He couldn’t even be mad when Dodge let out a disbelieving snort. If Colt managed to pull that off, he might be the first alpha wolf shifter ever to put off going after his mate once he found her.
The ghost wasn’t about to give up yet.
“C’mon. Mad Dog’s gotta understand. We saw the crap he went through with his mate. Whiskey and Def Leppard,” he reminded Colt. Because of course Dodge remembered that hell. Dodge had perfect recall; he remembered every embarrassing thing that had ever happened to either Wolfe brother. “You even told me what it’s been like since you discovered she’s still one of you’se. You know, still livin’ and all. He’ll let you out of helpin’ him so you can get your gal. No doubt.”
He would. Colt knew he would. He’d be happy for Colt. But that was the thing: Maddox had wanted a mate his whole life. And Colt?
He spent twenty-six years swearing he’d be happy if he never happened on his.
If she was a wolf, it might’ve been all right. If she was a wolf and his mate, then that meant he was her mate, too. Humans… they didn’t have to wait for their fated mate before they could be intimate with a partner. The biological quirk that insisted a male shifter couldn’t mate and create pups until he met his fated mate made it impossible for Colt to be anything but a virgin.
If she wasn’t, he could live with that. Everyone had a past—she was human, a grown female, and he doubted that she was still as untouched and inexperienced as he was. But now that he knew she was out there… that she existed… that she was his—
The idea of her with another male made his claws unsheathe violently.
At that moment, he couldn’t do anything to change that she was out there, but she wasn’t his. How could she be? The second he got hard, he got spooked, and then he ran out of her shop on a broken ankle.
Despite Dodge’s prodding otherwise, he couldn’t mate her. Couldn’t fuck her. Couldn’t claim her.
Not… not yet.
Didn’t mean she might not have a date tonight with some other man, though. That Hudson guy, maybe? Bastard couldn’t even show up to help her with her dresser, but he’d probably be warming her bed tonight, right?
Just the thought that the one woman meant for him had no idea that he was anything other than a grumpy delivery man sent rage coursing through him. His wolf yipped and scratched and whined, begging him to turn tail and return to her.
They might be strangers now. What if he went back and, now that he knew she was fated to be his mate, he tried again?
He thought of her and finding her with Hudson and couldn’t even contain his temper. He just let his anger out.
His ankle might’ve been healing. Better late than never, since his regenerative properties should’ve already started, but it didn’t matter because Colt unthinkingly kicked his left leg out, connecting with his couch, sending the furniture shooting across the room.
As it slammed against the wall, Colt felt a new wave of agony and realized he had broken his Alpha-damned ankle all over again.
With Dodge still hovering nearby, he refused to show any sign that he was that much of a dumbass. Swallowing his pain, he forced himself to put one foot in front of the other, marching toward the door. He didn’t limp, though he really fucking wanted to, and he survived by promising himself that he’d let out one hell of a howl once he was locked inside his private work shed.
“Where you goin’?” Dodge called after him.
Shallow breaths.
Don’t snap.
Don’t snap again.
“Out back,” he growled. “I’ve got orders that are waiting for me. Maddox is gonna need me sooner or later. That’s my priority. I might as well get some work done until he gets here.”
“You sure ‘bout that?”
Colt jerked his head in an angry nod. “Oh, yeah. I’m positive.”
He needed to work.
He needed the distraction.
He needed his space.
He needed Dodge to stop egging him on before he listened and sprinted back to Grayson.
And, more than anything, he needed to focus on something instead of a gorgeous black-haired beauty and the erection that just wouldn’t deflate.
4
Looking for a witch for his brother was a good thing. It kept him focused.
It kept him distracted.
It was a good thing that Maddox was absolutely hellbent on claiming his mate for once and for all. With every ounce of his attention devoted to Evangeline, Maddox didn’t have any to spare to notice that Colt was dealing with some shit of his own.
In the weeks following that fateful delivery, Colt had stuck to the decision he made that afternoon. Help Maddox get his mate back and then maybe—just maybe—he might figure out what the hell he was going to do about his own.
His brother might be totally focused on finding his mate again, but Maddox wasn’t a moron. He could tell that something was going on with Colt, though he was willing to let it go whenever Colt made it clear that he wasn’t gonna have a little chick flick moment and talk about his feelings.
Eventually, once Maddox had claimed and bonded Evangeline to him, Colt would have to deal with his brother’s curiosity, but that could wait. Until then, he eagerly accepted Colt’s offer of help.
Colt was prepared to do anything to make this all up to Maddox. So, when Maddox told him that he needed Colt to hunt down a witch and hope that the magic-user could explain what had happened to Maddox and Evangeline’s severed bond, Colt was game. It pissed him off that his brother didn’t mean a literal hunt—his wolf could’ve used the challenge—but he said he would do it.
And that’s when he took that meet with Luciana la Sorcière.
What a mess that had been.
He’d had to drive right into the heart of Coventry. Witch territory. No way around it. Colt was known to be a witch’s enemy so it wasn’t really a big surprise when he couldn’t get a single one to take his gig. His brother’s old friend, Priscilla, was out of town, and everyone else referred him to the local coven.
Witches made up almost the entire downtown area of Coventry. If he needed one, that was where he had to go.
Oh, there used to be a handful who lived on the outskirts of Colt’s Bumptown—used to be, since he’d never been subtle when it came to expressing how he felt about their magic—but unless a witch chose to go solo instead of relying on the coven, witches mainly stayed in the three skyscrapers that cemented their power and place in Coventry. Going the corporate route seemed his only option.
Turned out it was.
It was also a disaster.
In the end, he had no choice but to meet the head witch of Coventry at the seat of her power if he wanted to broker a witch to help out his brother. Delivering her a diamond that set him back more than three grand, Colt went there for answers regarding Maddox’s bond—and came out with more than he bargained for when it came to his own.
A witch. His black-haired beauty was a witch.
You’ve definitely been touched by a witch. That’s what Luciana had told him, almost gleefully. Only his aversion to being turned into a toad on the spot kept him from wolfing out in the middle of her penthouse office.
He’d denied it. Of course he had. Between his furtive visits, the times he steadied himself by parking outside of her shop just to get a glimpse of her before he ran off on another errand, Colt had sought to learn everything he could about Shea.
She owned her shop, selling essential oils, soaps, candles, crystals, and more. The Hudson that incited Colt’s jealousy? Her brother. Colt saw the man walking into her shop once and, struck by two things, he lingered near enough by the door that he could eavesdrop.
One: Hudson looked like a male version of his Shea. Same blue-back hair in messy curls, same olive-toned skin, and a pair of warm brown eyes that seemed haunted as they darted to and fro, walking as if he expected someone to jump out at him.
And two: he smelled like meat.
Unlike Shea, whose scent was
still muted, he caught a whiff of her brother from more than a block away. The rotten smell was normally the calling card of a Nightwalker, but the man was moving around in broad daylight, so he couldn’t be one of the night-bound vampires.
Colt’s lips curved upward in disgust. Her brother was a Donor. A blood junkie. A Nightwalker’s willing meal.
And Shea was a witch.
He didn’t want to believe it. When Luciana dropped the bomb—when she told him that a witch had a claim to him—his first instinct was to deny it. His second instinct, too. He was an alpha wolf. So her scent was muted beneath the overpowering scents in her shop, but shouldn’t he have been able to guess?
Her eyes were brown. Not purple. She had brown eyes.
She couldn’t be a witch.
Except she was.
Moonshadow. Shea Moonshadow. He should’ve known from the name. Just like how she pointed out that she knew what he was by his, he was an Alpha damn idiot not have caught that she had one of the most infamous witch names out there.
Her missing scent? It made sense when he realized that it wasn’t missing—she was hiding it.
It was a sneaky witch trick. Whether they did it to cover up their power level or what they were, a witch could glamour their appearance—like Shea did, making her eyes brown instead of purple—or shield their scents.
Just another reminder that his mate wasn’t a human. To Colt, though, a witch was a million times worse.
Tell that to his wolf, though. Despite the man part of his brain warning that he could never be happy with a witch, his wolf was insistent that Shea was meant for them. Which was why he was parked outside of Moonshadow Apothecary again while waiting to see if any of his contacts could track down Priscilla Winters at last.
Luciana swore that whatever happened to cause Evangeline’s memory loss and her broken bond with Maddox, it wasn’t anything one of her witches could fix. Colt didn’t buy it. Someone out there had to be able to help him but, as of right now, Cilla was his last hope.
Too bad no one could find the wayward witch.
It killed him that he had a witch of his own right here. And, due to his own stubbornness, there wasn’t any way in hell he could ask her for her help.
As if that was all he wanted from her—
For a second, one measly moment in time, Colt wondered if he should just give in to his instincts, give in to his wolf, and go try to claim his mate like Maddox was struggling to do. He’d feel complete, his wolf would be whole… and he’d be at the mercy of a witch for the rest of his long, long life.
His lips curled back from his canine fangs. His boot eased off the brake, slammed down on the gas.
With her shop shrinking in his rearview, Colt snarled as he sped away, already reaching for his cell phone as it began to ring.
Yeah.
No way.
Part II
Shea
5
It began with a wheeze.
Shea Moonshadow was standing in the middle of her shop when, suddenly, she couldn’t catch her breath. One second she was taking inventory of her essential oils. The next? It felt like the air had been knocked from her lungs.
The clipboard clattered to the tiles. Her hand went straight to her chest, her brown eyes wide and afraid as she choked on a gasp. She bent over, clutching the crystal hanging from the chain around her throat. She wheezed and shuddered, desperate for her next breath.
It didn’t last long. But five seconds could feel like an eternity when she couldn’t explain the stabbing pain that arced down the fleshy backs of her upper arms before she fell to her knees, hands flat on the floor, her shoulders screaming like someone had taken a bat to them.
As soon as she was down, though, the phantom aches dulled, disappearing as quickly as they had come. If it wasn’t for the fact that she’d been brought to her knees by something she couldn’t explain, she might’ve thought she imagined it.
She didn’t.
She couldn’t.
It was so sudden, so all-consuming, and so… so real that the first thing Shea did when she finally got unsteadily back to her feet was reach up and check that her arm wasn’t bleeding.
Well, no. That was her second reaction. First? She dropped a fraction of her impressive shields to put out a feeler, checking to see if someone had used magic against her. She might be a witch who chose not to practice the craft—for way too many reasons—but that didn’t mean she couldn’t sense a vindictive spell when she was on the receiving end of it.
Was it a curse?
A hex?
A jinx?
Shea frowned, rubbing her chest with the heel of her hand, then breathed in as deep as she could.
Nothing.
The tell-tale scent of baby powder would be easy to miss with all of the candles, incense, and oils in her apothecary, but she didn’t need her nose. The still air was enough of a clue that, whatever caused her little, well, spell, it wasn’t witchcraft.
Weird.
Luckily for her, that was a good thing. With the way her magic had the tendency to backfire when she attempted even the smallest of spells, if someone had cursed her, there wasn’t much she could do to fight back on her own without a bunch of diamonds, her grandmother’s grimoires, and a whole mess of luck.
Healing, though? Healing she could do. And while a lot of her customers were convinced that she had a charmed touch when it came to helping them with their health and wellness, healing was the only one of the Moonshadow family’s gifts that she could actually tap into.
But it wasn’t magic—at least, not the way other charms and spells, wards and incantations were. It was more of a talent and a skill, and one that Shea prized greatly.
A small, tentative breath. Another. She still wheezed, though the sharp pain had lost some more of its edge. She took another breath, deeper this time, and closed her eyes, trying to get a sense of where her strange injuries began and where they were the worst.
It… it seemed to be everywhere. Her arms, her chest, her back, her shoulders, even her hip. Though it wasn’t as strong as it was when the feeling first hit her, there was no denying that she hurt. It kind of felt like she’d been in a car crash or something, but that was impossible.
Wasn’t it?
Growing up a witch with a Nana like hers, Shea knew better than to think that anything was impossible. However, when she finally got back to her feet, leaving her clipboard on the tiles as she grounded herself against her countertop, she was seriously beginning to second guess that.
The black star diopside threaded throughout the marble helped Shea grow calm, balancing her as she dug deep to heal her body. She’d done this a thousand times before, knew how much energy she needed to heal a papercut or, one clumsy afternoon, a broken arm.
Only, this time, it didn’t work. At least, not entirely.
The pain dulled. Shea breathed in again, with only the tiniest of twinges radiating along the right side of her body. Even that tiny twinge was too much. With as much power as she conjured up to fix herself, she should be pain-free.
She threw more healing energy at her right shoulder. Breathed again.
Wheezed when another stab cut through her chest.
Okay. Enough of that. If she kept trying, if she kept digging deep into her well of healing, she could actually make things ten times worse. She did that once, pushing too hard when Hudson got terribly hurt when they were teens, and ended up in a hospital for a week when she used half her life force to save his.
Shea liked to think that she knew her limits by now. So even though she still had no idea what was going on, she had to stop questioning it. Way she saw it, it was either her bed in the rooms she kept over her shop, or a hospital if she kept on pushing against this strange sensation.
Shuddering out another breath, she walked carefully toward the front door, leaning against it as she turned the open sign to closed.
Goddess willing, she’d be recovered tomorrow and her sudden spell would be nothing but
an odd memory.
6
It didn’t get any better. Not really.
The pain wasn’t so bad the next morning, or maybe she just got used to the continued hurt. The wheezes? They came and went, never fully disappearing. Shea wasn’t an asthmatic, and she wondered if she was coming down with a cold; that would explain the annoying body aches. Embarrassing for a healer, especially since she loaded up on echinacea and oil of oregano to no avail.
A couple of days after the spell first hit, it was taking everything she had to drag herself downstairs to open her shop on time.
The pressure in her chest? So long as she took it easy—and avoided stress—she could deal with that. It was what it was. Fine. But the twinge in her hip? The way her back stung like she’d been dragged over the carpet or something? How not even a full blast of healing energy or her supplements did anything to help?
In the end, she figured it would go away on its own. It wasn’t getting any worse, and she couldn’t afford to keep her shop closed for more than the one afternoon. So, every morning, no matter how much it took out of her, Shea got dressed, pulled on her glamour, and went down to man the counter.
On the third day, Shea was leaning against the counter, rubbing her thumb along the smoothed side of a length of blue kyanite. It was her favorite healer’s stone and, at that point, she was willing to try anything—well, anything except ask for help.
Business was slow. It was the end of June, and considering the big to-do from last week when a rogue witch got angry and threw a shifter out of a window, traffic had been diverted while the crews cleaned up the mess and worked to repair the crater left when his body slammed into the pavement.
Shea was just wondering if it would be worth it to close a little early, maybe take the rest of the afternoon off, and hope to the Goddess that she felt better in the morning when, suddenly, the front door swung as if pushed in by a gust of ferocious wind.
No Way: Colton & Shea (Claws Clause Book 1.75) Page 3