Mate?

Lucian's pov

Tonight was just like any other night but something felt different.

I've been looking for control all because my wolf has been slipping. 

I was coming back from a recruitment meeting in the city, half my mind on the season ahead, the other half on the familiar weight of the curse settling deep in my bones.The family curse was catching up to me faster than I thought and most of the time when I call on my wolf I get little or no response.

And it was worse than any punishment, loosing your wolf slowly while you still lived.

I was dying slowly and I knew that since I was fifteen.

I turned down the road and that's when I smelt it.

Not just blood, not wolf, not human. Something totally wrong.

Something that made my chest tighten like my body remembers what my mind doesn't.

I should have turned back but instead I found myself tracking the scent.

Then I found the wreckage, a beautiful Harley was twisted at one corner, I immediately stop my Bentley and rush down to it, but there was no body. My blood ran hot and fast, I quickly carried it to my boot and turned back to look for the rider.

I followed the weird yet sweet scent till I found her. I was expecting a male instead I found someone small, wrapped in too much leather, her helmet was cracked and splintered and her hair almost black spilled out to frams her lovely face like ink in water. She was curled on her side and one arm tucked under her belly in an awkward angle that made my stomach clench.

She smelt wonderful, a mixture or herbs and lavender.

She was alive, barely but alive I could hear her heart beat which was really irregular but beating all the same. 

As I reached out and touched her my vitals increased, it wasn't supposed to. My wolf stirred mercilessly within me. It hasn't done that, not even in years. 

I recognize that feeling. It wanted to protect her. 

She felt different.

Mate!!!

I could feel it in my blood, she is my mate, but how. From the way my health has been waning since, healers said I would never find my mate again, that the moon goddess would give her to someone else and not to me as it would be a punishment to her.

I sniffed her in and this time it was different. Masked. I couldn't even feel the mate bond. Maybe I was mistaken and maybe I wasn't.

Just as I was about to carry her I felt another presence.

Rouges. They crashed through the tree and came right straight at us. So they were the reason she was in this state.

Something raw flared within me. I knew what they did to girls that were alone. And at that moment I didn't even think. I just shift, and I noticed it wasn't as painful as it used to be.

They were weak, just all muscles and no strength, the snapping of their bones, the tear of their skins only fueled my powers and made it flood.

I was fast and merciless and soon I realized that this wasn't a fight. It was a massacre.

Because something in me was furious for what they had caused and what they would have done to her.

Soon it was all over and I turned to her, blood dripping from my mouth as I shifted back. I quickly use my sleeves to clean it.

I quickly ran to her and pulled her up and my wolf roared back to life. It wasn't weak and dying. I've never felt so alive in so long.

"What are you?" I ask quietly as I looked at her closely.

Seconds later her eyes fluttered open and before she could try closing it back, I cursed and held her closely as I ran towards my Bentley.

"Stay with me"

And with her face close to my chest I heard her say weakly, "Don't let them take me" 

I didn't know what she was running from but I had this strong urge to protect her.

The drive back to Blackfrost took twenty minutes and hell that felt like my longest drive. She was unconscious for most of it, her head lolling against the passenger seat. Her breath was shallow and uneven. I just had to make sure she doesn't die in my car. That reason was a lie, all of it.

She smelt forbidden and my wolf hasn't stopped pacing since I picked her up, it kept insisting she was our mate but I didn't feel it anymore not since that time.

Regardless of it all, I carried her to my territory anyways.

The nurse, Madame Voss, a wolf who had served the academy for forty years took one look at the girl in my arms and didn't ask a single question.

She cleared a bed, gathered supplies and shooed me into the waiting room without as much as a word.

I didn't want anything to happen to her.

The door opened within minutes and Madame Voss stepped out, her face neutral and her hands clean. "She'll live. Broken arm, three cracked ribs and a concussion."

"The cut on her face?" 

"Superficial, it'll scar but not badly" she paused, "There's something you should know. When I was treating her, she asked about the wards. The one at the gates"

My chest tightened, "What did she ask?"

"If they'd register her. If anyone knew she had arrived." 

Voss's eyes were cold. "She's not human, neither is she wolf Master Lucian and you know it"

I did. A human who passed through the wards without setting them off was nothing. A wolf who passed through was home. But something else, something the wards were meant to flag, to alert.....

"They didn't register her." I said, it wasn't a question.

Voss shoke her head. " They didn't which means either the wards are broken or she has a way of hiding that I've never seen before..." And then she held my gaze and continued, "...whatever she is, whatever she's running from, she's not your responsibility."

I looked behind her at the closed door. I could still smell herbs and lavender, still feel her weight against my chest.

"She's in my territory," I said "which makes her my responsibility"

Voss said nothing. Just handed me a slip of paper with a room number and before she left, she said, "She heals fast, faster than most wolves and humans." And with that she walked away.

As I enter her room, the first thing I did was to sneak a peek at her chart.

Her blood work was flagged: Anomalous Cellular Regeneration.

"She's definitely not human, neither is she a wolf" I said to myself as I dropped her chart back and walked to her bed side. I silently brushed a stray strand of her hair and just as my hand grazed the cut on her face, a sharp jolt of energy zapped and inadvertently pushing my back.

"Bloody hell"

As I held my already reddening finger I looked closely at her. And what I saw shocked me to my bones.