PRINCE OF WOLVES By Susan Krinard

Joey leaned into Luke and drew in a deep breath as they came down to earth again. The brightness faded, but it left its pattern behind her eyelids as if she had stared into the sun. The bond between them was still there. Inevitable, inexplicable, undeniable. She tucked her head under his chin and rested her hands on his chest as she traced the path of it in the matched rhythm of their heartbeats.

After a moment Luke set her back and caught her hands, kissing them one by one, such undisguised wonder in his face that Joey nearly lost herself in his eyes. She blinked fast and hard.

“Are you real, Joey?” Luke whispered, cupping her cheek in his hand. “Do you actually exist?” He accepted her evasion when she turned her face aside and pressed it into his shoulder. His arms closed around her again.

Discover your heart’s truth, Collier had said. She closed her eyes so tightly that they flashed red sparks.

There was a silence then, so deep and profound that Joey followed it down, beyond the physical boundaries delineated by Luke’s embrace, past the slow vibration of the emotional bond that tried to block her passage, deeper still into the very core of what she was.

Emptiness. It sucked at her, and she struggled to hold herself free of it. The core of her being was a black void. Above was the promise of light, Luke’s strong hand reaching down to grasp hers and pull her up into brightness. Blinding brightness that was just as deadly, reducing her into a mere shade, a weak reflection of the man from which it came. Either direction was loss, terrible loss—the familiar aching loneliness of the void or loss of herself.

Luke had filled that void. He had not asked her if she wanted the brightness, he had simply filled her mind and soul with it so that no darkness remained. And in the absence of darkness, there was no contrast. No meaning. No truth. No self.

She only knew how hard her body was shaking when Luke shifted her in his embrace and held her away. She stared into his eyes from behind dark shutters even his will would not penetrate. “Joey?” he questioned, his fingers tightening on her arms.

With deliberate care Joey pushed back the light that pulsed between them. She felt the bond constrict into a fragile cord, and Luke jerked, the muscles in his bare chest seemed to ripple under the tanned skin. The pupils of his pale eyes constricted with shock. It was as if she had struck him, she felt the blow rebound against her, just as she had felt his pain and joy. She rejected it and pushed again. The void came up to swallow her; the tiny deadly kernel of ice that had formed in her heart when she had changed—when she had discovered his betrayal—grew hard with resolve.

She forced herself not to see the dazed and naked bewilderment on his face. “It’s wrong, Luke,” she said. Some small part of herself was stunned by the brittle coldness in her voice. Her arms slipped free of his nerveless fingers. “It’s too late.”

From a great distance she watched his expression change. Not quite grasping, not yet.

“Don’t you understand, Luke? I know what you did.” The locus of emptiness shifted within her, for the first time she gathered her anger, her fear, her outrage into a single hard knot and forced it outward, along the path of the fragile cord that linked them. There was a sudden, blazing shock when it struck him, and Joey reeled with the backlash.

He cried out, a harsh, astonished grunt of pain. His eyes were glazed with it as she stared into them.

“You think everything is fine, everything is completely under your control,” she said softly. The broken waves of her distress slapped her and again, bringing tears to her eyes like physical blows. “You’re wrong, Luke. When I changed—when I saved your life—I broke through. I broke your influence. I learned what you’d done to me.”

Comprehension pierced the blank shock of Luke’s gaze. “No,” he gasped. Denial, and the first stirrings of reaction.

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