Page 31 of Match Made In Growl

The change was faster than usual, his tiger ripping through skin and bone with an urgency that bypassed the usual controlled transition. One stride he was a man running barefoot on packed earth. The next he was four hundred pounds of muscle and striped fur tearing through the underbrush with eyes that turned the dark woods into a landscape of silver and shadow. His paws barely touched the ground. Branches whipped past his flanks. The scent trail hit him like a wall: rain-soaked earth, green herbs, the fading traces of coffee and leather and her, threaded through with something acrid and wrong that made his tiger snarl.

Fresh, active magic. And it reeked af malice intent.

He covered the distance to the basin in minutes and exploded through the tree line just as the ground opened up.

The trench along the basin's western edge collapsed inward with a sound like a giant exhaling, stone and earth folding into a void that hadn't existed ten seconds ago. Dust and debris blew outward in a cloud that whited out the basin, and through it he could hear her, not screaming but swearing, loud and fierce, scrambling away from the collapse zone with her field pack clutched to her chest.

Steph emerged from the dust cloud coughing and stumbling, headlamp still on, illuminating the destruction in a narrow beam that swung wildly as she moved. She was covered in limestone dust, her dark curls white with it, and she was moving fast toward the oak tree when the second event started.

The ridge face above the chamber entrance groaned. Not the settling sound of natural stone but a deliberate, grinding protest, as if the rock was being forced apart from inside. Cracks appeared in the limestone, racing upward from the chamber entrance in patterns too regular to be geological. Something was pulling the ridge apart, targeting the opening Steph had been working in, and if the face collapsed it would seal the chamber permanently and crush anything in its path. And Steph was directly below it.

Criss's tiger covered the distance in three bounds. He hit her at full speed, his massive body between her and the ridge, and the impact carried them both behind the oak's root system as the face let go. Slabs of limestone crashed into the basin where she'd been standing half a second earlier, the impact shaking the ground so hard his teeth rattled. Dust billowed over them in a choking wave, and he pressed his body over hers, shielding her from the debris that pinged off his hide like thrown gravel.

The collapse lasted maybe fifteen seconds. When it stopped, the silence was enormous.

Criss shifted back. The transition was rougher than usual, his body protesting the rapid change, muscles cramping as bone and sinew reorganized. He ended up crouched over Steph in the dark, naked and breathing hard, his hands braced on either side of her head and her headlamp shining directly into his face.

"Criss?" Her voice was hoarse from the dust. "What the hell..."

"Are you hurt?"

"I'm... no. I don't think so." She was shaking. He could feel it through her whole body, the fine tremor of adrenaline and shock. Her eyes were wide and her hands were gripping his forearms and she hadn't pushed him away yet, which told him exactly how scared she was. "The trench just collapsed. There was no warning, no energy spike, nothing on the magnetometer or that I could feel. It just went."

"I know." He pulled back enough to give her space but stayed close, scanning the destroyed basin. The chamber entrance was buried under tons of fallen limestone. The trench was gone entirely, swallowed into whatever void had opened beneath it. And the air smelled wrong, that acrid trace of magic still hanging in the dust like smoke after a fire.

"This wasn't geological," Steph said. She was sitting up now, wiping dust from her face with the back of her hand. Her eyes were adjusting, reading the destruction then coming to the realization that this wasn’t a natural incident. "Trenches don't fold inward like that. And the ridge face, the crack pattern was symmetric. Like it was engineered."

"Yeah."

"Someone triggered this." Her voice had gone flat with that particular angry-calm of a woman. "While I was inside the chamber. Someone waited until I was underground and triggered a collapse designed to seal the entrance."

Criss looked at the buried chamber, at the precision of the destruction in the way the collapse had only targeted exactly the areas where Steph had been working and left the rest of the basin largely intact. This wasn't random or a warning. It was a message that said I can reach you whenever I want, wherever you are, and there is nothing you can do to stop it.

He thought about Rydan Ashkar walking up that northern path with his book under his arm and his absolute certainty that silence was a virtue.

Testing how far you'll go, his tiger said, or maybe he said it to himself. Testing whether fear will keep you quiet.

Steph was watching him. The shaking hadn't stopped, but it had changed, the sharp edge of terror giving way to something rawer as the adrenaline caught up with her nervous system and flooded in. Her chest was heaving, dust-coated curls plastered to her neck, and her fingers were still locked around his forearms with a grip that would leave marks.

Then her eyes dropped. Down from his face, across his bare chest, over the hard lines of his stomach and lower, and the realization of exactly how naked he was landed on her face in real time.

"You shifted," she said, voice rough.

"Yeah."

"You're not wearing anything."

"Tends to happen."

Her gaze came back up to his. The fear was still there, written in the rapid pulse he could see hammering in her throat, but something else was bleeding through it now, hot and reckless and alive. The particular wildness of a body that had just been inches from death and needed proof that it was still here, still breathing, still capable of feeling something other than terror.

Her hand moved from his forearm to the side of his neck. Her palm was warm and gritty with dust and her fingers curled into the hair at his nape, and the touch sent a jolt through him making him harder than he already was.

"I almost died," she whispered.

"You didn't."

"Because of you."