A Love Untamed (Feral Warriors #7)(57)

“Run, Mel,” Fox said urgently. “They’re here. Run.”

Stars in heaven. There had to be paths, but the way the palm fronds overlapped, it was impossible to see where. She began to lift the huge leaves, tossing them into the nearest pit, revealing the holes, one by one. The trouble was, bending, lifting, shoving the fronds down took time. And with two dozen warriors racing to cut out their hearts, there was no time.

She prayed to the ancient queens and leaped forward, grabbing one of the long fronds and slamming down the hard stem over and over, walking as fast as she could. Where she hit solid ground, she followed. Where the frond pushed through, she exposed another hole.

At the clash of metal behind her, she whirled to find Fox fully engaged in battle. The only good news was that the savages would be as hindered by the pits as they were. And maybe the pits were the key, the way to even the numbers a little. After a few more yards straight back, she made a hard right. Just as she suspected, with Fox no longer running interference, the painted ones began racing straight for her. Two hit the first pit and fell in with twin cries of fury.

Melisande grinned and kept going. Another three leaped for her and landed in the next pit. Death cries echoed through the tropical woods as Fox made kills behind her. Two more savages leaped to fall in. They certainly weren’t the smartest lot. Then again, they weren’t real.

She’d sent seven of them into the holes so far. A quick look over her shoulder told her that Fox had killed close to that many, too, leaving . . . ten. Still far too many. But another one cried out. Nine. And another. Eight. Fox was hacking through them quickly, following after the horde that stalked her, taking them out from behind. Seven, six, five.

Suddenly, three of them turned, like puppets pulled by a single string and leaped at Fox all at once. In a coordinated, horrifying move, they tackled him, pushing him into the nearest hole and following him down.

“Fox!” She sprang forward, but one of the two remaining warriors stepped into her path and the other came at her from the other side until she was trapped between them on a strip of ground no more than two feet wide. If she fell in either direction, she, too, would be trapped in one of those pits. And she had little doubt that she’d never leave it alive.

Her only choice was to fight.

Melisande hesitated for only a moment, then lunged. Fear and desperation fueling her actions, she fought for her life and for the life of the man she was coming to care about far too much. She ducked, stabbed, whirled, until sweat ran into her eyes, and her tunic was torn and bloody. But, finally, she managed to hamstring one of her assailants, toppling him into one of the pits. Then she whirled and slashed the other’s throat.

With a shuddering breath, she wiped her bloody blades on her ruined tunic and slammed them into their scabbards, then lunged for the pit where Fox had disappeared. But between her first step and her second, the tropical forest disappeared.

And suddenly she stood in the middle of an empty, snowy plain, at the base of a rocky, frozen hillside. No. She turned, trying to return to the island, and failed. There was no going back. And Fox was trapped.

The labyrinth had separated them at last.

It was late afternoon when Grizz and Lepard knocked on the front door of the tan-and-brown two-story frame house in Whitefish, Montana. It sat along a quiet neighborhood street, its front porch overflowing with plants and flowers, in the midst of which sat a padded bench adorned with a fat, sleeping tabby.

In the distance rose the mountains, the Rockies, their snow-covered crowns at odds with the warmth of the late-spring day.

A man opened the door, light brown hair falling straight and shaggy to his shoulders, his beard full and thick. Paint splattered his white T-shirt and jeans and a glass of what appeared to be whiskey sat comfortably in his free hand.

“Yarren Brinlin?” Grizz asked.

Small eyes narrowed. “Who wants to know?”

Grizz pushed his way into the house, startling a squeak of objection from the smaller man.

“Hey! What do you think you’re doing?”

Grizz stopped in the middle of the front room and looked around at what was essentially an art studio—two easels with half-painted canvases, a stack of blank canvases propped against one wall. Paints of every conceivable type and color littered every surface. The house smelled of oil paints and paint thinner, with an underlying layer of cigarette smoke and microwaved pizza.

“Get the hell out of my house!”

Grizz’s temper ignited, his fangs and claws erupting in a hard growl.

Brinlin gaped, his eyes going wide as dinner plates, his whiskey glass slipping through his fingers to shatter on the paint-splattered hardwood floor. “You’re a Feral Warrior.”

Grizz felt Lepard’s hand on his shoulder. “Dial it back, Grizz.”

Wide eyes went impossibly wider. “The grizzly? Man alive.” His gaze swung to Lepard. “You, too?”

“Snow leopard.”

Brinlin took a shaky step backward. “What . . . what do you want?”

“Sabine.”

The male’s anger-flushed cheeks drained of all color. “No. No way. She’ll kill you if you try to go near her. Or she’ll kill me.”

“She doesn’t like Ferals?”

“She doesn’t like anybody. She’s a loner.”

“We need to talk to her,” Grizz told him.