Chapter 2
Rykan tracked the big grazing animal through the snow covered trees.
The heavy snowfall was unusual this early in the season, but it made tracking easier.
Each hoofprint told a story—the animal was old, favoring its left hind leg, and moving too slowly to outrun a determined predator.
An easy kill. Almost disappointingly so.
He followed in silence, his boots leaving barely a whisper in the fresh powder.
His beast stirred beneath his skin, eager for the chase, but he kept it leashed with his usual discipline.
There was no sport in releasing his full form for prey this simple.
Better to save his energy, use his bow to make a clean kill, and drag the carcass back to his cabin to add to his winter preparations.
The grazing animal paused at the edge of a frozen stream, lowering its massive head to sniff at the ice. His muscles coiled as he started to raise his bow. Thirty meters. An easy shot. The animal would be dead before it even registered the threat.
Then the sky screamed.
His head snapped upwards as a streak of fire tore through the grey clouds, burning brighter than the noon sun.
It came down fast, too fast, a falling star aimed directly at the mountain’s northern peak.
He tracked its trajectory, watching it disappear behind the ridge.
He expected to see the flash of impact and the plume of smoke that would mark a crash site.
Instead, there was only silence.
The grazing animal bolted, but he barely noticed it flee. He lowered his bow, his attention now completely diverted from the hunt. The lack of explosion was wrong. That kind of velocity, that kind of heat—a downed vessel should have torn a hole in the mountain.
He stood motionless in the silence as snow drifted down from disturbed branches, settling on his shoulders and in his dark hair. His beast prowled restlessly inside him, curious despite itself.
Not my concern.
Whatever had fallen from the sky—spacecraft, satellite, debris from some orbital catastrophe—it was none of his business.
He’d chosen to live high in the mountains precisely to avoid involvement with the outside world.
Six years alone in these mountains, six years of blessed silence and solitary hunting, and he intended to keep it that way.
The animal’s tracks were already filling with fresh snow. If he wanted to add to his winter stores, he needed to—
A shift in the wind brought him the scent, distant but still detectable to his enhanced senses.
Burning metal. Scorched earth. Chemical accelerants. And beneath it all, so faint he might have imagined it, something else. Something that made his beast snap to attention with sudden, fierce intensity.
Life.
His jaw clenched. He could still walk away. Whoever had crashed in his territory was almost certainly dead already, and if by some miracle they weren’t, someone would come looking eventually, asking questions he didn’t want to answer.
He took three steps towards his cabin, then stopped.
The wind shifted again, and that faint thread of scent wrapped around his senses like a hook. His beast snarled, straining against the control he’d spent years perfecting.
Go. Find. Protect.
“Damn it,” he growled to no one. Then he turned north and headed for the wreck.
Half an hour later he crouched at the edge of a natural amphitheater carved into the mountainside, surveying the crash site.
The destruction was worse than he’d expected given the lack of explosion.
The impact had torn a gash through the alpine meadow, the trail leading to a small escape pod half-buried in a snowbank and tangled in a thicket of thorny alpine brush.
The kind of escape pod carried by civilian vessels rather than military craft.
Its hull was scorched black on one side and crumpled inward on the other where it must have struck rock during its violent descent.
But it was largely intact, either a miracle of engineering or sheer dumb luck.
He made his way down the steep bank and approached slowly, his senses extended to their limits. The burning metal smell was overwhelming here, mixed with the acrid stench of fried electronics and the copper tang of…
Blood.
His beast surged forward before he could stop it, his claws extending and his canines lengthening. Someone was hurt. Someone was bleeding. The protective instincts he’d spent six years suppressing roared back to life with terrifying force.
He forced the shift back, breathing hard through his nose. Control. He needed control.
The pod’s clear cover was cracked in a spider-web pattern but still held its seal. He wiped frost from the glass with one hand, and peered inside. His world stopped.
She was beautiful.
She lay suspended in the pod’s acceleration couch, her head tilted slightly to one side, pale hair spilling across her shoulders like moonlight.
Her skin was pale as well, almost translucent, and he could see the delicate tracery of veins at her temples.
An intricate necklace sparkled around her throat and a thin nightgown clung to curves that made his beast howl with appreciation—soft and small and perfectly formed.
Human.
Relationships between human and Vultor were difficult at best, violent at worst, but it didn’t seem to matter. He couldn’t look away.
Her eyes were closed, her expression peaceful. She might have been sleeping, except for the frost gathering on her eyelashes and the bluish tinge creeping into her lips. Any lingering heat from the crash had long since dissipated.
One small hand was pressed against the viewport glass, fingers splayed as if reaching for something. For someone.
His chest tightened.
She’s dead. I’m too late.
But then he saw it—the faintest rise and fall of her chest beneath the thin silk. The shallowest breath, barely perceptible, but there.
Alive.
His beast exploded through his control. His claws extended fully, black and curved and sharp enough to shear through steel, and he drove them into the seam where the pod’s hatch met its frame.
Metal screamed in protest. The thorny brush tore at his arms and face as he worked, drawing blood he barely felt.
The pod’s emergency locks engaged, fighting him, but he was stronger.
He was always stronger.
With a final wrench of muscle and fury, the hatch tore free—and with it came her scent. He staggered back as if he’d been struck.
Sweet. Floral. Something like the wildflowers that bloomed in the high meadows during the brief summer months, but richer, deeper, more intoxicating.
The scent wrapped around him like silk, sinking into his lungs, his blood, his bones.
His beast roared in recognition, a sound that echoed through his skull with deafening intensity.
Mate. OURS.
“No,” he snarled through lengthening fangs, but he already reaching for her.
He unclipped her harness with trembling fingers, then slid one arm beneath her shoulders and another under her knees. She weighed nothing—a fragment, a whisper, a thing that might shatter if he held too tight. He gently lifted her from the pod and into the cold mountain air.
She was freezing. Her skin was ice beneath his palms, her breath so shallow he could barely detect it. Whatever stasis system had kept her alive during her time in space had failed with the crash. Without help she would die of exposure.
Cannot allow. Will not allow.
He opened his heavy coat, then tore open his shirt and pulled her against his bare chest, tucking her head beneath his chin.
Like all Vultor, his body ran hot and he willed that heat into her fragile form.
She was so small. So vulnerable. Every protective instinct he possessed was screaming at him to carry her somewhere safe and warm, where no threat could ever reach her.
Her eyes fluttered open and he went absolutely still.
Her eyes were grey like storm clouds, like morning mist, like the smoke rising from a winter fire. Unfocused at first, they sharpened as they found his face.
He knew what she would see. His beast was still surging against his control, and he hadn’t fully suppressed the shift.
His eyes would be glowing gold and his canines would be visible.
His features would be harder and more angular, caught somewhere between male and monster.
He braced for the scream, but it didn’t come.
Instead, she studied him with those clear grey eyes. No fear. No panic. Just a calm, curious assessment that shouldn’t have been possible from someone half-frozen and barely conscious.
Then she smiled.
It was barely a curve of her frost-blue lips, a tiny softening of her features. But that smile drove the breath from his lungs and the thought from his mind. His beast howled in triumph, in recognition, in a joy so fierce it bordered on pain.
Mate. Claim her. Keep her. Protect her.
“You—” His voice came out rough, barely intelligible. He tried again. “You’re safe. I have you.”
Her smile widened fractionally before her eyes closed and she went limp in his arms.
He stood in the wreckage of the crash site, holding the unconscious female against his chest, his beast still raging beneath his skin. He should put her down and walk away before this became something he couldn’t escape.
But she was cold.
She was hurt.
She was his.
He wrapped the remains of his shirt and his coat around her, then he turned back towards his cabin and began to run.