Blood Crown

by Tamara Rose Blodgett

  Jenni pauses, looking back at Devin’s car with its missing handle.

  “We’ll take care of that later,” Dare says, glancing at Devin’s beater car.

  “The car?”

  “Yes,” Quillon says with a clipped word.

  Devin walks toward them, coming to stand beside Jenni.

  Quillon holds out his hand toward Jenni.

  Ignoring the gesture, she stomps to his side and crosses her arms.

  After a moment, he drops his hand, smirking at her. Turning, he leads the way down the road they’d just used.

  Jenni follows reluctantly.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Tahlia

  There’s not a place on Tahlia that doesn’t hurt. She wiggles her toes.

  Maybe my big toe. Otherwise, she feels beat up, exhausted, and beyond hungry.

  Slowly, she opens her eyes, gazing around.

  A cavernous ceiling rises above her; honeyed-amber wood glows down at her. She pats by her body and finds a fluffy, soft bed. Small lamps burn low light on either side of the platform bed she’s lying on. All are wolfmade structures.

  It’s night.

  Tahlia can feel the call of the moon through the tall wood ceiling that encases her. No building would dampen her call, for the moon is nearly full.

  After an exhausted inhale, she lets the breath slide out before taking another. Then the memories come. The last image she recalls is the clawed-up face of a fellow Lanarre.

  And the brutal remnants of Lazarus’s torture.

  Drek.

  The Redwood pack where she’s from has a method similar to lashing. It’s ancient. Were do not believe in, as Tessa would have said, changing things up. Tahlia always thought lashing was barbaric, but the threat of it was enough to keep wayward male whelps mindful.

  Closing her eyes again, she finds the memory of Lazarus’s form is etched on her brain.

  She scents Drek before he speaks.

  “Tanya is gone,” Drek says in a low voice at her right.

  Oh, isn’t that just magnanimous of him? She bites back a derisive snort. Tahlia knows he won’t harm her physically, but she would rather suck on raw silver than be near Drek at present.

  She’s hungry, bone-tired, and horribly confused. Tahlia doesn’t really want to think about what she’s been through. There’s too much to process. She’s been too busy surviving to get to this pack. Only to find disillusionment sinking its teeth into her naive expectations.

  The prince of the Lanarre runs his pack poorly. Now that he is within touching distance, Tahlia’s not impressed.

  “Look at me,” Drek says.

  Tahlia opens her eyes, turning her head to the side on the soft bed so she can see him.

  They stare, and Tahlia is jolted anew. There is no doubt that their heritage is a subtle thread in the very fabric of her being. He is heartbreakingly handsome, epitomizing everything that a prince of the Lanarre should be.

  Tahlia hardens her heart. “As Tessa would say, ʻYay for you.ʼ”

  Drek sighs, his face troubled. His dark brows pull together. “I know that I misunderstood so much of what has occurred. I mistook, or was unsure of, who you were versus Tanya. I have made her character. The demonic is gone.”

  Tahlia sits up suddenly, and the world spins for a moment before righting itself.

  She ignores the sensation.

  “And Tessa along with him. Why would you use the ancient rite of Blood Sacrifice against Lazarus? When a female had chosen him.”

  Drek studies his finely sculpted fingers.

  Tahlia steels herself against the instinctive lust that breaches the shore of her anger. Sometimes she loathes being Were. Her biology overtakes her intellect, and that is something she prizes about herself. She might be young, but Tahlia is Lanarre. She was born smart and never took that gift for granted.

  “I had Blood Oathed him.”

  “What?” She leans forward despite her resolve to remain aloof, shoving her curly black hair behind her back.

  Drek lifts his chin, his deep brown eyes blazing back at her. “He saved me from the high demon, Praile.”

  “Then why was it when I came upon you, that you’d just finished lashing him to nothing but a puddle of shredded flesh and blood?”

  He rests his palms on his knees, as though willing himself to not touch her, to remain neutral. Yet their interaction is anything but neutral. “You understand the way of it, Tahlia. The shortage of females. Then an Alpha female strolls into our territory with a half-breed demonic that she chooses above all others. Oh yes, and she happens to be in heat.”

  Tahlia realizes his points are well made. Crossing her arms, she smoothly tucks the sheet beneath her armpits. “So you made the Blood Sacrifice a contingency?

  Drek nods. “I can’t have anarchy.”

  “Looks to me that you already have a bit of that. Or more than a bit.”

  “I do not wish to hold with the old ways, and some of my thought processes have leaked out. There are those who wish to move to a democracy rather than the traditional royal lines of old.”

  “Is this why you chose me?” Tahlia asks, incredulous, searching his eyes. “You thought to mate me and thereby secure another generation of servitude?”

  A fine shiver of anger flows through Drek, and despite her knowledge that the prince would not harm her, Tahlia shifts her body slightly away from him.

  She is naked beneath just a thin sheet of fine cotton linen. After all, she’d lost her clothing when she shifted to her dove form.

  His eyes tighten at her distancing gesture, and his mouth thins to a flat line. “If you spoke with Bowen, you would know that I don’t stand on ceremony. I am a real Lanarre, not just in name. I hunt, feast, fight, and toil with all my wolves.”

  “Then why be purposefully cruel with Lazarus?”

  Drek leans forward, nostrils flaring. “And why would you care if I flogged the skin right from the bone of a demonic?”

  “Because it reflects on your character!” she yells in his face, and Drek grips her arms, lifting her off the bed and against him.

  Tahlia squeaks.

  “My character is not in question.” Drek shakes her, and she desperately clutches the sheet that separates them as it threatens to slip. “What is in question is why you choose to defend a demonic by savaging the face of one of my guards.”

  Tahlia leans in, throwing self-preservation to the wind. “Because you could not take my word, and your supposed guard struck me. They marked a royal female of the Lanarre,” she finishes in a low voice that throbs with her anger.

  Her furious admittance does two things.

  It causes Drek’s anger to cool. She sees the emotion seeping out of his eyes and feels the tightness of his fingers begin to loosen as she dangles above the floor.

  As though for the first time, Drek appears to realize he’s holding her in the air.

  His nostrils flare again, and a flaming blush rises on his dusky skin.

  “I apologize,” Drek says as he carefully sets Tahlia on her feet.

  Gripping the sheet to just beneath her chin, she asks, “Now where does this leave us?”

  Drek gives her his back, and her eyes take on the sheer breadth of the male. He is built as all the Lanarre royalty. Like a warrior.

  And as for her, Tahlia has steely strength for her size. But that is not her royal gift. Not as she sees it. Her gifts are the form of her bird and her sharp mind.

  Those things are what allowed escape from the insane Were and Tony Laurent.

  Tahlia looks away as Drek turns, not wanting him to ascertain her thoughts from what she’s been told is an “open face.”

  “I know you are not shy.”

  A laugh erupts from her throat. “No. I am not. Nor am I a rug to be walked upon.”

  Their gazes lock.

  “You are young, Tahlia of the Redwood Lanarre.”

  Her eyes slim down on him. “And you are both arrogant and assuming.”

  Drek�
��s smile is a slow burn of emotions over his face.

  Tahlia lets the expression build, and the silence grows between them.

  Finally, unable to stand it another moment, she says, “What would have occurred had I arrived with my entourage as planned.”

  “We would even now be mated.” Drek’s face molds itself into somber lines.

  “And now?”

  “Have you been defiled?”

  Tahlia slaps him before Drek is aware her hand has moved. Good Moon.

  Unfortunately, it causes the sheet to drop, instantly revealing her state of undress.

  An angry red handprint rises on the flesh of his face.

  Drek growls.

  “You have never been treated that way,” Tahlia guesses. As you deserved, she mentally tacks on.

  His eyes tear down her nude body, and she stands proud and straight before him, too angry for modesty.

  Drek’s jaw slides back and forth. “No.”

  “Do not ask me if another male has pierced me.” Her body shakes with her anger. “Can you not use your nose? Or do you attempt to insult me further.”

  Mutely, Drek shakes his head, stepping nearer to her.

  Tahlia defiantly jerks her chin high, waiting for a lecherous advance or some other tangible sign that Drek believes his conduct warrants anything but her righteous indignation.

  Instead, he reaches out, fingers threading through her waist-length tumble of messy black curls. “You are an intoxicating female, Tahlia.”

  It is not what she expected him to say, and her breath catches at the gentle fingering of her hair. His touch leaves her hair and travels along her collarbone, his fingertip as light as breath on her skin.

  “You touch me,” Tahlia says stupidly.

  “Not as I want to.”

  Their eyes meet. “I’m angry with you—your pack. Everything that I’ve discovered so far has not been to my imagining.”

  “And what was that?” Drek asks, his fingertips caressing, his voice gone low.

  “I thought my guardians would live,” she says, throwing the equivalent of cold verbal water against him.

  Drek’s hand falls away.

  “I never believed their murder would happen within my hearing, in such a gruesome way.” Tahlia covers her face. “They were like parents to me.” Her guardians had reared her. Tahlia’s actual parents were too busy with den matters to attend to a whelp.

  “They would pledge me to the most handsome Were I had ever dreamed about, hoped for,” she says behind her hands.

  Drek takes hold of the hands she hides her misery behind, studiously keeping his eyes on her face. “And that is how it would have been.” Then he chuckles, dipping his chin. “Except maybe the handsome part.”

  Tahlia believes him to be just as beautiful as she had anticipated. However, events that have occurred are at great odds with her expectations.

  Drek gently cups her face. “I will protect you with my body, shield you from harm, pierce you with the utmost care and passion, and make your body ripe with our child.”

  Tahlia blushes to the roots of her hair.

  “What if I do not wish to be your life mate?”

  “You can deny me,” he says with soft emphasis, “but can you deny what lies between us?” His dark eyes search her every micro expression.

  Tahlia cannot deny it. Even with all that had happened, with the Lanarre of the Hoh coming apart at its very seams, Drek’s pull is undeniable.

  “No,” she reluctantly admits in a soft voice.

  He leans forward, and she places a hand on his muscled chest. Just her bare hand on his skin draws a shaky breath from the deepest place in her body. “Drek.”

  He does not move closer, but his eyes turn to silver with the beginnings of wolfen. “You bring my beast, female.”

  That is the highest compliment a Lanarre male can give a female, because the reverse is not true.

  Males have been known to change into their wolf form from sheer desire of a female.

  Tahlia watches Drek struggle with wolfen. And he is a prince of them all.

  She does not make it worse by moving, making eye contact, or, of course, touching him further.

  Their heartbeats sync where her palm connects with his bare skin.

  When his struggle ends, Drek gives her steady eyes, human-looking brown ones. “You stand before me naked, with fire—”

  “I am naked because I was taken in bird form.”

  Drek lifts a palm, and she marvels at how expertly put together he is. Wearing only the simple stretchy black pants favored by Were, especially this close to the full moon, he is shirtless. She watches the fine muscles play in rippling patterns beneath the skin of his forearm.

  “I revere your dual form.”

  Tahlia drops her head, taking her eyes from his. “It was all that saved me from the savage Were.”

  A heartbeat of silence soaks them in quiet. Then, “I must hold you,” he says.

  In the next breath, she is in his arms.

  Drek is a perfect male. His hands do not wander, but stay stroking her head and upper back. “I would kill him again if he were here before me.”

  Tahlia is so full of tears, she can’t speak.

  She has no pack, her guardians are dead, and her one friend has lit off with Lazarus.

  The loneliness assails her with brutal precision, stealing her fortitude.

  A dam bursts within Tahlia, and all the ordeals of the last few days catch up in that single, swollen moment of unease and uncertainty.

  Her sobs are pieces of torn grief, calving deep within her body from the great icebergs of her despondency.

  Tahlia can only stand there.

  Drek doesn’t speak but endlessly strokes her until she’s too weak to cry further.

  At last, he pulls away, searching her eyes. “Are you well?”

  She answers truthfully. “No.”

  “What can I do to make this right between us?”

  The edges of her lips tilt. “There’s nothing you can do to erase what’s happened.”

  “Then can we—could we start anew?”

  Tahlia looks up into his face, pondering the ancient pledge of his words from earlier. That he would shield her from all harm. Tahlia reminds herself that when he acted, it was conduct based in ignorance, and he had been seeking her as long as she’d been running toward what Tahlia thought was the sanctuary of the Hoh den.

  Drek had not been here to greet her, and an imposter from her home den had been.

  Much of what she was angry about was not Drek’s direct fault.

  With much reservation, Tahlia holds out her hand.

  Drek takes it.

  Instead of pulling her to him, and ignoring her nudity, he slowly raises it to his mouth, pressing the fullness of his lips to her flesh.

  Then he licks her once. Hot. Wet. Bold.

  Branding her.

  Moisture pools between her legs, as it should after such a gesture reserved for mated couples. But, showing restraint born of his station, he does not follow it with more.

  “Please use whatever you need here. My dwelling is yours.”

  With one more sweeping glance at her form that feels like liquid heat, Drek swallows his beast. Tahlia watches him spin then stride quickly toward the front of the house she woke up in, leaving her stunned and more unsure than ever.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Tessa

  Tessa leans back, her hands bracing her fall. She’s such a fat sow after her banquet with Laz, she thinks the world could end and she would still just lie there.

  Laz gives her a lazy smile, blood lining his teeth with slim threads of scarlet.

  They picked the cougar’s carcass clean. Bones, fur, and most of the face remain. Otherwise, they took care of it, and the remnants are only a few yards away from where she and Laz have collapsed.

  Falling backward, Laz is beside her, completely nude—as she is. He folds his hands beneath his head, elbows pointing out, and sighs deepl
y.

  “I guess we shouldn’t be lounging around, contemplating how full our bellies are,” Tessa admits, turning her head to gaze at him. Her eyes travel right to his impressive package. Even flaccid, the promise of what he can do with his shaft makes Tessa lick her lips.

  Of course, part of that is post-feasting euphoria coupled with a complete joy of being free of the crazy-ass Hoh Lanarre.

  Still... her gaze roams the length of Laz’s body before coming back to his face.

  Laz’s eyes hood as he watches her expression. “I would do much to see you beneath me, but at present”—his palm skims over his nude form—“I seem to be in need of additional healing.”

  Tessa gasps, covering her mouth.

  “It is ʻall good,ʼ as you the humans say. You are in heat. I have quenched the fires of my own demonic version. For the moment.”

  Slowly, Tessa drops her hand. “I’m sorry. You’ve just been through a horrible beating by fucking Drek, and I want to jump your bones.”

  Unfolding his arms, he props himself on an elbow and captures the hand that just covered her lips. “Do not be sorry.” Laz’s eyes appear to glow in the nearly full moon that hovers directly above the open meadow. “I would very much like you to...” He seems to pause over the vernacular. “Jump my bones.”

  Tessa bursts out laughing. Laz speaks in a quaint, semi-old-fashioned manner, and her modern language sounds so wrong coming from his mouth.

  He cocks a brow. “What?”

  “You’re so funny when you quote me.”

  Laz’s face becomes serious, chin dipping, as he replies, “I am not you.”

  No, he is not.

  Quicker than she can track, Laz is on his knees, looming over her, and she lies backward, stretching her arms above her head.

  With hardly a tightening of eyes Laz swings his leg over her body, placing his most intimate part against hers.

  Tessa’s breath catches.

  Laz wraps her wrists together with one hand, keeping her gently restrained against the grass, looking deeply into her eyes. “If I were not still healing, I would take you here—with your kill cooling at our side.”