He brought a hand to my forehead, as if assessing me for fever.

I pushed up more, realizing my body was no longer sore, and the plethora of cuts I’d had before were gone. “Did you heal me?”

He gave a sharp nod. “I gave you a potion after you passed out, not my . . .” His jaw locked.

Not his blood. Right.

I ran a hand through my hair and grimaced. I could only imagine what I looked like considering the snarl my fingers just encountered. “Was I sleeping?” I tried to make sense of everything, but a fuzzy feeling still coated my mind.

“You passed out after I broke the cuffs. You’ve been unconscious for nine hours. I didn’t know how to wake you.”

I frowned. My mouth felt like cotton and once again I was in a room I didn’t recognize—it was a bedroom though. “Where are we?”

“My home in Montana. It wasn’t safe to bring you back to Ontario, to those—” Roaring fire leaped to life in his irises. “Someone betrayed me and handed you over to those sorcerers, and from the scent on your clothes, I’m guessing it was my dear brother.”

My lips parted when some of the dizziness cleared. “It was Cameron. He came to your cabin this morning. Or yesterday morning. Or whenever it was.” I hung my head, still trying to make sense of everything. “He surprised me, then took me. I didn’t have time to fight back before he put those cuffs on my wrists.” My fingers curled. “If only I’d fought back immediately when he’d grabbed me, I could have annihilated that donkey’s ass. But it all happened so fast, and I never thought he was capable of something like that even though he’s a real fucker. He willingly handed me over to those sorcerers knowing they would probably kill me.”

The flames in the hunter’s eyes shifted from blazing red to deep-black. My breath hitched. I’d never seen them that color before. His demon shone fully through those irises as if rising from the depths of hell.

“I’m going to kill him,” he said in such a low guttural tone, that I knew he was close to losing control, the rage or fear or whatever had been making him look so crazed when I’d been abducted was returning full throttle. “I’m going to kill him once and for all.”

The mind-altering fury that strummed from the hunter was palpable. It flowed off him in hot, vicious waves that hit me again and again. And a scent accompanied it, a metallic scent of iron.

But I brushed that realization off, because I knew without a doubt that Kaillen had meant it. He would truly kill his own flesh and blood. He hated Cameron that much.

I shook my head, trying to dispel some of the whirling vortex of malice and death that swirled around the hunter. “Is there some water around here? I’m so thirsty.”

My very uninteresting, mundane question seemed to snap whatever grasp the underworld had on the hunter. He blinked, and those black flames calmed back to the fiery red I was used to. They were still a bit crazed-looking, albeit not as much.

“Yeah, I’ll get you a glass.” In a blurred movement, he was up and gone. Not even a second passed before he reappeared at my side, a glass of water in hand. The water sloshed over the rim at his abrupt stop, but half of it stayed put, and at least his demon had receded enough that I was once again looking at the Kaillen I knew. “Here.” He thrust the glass toward me.

With a shaky hand, I greedily gulped all of it, draining the entire glass in one go. “Thank you.” I set it on the bedside table when I finished, and some of the dizziness swimming through me faded.

I tried to process my current time and place. I was in Montana, and it was obviously nighttime, but it felt as if I was jet-lagged, or had done too many realm crossings between earth and the fae lands. Everything felt discombobulated, disjointed, and it all rolled into one big swirling mess.

“Say, where did you go earlier this morning, or yesterday morning, when you left the cabin in Ontario after we . . . fought?”

His shoulders stiffened. “For a run. I needed to . . . clear my head.”

“Right.” I didn’t press further. I could only imagine the guilt that was eating him. I figured he was blaming himself for my abduction since he hadn’t been there. But it was my fault he’d left. My rejection. That letter from Carlos. All of it.

My head began to pound just thinking about that unfinished conversation.

I cleared my throat, shifting my attention back to the matter at hand, because one thing stood out clearly. I’d been with Kaillen’s pack when I’d been abducted. I was supposed to have been safe there, but Cameron betrayed the hunter and me, and Maybe-Jakub had nearly caught me because of it.

An image of that man in the sedan came back to me. Medium build. Short brown hair. Wide mouth. Detached, clinical expression. I shuddered. Had that truly been Jakub?

“We need to contact the SF,” I finally said. “They need to know about the second abduction attempt made on me and those dead sorcerers that are probably still lying in the street.”

“I’ve already spoken with them. They’re in Philadelphia as we speak. Don’t worry about the bodies. They’ll take care of them.”

“Philadelphia?”

“That’s the city they took you to—where I tracked you to. The SF is there searching for clues about where Jakub went and who he is.”

“But what about you finding him? Did you catch his scent while you were dueling Tall Sorcerer?”

“I did.”

“Then we can find him.” Um, okay, I’d actually just said that in spite of my realization earlier that staying side by side with the hunter wasn’t a good idea.

Kaillen’s entire body stilled. “You . . . want to stay with me?”

“Well, I dunno. I mean, it’s been a bit, you know, and I mean, I—” I swallowed. Awkward much? I forced a deep breath. “I want to find Jakub and stop him. I know that much.”

The muscle ticked in his jaw again. “But he’s after you, Tala. I heard enough while battling that sorcerer to know that much. I don’t know if you going after him is a wise move.” That slightly crazed look entered his eyes again.

It struck me that he said you going after him, not us. I shrank back and remembered that agonizing moment we’d shared after waking in his cabin in Ontario. It was possible that things were over now for me and the hunter. Perhaps he truly had eradicated the mate bond, and from hereon I would be on my own.

“I see,” I finally said, licking my lips. A rolling sensation dipped my stomach, and something a lot like pain flowed through me. But wasn’t this exactly what I’d known was coming? That once he’d realized his feelings for me were merely animal driven, he’d snap himself out of it?

A growl came from the hunter. “It’s not what you think,” he said softly.

My head whipped up.

That golden glow rimmed his eyes again. The mate bond stared back at me bright and shining.

My heart thumped more. So he still felt it?

I straightened the sheet over me, anything to give my hands something to do. “If Jakub wants me, then I should be the one hunting him. He won’t expect that. I’ve been hiding for days now and running every time he’s showed up. But if I turn the tables, and begin seeking him out, I could catch him unexpectedly.”

“The SF won’t like that.”

“The SF doesn’t have to know about it.”

A reluctant, albeit proud, smile kicked his lips up. “A colantha to the bone.”

I snorted, then realized there were still so many things I didn’t know. Like how the hell he’d found me for one. Now that I had a second to think about it, it seemed like a miracle that he’d been able to track me so fast.

I cocked my head. “How did you know I was in Philadelphia?” I sat more upright on the bed, intent on pulling our conversation away from all things mate-driven. The fact that the hunter still felt the bond after our explosive interaction before my abduction was something I was still processing. “I couldn’t have been gone from Oak Trembler for more than fifteen minutes before you appeared. Did you do something other than scry? I didn’t think you could do it so quickly.”