Moon Glamour

by Aimee Easterling

  This time, I was too distant to warn him. Could only watch in horror as the nameless alpha was mown down.

  The fae trickiness would all end at sunset, however, and the light was already dimming. Sunset would mean Marina’s friends coming through the node, but there were enough of us left to stop them. We’d stop the fae and break whatever hold Marina had over Rowan....

  The sun dipped below the horizon. Swords clanged all around me.

  Nothing happened at the portal site.

  Chapter 38

  Which is when I realized where the node was. Not here, at my feet. Here below my feet. Down in the subterranean living quarters I’d spent days locked within.

  Now I was the one swearing, using Ryder’s words to warm the hollow pit of my belly. Butch and I alone couldn’t storm the walls of Rowan’s compound. It was doubtful if all of our allies together could do so, not with the defenses I’d seen during my tour.

  But a single thief might make it past those defenses. If she was subtle. And skilled.

  “I need a distraction.”

  I expected Butch to push for more information. Instead, he half-bowed, the gesture almost toppling him. “Any particular location or duration?”

  “Away from the compound. As long as you can last.”

  Then I fell back on my strongest skill—innocuousness. Sheathing my sword and dropping my gaze, I prepared to make a break for it.

  Something exploded behind me and I ran. Past McCallister shifters, who were shouting and panicking. Whatever Butch was doing, it had certainly attracted their attention.

  And I was a lone female. Apparently unarmed and overtly submissive. The macho McCallisters were hardwired to let me past.

  I made it to the treeline before dropping the act. Heard battle rematerializing behind me and winced as I imagined Butch crumpling during his distraction’s grand finale.

  Because he wouldn’t have given up so soon unless he’d run out of energy. Or unless someone had forced him to stop.

  Had Ryder backtracked to help him? Had Lupe come to his assistance? I wouldn’t be able to tell at this distance, so I didn’t even look.

  Instead, I curved through the woods until I reached the back face of Rowan’s mansion. The whole thing had been security alarmed up the wazoo, from what I remembered during the day Jasmine walked me through it. But I suspected they hadn’t had time yet to fix the window Ryder had broken during our escape....

  Sure enough, an expanse of plywood met my fingers as I pushed through the final line of shrubbery and straightened. Tensing, I waited for motion-activated lights to come on. For sirens to blare. For the guards Rowan must have left behind to arrow in on my hiding place.

  But nothing happened. I’d gotten lucky. This location had no external security. And the internal security, I hoped, had been disabled during our hurried retreat.

  Now, finally, the weight in my pocket came in handy. I drew out the battery-powered drill I’d bought before meeting with the alphas. Made short work of a dozen screws.

  The plywood fell to the ground as I attempted to lower it. Splinters bit into my palms. But I was smiling.

  Or maybe my wolf was smiling. When I ran my tongue across my teeth, they were remarkably sharp.

  And it was a good thing my inner wolf was present. Because lupine eyes saw the movement inside the darkened room before human eyes would have.

  As suspected, Rowan hadn’t taken all of his fighters with him. Someone left behind had heard my drill and come to investigate.

  I shoved myself through the windowless cavity, tackling my enemy to the ground.

  THE OTHER SHIFTER DIDN’T struggle. Instead, she lay there beneath me, scent heavy with annoyance. After a moment, she put that emotion into words.

  “If you’ll let me up, we can deal with the problem in the harem.”

  “Jasmine?” I recognized her voice. Still, she’d been the one who led Tank into what appeared to have been a trap. So I rolled sideways but kept my hand clamped down on her wrist. “Where’s Tank?”

  “Is that really relevant given the bigger picture?” She was blustering. I could tell because her shoulders slumped when I squeezed her wrist bones together.

  “Where,” I repeated, “is Tank?”

  “He’s fine,” she assured me. “I hid him in the harem yesterday just like he asked me to. But one of the younger girls saw him and shrieked so loud half the pack showed up. If it wasn’t for those scars....”

  My own patience was fleeing quickly. I shook Jasmine, or rather my wolf shook her. So this was why alphas turned so brutal. If I’d been in wolf form, I might have given her a little nip to speed the story along.

  The shake, luckily, was effective at getting Jasmine back on track. “Rowan locked him in the barracks,” she explained before my wolf could entirely take over. “I don’t have the key and we lack the time to look for it. The sounds from the harem are getting stranger....”

  That was where the node was. I knew in my gut.

  Still when I released Jasmine and sprinted down the stairs, I didn’t head toward the harem. Instead, I retraced the far more familiar path to the room I’d been locked within.

  TANK WASN’T IN THE exact same room that had caged me, as Jasmine explained when she caught up. My guide was annoyed by the side trip, but she led me to the proper door anyway. Stood beside me and tapped her foot as I pulled out my lock picks.

  “There isn’t time for this. Can’t you hear the fighting?”

  I could. And the fact I could hear it through several yards of soil and concrete was a bad sign indeed.

  Still, I was more concerned with whether Marina was aware of my proximity. Maybe, if I was lucky, she couldn’t tell the difference between me being here and up above on the battlefield. Or, more likely, she simply wasn’t interested while opening the node.

  Either way, there was no hurrying the lock. No hurrying the slow search for the proper tumblers. Ah, there. I grinned as I heard the sound I’d been waiting for. The click of an obstruction drawing back.

  The door swung inward so fast I lost my balance and fell forward. Onto Tank. Into Tank. He smelled like home and I wanted nothing more than to snuggle up against his skin.

  Instead, I drew back, cocking my head. There was dried blood on his face, as if Marina had tried and failed to force him to do her bidding. His shoulders weren’t stooped, though. And he’d taken advantage of his time in solitary confinement to assemble an armful of something I couldn’t quite make sense of.

  “What are those?”

  “Slats from the cot. Metal.” His eyes smiled even if his lips didn’t. “Do we know where the node is?”

  “Yes, if you’ll let me take you there,” Jasmine huffed, grabbing a slat and turning back down the passage we’d come in through. She was ready to fight, even if she didn’t know anything about the danger we were facing.

  Jasmine was clearly coming with us, so I provided the bare minimum of information. “Metal through a fae’s chest will send them back to the other side,” I called after her, even as the fingers of Tank’s free hand slid between mine. His sturdiness was grounding, making up for lack of sleep and far too high stakes.

  And even though we should have followed Jasmine immediately, Tank used our joined hands to draw me in closer. Then he kissed me. Or I kissed him. Whoever did the kissing, it was fast and fierce. More like the meeting of wolves than the affection of a man.

  My wolf and I responded, curling around our partner. Hot, intense, the rest of the world faded....

  Until, abruptly air separated us, all except our interlocked fingers. I’d pushed Tank away at the same moment he’d ended our embrace. Jasmine was still in sight, fifteen feet distant.

  “There’s no time...” I started just as Tank promised:

  “Later.”

  Together, we raced to catch up with Jasmine. The heat between us would have to wait until we closed the node. We were ready to dive into battle first.

  Well, not quite ready. I fumbled to excha
nge weapons without unlocking our intertwined fingers.

  “Are you sure?” Tank’s eyebrows rose as I offered him the sword I’d chosen out of Lupe’s stash back at the campground.

  “I’ll do just as well with a stake,” I promised, taking the bundle of slats he still held in his hand. “There are a lot of these. Did you expect me to bring an army?”

  “From the sound of it, it seems you did.”

  This time he did smile, an expression that should have been horrifying with the new streaks of red joining old scars and twisting his face into a Halloween mask. Instead, a burst of joy hastened my footsteps. And Tank sped up to match me until we ran in perfect synchrony. Ran like pack wolves on a hunt.

  Ran into air that sweetened ominously. Papaya, then pineapple. By the time the three of us passed through the shower room and turned into a passage I’d never traversed before—the one, I assumed, leading to the harem—it felt like I was racing through a human-sized bowl of fruit.

  A bowl of fruit that was already rotting. Rotting into words just loud enough to hear over our pounding footsteps.

  “If I help you through, you’ll be indebted,” Marina warned, her voice even more beautiful than it had been previously. Her bell-like tones rang down the corridor, carrying floral odors along for the ride.

  “Understood.” The chorus came in at least half a dozen voices. All were equally beautiful, but their combination was so dissonant it set my teeth on edge.

  “For one year, you will remain indentured,” Marina continued. “At the end of that time....”

  I never learned what would happen on the next Samhain because Jasmine burst through the doorway ahead of us. She wasn’t waiting for backup. Wasn’t waiting for the right moment. Instead, she was bound and determined to squash the danger to her pack.

  Tank and I could do no less.

  Chapter 39

  Inside, the harem was so pink I had to close my eyes for one split second. Pink walls. Pink furniture. Pink-clad women standing in a circle with joined hands.

  Between us and them, Marina guided the portal opening like an orchestra conductor. The junction between earth and the Otherworld was a black hole that made the surrounding pink pinker. A looming pit of danger that, I suspected, was responsible for the stench I’d recently waded through.

  And yet, the harem girls didn’t struggle against its opening. Instead, they closed their eyes and swayed to inaudible music. They tilted their chins toward the awfulness as if soaking up the sun.

  They were in league with Marina, or at least appeared to be. Were we really going to have to take down all the McCallister females in order to save their pack?

  Moralities, however, slipped away from me as Marina spun to face us. She was outside the circle of pink-clad women but she moved in time with them. Meanwhile, behind her back and within the portal’s darkness, shapes coalesced. Shimmering. Gleaming. Like clouds of floral-scented smoke.

  The fae were through, but they weren’t yet solid....

  Then a harem girl fell to her knees and the circle broke. Fae began materializing. There weren’t half a dozen, the way I’d assumed from their voices. There were hundreds. Far too many to count.

  And Tank didn’t hesitate. He flung himself at the clouds of half-solid enemies, swinging his sword in broad arcs that whipped through a handful of fae with each stroke. The ones he cut down dissipated into nothing, but there were so many left.

  There were hundreds of fae to fight...and every minute more emerged into solidity. The newcomers were feeding, I realized as the harem girls’ swaying turned boneless, on the shifters’ connections to their own subpack.

  “Jasmine! You have to get them out of here!” I yelled, pressing toward the pink-clad women.

  “Tell your mother how to suck eggs, why don’t you?” Jasmine shot back, wading into the spinning haze of fae. Her slat was raised, but defensively rather than offensively. “Ladies,” she said. “Follow me.”

  They didn’t, of course. If they’d been in their right minds, they wouldn’t have assisted Marina’s portal-opening in the first place. Instead, they stood there, more bobbing than swaying at this point. The few open eyes were glazed and faint smiles curved each woman’s lips.

  And the fae swirled between us and them. Every time I tried to take a step forward, two fae pushed me backward. They weren’t solid enough—yet—to do real damage, but I still ended up being buffeted like a boat in stormy seas.

  Jasmine was doing no better. The bed slats, unlike Tank’s sword, weren’t sharp enough to cause serious damage. The metal protected us, but that was it.

  Still, I did have an awful lot of slats on hand....

  So I did the only thing I could think of. I remembered the way Harper had gained assertiveness after spending just a few hours among werewolves. She’d been buoyed up by pack and had risen to the challenge. Was that all Rowan’s harem needed? To be shown their own strength?

  Slipping the bundle of slats between my knees, I drew one out and flung it. Another. Another. Tossing them through the air.

  Weapons whipped across the haze of fae, who ducked rather than trying to catch them. I tossed seven slats into the cloud of fae and harem girls, keeping only one for myself.

  Metal spun through the air, seeming to catch sunlight even though that was impossible down here in the basement. A slat cut through one immaterial fae’s shoulder and he bared smoky yet still sharp teeth that were far too large to be human. I couldn’t tell if the gesture was a laugh or a scream.

  Probably the former, since he twisted his smoke tighter and began drifting toward me. Randomly flung slats wasn’t the way to expel our enemies back to the Otherworld. Plus, seven slats was nothing in this battle against hundreds of ethereal beings.

  But I wasn’t trying to kill the fae. I was trying to wake the harem girls. Give them a weapon. Prove they weren’t helpless to impact their own fates.

  The first slat hit a harem girl on the forehead. She stumbled backwards, sinking to the ground. I winced. My ploy wasn’t working.

  But Jasmine caught on and ran with it. Her voice turned fierce as she dove for the fallen slat and sent it spinning back upwards. “You’re wolves,” she growled, sounding for all the world like Ryder at his surliest. “Act like it!”

  This time, the slat was grabbed out of the air by a girl Harper’s age. The next slat I’d thrown thudded into the fist of a mature woman. Four, five, six, seven. One after another, the rest were caught.

  “Now fight!” Jasmine ordered, suiting actions to words by slicing at encircling fae.

  Maybe the burst of command was what did it. Or maybe the harem girls were boosted simply because the handlocked circle had broken. Either way, glazed eyes cleared. Smiles turned into frowns.

  “Slice through their chests!” Jasmine called, repeating my instructions.

  And they did. Slats caught the air, caught fae not yet materialized. The harem girls were more successful than Jasmine and I had been. Perhaps because they were at the center of the portal? Because their energy had been used to open the node wider? Whatever the reason, hazy fae poofed into nothing beneath their onslaught. The room was growing less crowded rather than more so.

  But the solidified fae weren’t so easily vanquished. One grabbed the hair of a teenager who fell, shrieking. Another swept an older woman off her feet.

  The members of the harem weren’t trained in swordcraft. Like me, they had little chance of standing up in the face of outright battle....

  Before I could speak, though, Jasmine was on it. “Lillian, grab Catherine’s legs,” she barked. “Minta, take her feet. You and you, help McKenzie up.”

  The fallen woman was lifted. The teenager scrambled upright with the help of her compatriots. The harem girl I’d accidentally struck in the head was also on her feet.

  Those with weapons formed a bristling circle protecting the unarmed from damage. Slowly but surely, they inched backwards. Away from the portal. Away from danger. Tank and I were the only ones in the m
idst of the fae now. I turned to help him...

  ...And found Marina in front of me. She smiled, the chill of her regard raising goosebumps all over my skin.

  SHE WAS GLAD TO SEE me. That couldn’t be good.

  I jabbed out with my slat, ignoring the tremors of wrongness sliding through my body. Marina had no weapon and made no move to stop me, so this should have been easy.

  It wasn’t. I felt like I was trying to push a needle through a bar of iron. My arm moved a mere millimeter before freezing into place.

  Marina smiled then, the fruity scent of her breath seductively awful. She raised one perfectly arched eyebrow. “Are you ready to discuss your boon?”

  Behind me, the slap of bare feet against pavement promised that Jasmine and the other women were fleeing the harem. I was glad. They were safer gone. Still, I swallowed as I realized Tank and I were the only ones left to deal with the fae.

  “My boon?” I asked, risking a glance sideways. Tank’s sword had been remarkably effective. There were less than a dozen fae left now, although the ones who remained were sucking up the remnants of the others. As if each fae sent back to the Otherworld left all of their energy behind.

  “Yes.” Marina took a step closer, whipping my attention back to her. Her voice sweetened and I tasted elderberry syrup, as if I was an ailing child being dosed by her mother. “So many opportunities for you to consider.”

  I tried to ignore her words and stab her torso just like I’d told Jasmine to do. But my arm wasn’t moving. Instead, something forced me to consider what Marina had to say.

  Ideas I’d dismissed swirled around me like yellow jackets above rotting fruit in an abandoned orchard. Harper’s social network. Tank’s charisma. My place in the werewolf world.

  Marina took another step forward, the buzz of yellow jackets turning into words of seduction. “Do you really want to depend on the goodwill of an alpha to keep yourself and your sister safe?”