Tipping The Scales: Knox (Mate Craze)(39)

My knees treaded against the rocks and dirt roads as I took the turns at more than a hundred miles an hour. The place she spoke of, the place that my grandfather’s ashes were scattered, was at the very top of the mountain. It was a sacred place to our elders and to our clan. Every wedding, funeral, and anything else important took place there.

How dare she use it for such betrayal.

I nearly killed myself several times getting to that place, but by the time I did, best friend or not, if Rhi was responsible for Kallie being hurt, I would unleash my dragon and rip her head off myself.

“Come on, Kallie. Hang in there. Don’t you give up on me, darlin.”

Even though we hadn’t been properly mated, I prayed that maybe my words would get through and she would hang on. We had clan healers who could do double what traditional doctors could in half the time.

I could get there in time.

I had to get there in time.

I hadn’t even gotten off the bike fully before I began calling her name.

“Over here, Knox. We’re just getting started.” The voice belonged to Rhi, but the only thing I could see was Kallie, strapped to a pole, standing up with logs and rocks encircling her. Her mouth was gagged with a piece of cloth and her hands were bound with rope. There was something poured over her head. When I realized what my knees gave a little.

It was gasoline.

Like Rhi intended to burn my mate at the stake like some antiquated Salem ritual.

Now I was really going to kill her.

I approached Kallie, not caring where Rhi was, but when I did, I was stopped, as though there was a transparent wall between me and my mate. I tried again, over and over in vain, determined to release her, though it shocked me every time I tried.

“Can you please stop? You’re embarrassing yourself. Damn, I mean, you’re kind of embarrassing me. You can get her down. We can be done with all of this really quickly. Wanna know how?”





16





Kallie





Darkness. Pain. Darkness. Pain. Darkness. Pain. I couldn’t process anything around me except for those two things. One moment I was sitting in a truck, the next I was… holy crap, I was dead. I was hit by another car and was killed. In all my imaginings of what death was, this wasn’t one of them.

As a child, I pictured bright lights and angels swooping down to take me to the clouds. As a teen, I thought it probably would be less dramatic, but still pleasant. As a college student, I pretty much decided it was going to be like going to sleep but without the waking up. This pain and darkness, no this wasn’t at all what I had anticipated.

“Roll over,” Rhi called to me in a loud whisper. Maybe I wasn’t dead. That didn’t explain how I was here, in the dark, and in so much pain. I blinked rapidly hoping to adjust to the darkness quicker, but with no success. Wherever we were, it was dark, the kind of darkness we rarely saw in the city. “I said, roll over.”

“Dead?” I asked just to be sure. As much as a relief as the whole not being dead thing was, the pain and darkness had me instilled with just as much fear and anxiety. This was wrong. The entire scene around me was just plain wrong.

“No.” Her voice cracked as she spoke. That was not good. Not. At. All. “Not yet, but you need to get up.”

I wished I could see her to see if she was, as her voice indicated, crying. She often cried out of frustration and sometimes out of rejection, both of which I understood and could deal with. This, this didn’t sound like those kind of tears. These tears sounded like they came out of a place of fear, and that was something I’d never seen in my friend before.

“Rhi, what the heck happened?” I tried to roll as she asked, but the pain radiated beyond the massive headache and into my shoulder. Freaking perfect.

“About that. I kind of rammed into your truck.” If I had been close enough to her, I would’ve… I don’t know what I would’ve done, but rage was filling me to the point of surpassing the pain. Deep down I knew I had to keep her talking. I couldn’t move my arms apart, as evident with my attempt at rolling which meant I needed her, which sucked since she was the reason I was there. “On purpose,” she said the last part lower, probably hoping I didn’t quite here it. Not that I could blame her because if we were anywhere but this dark space with my arms bound, I had no doubt my hands would be around her throat.

“Wh-wh-why would you do that?” What I really wanted to say, and by the force of will power and self-preservation, somehow managed to completely avoid, was How the eff did I not know you were evil? Sure I knew she wasn’t like me in so many ways and she made far different life choices than I did, but that never lead me to believe she was evil. I felt bad for her, sympathized with her, and on occasion wanted to smack her, but never thought she was capable of doing something at all like this. She rammed into Knox’s truck, with me in it, on purpose. It made no sense.

“Long story short… my parents.”

I tried again to roll over, biting my lip as I did as to not scream out in agony. If she were whispering, there was a reason. A reason I now could name. Her parents. Unlike Rhi, I had thought of them as evil on more than one occasion. Mostly for how they treated their daughter. Mostly, but not all.

The first time I met them, they gave me the squeamies. Rhi and I were roomies, but hadn’t quite crossed into the friend zone yet, although I was questioning whether we had ever truly become friends right now. There was something off about them, almost slimy. I’d felt that feeling only once in my short life and it was with a fellow at the local library. Turned out he was a perve who preyed upon kids.