As he ran, Adam continued to reach out for Mercy through their mating bond. But none of the tricks he’d learned did anything to let him break through.
His wolf pulled on the pack bonds—which were of more use. From that pathway, he could tell she was in a lot of pain. Not quite enough to register in the pack without someone actively seeking her out. She wasn’t dying. Not yet. He didn’t kid himself that she was okay.
Something was hurting her.
Everything slowed down, as it did in the middle of battle—as if there were seconds between each of the beats of his heart. Someone had hurt his mate.
He would stop them.
His human body was too slow. He was armed, but that wasn’t enough for the wolf inside him. He needed to have access to his teeth and claws.
He needed to not be too late this time—as they had been too late before.
A flash of Mercy’s garage as it had been, blood and bits of flesh that used to be a human man. Mercy had already killed her attacker, and all that Adam could do was tear the body to bits. He had not been fast enough.
And on a barren vineyard just two months ago, he’d writhed in the understanding that if Bonarata had wanted to kill Mercy, there was nothing that Adam could do about that.
Adam knew that he didn’t have time to change. Even if his pack had all been present, there wasn’t time to change. Changing would make him slower. With the pack so far away, he wasn’t even going to be half-shifted by the time he got to the place where he’d seen the creature. Adam could fight as human or wolf—but mid-change, he was clumsy and slow.
He understood that.
But someone was hurting his mate and he needed to not be too late. The wolf answered that need and ignored logic—because this was not time for logic, or for human calculations. The wolf was ascendant now and Adam had lost his chance to stop it—if he had ever had one.
He shed his clothing as quickly as he could, with no thought of wearing any of it again—including his boots. He didn’t even notice when the climbing harness was ripped to pieces. He retained enough presence of mind to throw his gun at the lake.
He threw it like he’d have thrown a baseball. It broke through the ice and fell into the water—where it was less likely it could be used by his enemies. He quit fighting then, and gave himself over to the wolf.
But Adam despaired, even as the wolf pulled on the pack ties. He felt the strain of harvesting the pack’s strength from such a distance, but anything that sped up his change might be the difference between life and death. As Alpha, he asked and they gave—and then there was a sudden hard surge of power, different from the pack magic, that brought Adam down to the ground in a spectacular tumbling fall.
Sherwood’s wild magic freely sent.
He thrust himself to his feet again, needing to run as long as he could. As he did, he howled through his still mostly human throat with the agony of that burning power that neither Adam nor the wolf had the ability to use. This was wild magic, unfettered power that didn’t come willingly to his call the way the pack magic came.
But there was a part of him that could use it. The part that had allowed him to break Mary Jo free of Ymir.
Let me, suggested the Beast that lived inside him.
Neither Adam nor his wolf trusted that creature. This wasn’t their pack home, where he could count on others to help if the Beast was freed.
The creature a witch had cursed Adam with was horrific, swift, and deadly. But when it was in charge, it fought only by instinct—and instinct had not been enough to win against Bonarata.
Brute strength had not kept Mercy safe then. Adam didn’t think it would be enough now. Worse, he didn’t know if the Beast would even pick the right target.
He still had nightmares about the time when it had nearly killed Mercy.
But the Beast didn’t require Adam’s consent. It fed from the power Sherwood gave them and used it to peel off Adam’s human body with the same ease and care that Adam had used to shed his shredded coat—and in about the same amount of time.
There was a moment that Adam felt himself slipping under the rage—but before the Beast could force its form on Adam, the wolf seized control, driving the Beast under with the ruthless efficiency of the Alpha of the Columbia Basin Pack.
And the Beast understood and let itself be thrust to the background.
Adam decided he would worry about what that meant later. Now he rolled out of the snow and onto his feet, four feet that belonged to the wolf. Adam and his wolf fell into the one-in-purpose compromise that they had fought for together and achieved with the help of fifty-odd years of moon hunts.
The change had been at the swifter cursed-by-a-witch speed that brought the Beast out, and not the usual quarter of an hour or so that Adam would have managed instead. It wasn’t Mercy’s in-a-blink change, but it had been fast. Thirty seconds, maybe, between his fall and rising to run as the wolf.
Four clawed paws meant that he could increase his speed because there was no chance of slipping. While Adam had been down, the one who had been following him from the lodge, running flat-out with inhuman speed, had sped past without pausing. Some part of Adam understood it was Liam, but the wolf only understood the green man as someone who had yet to prove himself an ally.
But now, in wolf shape, the fae was no match for Adam’s speed. Far in the lead, Adam crested the rise of ground that hid what proved to be a small depression where he’d first seen the monster in the woods. But he wasn’t thinking about the green man except as a possible future threat because, finally, he saw Mercy.
In that odd place where time was plentiful, Adam took in the scene before him as he gathered himself to attack.
Mercy lay naked on the ground, curled on her side. Her body was wrapped around the walking stick as if to protect it—or the opposite. The old fae artifact was in its battle form, the sharp head of the spear just visible in the snow under her chin.
Crouched over her, the creature had enveloped Mercy’s shoulder in its enormous mouth—Adam caught a glimpse of the yellowish fangs buried deep. Mercy’s body moved as the beast’s jaws flexed. Adam’s sudden intrusion didn’t distract it from what it was doing. Feeding.
Even as he considered his best attack, Adam noted that he could smell wet dog and a scent that he recognized. But although he could see the fangs buried in Mercy’s shoulder, there wasn’t enough blood. He caught a faint metallic odor, but not as strongly as he should have for the apparent injury. What he smelled was indicative of scrapes, not wounds. No blood stained the snow.
The creature was immense. It had a bearlike body the size of a horse. The fighter in Adam categorized the fangs as commensurate with its size, but the claws were blunt and short. The rest of him noted absently that it was vaguely canid, from a more distant point of the canid tree than Adam’s own werewolf was.
And it had withstood Mercy, even armed with her guardian fae artifact. He tucked that back in his battle plans along with the green man who would be along shortly.
Now, though, now was the time for his fangs to bite deep and his claws to rend. No one was allowed to hurt his mate.
Mouth wide, he leapt upon the beast’s back. The best attack, he knew, would have been to go for the creature’s flanks. It moved enough like a normal animal that he felt comfortable assuming that its hind legs worked the same as the hind legs of most other mammals on the planet. Hamstringing was unlikely, given the size of the creature, but he could still do enough muscle damage to cripple it. He knew he could have dragged it off its prey—but that would further damage Mercy.
Instead, he aimed himself at the creature’s back, as if he were a cougar instead of a wolf—because werewolves had front paws and claws that were more cougarlike than wolflike. Once on the creature’s back, he could go for the side of its neck.