I Cut My Alpha's Bond, So the Lycan King Came Hunting novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Ford

She runs the old logging road and stalls her pursuers with ward stones, but the Lycan King is waiting alone at the Sauk ford. She cuts his arm and goes into the river, and her cut husband is on the far bank, half wolf.

I had the truck moving before the howl finished.

The ridge gate road runs three miles down to the county road, and that is the first place a Marshal sets a roadblock.

So I didn't take it.

I took the old logging track behind the gatehouse, the one with a chain across it that only Wardens ever bothered to learn.

The chain was a ward line, a thin cold ribbon of old blood-magic, and I felt it before I saw it.

I put my cut wrist against the post and it opened for me.

The Coleridges have been border Wardens for as long as there have been borders.

Wards bend for our blood, and nobody in Eckert Hall had ever asked me why.

On the second switchback I stopped, climbed out and laid my hand on the boundary stone.

Behind me the road to the ridge went dead.

The Guard's trucks would have to go around by the county road, and that gave me most of an hour.

I drove with the headlights off and the window down.

The cut on my wrist had stopped bleeding, but the hollow place under my ribs went on aching.

That was the bond.

A cut bond hurts for days.

I put the pain in a box and shut the lid, which is what a Ranger does with pain she can't use.

Two black pickups sat on the shoulder at the bottom of the track, parked nose to nose.

Lycan hunters, with their lights off and their engines ticking as they cooled.

Nobody was in either cab.

I killed my engine, rolled the last fifty yards in neutral and slid down the culvert bank on my back, dragging the rifle case.

The first hunter walked past my boots without looking down.

The second stopped and lifted his head.

I did not breathe.

For three years Eckert's wards had covered me, and I had forgotten what it was to have a smell.

He turned his face slowly toward the culvert.

I threw a rock into the trees on the far side of the road.

Both men went into the brush before it landed.

I took the other way, down to the river, and I ran.

The Sauk is wide there, a gravel ford where the old road crosses and the water runs knee-deep in a good month.

It was not a good month.

The moon was up, and the water ran fast and white around the bar.

I stopped in the shadow of a cedar and counted the far bank.

One shape stood in the shallows halfway across, with the current breaking around its legs.

A man, alone, hands empty, in a long black coat.

"Sergeant Coleridge," he said.

He did not raise his voice.

The river was loud and I heard every word.

"You've got the wrong woman," I said.

"No." He turned his head and looked at the cedar where I stood. "I've had a name on a roster for nine years and no face to put to it. Your wards fell off you at the gate. You smell of sage, gun oil and cedar smoke, and you're standing in that tree because you counted me and didn't like the number."

I stepped out of the shadow.

There was nothing else to do.

Up close I saw a dark, quiet face with a scar down the left jaw.

His grey eyes had not slept in a long time.

He wasn't a monster.

That was worse.

"You know who I am," he said.

"The King of the Lycans," I said. "Dacre Vaughn. They show your picture to recruits."

"And you know why I'm here."

"I know what you think."

"That's fair." He started toward me through the water, unhurried. "I would rather you walked to the Court with me. I would rather a lot of things. But you won't, will you?"

"No."

"No," he agreed.

He lunged forward and reached for me.

I went under his arm, which is what I'd been taught, and put the boot knife into the soft place above his elbow.

I had left the Warden blade in the table in the hall.

This was the second knife, army issue, and he hadn't known about it.

He caught my wrist with his other hand, and the grip was iron.

I kicked his knee, hard, from the side.

He did not fall.

He looked down at the blood running off his forearm, then up at me.

For a moment his face went still with disbelief.

"You cut me," he said, quietly surprised.

"You should have brought more men."

"I should have. I wanted to see you first."

He pulled me in, and I let him, and then I dropped my weight and broke his grip against the thumb.

I was free.

I did the only sensible thing and went backwards into the river.

The cold hit me all at once, and the channel took me off the bar.

The current rolled me over stones and through white water toward the far bank.

The rifle case strapped to my back dragged me down.

I got my head up, spat water and saw a second shape on the bank ahead.

It was not a Lycan.

It was on all fours, and then it was not.

Then it was something between a man and a wolf, shoulders hunched, bone showing wrong under the skin.

Its eyes caught the moon and held it.

It was Halvard, and he had followed the cut bond straight to me.

← Chapter 1 · All chapters · Chapter 3 →

Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend