When We Were Mates (Demetra and Emris) novel Chapter 140

Chapter 140

Luna Demetra.

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Contd

I feel the fearful sound leave my throat before I mean to make it…it makes me scared and I back away…which I immediately regret cause Emris receives it. And I know him… it’ll only make him insecure….so that’s why he didn’t show me. That’s why he has been…. hiding.

A growl starts in his chest and he rises above me slowly. I cannot look away from them even though something in my omega brain is sending signals I don’t fully understand yet.

Yellow means fury. Yellow means the wolf is riding high and hot and looking for something to break.

But blue. I don’t know what blue means.

I don’t know and it scares my wolf so much that we are crippling.

“Your eyes,” I whisper and his hand moves fast, searching the sheets on either side of me for the patch I just took off. I close my fingers around it before he finds it.

“Demetra. Give it back!”

“Emris. Your eyes are blue.”

“Give it to me.”

“Why are they blue-”

“DEMETRA!! Give it to me. Now!”

I hold the patch tighter in my hand.

My breaths come in shaking gasps between my lips.

I’m not crying yet, I’m somewhere past the point where crying feels like the right response and not quite arrived at wherever comes after it.

There is something visibly wrong with my mate.

Not wrong like last night was wrong, not the grief and the rage and the broken open rawness of a wolf who found out too many things in one evening. This is different.

Slowly, I move.

Trying to get off the bed. Trying to put my feet on the floor. Trying to find words when my throat feels like it’s filled with cotton.

“We can talk. We can talk about whatever this is-”

15:53 Tue, May 19

Chapter 140

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“Demetra!” Emris head lifts and the growls that he makes my name is nothing like the ones I know. It doesn’t come from his throat. It comes from somewhere structural, load–bearing, and when his eyes dilate…the blue deepens, slit widens, both happening at the same time that my wolf makes the decision for me and I sit back down from pure adrenaline of my wolf who knows the order of hierarchy between omega and Trybrid.

“Stop talking and give it to me.”

Emris storms out.

I sit there for one useless second before I lunge off the bed.

“Emris!”

I run it anyway and I round the corner just in time to watch the elevator doors close with him inside them. I slam my palm against the button and get nothing. I watch the numbers above the door begin to descend and I spin and find the stairs.

Down. As fast as I can go, which is not fast enough, hand on the railing, taking two steps at a time, and I burst through the ground floor door and almost hit Summer head–on in the lobby.

Her hands catch my shoulders before I go down.

“Did you see Emris?”

“What – Demetra, it’s-”

I run and put everything I have into pushing them heavy front doors open as the night air plays in my face. I scan the driveway and catch the shape of his shoulder…. just the edge of it, disappearing toward the tree line of the woods.

I run as fast knowing I’m not wearing any slippers, knowing

It’s dark.

Really dark but I can’t stay back. Not when there’s something wrong with Emris. Not when he’s out here alone, in the woods, with whatever is happening inside him.

I can’t find him anymore.

I stop running because I have to, because I can’t see the ground, because my foot comes down on a rock and I bite back the sound it tries to pull out of me.

“Emris?”

I call his name into the darkness and it’s the same nothing I felt the first time Lake brought me here.

Except this time it’s Emris.

“Emris, please.” I raise my voice and hear it bounce off the trunks and come back to me alone. I turn in a slow circle, trying to pick a direction, trying to find his scent on the air but the Ghost Ash trees are disturbed and the compound scent is everywhere and nowhere at the same time and I feel tears prick the corners of my

15:53 Tue, May 19

Chapter 140

eyes from pure frustration.

I try again by sound. Take a breath. Close my eyes.

“Emris, you’re scaring me.”

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I hear a crack to my left and quickly push toward it, arms up against the branches as I break through a gap between two trees and my foot lands on something soft.

I look down and see his shirt.

Two feet from it, his trousers.

I take one step forward and I’m relieved, for one half of one second, because at least I’ve found where he is-

Until I see my mate who’s in the process of shifting. That’s the first thing I pick, and the second thing is that him not being fully shifted is more terrifying than the alternative would have been, because what stands between those two states is something I have no-

Emris is still standing on two feet but the body I know has Tripled.

He’s in a nocturnal shape where his muscle mass has restructured itself in the time it took me to get here, across his shoulders and chest and arms in configurations that no longer look designed for a world built to wolf scale. His claws are fully extended and tipped in blue that pulses faintly with its own cold light.

Both eyes are blue.

His hair has fallen forward over his face. Over the eyes.

But the blue finds me anyway.

The growl that comes from his chest

starts in the ground. I feel it come up through my bare feet and into my ankles and when I do hear it, the leaves on every branch within twenty feet begin to tremble. And my knees….without my permission begin to bend, and I have to fight to stay standing.

I have heard people say Emris in his changing state was something to fear.

I understood that intellectually.

I did not understand it until this exact moment.

All of a sudden, he is no longer there. He moved but I didn’t see it happen. I am standing alone in the middle of the Black Covenant woods with bare feet and a sleeping gown and the eye patch still somehow in my hand.

15:53 Tue, May 19

Chapter 141

Chapter 141