I Rejected My Obsessive Werebeast novel Chapter 93

Chapter 93

Debris came down the street with the water, Branches, chunks of wood, things I couldn’t identify in the brown chaos. And then I saw the rock–a stone the size of a fist, tumbling through the floodwater in a lazy, deadly rotation, heading directly for the side of my head.

I didn’t have time to dodge. I didn’t have time to do anything except register it and understand that it was going to hit me.

Silas moved.

He twisted his body, putting himself between me and the stone, and it struck him in the back with a sound that was dull and heavy and wrong. the kind of sound you hear when something hard meets something that should be harder but isn’t, in that moment, quite hard enough. His spine jolted. A low, involuntary noise came out of him–not a cry, not a word, just a sound of impact being absorbed by flesh and bone.

But he didn’t let go.

“Hold on to me,” he roared, and his voice was barely audible over the rain and the thunder and the mountain coming apart behind us, but I heard it, and I obeyed it, because there was nothing else in the world to obey. I wrapped my arms around his waist, both of them, locking my hands together against his back, and I pressed my face into the soaked fabric of his shirt and I held on while the water rose to our waists and the flood screamed past us and the world dissolved into noise and motion and the smell of mud and rain and something metallic that might have been blood.

I don’t know how we reached the wall. I know that we did, because suddenly we were behind it, in the lee of the stone, and the worst of the

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current was breaking against the other side, and Silas was lowering us both to the ground with a kind of careful, controlled descent that told me his legs were shaking but his will was not. He put me on the inside, against the stone, and then he crouched over me, his body a wall between me and the flood, his back to the debris and the wind and the rocks that were still coming down the mountain.

The wall held. The flood raged on the other side of it, a continuous, roaring presence that filled the air with sound and spray. Somewhere beyond the wall, I could hear people shouting–some of them close, some of them far, some of them in tones that I didn’t want to think about. The rain was still falling, still horizontal, still relentless.

I was pressed against Silas’s chest, my face against his collarbone, my arms still locked around him. I could feel his breathing–fast, deep, the kind of breathing that comes after the body has done something extraordinary and is only now beginning to understand what it cost. His heartbeat was a drum against my cheek, rapid but steady, alive, present.

And his back–I could feel where the stone had hit him, the place where his body had taken the impact that was meant for my head. The fabric of his shirt was torn there, and beneath it, I could feel the shape of a wound, raised and warm, the blood mixing with the rainwater that soaked through everything. The cold floodwater lapped at the injury with every surge against the wall, and I could feel him flinch, just slightly, just once, a tiny involuntary contraction of muscle that told me the pain was real and

constant.

But his arms didn’t loosen. His hands moved across my back in a slow, ‘continuous motion, checking, confirming, holding. His tail was wrapped around my legs, anchoring me to him, and his chin was pressed against the top of my head, and his breathing, even through the pain, even through the exhaustion, was entirely focused on the single task of making sure that I was still here.

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