by SM Reine
The females writhed with the melody line of the music, but it was the thump of the bass that aroused them. At least, that’s what they presumed made their blood hum and their skin tingle with suppressed excitement.
Music and the presence of a predator in their clean, modern world. There was nothing neat or slick about what he felt this night.
The drive to run and rut demanded release.
A few of the braver females glanced his way, and he didn’t mind the attention. He knew what they saw: a regular guy who looked like he either worked construction or had turned gym rat to maintain his athletic physique. But it was his inner wolf that felt their interest skate over his broad shoulders—his wildness awakening some remnant of human animal nature buried beneath spandex and lip gloss.
No matter how often he encountered it, the ignorance of humans never failed to stun him.
The only thing they associated with predator were mug shots of dreary, gut-bellied men with bad teeth and long rap sheets or sleek, high-tech drones cutting the air over exotic, foreign lands.
If they even thought about elemental risk in the first place.
Owen would bet a year of his miserable life that no one on the dance floor had a clue about reality. Not here in this funky vacation town on the Pacific Coast. Not now when the breezes of summer beckoned. Not when they’d escaped the cubicles and 24-inch monitors of Portland and Seattle and Sacramento. Reality was something else entirely than what they supposed in the boring stretches of their forget-about-it lives.
A balding, slump-shouldered man in a red plaid shirt and beer-stained khakis danced alone, edging closer to a clutch of females every few measures. He jerked his head back and forth like a possessed car ornament. Every swivel of his hips made his belly jiggle. Even from this distance, Owen could smell the sweet rot of diabetes on him that overlaid a darker odor of some other disease he couldn’t identify.
Mr. Excitement leaned into a curvy redhead, wrapped his flabby arm around her shoulders and moved his lips. Whatever he’d said earned him a swift shove with the heel of a manicured hand. He stumbled backwards on crepe-soled shoes, whining in protest. The bouncer caught him and muscled him out the side door.
Owen’s wolf preened and growled, and he tightened his grip on the icy mug, enjoying the bite of cold against his skin. On another night, he might have separated one of the women from the herd, culled her like the predator he was, and taken her in an alley or his truck or anywhere he damn well pleased.
That would be impulsive. That was precisely the sort of dick-in-charge, head-up-his-own-ass mistake that had landed him in trouble—the kind of trouble he couldn’t escape.
No matter how strong the urge, letting his wolf free this night would only make things worse.
In no way was his wolf prepared to deal with the potential shitstorm he’d created, and it wasn’t fair to take out his frustrations on a human female.
Not even the ones who licked their red lips and smiled in sensual invitation.
These teachers and accountants and risk-prevention specialists who’d shed their sensible pumps for scraps of leather and silk paired with boots and heels and chains. Like they’d signed up for BDSM summer camp and strapped on the uniform, but were still awaiting their first lesson.
Fuck if he was going to play camp counselor.
“I still think it’s a bad idea,” Remy said. “It’s not too late, we can still leave.”
Owen glanced across the narrow booth. The lyr’s dark, unfathomable gaze met his. Owen was the first to break contact and study the slight webbing between his friend’s fingers. To the casual observer, Remy looked completely human, but he had been born of the vast ocean and was only a visitor on land, as tied to the phases of the moon as any were. The cycle was all they had in common, though.
Remy didn’t have a clue what was at stake.
“So the fuck what?” Owen challenged. “It’s not your decision.”
Remy snorted. “The only reason you’re still in one piece is because I did make a decision. Get over yourself.”
“Think you run things now?”
“No, but your brother…” Remy paused, letting the moment stretch out. “Your alpha put me in charge while he’s out of commission, so unless you want to challenge him, I suggest you shut up and listen for a change. Unless you think the superior reasoning power that landed you in this mess in the first place will be sufficient to save your sorry werewolf ass.”
“Just so you know, I hate every shifting bone in your fucking fish body.” Owen folded his big hands on the scarred surface of the table. “My plan is the only way. I’m not going to let a woman die because I made a mistake.”
“You marked a woman who had no clue—”
“She’s a person. She has a name: Tasha McNeil.”
Remy sighed. “You marked a woman who had no clue what was happening to her.”
“She saw me that day,” Owen interjected, “so don’t tell me she had no idea what was going on. She gave her consent. I marked her. If Lilith hadn’t intervened—”
“But Lilith did make her move,” Remy said. “Smart one, too. Witch is strategic. Got to respect that.”
“The hell I do!” Owen growled and smashed his fist against the table. A woman at a nearby table jerked her head up in alarm.
“Your attitude isn’t helpful.” Remy flashed his trademark smile at the tourist, waiting until she resumed her conversation before turning back to Owen. “You were the careless bastard who allowed a witch to tamper with a woman you’d marked. You were the one not paying attention. Tasha McNeil is in danger because of you, not Lilith Darke.”
“You think you’re so smart, fishboy? I’m not an idiot. I was careful. Lilith said she’d wanted to talk, so when I went to meet her in the ice cream shop, I went sideways first, but Tasha could still see me.”
Going sideways was what weres and the lyrinye called to their ability to shift out of phase with the world and become virtually invisible to average humans.
However, average did not begin to explain Tasha McNeil. While minding her own business eating an ice cream cone, she’d noticed Owen and Lilith when they should have been invisible. That remarkable ability to perceive out-of-phase creatures was what had drawn Owen to her in the first place.
“About four percent of humans have some degree of psychic ability,” Remy said. “Maybe half that number have developed it to the point they can see a were or a lyr or even a rotting seraphim when we’re sideways.” He waved a hand in the direction of the gyrating mass of dancers. “That means there are at least two people out there right now who could detect our presence even if we slid out of phase.”
“If they weren’t too stoned or drunk.”
“The facts remain.”
Owen lifted his empty mug and flagged a server. The lyr could spout science and statistics all night, but it didn’t change the fact that Tasha McNeil with her ability to see was a rare prize.
“Thanks for the lesson,” Owen said, “and fuck you very much.”
Remy swore under his breath, but quieted when the waitress approached the table. Her bottle-blond hair coiled on her head in a messy nest, and a metric ton of black liner traced eyelashes so long they looked like they might take flight. She thrust her spectacular breasts forward as she bent to retrieve the empty mugs. “’Nother round?”
Owen nodded. His cock twitched as he watched the server’s hips swing as she worked her way through the crowd back to the bar.
“Who cares if Tasha McNeil can see when one fuck is as good as another?” Remy asked.
Owen growled. He wanted to shift into his wolf form and sink his teeth into the lyr’s neck for being right. Satisfying as that might be, it didn’t change the fact that he was the one who’d put the pack at risk. Because of his carelessness, Lilith had managed to tamper with the mark he’d placed on Tasha McNeil. How Lilith had managed that trick, he didn’t know, but as soon as Tasha had mentioned sitting in the park with Lilith immediately after he’
d marked her, he’d known.
Marking a female tagged her, and after that the marked female was a potential mate for any were in the pack. Owen had no intention of sharing her, however. He’d intended to make her his, but the bonding through sex had only been partially accomplished.
Whether that was his fault or Tasha’s or related to the hex the witch had added to the mark, Owen didn’t know. One thing was certain: the hexed symbol etched on Tasha McNeil’s wrist was an open invitation to Fate only knew what sorts of dark magick. It opened a psychic doorway to the Lost Legacy pack that the witch could manipulate. Witches were nothing but trouble, and Lilith Darke was the worst kind of trouble.
Owen had created this mess; it was up to him to make things right.
“You can still change your mind,” Remy said. “I haven’t told Lan. Yet.”
“Great plan,” Owen snarked. “Leave an innocent woman marked, but not bonded. What kind of a bastard do you think I am? Might as well plant a beacon on Tasha signaling every one of our enemies. I might as well kill her myself. It would be kinder.”
“You don’t know for certain that she’d be in danger,” Remy said with a shrug. “Even though she has the sight, as far as I can tell, Tasha McNeil is totally human. She spends most of her time in the city and has shown zero interest in anything out of the ordinary—”
“Except me.”
“Noted, Romeo. However, with time the mark will fade along with any danger carrying the mark poses. Her memories of you will fade along with it. She’ll go on with her life none the wiser. Better yet, you will be able to have a life.”
“No,” Owen said flatly. “If I stand around with my dick in my hand, this is how it will go down: Sooner or later, my brother will find out. When he does, Lan will act like an alpha. He will protect the pack. First, he’ll kill Tasha so he won’t have to kill me, even though he’ll want to. Then it will be my turn. By the time he gets done with me, I’ll wish he’d killed me. And that’s not even counting what the Council of the Kinraven will do when they find out, which they will. It’s only a matter of time.”
Remy sighed. “You’re probably right.”
“Besides, instead of forgetting about the whole thing, Tasha’s been hunting me the past ten days. Rather than enjoying her stay at the spa, she’s been asking questions and digging into the history of Lost Legacy. I’ve had to hole up in Lan’s quarters to avoid her.”
The waitress slid two mugs frothy with a local brew across the table. Owen kicked back a long slug and dragged his hand across his mouth. “Woman doesn’t know how to quit. If I don’t do something, she’s going to get herself killed and start a war in the process. So yeah, my plan sucks, but at least I have one.”
Remy leaned his head against the back of the booth. “I respect the fact that you want to take care of this. I wish there were another way that didn’t include you submitting to the alpha of another pack. Call me crazy, but I think it’s a little extreme. I mean, it’s honorable that you want to protect this woman, but is she worth your life? What if Gideon Black decides to kill you instead of accepting you?”
“What the hell?” Owen laughed bitterly, allowing his gaze to stray to the sexy blond waitress. “I hear he’s a hell of an alpha. Maybe I’ll enjoy it.”
Remy slid him a haunted glance. “You’re wrong.”
Owen blinked. As the lyr representative in the Pacific Northwest, Remy had submitted to the alpha of the Lost Legacy pack years ago. It had been a routine thing in Owen’s view.
Or not.
He’d never asked Remy about his life among his own kind, simply assuming the lyrinye had hierarchies similar to that of the were packs.
Just then, Chill’s front door thwacked open, and a new crowd swept inside on a wave of perfume punctuated by chatter and the clickety-tap of heels on the planked wooden floor. More women—just what his overheated hormones needed.
Owen sighed, and was about to turn back to Remy when something sharp pierced his gut.
Not a physical thing, but more dangerous for that reason. It was like a tiny barb shot from the never realms straight into his solar plexus. His inner wolf howled, and Owen hunched in pain, gasping and slamming his palm against the table.
“What the fuck?” Remy straightened, his hand sliding under his leather jacket for his weapon. As head of security for the Lost Legacy Preserve, he never went anywhere unarmed.
With gritted teeth, Owen raised his head and stayed Remy with a hand while he scanned the bar, hunting for the source of the attack. He found it, and cool shock dulled the pain to a bearable level.
Tasha McNeil.
CHAPTER TWO
Lilith jammed her time card into the antique machine, muttered a brief spell while it clunked and stamped her work start time two hours earlier than the current moment. It wasn’t like her boss would bother checking or that any of the other employees cared. Smiling, she stuffed the card back in the rack under D for Darke, hefted a steaming rack of bar glasses and shouldered through the swinging doors.
Chill was jammed from the dance floor to the outside terrace with the first big wave of vacationers of the season. She hated bartending through the long, damp winters when the owner stayed open out of sheer stubbornness, refusing to admit he didn’t have enough business to justify keeping the lights on, let alone pay salaries.
She liked summer because she liked being busy. Busy meant more tips. Busy meant there would be fewer quiet moments to think about the way mortals stumbled through their shockingly short lives with utter blindness to the greater worlds that surrounded them. But if it weren’t for that same blindness, it would be much more difficult for her to part the fools from their money, so all in all, their ignorance was her bliss.
She deposited the glass rack on the stack next to the ice bin and started pushing a bar rag around to make it look like she’d been there for a while. The antique oak bar was dented and dinged by the decades, carved with initials going back to before World War II. Some frugal renovator in the past had re-done the bar top with a do-it-yourself pour-on acrylic mix and studded it with flattened beer bottle caps, old matchbooks, printed cocktail napkins, business cards, candy wrappers, plastic game pieces and a thousand other bits of stuff normal people had tossed in the trash back when it was called trash, not recycling.
Lilith had begun using the bar top as a divination tool when she’d started working at Chill a few years ago. Half the time she didn’t need to whisper a spell or invoke a level one charm because the bar top with its infinite variety of embedded crap was a virtual time machine. It started conversations and helped her read the clientele, making her selection of the night’s mark more efficient.
Benedict Ross wiped his brow with a damp, filthy rag. Lilith deftly snatched it out of his hands, replacing it with a clean one from the stack on the shelf below the bar top. None of the cards by the time clock bore Benny’s name, but that didn’t stop him from slipping behind the bar and covering for Lilith. Nor did she bother discouraging him.
“Good thing you got here when you did,” Benny said, gesturing at the crowd. “We been so busy, I was afraid somebody’d ask me to make one’a them Long Island Iced Teas.” His short, wiry gray hair stuck out from his head in wild spikes and probably hadn’t been washed in a week. He didn’t smell too bad, so Lilith counted that as a win.
“Anytime you want to learn how, Benny. Just say the word.”
Benny ambled to the civilian side of the bar. “I’m a’gonna leave the fancy stuff to you professionals.”
By Lilith’s reckoning, Benny had been afraid of complicated mixed drinks since sometime late in the second Clinton administration. He’d never taken Lilith up on her training offer, however. Every fall he disappeared, most likely hitching his way south to California where he spent the winter on a warmer beach only to return in the spring. One of these years, he wouldn’t survive the journey and she would miss him. Benny had his uses as another kind of divination tool. He wasn’t as dependable as the bar top or her best
spells, but if he didn’t like someone, there was usually a good reason.
Between gullible customers, Benny and the magick bar top, Lilith had cleared almost six-figures already this year on top of her shit wages and meagre tips. If things kept up like this, she could quit tending bar for a few years and focus her attention on more important matters.
Like mongrel weres who seemed to think their prime seat on the Council of the Kinraven meant they were above every other magickal being. She fingered the silver rune she wore on a chain at her neck and touched the air. The currents were wild, rippling and erratic.
She loved nights like this. It made men horny and women nervous. In other words, it was perfect for grifting and sex, not necessarily in that order (with or without magick).
Two of her favorite things in the world.
Misty Adkins dropped a fiberglass bar tray on the rubber mat at the waitress station. She was permanently blond, pushing forty, and blessed with tits that made twenty-something females jealous. “Nice you see you decided to grace us with your presence tonight, your ladyship.” She slid Lilith a slit-eyed grin. “Gimme a couple of Devil’s Rock darks, a scotch rocks and a ginger ale.”
When Lilith had started at Chill a few years ago, the two had bonded over their mutual disgust with the stupidity of vacationers who left their brains at home. Even though it had violated about 63 line-items of the Kinraven Charter setting forth rules for the interactions between magickal and non-magickal beings, Lilith had taught Misty a few tricks. She had enough innate psychic ability to make them work and ensure the process entertained Lilith, but not enough skill that Misty could ever have become a witch herself.
Not that Lilith had ever revealed herself or her true identity.
That was one rule even she was afraid to break.
The lordly seraphim who controlled the council rarely descended from the peaks where they made their home, but when they did, they were usually pissed off, and a pissed off seraphim was not a pretty sight. Exactly where humans had gotten the notion the winged beings were angels, Lilith would never know.