by Calin, Ana
She starts to breathe heavily. I put my hands around her to steady her, talking to her to calm her down, but her skin begins morphing into that of the Queen—the sleek, smooth leather-like skin, her fingernails transforming into black bone claws. In only a few moments the Queen springs out the open window, chasing something in the night.
I shift, my wolf shattering my skin and my clothes, rolling out of my human skin, and jumping after her. The entire pack follows, save for Nero.
When we return, half an hour later, we find Nero and the two women in the drawing room where my brothers and I talked earlier. Melanthe’s hands are full of blood, and she stares at them in shock. Her elegant face is blank, expressing nothing. It strikes me there isn’t much of Princess in her. I guess my brother’s mate took a lot from her father—her now dead father.
“Did you find him?” Princess cries with pain in her voice. Her face is hot, her eyes puffy, her red locks messy from all the times she’s pulled at them. Nero stands behind her, hands on her shoulders. If he weren’t here, exerting the power of his love on her, I’m sure she’d collapse and drown in her pain.
“We caught the trail of a wolf, but the scent mixed with that of a serpent,” I explain as Janine laces her fingers with mine. She’s retaken her human form easily, somewhere in the middle of the forest. “But I had to abandon the chase because of Janine. She shape-shifted automatically when she sensed the trail of the killer, but when she lost it she couldn’t keep her Queen form. I had to return and protect her.”
“I might have something,” Achilles’s voice reaches us from the front door, which he’s just thrown open. He comes into the room, still in the process of shifting back from a handsome white wolf into the athletic young man with long wild hair.
What he holds up raises more questions than it does answers. The killer could be anyone—or, better said, anything. A werewolf, a serpent, or a human. Only that the wound in the victim’s throat seems to have been produced by a wolf. It looked like someone bit his throat bones off.
Many had a reason to kill him. The serpents, because he’d betrayed them. In the end, he was the alpha’s father-in-law. An alpha he didn’t actually fully accept, so Nero could theoretically have had him killed as well, but all of us know he would have never done that to Princess. Or it could be the new wolves that we brought from Italy, Cinzia’s willing and happy servants.
“No,” Janine intervenes for the woman. “I’d put my hand in fire for her.”
“After everything she’s done to you, how can you trust her?” Princess protests, hungry for a suspect.
“After what happened in those dungeons a bond formed between us, a special one.” Janine says. “It’s hard to explain.”
“Am I missing something here? Why are we leaving out our main suspect?” Achilles intervenes, and we all follow his gaze to Melanthe. The woman is still staring at her hands, saying nothing. I doubt she’s even aware of us.
“We all waited for her to come down the entire evening, haven’t we? We were all downstairs dining when this happened—except for her.”
The eccentric woman doesn’t react. She keeps staring down.
“The main suspect indeed,” Janine whispers, intelligent eyes fixed on Melanthe. “It was so obviously her, that it can’t be true. If you ask me, only one thing is obvious—whoever did it, they wanted it to look like it was Melanthe.” She looks up at me. “I think I have an idea how to solve this mystery, but we can’t do it without this woman, and we need someone to monitor her at all times.”
“Are you saying she needs a bodyguard?”
“Yes, but not quite the kind of bodyguard you were for me. It must be a secret bodyguard. A ghost, a shadow.” She looks at the mentally absent woman. “Not even she needs to know about him. Whoever is trying to set her up is gonna try again when they see it didn’t work the first time, and when they do, we have to be prepared.”
“I like that idea,” Princess says. She looks around. “Any volunteers?”
THE END
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If Protected by Conan Wolf was the first Magnificent Beasts book that you’ve read, and you want more like it, you might want to check out the first two books of the series. Enjoy to the max : )
If you need more paranormal love to fill your time until next month, enjoy the Dracula’s Bloodline series (five books already out!), available on Amazon now: