A Love Untamed (Feral Warriors #7)(74)

“Did you do that on purpose?” Melisande asked.

No. His gut told him they were going the wrong way. Which made no sense considering they weren’t going either way. But in his animal form, he’d gotten neither shivers nor goose bumps and couldn’t tell if the intuition was true or false. A moment later, another intuition hit him. Look up. He did and saw nothing. Sniff the sidewalk to your right. Lift your left hind leg. Lie down and go to sleep.

The intuitions were flooding his head until he could barely think through them. Stop it! he shouted. His fox let out a pained whimper.

“Fox?”

He felt Melisande’s hand in his fur, felt his animal leap with pleasure at the warmth of her healing gift. And all of a sudden he could shift again. In a spray of colored lights, he was once more standing on two feet.

She gazed at him worriedly. “What happened?”

But before he could answer her, he heard a shout.

Fox’s head jerked up at the sound of the familiar voice. “Kara.”

A moment later, Kara came racing around the street corner half a block up, barefoot and unkempt, her ponytail akimbo, but looking no worse for wear.

“Kara!” He ran toward her.

She flung herself into his arms. “Oh, thank God.” Trembling and pale, she looked up at him with eyes wild with fear. “I escaped. But they’re after me.”

“They’re not going to touch you again,” he vowed. Setting her on her feet and pulling her against his side, he turned to where Castin and Melisande stood watching them. He met Castin’s gaze. “Our Radiant, Kara.”

Castin offered her a shallow bow. “Radiant.”

Kara looked up at Fox. “I know which way to go.” She pulled away, started forward, motioning them to follow. “Come on. We need to run. They’ll be here any minute, and there are too many of them to fight.”

Fox waited for Melisande, relieved to see the battle fire back in her eyes. Side by side, they followed Kara and Castin, throwing glances behind, but Fox saw no sign of the Mage.

Shivers tore through him, goose bumps rising on his arms. Kill Melisande. Don’t trust Kara. You’re going the wrong way.

Bloody fecking lying intuition!

“This way!” Kara called and made a hard left into a narrow alley lined with the rotting corpses of ancient motorcycles. But halfway down the alley, she began to slow. Tears started running down her cheeks. “I’m too tired. They’re going to kill us!”

“Kara . . .”

But as Fox approached her, she lifted her hands as if to ward him off. “Don’t touch me!”

He stared at her. Those bastards had done a real number on her. “Let me carry you, Radiant.”

“No!” She backed away, against the side wall, knocking over one of the motorcycle husks. “Don’t touch me. I don’t want anyone to touch me!”

Fox felt a hard fist of dread. Had they raped her? He frowned. She’d leaped into his arms when she first saw him.

“If the Mage are really coming, we need to keep moving,” Castin said behind him.

Fox heard the rumble a heartbeat before the steel caging shot up out of the ground like twin walls, one in front of them, the other behind, running the entire width of the alley. High above, another piece formed the cage roof, snapping shut with an ominous clang.

Fox met Melisande’s shocked gaze. Caught . . . again.

With a massive creak, the cage walls began to move ever-so-slightly inward.

“They’re going to crush us!” Kara cried.

Fox reached for Melisande’s hand.

Castin shook his head. “Not crush us. They’ll pin us close to the bars, where they can easily reach us.”

“Hell,” Fox muttered. Because a single touch by a Mage’s hand and they’d be enthralled, puppets who would follow their Mage captors without a fight, right to their own doom. Or to the doom of the Feral Warriors.

Chapter Seventeen

As one, Fox and Castin leaped for opposite sides of the cage that spanned the narrow alley in this latest world along the Mage’s labyrinthine gauntlet. Fox gripped the iron bars, throwing all of his weight, all of his strength into stopping the cage from collapsing inward, either crushing them or pinning them so they would be easily enthralled when the Mage came for them. He struggled until the sweat ran down his temples and soaked his back, until his muscles ached from the strain, but the cage wall just kept moving.

Behind him, Kara wailed, “They’re going to kill us!” He was tempted to knock her out just to quiet her screeching.

The thought stopped him cold. He hadn’t known Kara long, or well, but if there was one thing he did know, she was no coward. The Kara he knew would never screech.

His scalp crawled with memory. What had Melisande said? The key could be anything—animal, mineral, or vegetable.

Or Kara?

Holy shite.

Destroy the key, and I destroy the magic.

His scalp went ice-cold. And if he was wrong? If this was the true Kara? The thought that he might accidentally kill his Radiant, Lyon’s mate, had his flesh creeping with horror.

“You okay?” Melisande asked at his elbow.

As the contracting cage forced him back another step, he leaned close to Melisande’s ear. “I don’t think she’s Kara.”

Melisande looked at him with surprise, her gaze turning thoughtful. “I think you might be right. I never felt like slapping the real one, not even when I hated all Therians. In fact, I kind of admired her.” She frowned, then mouthed, “The key?”