CYRUS
I staggered, my feet seeming to tie themselves, before I righted myself. I had just been a second away from face planting on the wet asphalt. Again.
It had just finished raining and the rain seemed to have made my situation worse.
It was a cold night. I didn’t feel the cold much due to the fact that I was a lykae and we were good at maintaining body heat. The problem, was that I wanted to curl up with Avery and sleep. And not wake up for two days.
My craving didn’t make sense because I was usually did not indulge in cuddling after sex. I was always quick to leave so that the other party would get the idea that it wasn’t a commitment. Which made the fact that I wanted to cuddle with Avery even more strange.
Mating could bring forth certain things that a lykae didn’t usually do. Things that a lykae might have found strange, or even repulsive. Things that he might have mocked others for indulging in.
Something told me that was what I was going through.
I was changing due to the fact that I was now mated.
I side-stepped a pot-hole, feeling a small leap of victory that I hadn’t walked right into it and fallen to the ground. I wasn’t usually known for drinking myself to a stupor, but it was a habit I had developed ever since I stopped seeing Avery.
Ever since she told me to stay away from her.
She didn’t know how hard that was. Asking a lykae to stay away from their mate was like showing blood to a vampire and telling them not to drink it. It was impossible. As simple as that.
I was supposed to be drafting up a plan to go back home, resolve the issue with the Alpha and resume my duties as my clan leader. Yet here I was, drinking myself to a stupor everyday.
Still. At the same time, I could hardly be blamed.
I was newly mated. I was supposed to be spending as much time as I could with my mate. Having sex, hunting together, providing for her, lazing around and getting to know one another. Not stating as far away from them as possible.
How could I have been so cursed to be given a human as a mate? I didn’t want to call it a curse because Avery was far from that. She was a miracle through and through. But in the general aspect of things, she was a human.
How?
It had never happened in the history of lykaes. Both men and women had fellow lykae mates. Rarely, they had species of other fractions of the lore as their mates, but that was understandable and easy to get around.
But a human? It was unheard of.
I still had a hard time believing it. Usually, I would call Marcus and tell him everything that had happened, hopefully gain an advise from him, but I didn’t want to. I couldn’t. Thinking about Avery filled my heart and whole body with tremendous pain. I didn’t want to think about what I would go through if I talked about her.
Stay away from me.
The words echoed in my head, taunting me.
My mate. Terrified of me. Of who I was.
What way could possibly be around that?
She didn’t even want to see me. I saw the repulsion in her eyes. The fear and disgust when she saw the way I ruthlessly killed all those people and the hurried steps she had taken back, unable to get away from me as fast as she could.
She was disgusted by what I was. By what I had done. But everything that I did that night, I did for her.
All through the fight, the only thing I could think about was that I had to draw them to myself so that they didn’t notice her. Then when she came downstairs, fear like never before had gripped me, and all I focused on, was making sure that she was safe. And she left anyway.
Because I’m not human.
Fuck. I couldn’t think about it without pain spearing into my heart.
Of all the issues mates had-and they rarely ever had-what they were, had never been the problem. So how did one get over a thing like this? And how exactly had I managed to get a human for a mate?
Had it not been that the lykae Instinct was such a trustworthy and reliable thing, I would simply have dismissed what it told me. I had doubted it several times already over the last few days.
What if the instinct was wrong? What if it had identified the wrong woman as my mate? What if it wasn’t the instict that I had heard that night?
But the more I thought about it, the more everything began to make sense. How the instinct had directed me to go into the bar where she worked at my first night in this town, how I couldn’t seem to explain the connection I felt with her, everything.
It was all starting to make sense now.
She had been my mate all along, why had it taken a dangerous situation for the instinct to wake me up and tell me that she was mine?
My chest ached as my thoughts drifted to that night, just before my house had been broken into.
She had looked like a vision, coming into my kitchen, wearing my shirt and briefs. Her body so soft, so fucking sexy that it had taken all of my restraint to not lift her onto the counter right then and there and lose myself in her until we both forgot our names.
Then she had made things even worse by suggesting we went a considerable mile even if we didn’t outright have sex, testing my control even further.
God. She was so beautiful. So pure and entertaining and so full of life. With that blonde hair of hers floating around her, she could almost be an angel.
My angel. Too bad she didn’t want to be mine.
I halted when a strange smell wafted to my nostrils. Even though I was drunk and wasted, I could sense that something wasn’t right.
The streets were empty and that was normal. It was very late. The bartender had to kick me out before I could leave and I was the last person to leave the bar. So the streets being empty wasn’t the issue.
Rather, it was the odd smell that I couldn’t quite associate-it was a sickly sweet smell that I guessed immediately, that’s it’s use had to be for harm-and the fact that a few people were starting to come out.
They were still far away, so they looked like stick figures. But they seemed to be coming closer and more seemed to be appearing. Just to make sure I wasn’t seeing things, I wiped at my eyes and sure as hell, the people were still coming closer to me.
They were so close to me now that I could identify that they were men.
I turned around, prepared to run as fast as my drunken, sloppy feet could carry me, when I saw that there were also people behind me. I had been so focused on staring at what was in front of me, I hadn’t bothered with my back.
I looked left and right, and all I could see were buildings.
There was no escape.
Lights from buildings, glinted off the weapons they were holding, and from the distance, I saw a car starting to drive towards us at a slow pace. The car was with them.
“Place your hands above your head.” One of the men shouted. He was the one closest to me and he was holding the signature weapon of humans. A gun.
They were humans. No wonder I hadn’t been able to detect a scent from them.
That sick odour was still in the air, and it was then that I noticed that they all had masks over their face. To protect them from the smell.
I knew it was a deadly gas!
I hurriedly covered my nose with the sleeve of my long-sleeved shirt, remaining where I was. If I went backwards, they would hold me, if I went forward, the same. So instead, I watched them warily, trying to think of my next move.
I was drunk. My beast wasn’t even fighting to come out. How the fuck was I going to fight?
“Your hands above your head, sir.” The man shouted again.
Slowly, carefully, I looked at all of them. They were all holding guns and a ton of other weapons I couldn’t name since lykaes didn’t fight with weapons.
There were only two ways out. Fight or surrender. There was no way I could run away, not when all the escape routes were blocked.
Fuck it. I was going to fight, even if I died trying.
They seemed to have known the decision that I took because they threw something at me, and the fumes emanating from it were the same ones I had been perceiving all along.
I kicked it away from where it landed just a few centimetres away from my feet, and flew towards the man who had thrown it.
There was a shot.
Something rocked me, and I stopped. I looked down and saw that there was a bullet hole in my chest. I had been shot.
I looked up at the man who had pulled the trigger, anger boiling up inside me until it was the only thing I could feel. There was no pain from the gunshot. Only anger.
My beast slammed against my cage. It was finally coming out. Adrenaline spiked my bloodstream.
That these men would dare to attack me.
Roaring, I attacked and just as soon, gunshots rang out.
My body flew back from the impact of the bullets as they fired at me. Before I could reach my target, my chest was riddled with holes.
I managed to separate the head of the man who had thrown the gas at me, from his body before I collapsed to the ground, exhausted.
For a few seconds, I fought a losing battle with unconsciousness.
Eventually, I gave up.