The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 495

Chapter 495: Turn Left Now

Panic was steering the ship.

She knew it. Aurelia knew it. The panic was a living thing in her chest, massive and loud and producing a heartbeat so fast her ribs were vibrating. The panic was telling her legs to run and her legs were obeying and the obeying was survival but the survival was directionless because she was running through a jungle she had never been in toward a destination she could never find while the things behind her were faster and older and could smell fear the way wolves smelled prey.

Aurelia: Turn. Left. Now.

She turned left. A vine caught her shin. Her foot hooked under a root that was raised just enough to catch a boot moving at speed and whose catching was total.

She went down.

Face first, driving the air from her lungs in a single forced exhale that left her empty and gasping on the jungle floor.

For two seconds, she couldn’t breathe. Her diaphragm was locked. Her lungs refused to expand. The fall had compressed everything in her chest into a space too small for oxygen and the too-small was producing a suffocation that was temporary and felt permanent.

Behind her. Movement. Closing fast.

More of them. Three. Five. The rustling of bodies moving through canopy at speed, the specific sound of predators converging on prey that had stopped moving, and the stopping was a signal and the signal was dinner.

"Run, little luna..."

"Shift for us..."

"We want the white one..."

The voices were layered. Overlapping. Coming from every direction, designed to pin her in place with sound alone, the acoustic equivalent of a net thrown over her mind.

She pushed herself up. Her hands were shaking. Her palms were scraped raw. Blood was running from a cut on her chin where the ground had split skin.

Aurelia: SERENA. GET UP.

She got up.

A shadow dropped from the canopy twenty paces ahead. Another landed to her right. A third materialized from the undergrowth to her left. Black eyes. Grey skin. Fangs extended. Three vampires forming a triangle around a woman who was standing in a jungle bleeding from her chin and whose bleeding was producing a scent that was drawing more of them and the more was audible in the trees above.

She was going to die here. The thought arrived clean, clinical, delivered by the part of her brain that processed odds and whose odds were zero. She was human. She couldn’t shift. Her magic was depleting. Her mates were gone. Her mages were gone. She was alone in a jungle surrounded by creatures whose hunger was ten thousand years old and whose old was patient enough to wait for her legs to give out.

Then Fin’s wolf spoke in her mind.

Xeon: SHIFT, AURELIA.

His words carried the specific frequency of an Alpha command delivered through a wolf-to-wolf channel that bypassed human consciousness and hit Aurelia directly.

An Alpha command through mindlink. From his wolf.

She didn’t know any of that was possible.

Aurelia: They will not bite us in wolf form. Mate says that.

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