Araña could hear the tension in Levi’s voice. She knew without being told that if the stranger couldn’t be freed, he would be left behind, his shackles giving him no chance of escaping the guardsmen.

There should have been cutters or a saw in the truck, but there weren’t any. Araña salvaged a collection of stiff wire as she searched, claimed a short machete in a sheath as well as a knapsack packed with food, camping blanket, and matches kept safe in plastic.

Rebekka retrieved the child.

From the direction of the clearing, the helicopter rose above the trees, circled, and dropped again, the rotors thumping the air, a mechanical heartbeat sending terror out before it. Araña finished rifling through the locked tool trunk welded onto the truck body, the last of the places where anything useful might be stored, and found nothing.

She returned to the shackled stranger, who waited stoically, his gaze rarely leaving her.

“We’ve got to leave now,” Levi said.

“Go. I’ll catch up later.” The words held a confidence Araña refused to waver from, though her nerves were strung tight and her heart raced. She knelt and tried to steady her hand for the work of picking locks. She wasn’t adept at it, not like Matthew and Erik, but given enough time—

Levi hesitated a second, then stepped to the trapper’s body. He removed the knife and sheath strapped to the dead man’s thigh and dropped them on the ground next to the claimed knapsack.

“You know where to find us,” he said, hefting the still unconscious werecougar over his shoulders and leaving with Rebekka and the toddler.

The werewolf looked back before following the others into the forest. Araña’s gaze flicked upward to meet the prisoner’s and then she went to work on the locks.

In a thousand dreams of freedom, Tir had never imagined a human would risk her life for him, and yet there was no mistaking that the woman kneeling at his feet was mortal, despite the mark that had appeared at her wrist when she stood in front of his cage and refused to yield the keys.

His hands clenched and unclenched as he fought not only to remain still but to resist the urge to spear his fingers through her hair. He’d convinced himself she was a sliver of recovered memory—a woman he’d lain with when he knew who and what he was; or a fantasy conjured up to accompany the dream of freedom, but neither had done her beauty justice.

She was exquisite, her skin the dusky brown of earth, her hair and eyes the color of night sky. “I am Tir,” he said, giving her the name he hadn’t heard spoken in centuries and had never willingly shared with any of his captors.

“I’m Araña.”

Araña, the Spanish word for spider. He glanced at the mark on her wrist again and wondered if she had a witch’s training, or carried a witch’s spell.

There was the barest trembling of her hands as she tried to coax the lock open. He could sense her fear. It washed over him in waves despite her outward calm.

The tiny click of the lock yielding to her coaxing sent emotion surging through him, a fevered song pouring hope and anticipation into his blood as the first shackle fell away. The second followed quickly, and then she rose to her knees, her fingers going to the band at one wrist, the heat of her and the proximity of her mouth to his cock searing him, burning a fantasy into his mind even as the wrist restraints fell away and she turned her attention to the steel belt with its dangling chains.

When the last of the restraints put on him by humans dropped to the ground, Tir reached for her as she stood. She stumbled backward, evading him, her fear spiking. “Don’t. It’s not safe to touch me.”

A small sound of anxiety followed as the tone of the chopper blades changed, indicating the pilot’s success in landing it a short distance away. She pointed to the sheathed weapons and knapsack on the ground and said, “You can have them,” before whirling away, heading in a different direction than the one taken by her companions.

Tir grabbed the items up and followed her, his muscles rejoicing in the movement. He didn’t fear recapture, not in that moment. There was no room for it in the heady reality of freedom—the sweet scent of forest and the play of sunlight in shadow, the smooth rhythm of movement denied him for centuries.

He wanted to laugh. To sing. To raise his arms toward the heavens in embrace.

Behind them he could hear shouts as the dead dragon lizard and the trapper’s corpse were discovered. A machine gun rattled, a nervous burst slicing through leaves and silenced by a shout from a superior officer.

He smiled, a savage baring of teeth. Let them come after him. Let them try to take him. They’d be the first to feel his vengeance.

From time to time he caught a glimpse of the city. They were moving away from it and he wondered if Araña had a destination in mind.

He didn’t ask. He didn’t care. If he’d ever walked freely among men, it was locked away, the memory of it blocked by the collar.

Eventually he would go to Oakland and begin his search for the texts that would help him translate the tattoos on his arms. But for the moment he savored the freedom.

He easily paced Araña, found his attention returning to her repeatedly, caressing her lines, appreciating the sleek feminine form, the confidence in her stride.

His eyebrows drew together as the scent of blood reached him. His gaze was drawn to the black material of her shirt and the darkening spot on her side.

She was injured. The knowledge of it sent emotion roaring through him—not unfamiliar in the violent resolve it contained, but unfamiliar in its cause. The thought of someone touching her, hurting her…

Tir’s fingers curled into fists, tightening on the sheathed knife and machete. He told himself the savage anger rose from the debt he felt toward her for freeing him, from the belief she would be of further use to him in navigating a human world he had no experience with.

He told himself the fierce possessiveness came from the lust she generated in him, a heat unlike any he could remember. Thoughts and images from the previous night flitted through his mind.

Suspicion flared as he remembered his revulsion when the trapper’s wife was ordered into his cage to breed with him, her face overlaid onto a hundred other faces—women who’d failed to tempt him into breaking his vow never to lie with a mortal. And now, when he should care about nothing but savoring the freedom he’d gained, he burned for a human whose life was nothing against the span of his.

He didn’t think he would be able to stop himself from taking her. He wanted to cover her body with his and know the sweet heaven of finding her opening and thrusting into her slick, heated core.

He wanted her kneeling in front of him, as she’d done when she removed the last of the shackles, and taking his cock into her mouth. The fantasy was so visceral it sent a jolt of icy-hot pain through his shaft.

Tir slowed, allowing her to pull ahead of him and move out of sight. His lips pulled back in a silent rage. Was she a witch? Was that how she’d shown herself in his dreams and sent lava-hot lust boiling through his veins?

Was this the work of some dark deity? Or some elaborate human ploy, his freedom an illusion to trick him into surrendering what he’d never surrendered before, his seed? Already he’d given her his name.

Tir slowed further, stopping at the edge of a clearing. There were no sounds of pursuit, and with the fading of Araña’s footsteps, he was left surrounded by the rustle of leaves and grass, the scolding of a jay and the chirp of a squirrel.

He became aware of the knapsack he carried and the weight of the weapons in his hands. He didn’t need them to survive, but they gave him an unanticipated advantage as he prepared to enter a world that was unfamiliar to him in so many ways.