The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 503

Chapter 503: Fuck Off Times Three

From the shadows at the far end of the corridor, wolf skeletons embedded in the walls began to twitch.

The twitching started small. A jaw rattling against stone. A claw scraping inside its mounting. The sounds were wrong, wet-sounding despite being bone, producing an audio that belonged to living muscle and was coming from things that had been dead for millennia.

One skull rotated. Then another. Then five.

Stone cracked as ancient bones tore themselves free. Joints bent the wrong way. Spines twisted backward. Jaws hung open at impossible angles, hinged wider than any living wolf’s jaw had ever opened, the gaping producing a silence that was worse than a growl because growling meant alive and this was something else entirely.

Wolf shapes, once sacred, now perverted into something silent, predatory, and utterly wrong, stepped forward on skeletal limbs.

Their hollow eye sockets fixed on him.

And they began to stalk.

Rook: RUN.

Gavriel: Already ahead of you.

Gavriel ran at a speed down the corridor that only belongs to Alphas. His boots tore through ancient dust, his arms pumping, the tunnel blurring past him in streaks of blue-white rune light. Behind him, the skeletons moved without sound.

No footfalls. No clatter of bone on stone. Just the hiss of dead air being displaced by things that should have stayed in the walls and whose staying had been overruled by whatever defense system this corridor was running.

Fin: Serena, give us a status update.

Nothing.

Gavriel felt her panic surge again, sharp and electric, slamming into his chest. The matebond was a live wire. Her terror hit him so hard his stride stuttered, his lungs seizing for one half-second, his body processing her fear as his own before his brain could sort the signals apart. His wolf snarled, claws raking at the inside of his skin.

Rook: FASTER. She is close. I smell her.

Gavriel: I smell her too. Everywhere. This place is weaponizing her scent.

Rook: The real scent is forward. The dead wolves behind us are gaining.

Then arms burst from the walls and seized him.

Grey, skeletal, grasping. They hooked his armor, his shoulders, his wrists, the hands erupting from cracks in the stone with the coordinated timing of a trap that had been waiting for exactly this body at exactly this speed. They dragged him forward through the chaos.

Gavriel made a noise he would later insist was a battle cry.

Instinct flared and he blasted them back with magic, forcing space. The magic was gold. His magic was gold.

"Get back you fucks!" he yelled.

The realization registered. He was magical too. It was contagious apparently.

Rook: That is why I glowed. Use your magic.

Gavriel: How the fuck do I do that?

Gold flash up ahead and his eyes locked on Serena.

She was hauling herself out of what looked like a portal, caught halfway between worlds. One knee braced against stone, one arm still swallowed by darkness. Her eyes were molten gold, her wolf pushing to the surface, Aurelia fighting from the inside with the desperate, clawing fury of an animal whose human was being dragged somewhere the animal couldn’t follow.

"SERENA!"

He sprinted. Full speed. The skeletons were behind him and the arms were in the walls and the portal was pulling her and the pulling was winning.

Fin: Does anyone copy?

Dexmon: Serena, where are you? Can anyone hear me?

Gavriel: I can hear you. I’m trying to get to her. She was pulled through a portal.

Fin: Aeron. If you can hear this, make a portal. Now.

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