by Alyssa Day
She tried to stand, but the effort was too much. Pine caught her as she fell and swung her up into his arms. She allowed herself to lean against his strength for a moment, but then pushed against his chest. "Let me down. I need to check on them."
He started to argue, but they heard the sound of vehicles approaching, so he gently placed her down on the grass between the two men.
"I'll run over and wave them down," he told her. "I'll be within shouting range, so call out if you need me."
"My bow. Now."
He started to argue, but one look at her face must have told him not to waste his time or breath. He handed her the bow and then took off at a dead run toward the sound of the Jeeps.
"He'll see," April told the wounded men, who couldn't hear her but would soon be able to tell their stories. Then Pine would owe her a serious apology, if she were still alive to hear it.
Demons. She shuddered.
She checked the men's pulses again. They seemed a bit stronger, but she was no medical professional or healer. "When the demons show up, he'll be sorry," she told them.
"People usually are," a cold voice said from behind her.
DENAL! She shouted, on the Atlantean mental communication pathway.
Then pain, bright and brilliant, pulsed through her head and the world went black.
Five minutes later, when Pine raced back to the clearing with the medics and some of his shifters hot on his heels, April was gone. Her bow lay on the ground, broken in half.
The scent of stone and sulfur hung in the air.
Pine threw back his head and howled a cry of such despair and rage that his shifters immediately dropped to the ground around him, and the wounded men shifted to wolf shape.
"Find her," he growled. "You take them to the clinic. I'll go find her. Move!"
He howled again, and before the echoes of the sound had faded, the Dire Wolf who was also Pine stood in his place. Six feet tall at shoulder and hip, Pine's wolf was nearly five hundred pounds of pure, predatory, power.
I'm coming for you, April. And I'll kill anything that gets in my way.
9
When April swam back up to consciousness, she had a pounding headache and the smell of demon in her nostrils.
Neither made her particularly happy. She reached for her bow, but it was gone. Her knives, too, she could tell by slightly flexing certain muscles.
Ah.
They'd missed the one strapped to her left thigh. They'd be sorry about that, she promised herself. Then she opened her eyes, to find Pine standing over her, staring down at her. Her first confused thought was that he'd changed clothes into black pants, black shirt, and black boots.
Her second thought was that he smelled like demon.
"You're not Pine," she rasped out through a throat that burned with thirst. How long had she been out? Or was it the head injury?
"Smart for a human," Not-Pine said, his face expressionless.
It was bizarre. She knew he wasn't Pine, and yet the resemblance was uncanny. "Scary duplication demon magic?"
The demon blinked his blue eye, and then he blinked his green eye. She realized they were wrong. Reversed. On Pine, the right eye was blue. On the demon, blue was the left.
"Close, but not exact," she taunted him. Angry opponents were more likely to make mistakes.
Or kill you, her rational side reminded her.
You win some, you lose some, her irrational side chimed in.
She might possibly have a concussion. One didn't suddenly develop split personalities while lying on the cold floor of a … cave?
"I'm not a demon," he offered, still studying her. "If that's what you think."
She rolled her eyes. "Sure. You only shop at Demon Perfume for Men boutique, right? The stone and sulfur smell is so trendy these days."
He scowled at her. "You should be more afraid of me. Either I'm a demon, and I'm lying to you, or I'm the long-lost twin brother to Pine, and I'm a terrifying Dire Wolf come to eat you."
"Will you huff and puff and blow me? Wait. That's not right." She tried to think about the new children's story that the queen had brought to Atlantis, but her head was definitely fuzzy.
"I'm a Dire Wolf," he suddenly screamed, and his voice was so unlike Pine's that she actually breathed a sigh of relief before nearly passing out from the pain of his hideous voice ringing through her poor broken skull. "You should fear me!"
Another voice rang through the cavern. "She fears nothing. Try me on for size, Demon"
It was Pine. She'd known he'd come for her. She'd have done the same for him.
April tried to sit up but nearly fainted from the spike of pain that shot through her head, before she remembered that she was one of Poseidon's Warriors and far too tough to do anything as pathetic as faint.
Instead, she rolled over and retched. In a totally non-pathetic way. But even while she was doubling over in pain, she managed to get her hands on her knife.
Pine froze when the demon turned to face him, because the demon's face … was his.
An exact mirror image, even down to the eye color.
How?
"It's not what you think," April called out to him. Her voice was weak and hoarse but she was sitting up. There was blood in her hair, though. The bastard must have hit her. He was going to die.
"He's a demon. It's a trick. You need to believe me this time."
The demon—or his twin—screamed again and aimed a kick at April, who managed to half-roll, half-fall out of the way, but by the time the demon pulled his foot back again, Pine was charging across the cavern, launching through the air at the demon who dared to attack April and wrenching his body in mid-air into the fastest shift he'd ever done.
When he landed on the demon who looked like him, Pine was a quarter ton of raging fury in the shape of a Dire Wolf. He swatted the thing so hard that it flew twenty feet across the cave and smashed into a stone wall.
So much for puny demons who pretended to be princes.
He bent his head to April, praying that she wouldn't be afraid of him—she hadn't seen him shift shape before—but she started shouting, and he backed away, saddened and discouraged, before he realized she wasn’t afraid of him. She was telling him that the demon was coming back.
Before he could move, the demon, still wearing its human-Pine shape, slammed into him with the force of a freight train. Pine flew through the air and crashed into a different wall, but he bounced right back up as soon as he hit the floor. Dire Wolves were hard to kill.
The demon wasn’t trying to kill him, though. It had other ideas.
It had yanked April up off the ground and tossed her over its shoulder, and now it was racing toward the back of the cave, where Pine only just now noticed a gathering mass of darkness that was blacker than black.
An inter-dimensional portal.
If the demon succeeded in getting April through that opening, Pine would never see her again.
He roared so loudly that the walls of the cave shook, and then he chased after the demon, but it had too much of a head start. April was screaming, something about ice daggers? What?
From behind him, a tornado of arrows and ice daggers, both, sliced through the air on either side of Pine and smashed home into the demon, somehow—miraculously—missing April. The demon screamed again, a noise that sounded like hell itself, and hurled April against the stone floor before lurching forward toward the portal.
Like hell he would. Pine would be damned if he'd let the hell beast escape, so he could recuperate and return. He gathered his feet and pushed off in a powerful leap, soaring through the air so high and so far that he landed between the demon and the portal.
"Nooooo," the demon screamed, his Pine-face melting into swirls of blackened red and purple that were so hideous Pine almost closed his eyes before he flattened the thing's head with one paw.
When the demon died, the portal winked out like a snuffed candle, but Pine had no time to care about it. He ripped the magic of the
shift through his body again and shifted into human in seconds then raced over to April's limp form huddled, unmoving, on the stone floor.
"April. Come back to me, now," he commanded her, hoping, praying that just this once she'd listen to a command. He gently lifted her body off the floor and into his arms, right there on the floor, and realized that the tears dripping onto her face was coming from his own.
"I love you. Don't you dare leave me," he begged her, but she was so still and so pale, and he started to despair, but then another man crouched down next to them.
Pine started to snarl at the man, but then he recognized him. The unmistakable long, white hair and silver eyes. This was Griffin, the Atlantean mage.
"Heal her," he demanded.
Griffin snarled right back at him. "I take no orders from you, Prince. You should have taken better care of our ambassador."
The words hit Pine with the force of the blow they'd been. Griffin was right. If she died, it was his fault. He would die with her.
But another person ran up to them, and as if in a daze, Pine heard his sister's voice. "Heal her or die yourself, mage."
He looked up to see Nyn pointing her bow, arrow cocked, at Griffin's head. The mage spared an irritated glance at Nyn, but then his mouth fell open and he fell back from the crouch to land on his ass on the stone.
"You—who--" The mage reluctantly tore his gaze from Nyn, sentence unfinished, and spread his fingers, palms down, inches over April's still body. Immediately, a super-charged version of the blue healing light April had used earlier spread over and around her, and within seconds she opened her eyes and smiled up at him.
"That was a funny dream," she told him. "I think you should kiss me now."
"I think I should kiss you forever," he said, but instead he tightened his arms around her and nodded his thanks to the mage while April dropped off into sleep in his embrace.
"Nyn, this is April's fellow warrior, Griffin," he told his sister, knowing it would be useless to ask her what the hell she was doing putting herself in danger.
The mage stood and bowed, deeply and elegantly, to Nyneve before staring down at her as if he'd never seen a woman before. After several long, silent moments, Griffin inclined his head. "I have no need to be threatened with death to help those in need, fierce one."
Nyn lowered the bow and stumbled back a step, her gaze locked on the mage. "I'm sorry—I'm … I didn't--"
"We need to get April back to the manor," Pine said, not liking the looks of whatever was happening between his sister and the mage.
"We need to get all of you home," Sean called out, leading a team of their people into the cave. "Whatever black, demon magic was holding us out finally disappeared."
Pine blinked. "You came, too? You all came?"
Three more of the Atlantean warriors, including team leader Denal, flew into the cavern just then on clouds of glistening mist. They landed next to Griffin.
"We always come for family," one of the Atlanteans said. Denal, Griffin, Nyn, and Sean all nodded.
Family. He and April had family.
They were family.
Forever.
In his arms, April stirred and opened her eyes. "Hey, Denal How do you feel about werewolf soccer?"
Denal tilted his head. "Sounds fun. But what is that noise?"
"What?" Pine looked around, and then he heard it.
"Oh, no," Nyn said.
The Atlanteans pulled ice daggers from the air itself and crouched into battle readiness. Griffin moved his body to protect Nyn so smoothly that Pine didn't think his sister even realized it was happening.
"What is the danger?"
"No danger, Griffin," April said sleepily. "Annie's just coming to murder me again."
Then the woman Pine had finally realized he was in love with fell back asleep, leaving him to explain to several dangerous Atlantean warriors that the murderer was, in fact, his niece.
Again.
10
A week later
April woke up and stretched and then pounced on the extraordinarily sexy, deliciously muscular, and absolutely gorgeous man stretched out on the bed next to her. He opened first his blue eye, and then his green eye, and then he put his hands on the sides of her face and pulled her to him for a long, luxurious kiss.
"Have I mentioned how much I love you?"
She laughed. "Several times a day, in fact."
Pine flipped her over in one quick, powerful movement so that her naked body was beneath his, which made all the tingling feelings she'd been having intensify. Then he took her breasts in his clever, clever hands, and she moaned.
"Again?"
He flashed that wickedly seductive smile. "I only made you come seven times last night. I can't have my woman be unsatisfied."
She gasped when those clever fingers reached down and parted her legs but then her body went boneless with surrender and liquid with need. "Only … seven … times? Now you're just boasting."
He kissed her hard and deep, and then he replaced his fingers with his cock and she wrapped her legs around his and pulled him to her. "Also, don't think we're not going to talk about that 'my woman' crack, even if you are the werewolf prince of Europe."
"We prefer wolf shifter," he said silkily, plunging deep inside her wet heat with so much power that she felt him inside her soul.
Again.
They'd reached the fabled Atlantean soul-meld on their first night together, when they'd connected on such an intensely deep level that they'd actually seen inside each other's souls. She'd seen his intense loneliness, his love for his family.
His love for her.
He'd seen her desperate, isolated childhood, her fierce need to prove herself as a warrior.
Her love for him.
Now, every time they made love, the connection only grew deeper and more powerful.
"I love you, too, you know," she told him, meeting him thrust for thrust, reveling in the music their bodies made together.
"And you always will," he said with an expression of such smug masculine triumph that she had to laugh.
"And I always will. Now shut up and kiss me."
And so he did, while claiming her body, her heart, and her future in the most primal way possible.
When they both lay panting, sated, but still unwilling to stop touching each other, Pine reached over her body and reached into the end table drawer. He rolled over to face her and kissed her again; slowly, deeply, gently.
Then he handed her a tiny blue velvet box.
She blinked. "What? Are we supposed to give each other gifts?" A panicked expression crossed her face. "I didn't know. You promised to tell me when I missed some human ritual. I--"
"April." He smiled at her, and everything in her world was suddenly okay.
"Yes, Pine? By the way, you still need to tell me your first name. I know from Nyn that Pine is your last name, but she won't tell me, either."
"I have dirt on her, too," he said, still grinning. "Now stop interrupting me. I need to ask you a question."
April rolled her eyes and sat up. "So ask, already. It's not like--"
"Will you marry me?"
She fell out of bed.
Pine leaned over the edge of the bed and looked down at her, laughing. "Is that an Atlantean ritual? You accept a proposal of marriage by falling off the bed?"
She could only stare at him. Words didn't work. "I—you—we—I--"
"Yes, honey, that's all the pronouns. How about we try other words now? Like yes?" He leapt out of bed, gloriously naked, and swept her up into his arms. "Marry me, April. Be my love and my soul-mate and my ambassador and my woman. Be my conscience and my challenge, be the mother to my children and the aunt to my niece and the joy of my life. Marry me, April, because you are my life, now and forever."
April's face felt hot and wet, and she realized she was crying. For the first time since she was six years old, she was crying.
"Yes," she told him. "Yes. For all of those reason
s, but most of all, because I will love you until the oceans run dry. I will marry you, my werewolf prince."
He kissed her then; kissed her until they had no breath left in their lungs. "Now you'll be my werewolf princess." With that, he took the beautiful ring and slid it on her finger.
"No," she told him.
He froze. "No?"
"No. I will not be your werewolf princess." She held up their joined hands and admired her ring. "We prefer wolf shifter."
When they finally stopped laughing and kissing for a moment or two, April poked him in the chest. "Now that I’m going to marry you, you have to finally tell me your first name."
He sighed. "Fair is fair." Then he leaned over and whispered in her ear.
When he sat back up, she stared up at him in a mixture of horror and shock.
"No!"
"Sadly, yes."
"Really?"
"Really."
She thought about it for a minute and then nodded. "Okay. The wedding's off."
11
Atlantis, a week later
Queen Riley stood on her balcony, smiling down at the garden below. "This is getting to be a habit, my love."
Her husband and soul-mate, King Conlan, sighed. "Can I pretend I don't know what you're talking about?"
She laughed. "You could try, but since April and Pine are down there talking about wedding plans, you won't have any credibility."
Conlan shook his head, but then he pointed at two people across the garden almost to the gate. "Is that Denal? And … Sunny? He is the only person on Atlantis who doesn’t like that woman, for some odd reason."
Riley frowned a little. "I know, but the emotion I feel from him—never mind. I'm sure I'll figure it out. In the meantime, did you see Griffin when Pine's sister and niece walked into the room last night? He looked like somebody had stabbed him."
"Somebody probably had," her husband said dryly. "That wolf cub has a fairly wide murderous streak, or so I hear."