"Ryker. What an unexpected and frankly unwelcome surprise. I was having a lovely morning."
Kael didn't look away from Guinevere when he spoke, and kept his grip on her neck tight.
Ryker. One of the Drakencrest king's men and the literal dragon she fell asleep on last night.
"I can see that. You are choking a woman in the middle of a warded forest you should not have been able to enter. Honestly, the more I look at this picture, the worse it gets for you personally. I want you to know that as a friend."
"We are not friends."
"We have been to three wars together. Opposite sides, but I think that qualifies us as friends on the weekends."
Kael's hand tightened around her throat. Just enough. Guinevere's vision started to fray at the corners.
"Who is she," Kael clipped.
"A woman. You can tell because of the hair."
"Ryker."
"Kael."
"Why is the second in command of the Drakencrest crown personally in the forest fetching a woman. I sent my mage for high-blood women. I received, as a bonus, this. Explain."
Ryker took one step forward.
Kael's hand tightened further. Guinevere felt something in her throat creak in a way that throats were not supposed to creak.
"Take another step, Ryker, and I will snap her neck before your boot finishes its arc. I promise you this on the grave of my father."
Ryker stopped. He raised both hands, palms out, in the universal gesture of a man who had been here before and did not wish to be here again.
"Come off it, Kael. You are not going to snap her neck. You have her pinned like a butterfly in a book. That is not the grip of a man who has decided on murder. That is the grip of a man who has decided on something much more interesting and is annoyed I am interrupting. Be a sport. Let the girl go and I'll pretend I didn't see any of this. Small favor from me to you. Friends on the weekends."
Kael smiled.
It was a slow smile, and it was not a nice one, and it did something complicated with his iron eyes.
"You know what, Ryker. You are right. I was not going to snap her neck. I was going to take her with me and spend the next six months figuring out what she is." He paused. "However. Your intervention has clarified something for me. I am definitely keeping her now. And when I figure out who she belongs to, you may pass along a message from me. Their toys should not punch dragons in the face, kick dragons in the testicles, throw ropes at master mages, or run from me in a forest."
Ryker's jaw worked. His eyes flicked to Guinevere. His expression did not change.
But his free hand, the one not near his blade, slowly curled into a fist.
Guinevere's limbs were getting heavy.
She could feel it happening in stages. The fight in her arms was going first, sliding out of her fingers like water through a cupped palm. Her legs were still trying to push against the moss but the push was smaller now. Her thoughts were stretching sideways. The canopy above her was getting darker at the edges and brighter in the middle, a tunnel closing around the sun.
She was being strangled to death.
Ryker took another step.
Kael's smile widened like he could not believe his luck.
"Oh." His voice dropped into something almost tender. "Oh, Ryker. Look at your face. This is your mate, isn't she. This little bleeding girl with the broken hand. This is the Drakencrest second's mate. Which means what I have in my hand is not a toy at all. What I have in my hand is a question that the entire Drakencrest crown is going to answer for me personally. Tell me, second. What will you do to get her back."
Ryker opened his mouth, about to deliver what was probably an iconic line, but her wolf stole the moment.
It tore out of her in a way she had never experienced before. The other three shifts had been chosen. This was not chosen. This was survival. Her wolf was being strangled to death inside her body at the same time her body was being strangled to death on the outside, and it reached the cliff edge of dying before she did, and it leapt.
The pain was nothing like the other times.
The other times had been bones reorganizing. A hot, bright tearing that hurt the way a burn hurts and then ended. This was different. This was every bone in her body screaming at once in a frequency she had not known bones could make. This was her ribs breaking and reknitting mid-motion because the cracked ones from earlier could not take the shift without giving. This was her dislocated thumb popping fully out of its socket and then back into the paw it was becoming.
This was her wolf dying inside her and fighting back against the dying at the same time.
White light exploded outward from her body.
The white light tore Kael's hand from her throat. Everything around her was lit up in a white so bright it turned the forest into a negative image of itself.
Her wolf was up, then running.
Behind her, she heard voices. Stunned. Human. The mage, swearing in a language she did not know. Ryker, shouting something she could not parse. Kael, a single word she was too far away to catch. The soldiers she had taken down earlier, back on their feet somewhere in the chaos, adding to the noise.
Every single one of them was staring.
A glowing white wolf in the middle of a Drakencrest forest, running at a speed no she-wolf had any business running at.
She did not look back.
"GET HER!"
Kael's voice, behind her, cracked across the pines.
She heard the shift. Wings. Talons. The rush of air that meant a very large black dragon had just taken to the canopy above the trees and was tracking her through it.
She ran.
Her paws thundered across moss and pine needles and over a fallen log and down a slope and through a shallow creek and up the other side, and the light was still coming off her in waves because she had not been alive long enough in this form to learn how to dim it. She was a streak of white against the brown and green, a beacon, a torch running through the trees at the exact moment she needed to disappear.
The forest blurred.
One mile. Maybe more. She did not know how far she had gone when her body hit its limit.
Her paws stuttered. Her ribs, freshly broken again from the shift, gave out from under her. She skidded to a stop at the base of an enormous oak and the world went sideways on her, and the shift reversed on its own because her wolf had nothing left to give.
She hit the moss on her hands and knees, fully human again, coughing so hard she could taste copper. Her throat was a ruin. Her ribs were worse. Her right hand could not hold her weight. She collapsed forward onto her left elbow, gasping.
Thirty feet away, a black dragon dropped through the canopy and shifted mid-landing.
Kael rose out of the motion already walking, already smiling, iron eyes bright with something that was no longer intrigue. It was possession.
"Oh," he said softly. "Oh, kitten. I'm already enjoying every minute of figuring you out."
He lunged for her.
A blur hit him from the left side at dragon speed.
Another blur from the right.
More blurs, and wings, and the sound of something very large slamming into something very large in the canopy above her, and Guinevere was too far gone to track any of it.
Her vision was already going. The last thing she saw before the dark took her was a flash of gold against the black and then nothing at all.