by May Dawson
He crooked a finger at me to come to him for more kisses, but instead I moved lower, straddling his legs. My clit was throbbing, but I wanted to make him suffer the same delicious way he made me.
“Maddie,” he started to say, his voice commanding, but I just glanced at him mischievously and then wrapped my mouth around his cock. His breath gave and his head fell back into the pillows.
He might be an alpha, but he surrendered to me anyway.
I twirled my tongue while I moved up and down his cock. He looked up at me, biting back a curse, and his fingers threaded in my hair again, gently this time. He played with my hair as his eyes drifted shut. His touch sent pleasant prickles down my spine.
“I’m going to come if you don’t stop, you impossible girl,” he murmured. “Get up here.”
This time, I obeyed, straddling his hips again. He caught me around the waist and rolled with me, changing our positions in a second. His lips seared to mine.
His cock teased between my thighs with his movement, and I caught him in my hand, brushing him over my slick heat. The feel of him against my throbbing core both satisfied me and lit an even deeper, more intense ache. I drew him in circles over and over again against my clit until we were both gasping in desire.
He pulled his hips away from me suddenly, pulling his cock out of my hand, and I started to protest. But his lips came down on my throat, covering me with kisses that stroked the heat even hotter in my blood. My chin tilted up, welcoming him in. He alternated between kissing and sucking my tender skin, teasing me with his teeth until my hips were rocking up against his.
Then as my hips rose against his, he plunged deep inside me. I gasped into his ear, and his arm slid around my shoulders, crushing me against his chiseled body as he rocked into me.
Our bodies moved in time together, and I wrapped my arm around his shoulders, feeling his muscles ripple. His jaw was near my lips, and so I turned into him, kissing him as wildly as the heat suffusing every part of my body now.
My core clenched around him, the first ripples of my orgasm, and my thighs slid against his narrow hips as I wrapped my legs around him. Then the two of us were coming together, his lips parting. I could feel myself coming apart, starting to make a wild sound, and I bit his muscled shoulder. My orgasm swept over me in waves as my thighs squeezed him, and I felt him come inside me.
Then the two of us stilled. He glanced down at me, his brows arching.
I released my grip on his shoulder. I’d left teeth marks on his skin, and I rubbed my thumb across them, pulling a face. “Sorry.”
“I like it rough,” he promised me, his lips tracing the curve of my throat, and my chin rose again to welcome him in even though my core was still sensitive and aching from the intensity of the orgasm. “As long as you want to take it as well as give it.”
I pretended to think it over. “I think I do, actually.”
“Well, let’s find out,” he murmured.
I laughed out loud with the promise in that.
And just in case there might not be a tomorrow for us, I turned my head and kissed him, my thigh stroking over his narrow side, welcoming him to keep going.
I didn’t need sleep when I could have Penn instead.
Chapter Twenty-One
The next morning, Tyson and I threw our bags in the car as we prepared to leave Penn behind. I hated being away from him.
“Look out for our girl,” Penn told Tyson.
Ty’s lips pulled up at one corner, as if he wasn’t certain how to take that.
“I’m always the one looking out for you guys,” I pointed out. “You’d be lost without me.”
“Maybe,” Penn murmured. He caught me around the waist, kissing me hard, and I grinned.
I glanced in my rearview mirror one time as we left, but Penn was already walking back into the house. He didn’t look back.
Wolves, man.
They never look back.
“He’ll be fine,” Tyson said.
“I don’t like having any of you out of my sight,” I admitted. I didn’t like being away from the rest of the team, either.
When we were together, it felt like we were invincible.
“First stop, creepy fortune teller?” Tyson asked.
“Dani said she’s very reliable.” I was going to show her the necklace that was tied to my father and to the demon-bear that had stalked me, and see what she could tell us about where it had come from.
No one had seen my father in a dozen years. I wasn’t sure if the message had come from him at all.
But part of me desperately hoped that I would find my father. I dreamed that he’d be glad to see me, that he’d hug me with wonder written across his face, or maybe break down crying because he thought I’d died and he was so relieved to meet me.
Yeah, it was a ridiculous fantasy. I knew it. But that didn’t stop me from wanting my father.
“Penn had reservations about our ability to keep a low profile.” Tyson pulled off the highway to take us through a drive-through for coffee. “If Clearborn catches us, it’s going to be hard to explain.”
“If Clearborn catches us, I wanted to find the truth out about my mother’s craziness—I think that’s pretty understandable—and you went along with me to keep me out of trouble. Let me take the fall.”
Ty rolled his eyes.
“I’m serious, Ty.”
He ignored that. “How do you want your coffee?”
I crinkled my nose. “I’ll take a hot chocolate, please.”
I wasn’t a fan of the hot bean water.
I tried to bring Ty back to the subject of how things should play out if Clearborn caught us—there was no point in more than one of us taking the fall, and there was no way for me to avoid it, so it just made sense—but he kept diverting the conversation to concerns about my sanity if I didn’t drink coffee.
We parked across the street from the tarot reader’s office. It was a second floor walk-up, and a glowing purple sign advertised her psychic wares.
I would’ve doubted her, except when we walked into her office, she looked up and groaned.
“Not shifters,” she said.
“Hello to you too, witch.” Tyson flashed her a smile as he grabbed one of the chairs at her table and flipped it around so he could sit, his forearms braced on the top rail. “We come in peace. But you know that already, don’t you?”
“Oh, a shifter and a skeptic,” she said. “Two of my favorite things.”
“We’re happy to pay,” I said. “We just need some information.”
Her gaze flickered to mine, and she patted the table. “I like you a little better.”
I pulled out five twenty-dollar bills and laid them on the table. Then I dropped the necklace on top.
Her hand had been flashing to grab the bills, but she paused when she saw the necklace. “Where did you get that?”
“It was a gift.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Why don’t you tell me why you’re here?”
“Someone sent me a message through this.” I tapped the heavy locket with my fingernails. “I don’t know who. I’m trying to find them.”
“What kind of message?”
“You have a lot of questions for someone who peddles answers,” Tyson said.
“If I don’t like your answers…” She pushed the bills toward me, and the necklace with it. “I don’t want to get mixed up in this.”
“Why? What does the necklace mean to you?”
“The necklace itself means nothing,” she said. “But the magic that clings to it is another story.”
I hesitated. Ty shifted his weight, and I could feel the coiled danger in his tense, muscular frame. I rested my hand on his forearm, stilling him.
“Okay,” I said. “I think the message came from my father. But he disappeared a long time ago, when I was just a kid.”
She paused, as if she was debating what to say. “I see a lot of people come in here looking for someone. Usually, they wish to con
tact someone who has passed. The truth is, I lie—like a lot of fortune tellers—because meeting the dead is almost always a disappointment.”
She went on, “If you can, I’d think about leaving him…unfound.”
“He called to me for help,” I said. “He said my mother wouldn’t tell him where I was. And my mother… she doesn’t remember anything about me being born.”
Her gaze sharpened. “Memory work? That’s cruel magic.”
“So I’ve seen.” Even before my mother’s memories were erased, I’d experienced how cruel it was to alter someone’s memories. The coven stole my memories and Piper’s, convincing us we were sisters from birth and that our birth families never existed.
“Listen, maybe he will be a disappointment,” Tyson said. “But we’d rather have the truth. The other option isn’t that great, either.”
I glanced at Ty, whose lips were set. I knew my life was in danger if I were a witch, but I knew that in an abstract kind of way.
The tension curling through Tyson’s voice made it feel a lot more real.
He was scared for me.
She gazed at his face for a second, then said, “The magic on this necklace isn’t of this world.”
“Interesting,” Tyson leaned back impatiently. “Are you going to tell us more, or are we supposed to flag down the Starship Enterprise for help?”
“Believe me or not,” she snapped. “I’d prefer not, really.”
“Please tell us,” I said, shooting Tyson a look. Be nice.
The look he shot back, his lips pursed to one side, suggested that being nice was not his strong suit.
“I’d recommend you keep it to yourselves so you don’t seem like lunatics,” she said.
Relief flared in my chest. She was going to tell us.
“There are rips between worlds. There’s one here, for that matter.” She gestured to the wall behind her, which was covered in purple silk that hung sloppily from the ceiling.
“And what happens in these rips?” Tyson asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “The rips are just portals. Doorways. There are many places you can travel to. And not many places you would want to.”
“Do all these worlds co-exist in the same space simultaneously?” Tyson asked.
I glanced at him, and he said, “What? I took Physics in high school. Unlike Penn, I even tried to pay attention.”
“Yes.” She studied the two of us as she frowned. “You two are taking this well.”
I waved my hand airily. “Our lives are already pretty weird.”
For some reason, that made me think of leaning over Penn’s chest the night before to kiss Tyson. I still wasn’t sure what had come over me.
But neither of them seemed to mind.
“Well, you might have a difficult journey ahead,” she said. “This necklace is marked by magic from another world.”
The two of us stared at each other. She sighed as if she had to draw with crayons for us to understand.
“Either the person who put the spell on this necklace had just come from the other side—maybe the Fae world, maybe Avalon, I can’t tell—or it was enchanted there. Either way, finding them might be more challenging than your average road trip.”
Okay, it was going to take time to process that information.
“So maybe my father came from… somewhere else?” I asked.
“Or maybe it was a trick,” Tyson said. “Hell, maybe there’s a reason why your mother’s losing her fake memories now…”
The fortune teller’s brows rose. “Your mother had false memories? If you weren’t a shifter, I’d think you might be a changeling child.”
Well, I needed more info about that.
“What else can you tell us?” Tyson asked.
She rubbed her hand across her forehead. “I can read your cards. Try to give you a glimpse into what lays ahead. It will cost extra.”
“Why?” Ty leaned back to glance out the open door into the narrow little corridor at the top of the stairs. “You have other customers?”
“Because you annoy me,” she snapped at him.
“Well, that seems legit,” I said, giving Ty a look. I pulled out my wallet and laid another stack of bills alongside the first.
“Yours first,” she said to Tyson. “Perhaps the cards will predict you’ll die in a fiery car crash.”
Tyson glanced at me. “Normally people find me very charming.”
“I know.” I tucked my hand through his arm, feeling his corded forearm under my fingertips. “This seems like it must be good for you.”
She turned over the cards in front of Tyson.
“Your childhood is marked with trauma,” she said.
“We’ve pretty much got a fucked-up childhood club going on around here,” he muttered. “But no one cares. Let’s get to the future.”
“I can’t,” she said. “Or rather, you can’t. Your past and future are interlinked.”
“Well, shit,” Tyson drawled dramatically.
She tapped her long black fingernails on the second card she’d just turned over. “This trauma is connected to your childhood. The Stranger.”
“And?” he asked.
“Let me see something,” she said. She flipped over a card in front of me.
The first was the same trauma card she’d played in front of Tyson. I found myself holding my breath as she flipped over the second.
The Stranger. Again.
Tyson and I exchanged a look.
“What does that mean?” I asked. “Besides the fact that we have the world’s saddest club? We should really look for other things to bond over. Baking macarons. Raising hermit crabs. Whiteclaw appreciation. Anything.”
“The two of you have a close bond,” she said. “Both of you have a Stranger in the family—someone you don’t know.”
“Well, turn a third card over,” Tyson said drily. “I do know who both my parents are. They’re dead, which I guess makes them strangers—”
“No, you don’t,” she said. “The Stranger is alive. The cards don’t lie.”
“You already said that you do.”
She gathered the cards back into her hands. “We don’t need to go on.”
Tyson gritted his teeth, which made his jaw tighten. He managed to say, “No, I’m sorry. It’s just a lot to take in. Go on.”
She favored him with a thin smile. Then she handed the cards she’d shuffled back to him to cut again. His jaw was so tense his cheekbones were sharp above his drawn-in cheeks.
She turned the same two cards over in front of him again, then in front of me. I’d watched her shuffle. It might be some slight-of-hand, but I wasn’t convinced it was.
“I do an unconventional reading,” she said. “It’s time to address your problems.”
“Great,” Tyson said. “I usually deflect with humor, but I guess we can try that instead.”
She began to turn another card over, then frowned. I wasn’t sure why she was so annoyed until she tried to drop the second card back into the deck; it seemed as if two cards were stuck together. She finally peeled them apart with her fingernails, as if they’d gotten stuck together somehow.
“This is the Queen of Hearts,” she said. “And stuck to it, we seem to have the friendship or Brotherhood card. And also, your presence seems to be damaging my card deck—”
Without comment, I drew the last of the cash out of my wallet and dropped it next to the rest.
“What does that mean?” Tyson asked.
“Oh, are you feeling like a believer now?” she asked. “The cards don’t care if you believe or not. These…cards…show that you face obstacles.”
Tyson elbowed me. “Should I start calling you queen of hearts?”
“I’m going to get to you first,” I said. “I’m pretty sure the guys will embrace calling you that.”
Tyson shook his head dramatically. “Don’t do me dirty, Northsea.”
“Your first obstacle,” she said, turning over a card with a wolf
on it. She stared at it, her cheeks growing pale. She turned over another card, and on it was a witch in dark robes.
She frowned, turning over a third and laying it beneath the others. It showed a graveyard. Well, that seemed promising. “It seems you have many dangers to face. Do these mean anything to you?”
“Yeah.” Tyson touched his finger to the wolf’s face. “Wolves are assholes.” He moved it to the witch. “Witches are assholes. This isn’t exactly new information for us.”
The fortune-teller looked awfully twitchy.
“What’s wrong with the cards?” I demanded.
“They aren’t in my deck,” she said, her voice clipped. “There’s magic at work here.”
“I thought that was your shtick, that magic was supposed to be at work—”
“It’s not my magic,” she said. “It’s yours.”
Tyson glanced at me.
I swallowed a lump. “I’m not doing anything—”
“Not you,” she said, then looked to Tyson. “It’s you. You’re controlling the cards.”
Tyson got up abruptly, his legs bumping the table. “I’m not a goddamn witch—no offense, Maddie.”
Apparently we were all assuming I was a witch now. I did have more power than any shifter was supposed to have. Maybe I was.
Tyson’s reaction rattled me. He could believe that I was a witch, and take that in stride, but he was clearly shaken by the possibility that he was one.
“Believe what you want,” she said. “There’s magic in this room, a lot of magic.” She tapped the death card again. “From the whispers from beyond, two of your friends were supposed to already be dead.”
Tyson backed up to the doorway, then stood with his arms crossed and his face stony, watching the fortune teller.
“That graveyard card doesn’t seem like a great sign,” I said.
“No,” she said. “Perhaps not. Is his name…Rafe? He was supposed to die, but he was healed by magic.”
My cheeks flared with heat. Tyson didn’t even know about that. I didn’t dare look over my shoulder at his face.
Still, that was hard to argue with.
“And Chase,” she said. “He should be dead already too. But he’ll have a second chance soon.”
“What’s that?” I demanded.