The Enchanted: Council of Seven Shifter Romance Collection

by Juniper Hart

  Hazel started to scoff, but the noise died in her throat. He was certainly something she didn’t begin to understand. Why was she laughing?

  “You’re saying that the Werewolf is an actual werewolf?”

  “Yes,” Lev answered, his hand closing around a coffee tin and pulling it out from the cupboard over the sink. “And so are you.”

  She laughed mirthlessly. “So what? I’m the killer now?”

  Suddenly, she gasped, gooseflesh exploding over her arms. The memory loss. What was I doing all those nights?

  “You’re not the killer either,” Lev sighed, measuring out the coffee into a black coffeemaker and pouring water inside before joining her at the table. He reached across the table for her hands. “What I’m about to tell you is bizarre,” he warned, and Hazel snickered again, but it was a painful laugh without humor.

  “Things can’t get any more bizarre,” she assured him. “I just want the truth.”

  “The killer is a Lycan named Gabriel—or at least, I’m ninety percent sure it is. He’s a rogue wolf who turned a bunch of mortals into Lycans illegally; criminals, dangerous types who should never know eternal life.”

  Hazel’s mouth gaped slightly. “You can just turn people?”

  “No,” Lev replied. “You can’t. It’s illegal, and if it’s ever done, there is a process, which is why Gabriel is being sought after. He’ll be found and brought to justice.” Hazel didn’t ask what that justice entailed. “You were one of four women he turned,” Lev continued, but Hazel shook her head.

  “I know you think that, but it’s impossible. I’m not a… Lycan,” she choked. “I think I’d know if I could do what you can.” A peculiar expression fell over Lev’s face, and he exhaled in a rush.

  “You are,” he insisted, and she pulled her hands back to fold her arms over her chest.

  “Lev, surely I’d know if I was a damned werewolf!” she snapped. “Don’t you think?” He chewed on his lower lip, and Hazel could see he was debating whether to tell her something else. “What? Don’t hold back now.”

  “I’ve seen you shift,” he confessed.

  “What?”

  “The night we were together, you woke up and had become a different person.”

  Her heart began to hammer in her chest. “What are you talking about, Lev? Are you messing with my mind? Because I don’t know how much more of this I can take.”

  “I’m not messing with you, Hazel. You have an alter ego, Asha. When you shift, you become her.”

  Hazel’s mind raced as she tried to absorb everything she’d been told.

  I’m a werewolf, but when I become a werewolf, I have an alter ego that takes over. Somehow, in a sick, weird way, it made sense. It explained the memory loss. It explained why this Lycan had come into her life. She wracked her memory for what she knew about Dissociative Identity Disorder. It spawns from trauma. The mind blocks out the stress and creates an entirely new personality to deal with it.

  “Why?” she breathed. “Why did he do this to me?”

  Lev looked at her sympathetically and extended his hands for her to take again.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to why he chose the women he did. We also don’t know why he didn’t take you with him, but we have reason to believe that he’ll come back for you. I think these killings are a way of drawing you out somehow.”

  “What does he want with me?” Lev’s mouth became a tight frown.

  “I assume his intention at the time was mating,” he muttered, the anger in his face evident. “He’s unable to turn any more women right now, and eventually, his pack will want to procreate.”

  “His pack,” Hazel muttered, remembering the words that Lev had spoken before.

  Just before I had him arrested. Shame flooded her.

  “If this is true, why are you helping me?” she asked, her eyes wide. “I tried to have you locked up. Why do you care if Gabriel finds me?”

  “You’re kidding, right?” Lev squeezed her long fingers. “I’ll kill him before he lays another finger on you. You belong with me, and I belong with you. That’s how mates work.”

  Hazel felt a swell of emotion rise inside her, and she furiously blinked away the tears forming in her eyes.

  “God, I’ve been such an idiot!” she cried, her voice catching in her throat. “I haven’t been able to think clearly.”

  “None of this is your fault,” Lev promised her. “But we need to reconnect you to Asha before she does damage to us all.”

  “Damage? How?” There were so many other questions threatening to burst from Hazel’s mind, but unfortunately, her mouth could only handle one at a time.

  “She has no regard for what’s happening around her. She’s running off in full shift without noting her surroundings. She’ll get sighted or captured, and all hell will break loose.”

  “What?” Hazel choked, unsure of how much more she could take. “She’s just… running around like a wolf?”

  “She did the other night,” Lev said, “and if the leader of the Lycans sees what she’s been doing…” He trailed off and bit on his lower lip.

  “What? What will he do?” Hazel demanded. “Kill me?” Lev sighed.

  “Technically, you should have been destroyed to begin with,” he confessed, the words firing bullets of dread into her body. “Being turned the way you were…” He inhaled. “But you were spared for some reason, Hazel, and I was sent here to protect you, which I will do to the death. Asha, though… She’s a game changer.”

  “She’s me!” Hazel whimpered.

  “She’s an aspect of you,” Lev corrected. “We need to introduce both sides of your personality together and make you aware of what Asha is doing.”

  “And if we can’t do that?” she breathed. “Then what?”

  “We will,” Lev assured her firmly, holding her gaze with confidence. “I know a few psychologists we can trust. It will take hypnosis and reliving the trauma of whatever it was Gabriel did to you, but it can be done.”

  Hazel’s mind went back to the night she had found herself in the gutter, alone and covered in blood. Whatever he did was so bad, I blocked it out and created a new side of me. He did something worse than anything that has ever happened to me before.

  “What about the FBI?” she murmured, looking at Lev through heavy eyes. “What will we do about them?”

  “I couldn’t care less about the Bureau right now,” Lev replied. “My concern is you being safe and out of harm’s way.” Once more, he squeezed her hands, and she returned his embrace, a heady feeling washing over her. “Hazel?” she heard Lev say from somewhere far away. “Are you okay?”

  “Of course,” she said softly, rising from her chair to straddle his lap. Lev looked up at her in surprise, but she stopped him from speaking with a long, deep kiss.

  His hands spread over her back, and Lev pulled her closer to him, their tongues touching in a firestorm of energy. Hazel curled her fingers into the hair around the base of his skull and tugged at it, her teeth clamping down on his lower lip. Lev started, but she didn’t let him go, her hands fumbling at the buttons of his shirt as he rose, capturing Hazel in his arms. His eyes bored into hers, a slightly perplexed look on his face as he carried her from the kitchen and into the living room to lay her onto the sofa.

  In seconds, they were disrobed, barely a word spoken between them, and Hazel floated somewhere above, watching Lev explore her body with his hot kisses. His head dropped lower to seek out the crevices of her skin, the hairs on her body rising.

  But Hazel felt nothing, even as she watched him enter her, knowing that his hardness filled her in ways she’d never known. The woman pinned beneath Lev’s muscled form was a stranger, and she faded away, realizing that she was watching her mate make love to Asha.

  And there was nothing she could do about it.

  15

  Lev knew Hazel was gone the minute he opened his eyes.

  A part of him had already
sensed that he was no longer dealing with her but with Asha when they had made love hours before, but it wasn’t until he parted his eyelids that he understood that he had unleashed the wolf in his lover. And now she was gone.

  Dammit, Hazel, where are you? But as he rose to his feet, he had a strong feeling he knew exactly where she was headed. He just needed to figure out how she’d gotten there.

  Without her GPS and his phone, there was no way of tracking her conventionally, though there were other ways of finding her—ways that would force Lev to tell Landon Burke what was happening with her.

  His first call was to his IT contact in Virginia from the landline of the safehouse.

  “There he is!” Christina chortled. “I was wondering if you’d forgotten about the little people.”

  “This is an emergency,” Lev told her in a low voice, bypassing all the small talk. “I’ve lost my mate, and her tracker isn’t on her.”

  Christina whistled. “Oh, that’s not good. I can run her credit and debit cards—”

  “Pointless. She has nothing on her at all. The best I can hope for is reports of stolen vehicles or petty theft for her to have gotten where she’s going.”

  “Isn’t she an FBI agent?”

  “It’s a long story, Chris. Run the reports around Winthrop starting from last night until now. I’ll wait.”

  “Why don’t you call Landon?” Christina asked, her fingers tapping away on the keyboard. “He’ll do a mental lock on her location.”

  “I can’t involve him right now. You need to keep this between us, Chris.”

  “You’re my pack leader, not Landon,” Christina assured him. “My loyalty is to you first and foremost. Okay… I’ve got the reports of a stolen purse and a stolen car at a gas station in Twisp.”

  “Does the car have a GPS?”

  “It’s been disabled, but I can still track it,” Christina chuckled. “Amateur.” Lev exhaled and waited. “She’s heading along I-97, headed south.”

  “What are the details of the vehicle?”

  “A red Civic, 2015.”

  “Thanks, Chris. I owe you one.”

  “Let me know how it turns out.”

  Lev hung up and raced toward the door, barely looking about as he shifted. Hazel had a head start that would take hours to recoup. He couldn’t be bothered to worry about who would see him. Whatever she was planning, it was not going to escape Landon’s attention.

  I have to stop her before it’s too late, he thought grimly.

  If it wasn’t already too late.

  Asha hummed along to the radio, drumming her fingers against the steering wheel with a grin on her face.

  I’ve got this, Hazel, she told her alter ego, even though she knew Hazel couldn’t hear her. I’m going to take care of Gabriel for what he’s done to us.

  A twinge of guilt swept through her as she thought about how she’d left Lev, but he wasn’t really her concern. Lev was Hazel’s boyfriend, not hers.

  Idly, she considered that she was jealous of Hazel’s newfound happiness. She didn’t realize how good she had it. Hazel only saw the dark side of things. She was lucky to have found her mate. Lev wanted to protect her, and she had been fighting him from the minute he had arrived.

  Asha reasoned that her alter ego would be much happier once the threat of Gabriel and his killer pack was eliminated.

  She turned up the radio, nodding along to the Beyoncé song playing as her foot pressed heavily on the gas. Buckle up, Gabriel. I’m coming for you.

  Lev had no other choice than to stop, his lungs ready to burst, but that wasn’t the reason he paused. He had to reconnect with Christina and find out which way Hazel had gone.

  “She’s stopped,” Christina informed him. “Outside of Wenatchee. I can give you the GPS coordinates, but there’s not really anything around there.”

  “There’s something there,” Lev replied tightly, jotting down the numbers he was given. He’d shed his wolf skin, standing at a payphone near a sleepy town as he gathered his breath.

  “Are you sure you don’t need help, Lev?” Christina asked, a note of worry creeping into her voice. “I think you better call Landon before you get in over your head.”

  “No,” Lev said flatly. “I’ve got this.” But as he hung up the call, he realized that Christina was right. If his theory was correct, Asha was off to confront Gabriel and the pack. Who knew how many of them would be there and what they would do to her when she arrived?

  How the hell did she find them in the first place? What does Asha know that Hazel doesn’t? Silently, he tried to call out to his mate, but she didn’t respond. Because Asha wouldn’t respond, and Hazel is lost inside her own head somehow.

  It was all the motivation Lev needed to gather himself. He reached for the phone again. It was time to call in some backup. Consequences be damned.

  Lev was ready to drop by the time the house came into view, and he had to pause to stare at the sprawling estate in shock. The house was nothing short of a mansion, spanning as far as the eye could see in two massive wings. The exterior was stone-faced and ancient in appearance, but Lev wasn’t fooled. It had to have been built there recently. He was sure he was imagining the compound, but the more he thought about it, the more he realized that it made sense.

  Gabriel’s been hiding out here with the pack, off-grid and out of sight. Again, he wondered how Asha had figured it out.

  He lunged forward, cautiously, his eyes peering about for signs of trouble. Sniffing the air, he knew he was too late. Trouble had already found the place.

  Padding toward the house on all fours, Lev kept sniffing, trying to determine from where the tension was stemming. Something was happening, he could sense it, but what, he could not say.

  His ears twitched over his head, and suddenly, he heard the sound of voices trailing toward him.

  Hazel, are you here? As he expected, there was no response to his quiet cry, which didn’t stop Lev from moving toward the wide rectangular windows, his glowing eyes peering inside for signs of life.

  His breath caught when he saw Asha, her white-grey fur standing on end as her front paw pinned Gabriel to the marble floors of the study.

  “Admit it,” she hissed. “You’re the Werewolf!”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about!” he choked, and Lev gaped at the scene in disbelief.

  Why isn’t he shifting? He could take her… couldn’t he? Instead, he seemed petrified of her, and for a moment, Lev wondered if he was looking at Gabriel at all.

  “You did this to me,” she continued, gnashing her teeth with a ferocity that Lev didn’t recognize.

  Asha, look at me, he called. Her nose twitched, and slowly, her head raised to meet his eyes through the window. Her snout curled back to bare her teeth, but she didn’t let up.

  “Go away, Lev,” she snarled. “This is between him and me.”

  “Please!” Gabriel begged. “You can leave. I promise I will leave you alone.”

  Lev crashed through the window, realizing that Asha had no intention of releasing him. Gabriel jumped at the sound of the glass shattering, his eyes widening in disbelief.

  “Thank the gods!” he choked. “Can you do something about this?”

  “Asha,” Lev said reasonably. “What are you doing?”

  “You know what I’m doing,” Asha replied, her paw extending to cut off Gabriel’s air supply. The rogue wolf gasped and choked. “I’m getting justice for everything this cretin has done to me and the others.”

  “This isn’t the way to do it,” Lev told her gently. “You can’t kill him.”

  “Maybe not,” Asha agreed. “But I can make him suffer.”

  Lev didn’t want to admit that torturing Gabriel had occurred to him more than once.

  “That’s not the way we do things, Asha,” he repeated, ambling toward her. “Let him up.”

  “No!” she spat. “He’s mine. I found him fair and square!”

  “How?” Lev asked. Asha snorted.
>
  “He turned me, remember? We’re connected by blood now.”

  Is that true?

  Asha glowered at him. “Go away, Lev, and let me finish what I started the night he turned me.”

  Lev stared at her. “What do you mean?”

  Below her, Gabriel began to lose consciousness. It was probably for the best. Asha genuinely couldn’t kill him that way, even if she thought she could.

  “What happened the night he turned you?” Lev prompted. Gabriel finally passed out, but Asha didn’t release her hold on him.

  “I kicked his ass,” she snickered. “He thought I’d go with him quietly because Hazel is weak.”

  Lev bristled but managed to keep his calm. “You and Hazel are the same being. You were borne from her pain to protect her.”

  “That’s what I’m doing!” Asha hissed. “Can’t you see that?”

  “But if you torture Gabriel,” Lev offered softly, “Hazel will pay the price for it—and you’ll both die.” His words seemed to have some effect on her, and she slowly let up her paw, her eyes blinking.

  “He’s a killer!” she snarled. “He killed all those people just hoping one would turn, that the spell wouldn’t apply just once. He’s desperate for new pack members.”

  Lev processed what she’d said. “He didn’t do it to draw you to him?”

  “After what I did to him?” Asha scoffed. “No. He was happy to forget I ever existed. He was never coming for me.”

  “That’s good, Asha. He’s not a threat to you anymore.”

  “And what about everyone else? How can you call yourself an FBI agent and talk about letting him go?”

  “I never said anything about letting him escape,” Lev clarified. “I’m just saying you can’t harm him. It doesn’t serve any purpose.”

  “It serves my need for revenge!”

  Slowly, Lev approached Asha and placed a paw on hers.

  “Gabriel will pay for his crimes,” he swore. “And you will learn to move on from this, but you need to let him go, Asha.”