The Defiant Claim (The Claim: Book 2) LGBT

Chapter 18 - Mik

Mik's past flashed before his eyes—catching up with him. Mara jumping from the cliff and his father running to the edge and looking over it.

While he stood back and said nothing. Felt nothing.

Shouting brought him back to the present as a shudder shook him from the memory.

"Sam!" Cameron shrieked as he scrambled forward to where Sam was once standing.

Sam? Confusion swirled around Mik as he leaped forward. Renewed strength and energy rushed him to Cameron's side where he yelped and scrambled to keep from falling off the cliff. He shifted back into his human form on all fours as he clutched the rocky ledge with both hands and looked down at the rocks below. Small waves crashed over, but they weren't strong enough to move Sam's still body, spread-eagle on his back on the biggest, flattest one. Red tinted the foam that swirled around him.

Horror seized him as he stared, wide-eyed, below, his muscles locking up. Not moving, not breathing. He couldn't even think. He just stared. A numbing coldness swept over him as his vision blurred.

"Sam!" Cameron yelled again before grabbing Mik by his neck and snarled. "This is all your fault! You killed him! He wouldn't have jumped if you had been fucking loyal!"

"He's not dead yet."

He stared at him in disbelief.  "What? How do you know?"

"I'm not in crippling agony, am I?"

"No, but... You guys didn't seal the bond."

"I'd still know, wouldn't I? I'd feel something, right?"

Cameron narrowed his eyes and shoved him away. "You better be fucking right."

Shifting back into his wolf, Cameron threw his head back in a howl that alerted the pack of the emergency before darting past Mik to climb down the rocky ledge toward the beach town in the distance.

Following, Mik shifted into his wolf and made his way down as quickly and carefully as he could. Peering over the edge every minute to make sure Sam was still there. No longer were the waves red that splashed around him, but that didn't necessarily mean that Sam was okay. He had fallen from a great height... He should be dead...

Shaking those thoughts from his head, Mik continued his descent.

The rocks became smaller until they were replaced with soil as trees sprang up and a dense forest grew along the edges of the slope. When their descent became only a few feet from the edge of the water, they jumped down to the shoreline lined with small flat rocks, perfect for skipping across the water on a calm day.

He could hear a commotion in the distance, a boat at the dock of the beach town with people scrambling aboard. He ignored the sounds behind him as he and Cameron ran across the rocky shoreline back toward the cliff.

As the ridge grew higher, the rocks grew larger and the water lapped across their paws with the uneven surface. Within minutes of drawing closer to the peak, the motorboat pulled up as close as it could get to them. Cameron shifted back into his human form and hollered to the people on the boat where to go, pointing to the cliff and the rocks below it. It set out ahead of them and threw out an anchor, twenty yards away from the rocks clustered around Sam's unmoving form.

Mik shifted back into his human form before the rocks turned to jagged slabs, grasping them with his hands and pulling himself forward. The shoreline was swallowed up now in large uneven rocks with shallow water below. The waves crashed against him and Cameron, threatening to push them over. More than once, Mik scraped his knee or cut his flesh against the rough and sometimes sharp edges of the rock as his pace slowed to ensure his own safety on the wet and algae lined rocks.