As soon as Frankie was free she rose to her feet like a vengeful angel with balls of flame in each hand, then threw them both at the back of one of the vampiric wolves.
“Just be careful you only hit their guys and not ours,” I shouted to her in warning over the din of the fight.
“I know who the assholes are who kept me here,” she reassured me.
Dawn wasn’t much help in the fight, but she was fine at untying people, so I left her to that as I guarded her. One of the enemy wolves had shifted to his full lupine form and came at the two of us snarling. I lowered myself into a crouch to growl back, but didn’t immediately attack. He could be trying to draw me away from their prisoners so that they could kill them with impunity and increase their power.
The shifted wolf started to gather his legs under him to leap at me. I adjusted my crouch, my own hands starting to shift to give me claws to fight with. I saw the wolf leap and then a blur of blond fur struck him, knocking him back to the ground. The two skidded across the now blood-soaked concrete together, snarling and snapping at one another all the way. The golden wolf managed to get his jaws around the throat of the other and held tightly, growling as he demanded submission. The other wolf yelped in pain, but refused to back down.
Tien came running across the battlefield, his feet sliding just a bit in the spilled blood there. An already bloodied machete was in his hand. He paused beside the two wolves, unsure of which was on our side, if either was. I understood his reluctance, as I wasn’t sure what to think as well.
With a shake of his head and a crack, the golden wolf snapped the neck of the first, then released the body. As he backed up, he turned to look at me and I saw familiar red-brown eyes watching me. A flash of memory struck me of a woman with the same coloring, but it wasn’t my memory. Beyond me, I saw Hunter finish off the last of the wolves still fighting, then turn to look at me as if he had sensed me plucking the memory from his mind.
He stared at me for a moment, then looked to the golden wolf. The last of the vampiric pack.
“Don’t kill him,” he called and I felt a flutter of panic rush through him as he came toward us. He was limping and many of the others who had come with us were injured, but none of us had been killed.
The great tiger padded across the circle to find Dawn, then gently butted his head against her shoulder and nuzzled her with his massive head. She finished untying the last prisoner, then wrapped her arms around him tightly and buried her face in the side of his neck.
“My hero,” she breathed.
I cradled my bleeding wrist against my chest and slowly rose to my feet, still somewhat cautious about making movements that could be seen as threatening with the remaining vampiric wolf standing before me. When Hunter got to me, he wrapped an arm around me and held me close.
“This is my brother Ash,” Hunter said.
Tien looked up at the both of us quizzically, then back down to the wolf again. Ash began to shift back and his fur receded as his bones and soft tissues all changed shape. As his spine and hind legs became more bipedal, he began to rise up until a nude and handsome man in his early twenties stood before us. Well, he might have been handsome if his face wasn’t a brutal mask of blood, at any rate. One shoulder was wounded and looked as though he might have just ripped stitches out by shifting. His hair fell down over his forehead so that even without his fur he still gave the impression of an animal watching us.
“Go ahead and kill me,” he said. “I have nothing without my pack. I just wasn’t going to let your mate die. We’re even now, right?”
I could feel Hunter’s hesitation, his doubts. He wanted so badly to have a brother. He loved Jay and Paul as thoroughly as anyone had ever loved their family, but he longed for blood of his own. We might have pups someday, but that still wasn’t the same as having a brother. As hard as things had been between Aidan and me, I knew that. I hugged Hunter closer, unable to tell him what to do but offering my support all the same.
“You don’t have nothing. You have me,” Hunter pointed out.
Ash smiled, which looked eerily like Hunter’s smile save the blood all over it. “I took part in the last ritual three years ago and have been hunting women ever since. I’m not the brother you wish I was.”
I looked Ash over thoughtfully and saw no reason to doubt him. He certainly looked far younger than a brother Hunter had known at six could be. He barely looked old enough to drink. If they had the same mother, he had to have already begun the vampiric feeding to stop his ageing. While I hated the idea of killing him in cold blood, welcoming a man who had killed so many people into the pack would be more difficult than I had thought before. I’d wanted to offer mercy, but the reality of it was hard to swallow.
“If he stops feeding, he’ll eventually go back to normal,” Tien offered, his machete still at the ready. “But it’ll be like a heroin addict kicking the habit only worse.”
“What do you mean?” Hunter asked, turning his attention to Tien.
“It’ll be a long, drawn out withdrawal. He’ll be sick and miserable and when it’s all said and done he’ll still crave it. If he ever gives in, he’ll have to go through the whole thing all over again. And, in case you’re forgetting, ‘giving in’ will probably mean he rips someone’s throat out.” Tien paused, noticed that Ash had turned to stare at him as well, then shrugged. “Sorry, man. Just being straight with you.”
“Kill me,” Ash said again, with more conviction in his voice.
“You said your blood lets you control vampires,” Hunter said to Tien. “Would it work on Ash?”
“Yeah, it would,” Tien said, drawing the words out in his reluctance.
“So you could keep him from harming anyone?” Hunter pressed.
Tien stared at him wordlessly for several moments before his eyes moved to Ash, then to me briefly before returning to Hunter. “I’m here because it was the right thing to do and because I wanted to protect my friends. What’s in it for me to open a vein to this stranger?”
Through our marks I could feel the rush of frustrated anger from Hunter. I hugged him to me, thinking for a moment. I had only just met Tien and didn’t really know him at all. He was human with a gift, just like Frankie. It meant he wasn’t pack and would never truly be pack, so his loyalties wouldn’t be swayed just by Hunter pointing out that Ash should be treated like a member of the pack. I still felt a little sick to my stomach thinking about accepting as pack someone who murdered women and would have killed and eaten one of my friends or my cousin.
But Hunter’s wish for a brother was palpable to me and Ash had killed his own packmate to protect me.
I released my mate to step forward, then touched Tien’s arm gently to focus his attention squarely on me. He was human, which meant if I lied or misrepresented my feelings he might not notice. “You are the only one who can do this,” I pointed out to him. “This is a young man who has never had a chance at being part of a healthy pack. He never had the chance to make good decisions before. You can change his life and give him a chance to be a good man. You can give him something no one else here can give him. I know it’s asking a lot of you, but if changing other people’s lives was easy we’d all be heroes. You’re the only one who can be the hero here.”
I must have hit on the right tactic, because Tien’s entire demeanor changed as I spoke. He stood up a bit straighter, his face taking on an expression of smug contemplation.
“We’ll see what I can do for him,” Tien said.
Epilogue
Sofia
Our fingers were intertwined, my hand cradled in his larger one, as we lay on my bed together with my dog Leggy stretched across the foot of the bed. The bandage around my wrist detracted somewhat from the image and I wondered how badly it might scar. I hadn’t wanted to go anywhere with the second bite on top of the first, but Hunter had insisted I get a surgeon who worked in plastics to stitch it up as neatly as can be.
“I don’t want a reminder of him left there,” Hun
ter had explained.
It wouldn’t have bothered me much, but if it made Hunter happy I was willing to give it a shot. The surgeon had cautioned that he couldn’t guarantee it would scar neatly, though he had been optimistic. Marcus hadn’t succeeded in actually ripping any chunks of my flesh out, at least.
“Will you make promises for the future now?” Hunter murmured, nuzzling against my temple.
“Hm?” I turned in toward him, nestling in under the curve of his jaw. I inhaled the spicy, clean male scent of him and then sighed pleasurably.
We both ached from the battle and if I concentrated through the marks I could actually feel his pain from where he had been bitten in the leg, but I didn’t want to do that. I worried about giving him my pain as well and bit by bit I was finding ways to control the marks, so that our emotions and thoughts could slide against one another like the most intimate of touches without sharing physical sensations and, possibly, magnifying his pain.
After the fight there had been injuries to tend and clean up to enact at the warehouse. Savannah and the others had later called the police and said they escaped from the men who took them prisoner, then sent the authorities on a wild goose chase for dead men. I didn’t like lying to them, but I knew it was the only way to deal with it. There had been an abduction report. They had to account for their sudden return without drawing suspicion against those of us who had rescued them.
By the time I actually got to bathe and rest after visiting the hospital—we had blamed dog bites for our injuries—it was nearly noon the next day.
“You wouldn’t promise anything for the future before,” Hunter explained. “Will you now?”
I thought about that for a moment, honestly unable to even picture a future without him in it, then drew back enough from him so I could meet his eyes.
“You don’t know why I wanted to claim you as my mate in the first place, do you?” I asked.
He shook his head with a wry smile. “No. I seem to recall you saying something about it not being because I was ‘the biggest, baddest alpha’, though.”
I laughed softly and settled my head back against his shoulder. “It’s not,” I agreed. “It’s because of how you make me feel. You don’t make me feel like you just want me because I’m hot or I’d be a good prize. I feel like you want all of me, even the parts I didn’t know were there, and you make me better because of that. You accept the bad parts, but you’re so good at bringing all the good parts to the surface. I can’t help but be a better version of me when I’m with you.”
“I know what you mean.” He leaned down to press a kiss to my forehead, then rested his cheek against the top of my head. “You make me feel the same way. I don’t think I realized how badly I needed you to balance me out until we found each other again.”
“Mama said that without the marks working, us being separated left us both with wounds, as if we’d had something amputated and it could never heal,” I said.
I felt him nod against my head. “That sounds accurate.”
I was quiet for several minutes, just soaking up the joy of his presence. Finally as I was starting to doze I remembered I still hadn’t answered his question and roused myself enough to get back to it.
“I want to run this pack together,” I said. “I want to finally start the family we’d planned so long ago.”
He shifted around and slid his shoulder out from under my head so we could look eye to eye as I laid there. Hunter brought our joined hands up to his lips to brush a kiss against the back of mine. “I want that, too, more than anything else in the world.”
I smiled, then pushed myself up so I could catch his lips with mine. Our lips stroked over one another slowly, caressing in soft brushes and teasing nips. My uninjured hand buried itself in his hair to hold him closer as I settled back against the bed again, so that I could draw him down with me. He came willingly and stretched out over my body. The warm weight of him was comforting there, like the world’s most perfect blanket.
My plan for our attack on Marcus had been relatively simple. Hunter would distract them and ensure that they were all within the circle for their ritual before I came. Then I would trick Marcus into drinking my blood, activating the ritual prematurely and leaving them all vulnerable. Uncle Damon had used a bird call to let me know that the others were in place and it was time for me to shed blood.
The only hard part was pulling it all off without either of us getting killed. I had trusted Hunter’s judgement that he could get through it safely and he had trusted mine. Maybe all we had ever needed was to find our trust in one another again, because that was when the marks finally kicked into overdrive.
And now there we were on my bed, kissing and touching and losing ourselves in one another. I felt him as thoroughly in my mind and heart as I did against my skin. It was as though I was whole at last. For the last ten years I had been missing the other half of my soul, only ever experiencing one side of my own story. Finally we had found completion again.
Lost in Heat
Lilith T. Bell
All her life, Tina Tybault has felt wrong. Troubling dreams, sleepwalking, and adopted parents who locked her up at night didn’t help. Instead of the relaxing summer off from college she expected she instead found herself waking up naked in the woods one morning. A gorgeous stranger stood over her, claiming she was in heat and there to be his mate.
James Littlewolf is an alpha male werewolf who has dreamed for years of his destined mate. When he found Tina sleeping peacefully in the underbrush, he was sure he had found her at last. Instead he discovered she didn’t even know what she was. Educating her when all he wants to do is take her will push his self-control to the limit.
Chapter 1
There was moss under my cheek. I opened my eyes and all I could see was a carpet of green extending outward. The air was cool, much cooler than my bedroom should have been in summer. Then again, my bedroom shouldn’t have had moss and I didn’t generally make it a habit to sleep on the ground. I pushed myself up on my hands, which was when I realized that I was naked and in the middle of the woods.
“Well shit,” I muttered, rubbing one hand over my face.
Vague memories of the night before came drifting back to me, but they weren’t very helpful. Under normal circumstances, I’d dismiss them as dreams. I’d had dreams like this many times before, after all. I’d be running around on all fours, somehow transformed to a wolf, and I’d hunt and eat my kills with impunity. When I was tired, I’d return to my den—my own bedroom—and then wake up in the morning exhausted, but none the worse for wear. A few times I’d had sleepwalking experiences and woken up outside instead of in my bedroom, but those had become less frequent as I’d grown. My parents putting bars on my windows and locking my bedroom at night probably helped curb it.
But now I was in college and living like an independent adult with other students off campus. And the result of that greater freedom was sleepwalking my way out into the woods, apparently. Which was especially strange since I didn’t live particularly close to any woods.
“Are you all right?” a deep, masculine voice asked. There was a faint drawl to it, making me think of Texas or Oklahoma.
I sprang to my feet in a move so quick it would surprise me later when I could reflect on it. I spun to face the voice and saw a man crouched on an outcropping of stone, watching me with an apparently interested look on his face. He had thick black hair that was somewhat shaggy, deep brown eyes, and olive-toned skin. He wore a pair of well broken in jeans and a white t-shirt with a flannel thrown over it. Despite that nod to the coolness of the morning out here in the hills, he wore no shoes.
I crossed one arm across my breasts and tried to cover the rest of my nakedness with my other arm, which wasn’t very effective. “Who are you? Did you...do anything to me?”
One expressive black eyebrow quirked upward. “You don’t remember?”
He braced a hand against the rock he was perched on, then leapt down nimbly into t
he mossy hollow where I had been resting. He nodded over to a small pile of fur and bones and blood not far from where I had been sleeping. “You seemed a bit out of it when I saw you last night, so I didn’t approach closely. You hunted, ate, and went to sleep. I’ve just been waiting for you to wake up.”
I stared at the shredded remains of the rabbit, feeling my stomach lurch. How many times had I dreamed about hunting like that? Had I done this before while sleepwalking? The idea was terribly disturbing. How did I even know that it was only rabbits I had ever hurt?
When my eyes raised to the man again, I looked at him more closely. It was easier to see him now that he wasn’t crouched up on the rock and it was difficult not to admire what I could see. He was tall, with broad shoulders well-proportioned to his height. His body narrowed down to slim hips and long, muscular legs that were lovingly hugged by his jeans. My eyes traveled up his body back to his face, where full lips were curved into a faintly puzzled smile as he looked me over. His cheekbones were high and prominent, his nose straight and well built. His eyes were almond-shaped and fringed by dark, silky lashes. There was a light dusting of dark stubble across his cheeks, attesting to his claim that he had been watching me all night. He looked like he was a little older than me, perhaps in his mid-twenties or later, but it was difficult to be sure. He was gorgeous, in any case, and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt such knee-shaking lust from just one look at a man. It was likely that I’d never felt anything like this before at all.
There were dozens of questions I was desperate to ask, but the most practical came to my tongue first. “Could I borrow your shirt?”
He looked amused, then pulled off the flannel before tossing it to me. I caught it easily and pulled it on, immediately aware of the spicy male musk of his natural scent on it. I could have bathed in that scent, so rich and beguiling it was. The shirt hit me at around mid-thigh, but it covered my breasts, butt, and genitals, so I wasn’t going to complain too much.
Chosen Mates (Beasts of the Bay Bundle) Page 19