing is already gone. Whatever animated it fled the moment it felt its end coming.
In a matter of seconds, the threat has been annihilated.
I move around the camp making sigils in the dirt. The old man doesn’t stop me this time. He is too busy staring at what is leftof the dead thing, wondering how it is that there is a part of the world he does not know about at his advanced age.
“What the fuck was that?” Thorn asks the question with a hushed horror. It’s hard to see something dead act in a living manner. The corpse that came to consume them did not even have back legs. It was a torso, arms, and hunger.
“Someone infected,” I say. “People down the valley bury the bodies wrong sometimes. They make their way up the mountain after death and hunt.”
They’re all looking at me as if they want me to explain, but there’s no way to make them understand, not really. There’s probably some fancy city science-y explanation for why the dead walk so well in these hills, but it’s not of use to anybody.
I try to concoct some kind of word collection that might help them feel what’s happening here.
“These mountains have an energy that doesn’t exist anywhere else in this world. It’s a place apart from other places. People think they can just go anywhere, and it will all be the same, but that’s not true. Places have power. They have personalities. We do best when we live where we originated. Where our ancestors’ bones are buried. But if we move, we have to adapt. Or die.”
I look at them. I know I shouldn’t open my mouth and keep talking. I know nobody wants to hear the next thing I have to say. But it has a momentum of its own and it comes out almost like magic does, like it’s not really me, but a force that needs to be expressed.
“You will die.”
“Okay, that’s creepy,” Thorn shudders. “I don’t know what’s scarier. The monsters, or our mate.”
I smile at him. I mean it to be reassuring. His expression tells me I have not had that effect.
CHAPTER 3
Krall
“It’s going to be a long night,” she says, the firelight shining from her eyes. I’d say reflected, but at this point, when I look into her gaze I am sure I see two flames dancing.
I thought we came here to kill vampires. I was ready for that. I have a collection of stakes. My teeth are at the ready to tear vampire flesh apart. But I do not want to be anywhere near a creature that vile. It turns my stomach thinking about biting into such putrid substances.
