Rejected Luna: Untamed Desire Of The Lycan Alpha-Chapter 388: Death

A scent, much older than anything he had ever smelled, wafted over to where he was standing. It hit him in the back like a sledgehammer because everything about this scent was simply wrong. Too wrong. It masked all other scents of the forest. There were no traces of the fresh scent of pine or morning dew, but instead, this scent belonged to decay and rot. And not your everyday trash can rot. No.

This was dangerous.

The scent alone could make his spine tingle with something unknown–and his beast rose to his feet, snarling and growling, for he could sense that there was something amiss. The scent seemed similar to the one that he had smelled in the labyrinth. The same stink but heavier. It was the kind of stench that made him crawl back into whatever hole he crawled out from. It scared the living daylights out of him.

His beast slammed against the surface, ready to take on this unknown threat, but where? Even though his senses were on high alert, with his fight-or-flight senses tingling, what was he supposed to even do? The enemy was not even out in the open, and given the frown on Tracy’s face, he didn’t believe that there was anything for them to attack, because if there was, then this woman wouldn’t be sitting in the car looking as if she had lost the very piece of clothing in the sale she was gunning for.

Finn looked around; he noticed that Dominic and the rest were also standing straight with their hackles raised as if they were ready to attack. Their eyes were flickering to the left and the right, but just like him, even after sensing that there was something wrong, they couldn’t do anything except square their shoulders and stand upright rigidly. Even Veronica seemed nervous, and she was supposed to be in the same line as Tracy, with half of her blood belonging to the immortals.

Finn turned to look at Tracy, who was still sitting inside the car, but —holy fuck—she was no longer just sitting straight and looking through the windscreen as if she was watching a movie, no. She was now sitting in the driver’s seat with cold fury etched on her face, like she was this close to letting all hell break loose. There was a cold fury building behind her eyes as she looked at the cottage house. Like someone had disrupted her well-thought-out plan, and she was not happy about it. Not in the slightest. And that burning rage was exactly what Finn wanted to avoid.

He had seen that look on Killian’s face countless times and knew what came after that.

His beast took three steps back; even though he was no longer whimpering like before, he was nowhere close to getting over Veronica being turned into a rat or Dominic being turned into a toad. Coward. It was a good thing that Killian was not here, and he couldn’t see what was going on with his beast, or else he would be rushing to look for a way to change the beta of the pack, because how long was he going to take to get over it? 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝙬𝙚𝓫𝒏𝓸𝓿𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝙤𝓶

Yes, even his legs went all jiggly jellies when the witch turned Dominic into a toad and then let him hop around; he was over it. But his beast? He was not. He was still clinging to that one memory.

Tracy finally unravelled her arms that were crossed over her bosom. Her eyes were fucking narrowed as she swiftly opened the door of the car and then stepped out. She moved like a fucking poem; don’t even ask him how it was possible, but she did. Every action was filled with liquid grace.

"Alright, boys, calm down. We don’t want them to think that we came here looking for trouble," she said as if she were speaking to a bunch of toddlers. "We need to be polite whenever we are visiting someone."

Like they were not standing in what smelled like a mass grave that hadn’t been cleaned for centuries.

However, Finn and the rest knew better than to contradict her. They stayed quiet as the witch walked toward the cottage. And before Finn knew it, before any sense or rationality could even tell him that what he was doing was fucking stupid, he walked over and stood in front of Tracy. His body was screaming at him to shield her from whatever might be waiting for her inside the cottage, while his head was telling him that he was an idiot.

And truth be told, he agreed with his head. She could possibly turn whatever was inside the cottage into a bunch of ants and squash them into bits if she wanted to. He was in the same category as whatever was inside the cottage, and yet he—he stepped in front of the woman to protect her? It was like asking a dog to protect a cheetah. The sight must have been funny as fuck because why else would Dominic Cherith raise a brow at him with amusement flickering in his eyes?

Whatever, lover boy; at least he didn’t fuck up big time and cause his mate to run away from him. He was already in a better situation than him with just this alone.

Who was he smirking at?

However, that was not the point. He slowly turned and looked at the woman behind him. Just as he expected, Tracy was looking at him with one perfectly arched brow, but she didn’t look the least bit amused. Her gaze told him that she knew what he was doing and she didn’t like it, not even one bit. No surprise there.

But it was fine. This was something that a gentleman was supposed to do anyway; he was not doing this to earn some brownie points.

Ignoring the death glare that was pointed at him, he stepped close to the cottage. And with each step that he took, the scent of death started to get stronger.