I Rejected My Obsessive Werebeast novel Chapter 92

Chapter 92

Silas had my hand in his, gripped so tightly that I could feel the bones of his fingers pressing against mine through the skin, and his other arm was braced in front of me like a breakwater, his body angled into the wind and rain in a way that took the worst of it before it reached me. He was moving fast, his long strides eating up the distance toward the guesthouse, his ears flat against his skull, his tail rigid behind him. Around us, other people were running–residents and tourists alike, a scattered collection of figures splashing through the rising water, some of them shouting, some of them silent with the kind of fear that shuts the mouth before the brain has time to process what’s happening.

Thunder cracked overhead, not the rolling kind that announces itself from a distance but a sudden, explosive detonation that seemed to split the air directly above us and left my ears ringing.

We were close to the guesthouse now. I could see the stone foundation of the building through the rain, the terrace above, the path that led up to our room. Another hundred meters and we would be on higher ground, out of the flood’s reach, and this whole thing would be nothing more than a story we told later about the vacation where we got caught in a storm.

Then the mountain made a sound I had never heard anything make before.

It was low, deeper than thunder, a sustained rumble that seemed to come from inside the earth itself, as if the ground were groaning under some immense and sudden pressure. It wasn’t the sound of water. It was the sound of the mountain rearranging itself.

I turned my head, and through the curtain of rain, I saw it.

The hillside behind the town, which had been a solid mass of green and

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gray only minutes ago, was now moving. A wall of brown–mud, rocks. uprooted trees, everything that had been sitting on that slope for years–was sliding downward in a churning, liquid mass, following the natural channels and gullies that carved through the mountain’s face. It wasn’t flowing the way a river flows. It was falling, collapsing, a landslide that had turned into a flood and a flood that had turned into something that didn’t have a name because nobody had ever survived it long enough to name it.

The main body of it was heading for the lower part of town, but a??–a finger of the flow, narrower but still massive–was angling directly toward the street we were standing on.

Silas saw it at the same moment I did. He didn’t say anything. He just made a sound low in his chest, something between a growl and a command, and yanked me sideways toward a structure I barely registered- a low stone wall, part of some old foundation or retaining structure, half- abandoned and overgrown, but solid enough and high enough to break the flow if we could get behind it.

He pulled me into a run, and the water fought us every step. It wasn’t just standing water anymore. It was moving water, carrying force, carrying weight, and every second it was deeper and faster. The current hit me from the side with a sudden, brutal shove that I had no time to prepare for, and my feet went out from under me on the slick, debris–covered ground.

I went down hard, the water closing over me for a terrible second, cold and thick with mud, and then I was being dragged sideways by the current, tumbling, my free hand grasping at nothing, my wrist still in ‘Silas’s grip but feeling the fingers slipping, feeling the water prying at his hold like it was trying to take something away from him.

His arm locked.

I felt the muscles in his forearm go rigid, the tendons standing out like cables under the skin, and his grip, which had been tight, became

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