The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 292

Chapter 292: A Comet, A Shield, & A Wolf Made Of Gold

Hyran and Aeron both flinched, teeth gritted. Their Hidden Flame marks felt like hot iron was being pressed on their skin.

Maelor was too busy looking at the lake to notice.

He stood at the waterline, staring at the churning, icy-black water where the tentacle had disappeared. The lake hissed, seething with dark energy and cold that felt like it could stop a heart on contact.

The three mages exchanged a glance. All wearing the exact same expression: absolutely, categorically, under no circumstances.

"I have limits," Maelor said, staring at the water.

"I’d be in the way," Hyran confirmed.

Aeron nodded once. "We hold the shore."

Beneath the surface, the water was a nightmare. Black. Freezing. Alive with something ancient and furious that had been sleeping under this lake for longer than the temple had stood.

Whatever had dragged Serena into the depths did more than pull her. Something pierced into her side, deep, sharp, cruel, and the pain blasted through both matebonds so violently that Fin and Dex felt it as though they were the ones being stabbed. It ripped the breath from their lungs underwater, a sensation so disorienting that both men nearly inhaled the lake.

Gav felt nothing through a matebond. He felt it worse. He felt nothing, which meant he had to imagine it, and his imagination was a cruel, thorough machine that had been running scenarios about Serena being hurt since the day he realized what she meant to him.

Then something happened that none of them expected.

Dex’s body ignited gold.

His own gold. From his own core. Power he hadn’t touched since being marked, power that had been sitting dormant inside him, waiting for a moment catastrophic enough to wake it. The cold receded. The dark receded. He burned in the water like a second sun, and the shock of it nearly stopped his stroke.

Beside him, Fin’s wolf lit gold a fraction of a second later. Serena’s power was flooding into Xeon from wherever she was bleeding in the dark. She pushed it to him on instinct, pulling from backup reserves she didn’t know she had until her mate needed it.

Gav lit gold third. Warmth flooded back into his body as he swam.

Then his hands vibrated.

A sword materialized in his grip. Golden. Humming. Solid as steel and thrumming with a resonance that traveled up his forearms and settled into his bones. He stared at it for one disbelieving second.

Serena had put one in his hand from the bottom of a lake while something was trying to kill her, because even in agony, even dragged into the depths, she could still fabricate.

A sword formed in Dex’s grip at the same moment. Two men and a wolf, burning through the black water of an underground lake toward the woman who had armed them all.

Gav spotted her first. Fifty feet below, deep in the sapphire dark. He kicked hard, slicing through the icy water with a Gamma’s ferocity. Xeon shot after him. Dex followed like a golden comet, his newly ignited power cutting through the cold.

Serena’s eyes glowed gold. Burning, unnatural, borrowed from a place deeper than her own reserves. She was fighting.

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