King of Beasts

Chapter 17

Red hair caught the moonlight, made it look like burning embers. With eyes closed, Charlotte and her naturally pale skin looked like a statue sitting atop a roof, knees pulled up to her chest, face tilted towards the stars.

She was starting to get concerned with her odd obsession with roofs. Gabe would surely throw a fit if he saw her up there.

But that's why she was up there, wasn't it? Because Gabe was gone.

And unfortunately, the distance did odd things to Charlotte's head. Allowed her to think rationally. Or maybe not so rationally. All she knew was that she had gotten a headache the moment Gabe left and she was two seconds away from ripping her own hair out.

Almost self consciously, without her knowing, she traced that old, ugly scar on her chest, could feel her heart thumping from under her shirt. She wondered how odd it would feel if she really could connect with Gabe like he described. Even now she felt . . . incomplete.

"Charlotte, are you coming in soon?" Odin called from the front lawn, neck craned back to stare up at the girl on the roof.

"In a minute." she called back quietly, knowing he could hear.

He paused, like he was about to argue, before sighing and stepping back into Gabe's house.

Charlotte was having a mental struggle, an odd argument with herself that she couldn't seem to win. It was easy being mad at Gabe when he had dragged her from her family, had been nothing but the king of beasts to her.

But now he was Gabe, her mate. Now he was Gabe, who's soul flowed into hers, made her half complete, made her feel everything about him, every perfection that outweighed every flaw. He was everything now, and it seemed wrong to be angry at him for any reason.

Yet she was.

Gabe had left to go to her home without her. She wasn't concerned that he had gone on the run, no matter the fact Odin tried to hide it. Where else would he be in the middle of the night? Charlotte wasn't an idiot, it didn't take long to figure that one out.

What she was concerned about, however, was that he was hunting down answers in her home town without her, when he knew that the only thing she really wanted was to see her family again.

She thought she wasn't a captor anymore, but with Gabe dictating where she went, and Odin watching her like a guard, she felt like a prisoner.

She understood Gabe's concerns. Sort of. The elders had been grooming Charlotte for something, and it could only be trouble. She just— god, she didn't even know. Her head was being pulled in a hundred different directions and she could only feel a deep ache in her chest, right under her scar, where her soul yearned to open to Gabe.

She dreamed of her granddad sometimes. Dreamed of green blue eyes, the color or a tropical ocean, staring down at her and the knife in her chest. She dreamed of crimson, of blood staining the linoleum, of his fingers drawing runes in the tiles and crying.

She dreamed of her soul, as a separate thing, a separate entity of its own being pulled form her body and twisted, warped, forced from it's home.

Charlotte dreamed a lot of that night, but nothing more than the way he'd come up to her, had wrapped his arms around her and told her that granddad loves her, his Charlotte, his little girl, and that someday, she'd understand.

There was no sensation in dreaming, but Charlotte woke up gasping most nights, feeling that odd pressure in her chest, the sharp pain, the grunt as the knife was forced through bone and muscle and tissue all over again and fighting off an imaginary man who'd been her hero.

Shivering slightly although there was no breeze, Charlotte blinked her eyes and gazed at the forest in front of her.

Gabe was somewhere out there, trying to find answers. He'd been searching for Charlotte for years and all she could give him was a bite to the wrist and a promise to never be able to complete the other half of him. She brought him up, just so she could slowly, block by block, tear him right back down.

Unfortunately, though, Charlotte wasn't seeing much of the forest, too caught up in her own thoughts, too distracted by the stars in the sky. Maybe she could have seen the shadows otherwise, moving on their own in the darkness, the eyes blinking up at her, the snarl of rotten teeth and fur matted with bloody red runes.

.

.

The beasts lurked around every street bend, claws slicing across pavement, the very air stilling as if to not draw attention to itself. They moved like they were shadows, silent, deadly, dark.

The moon itself fell behind a cloud, and if you were lucky enough, you had found sleep hours before and were dreaming peacefully. If you were Samantha Mires, then you were on your way back to the beasts home, unconscious in the arms of a running man who looked down at her as though he were carrying gold.

If you were Sydney, then you had landed a solid punch to a naked mans family jewels, but hadn't gotten more than three steps before a hand put just the right amount of pressure on the back of her neck and she fell limp, supported in a set of broad arms that didn't dare hold her too tight for fear of breaking something so precious, so unbelievably perfect.

And if you were powerful enough to feel it, feel the beasts lurking in the shadows, then you were deep, very deep, in the very same shadows where they wouldn't even think to look.

In his eternal cage, in the darkness he was swarmed and drowned in, tropical ocean eyes saw into those shadows, watched the king of beasts prowl through the very same streets the king's mate had called home, and waited patiently, just as quietly, for the right time.

Because, as it turns out, his whole life he's had nothing but time until now, when it really mattered. Now, while the king sought after what he knew nothing about, his very mate was dreaming atop a roof with a dozen rabid beasts waiting to bring her home.

Jeremiah Strite, sitting in his dark, dark cage, could wait no longer.

It was time to finish what he had started.