Ashes of Midnight Read Online Free Page B

Reichen’s boots chewed up an unerring path toward her. Bloodred, laser-sharp, his focus locked on a huge ball of crumbling earth and the exposed, twisted dead roots of a fallen tree. Roth’s Breedmate crouched behind it.
     
Reichen heard the pound of her heartbeat kick even faster as he neared and the current traveling his body began to cook the ancient root ball, steam rising from deep inside the dark clump. It would be just moments before the whole thing ignited. His heat was too strong now and roiling outward in pulsing waves. He wouldn’t be able to stop the coming explosion, even if he tried.
     
“Come out, female.” His voice sounded rusty and foreign to him. Tasted as dry as ashes in his throat. “You don’t have much time left. Come out of there while you still can.”
     
She didn’t obey him. Some distant part of him wasn’t exactly surprised by her stubborn resistance—he might even go so far as to say that he’d expected it. But another part of him, the part that was lit up with pyrokinetic fury and deadly short on patience, let loose with a ground-shuddering roar.
     
The warning, such as it was, proved effective.
     
He caught a flash of movement—heard the quick rush of footsteps flying over leaf-strewn ground—in the instant before the tree root detonated. Sparks shot out in all directions, sending streamers of orange light high overhead. Reichen saw Roth’s woman bolting deeper into the woods as smoldering debris rained down around the crater that now gouged the earth where she’d been hiding.
     
On a black curse, he went after her. She was running fast, but he was faster. There was nowhere for her to go. It didn’t take her long to figure that out for herself. Her steps slowed, then stopped altogether. Reichen paused where he stood, some ten paces away from her. Leaves crackled and withered above his head, all around him branches scorching from his heat.
     
Her hands flexed and fisted at her sides, her feet shifting as she seemed to weigh her chances of escape and quickly dismiss them. “If you’re going to kill me now, then do it.”
     
Her voice was quiet, but without the slightest falter. The velvet sound of it awakened scattered memories that shot through his mind in a barrage of images: He and this woman, naked in bed together, caught in a tangle of sheets, laughing, kissing. Her deep brown gaze dancing in golden candlelight as he fed her sugared raspberries on a midnight picnic by the lake. Her arms wrapped around his waist, her cheek resting against his bare chest as she confessed that she had fallen in love with him.
     
Claire…
     
It took long moments for him to shake loose of that remembered past. He forced himself to think of a more recent one, the one that he could still taste in the bitter tang of the smoke that hung in the forest air. The one that was soaked in the blood of too many innocent lives.
     
“I haven’t come for your death, Claire Roth.”
     
She went very still at the mention of her name. Reichen stared at the rigidly held spine ahead of him, the delicate shoulders squared and unshaking, defiant, as his enemy’s mate slowly pivoted to face him. Her large, dark eyes held his gaze across the distance. He saw a note of recognition there, but it was swallowed up by disbelief. She mutely shook her head, staring at him as if he were a ghost or,rather, some kind of monster. He knew he was, especially after tonight, but seeing it in another’s eyes—in her eyes—made the anger in him surge a bit wilder.
     
“Tell me where he is,” Reichen demanded.
     
She didn’t seem to hear him. She stared for what seemed like forever, taking him in with that keen, inquisitive gaze. Finally, she gave a slow shake of her head.
     
“I don’t understand how this can be,” she murmured. She took a step forward, only to back off a second later as blackened leaves and pine needles fell from their branches around him and turned to white ash at his feet. “My God… Andreas. Is this a dream? I mean, I