When We Were Mates (Demetra and Emris) novel Chapter 133

Chapter 133

Chapter 133

Alpha Emris.

Eighteen years ago.

“What are these?”

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I’m seven pages into a history book I wasn’t supposed to pull from the shelf and I’ve stopped on an illustration of a creature.

My father looks over my shoulder.

“Those are Lycans, son.”

“Are they powerful? They look powerful.”

“Yeah.”

“Do they exist?”

Alpha Kael straightens, like he’s deciding how much truth an eleven–year–old can carry and then he says: “There’s nothing under the sun that doesn’t exist, son. But you’re a Trybrid. You have nothing to be afraid of.”

I close the book.

“I can’t even control my wolf.”

“You’re eleven years old-”

“I know how old I am.” I scoff. “I’m eleven and my eyes slit when I get scared and I can’t stop it and the other kids…it doesn’t matter.”

I push back from the table. “I don’t think I can be what you’re saying I’m going to be!”

“Emris.”

“No, Dad. I really don’t think I can.”

He’s quiet for a moment. Then he pulls a chair around and sits in front of me.

“Even a Lycan has a weakness. A Lycan is born under a wolf moon and the deepest fear of their existence is the Hunter.”

“What’s a Hunter?”

“A wolf born under a hunter moon is a hunger.” He holds my eyes. “You, my son, were born under a hunter moon.”

I stare at him.

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Chapter 133

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“I know you hate your eyes when they slit. I know it happens when the trauma surfaces and you can’t push it back down. But those slits aren’t weakness. That’s your vampyr bloodline activating. That’s your body becoming the one thing a Lycan cannot compulse, cannot break, cannot outlast.” His mouth curves. “Your eyes don’t betray you, Emris. They protect you. Don’t hate what protects you.”

I look down at the closed book. At the creature pressed into the old paper.

I didn’t believe him then.

Close Combat

I watch the wound on the Lycan’s shoulder close.

It’s not the way a wolf heals….gradually, cellular–ish but the way a door closes. This bastard straightens, and rolls his shoulder once.

And for the first time in my life, standing in the echo of that whistle and feeling the frequency of the old trauma…I don’t back down.

I roll my neck and the fight begins.

He raises one hand…almost leisurely and puts the other in his pocket like he’s going to fight me with one hand in his pocket.

I move first. Left feint, right cross…fast, cleaner than it looks and he sways off it like water moving around a stone. No block, no counter, just absence, like he was never exactly where I aimed. My follow kick finds air and he’s already on the other side of it, watching me recalibrate with something that might be appreciation.

He still hasn’t taken his hand out of his pocket!

I come again…driving from the hips with real weight behind it and Lake turns just enough, redirecting the force with his forearm.

His hand stays in his pocket.

I close the distance-

He weaves off two more, rolls his shoulder away from a third, and I catch something across his face…not quite concentration, not quite interest but I’m an equation he thought he’d already solved and I keep changing variables.

While he’s calculating that, I drive my fist into the center of his chest and for the first time since a minute, the bastard takes a full step back. His hand comes out of his pocket-

Now we’re fighting.

He comes at me and the difference is vicious” The first strike catches my jaw and the world whites briefly at the edges. I taste copper before I finish turning into it and his second hand follows so fast the two blows feel

like one.

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Chapter 133

I hear something crack in the cartilage of my nose.

We’re trading now and it’s the kind of fight where the sounds are wrong.

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Dense noise of bone finding bone, of two bodies that don’t break easily doing their level best to break each other. His knuckles open a cut above my eye!

I put an elbow into the side of his face and hear him exhale hard through his teeth.

He is sweating.

I see it on his temples, in the hollow of his throat. I think somewhere in the last ninety seconds he has understood something about me that he didn’t account for when he blurred into these woods tonight.

I get him across the face.

The knuckles land exactly where I intended and his head snaps sideways and I watch his footing break… one heel lifting, body torquing to absorb it. I’m already moving to press it when his hand shoots out and catches my wrist!

Catches it and twists, bending the joint to the edge of its limit, and the growl that comes out of me is not strategy, it’s just pain.

I hear my own elbow creak.

I pull back and roll my arm until something pops back into alignment with a crack that sounds worse than it is. In that second, he blurs and the Lycan’s hand is at my throat. His eyes are level with mine and his lips part.

“Take out your own heart, Emris.”

He is compulsing me but fucking bastard, I cannot be compulsed!

“EMRIS!” I hear Demetra scream.

I bring my forehead down across his face with a force that’s purely geometric. Skull to his face and he goes backward…down, one knee hitting the earth, and the leaves around us lift and scatter.

I bare my canines! Same as the slits in my eyes so he can look directly at the thing his bloodline was born afraid of and understand what it means. Lake stares at me from one knee, bowing to his Alpha.

And in the space of a breath, the calculation changes behind his eyes. I watch it happen.

He picks up off his side kick from the ground and blurs!

Gone. He ran.

He came here thinking he could compulse me into killing myself.

The moment that failed, he had nothing.

He’ll come back. I know he’ll come back. But he’ll come back differently, and so will I, and between the two of

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Chapter 133

us… I am the one who has a reason to fight to the death.

“Emris.”

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Demetra runs toward and I catch her. I hold on because for approximately four minutes tonight I was not certain I was going to get to do this again.

I press my face into the side of her head and say nothing.

AD