The Alpha's Oracle

by Merry Ravenell

  I was right at eye level with...

  His fingers slipped into my hair. Prickles rose over my skin, and tension fled my muscles. Locks of my hair swirled around his fingertips like water currents. “Do you not trust me to punish them, buttercup?”

  I wanted to close my eyes and savor the caress, drown in the waters of it. “I was only asking.”

  “Would you like to question them?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure? You take such an interest in so much else around here.”

  “As you said, your Queen is territorial.” I could live with being called territorial. I resented being called jealous. Jealousy was for little girls and daytime talk shows. I would never scratch and claw to keep my teeth in some male.

  “You seem so distracted. Am I too distracting? Should I put some clothes on?”

  He moved closer. His thigh brushed mine.

  I tried to avoid looking at the part of his body just about level with my eye.

  He scooped up a large handful of my hair, pulled me back so my spine creaked, and leaned over me.

  He smiled. He bent a little lower, pulled my head back a bit farther, fully exposing my throat. He kissed my windpipe. Out of the corner of my eye I could see just how much he was enjoying this.

  “Tell me, buttercup,” he whispered, his lips brushing my throat, “the rest of what you saw.”

  Escalation

  My throat worked. A few sounds came out. None of them were words.

  “Tell me what else you saw,” he purred again.

  My ears hummed. It was hard to breathe. I wheezed. “I didn’t lie to you.”

  Pleasure shivered over my skin. My skin jolted with life as my brain stumbled from lack of air. Every sense seemed so sharp under the threat. Adrenaline coursed through me, burnishing everything, distilling everything. Even his voice came from somewhere under an ocean.

  My addled brain sloshed, and the Bond pulled me deeper. He was there to meet me in the abyss.

  “Oh I knew you didn’t, buttercup. You just didn’t tell me everything.” He curled lower, reeking of hot desire. His body pressed against my thigh. I whispered a breathy sound. His teeth grazed my throat. My gasp wasn’t protest.

  I was wet.

  His lips moved over my throat. I think I gasped a laugh. He could have ripped out my windpipe. Broken my spine. Tossed me around like a doll.

  Dangerous and powerful and terrible, this cruel wolf shaped like a hound, this wolf who was mine as much as he could be anyone’s. He would drown me in thick desire. He was a miasma, and I inhaled it, thick and hot. He was glorious in his own, dark, terrible way, and he was mine.

  My brain hummed as the blood flow constricted further.

  I slid deeper into the Bond, sliding into the waters, boneless, knowing. His lips on my skin. Now his free hand gripped one of my breasts. Harsh, rough in his touch. I wanted his mouth to go lower. Much, much lower.

  I smelled the salt of the Tides and the horizon of my mind. I caught a whiff of jungle trees.

  I swung one knee outward, then hooked it around his hamstring. With a quick buck of my hips, I shoved him backward.

  All those hours grappling with Hix put to use.

  I pushed Gabel onto his back. He still gripped my hair. I straddled him and pulled against his hand, but he didn’t let go. The sharp pull on my scalp felt good, and so did his hot breath on my twisted throat. I hooked my heels under his thighs.

  I breathed hard. It wasn’t from the exertion.

  He yanked my face down to his, eyes shifting in a stormy, blue-green sea. He grabbed my hip again and yanked me flush against him.

  My body seared me. I had never felt so hot, begged so hard for clothing to not be there, resented wet satin so much. My skin pleaded and whispered to his. He was naked, I was the only one clothed, and those panties were so flimsy, so exquisitely flimsy...

  “Buttercup,” he growled, and I shuddered in pleasure at his tone, which sounded as thick and drunk as I felt, swirling about in a whirlpool. “You should have told me you liked being on top.”

  “Shut up, Gabel,” I heard myself say.

  My body begged for those panties to disintegrate. I arched against invisible hands. I should have been afraid. No matter how large he felt against me, how terrifying he was, how much I despised him, I knew all it would take would be a shift of my hips and those fragile panties being removed to feel him where every instinct told me he should be. We were kissing again, hot and deep. He held me against him, and my brain tried to shout over the din what was I doing.

  I can’t do this! It can’t be undone!

  The sound of the red ocean drowned out any thoughts.

  His hand released my hip. I whimpered, but a second later, his hand shoved under my skirt and grabbed a handful of my rump. His fingers curled around my panties.

  I moaned against his tongue. He held me pinned, rough, glorious. I drowned, tumbling in the hot ocean, pulled along the currents with him.

  His hand raked through my hair, down my cheek, grabbed my other thigh, and lifted me higher on him. I mewled, and exquisite trembles grabbed me. The Bond leapt within us, lashing each of us forward.

  The fabric of my panties cut into my skin when he yanked them off me. He tossed them away. Then he grabbed a handful of my dress and pulled upward. I curled backward, flowing forward like water, and the dress slipped over my head easily.

  Maybe I ripped off my bra, maybe he did. It didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was that I was naked, free of suffocating clothes. Skin on skin, lips on lips, his length pressed between my wet petals.

  The Moon hung in my mind, red-tinged, overlooking an angry, churning red ocean tossing back and forth.

  His teeth sank into my left breast. I grabbed his hair, dug my fingers into his scalp, urged him on, yelped when the stinging pleasure of his bite shot through me.

  The hand on my thigh moved between us.

  It hurt.

  Pain punched through me, through him, through us, ripped through my Mark, and I cried out. I clung to him as he sank deep, right to my core, all of him. The Bond anchored itself to us, metal claws grabbing and fusing our souls, burning melting iron.

  His tongue found mine again. I raked his shoulders, pain on exquisite pain, feeling the hot lightening of my nails through him, hungry for him, for every movement, thrust, everything twisting the Bond tighter and tighter, burning white-hot forged iron.

  Everything froze for one, exquisite, perfect moment.

  Then the moment shattered, flung shards across the span between us, sparkling embers scattered as new stars.

  My heartbeat slowed. My breathing eased. The burning heat ebbed.

  The Bond cooled, white blazing hot dimming to smoldering shades of red.

  I looked down at his sandy hair, his face pressed between my breasts, my fingernails dug into his thick shoulders. I reflexively lifted my fingers back. Trails of blood wept down them. Ten perfect crescents gouged into his skin.

  He was still inside me, all of him, exquisitely painful, complete, filling me.

  I yanked my fingers back with a gasp.

  The wetness... down there... slippery, undeniable evidence of what we had so senselessly, thoughtlessly done, for those who didn’t believe in Bonds.

  Pain throbbed stronger and stronger with each heartbeat.

  Gabel raised his head from my breasts, looked up at me.

  We stared at each other, dumbfounded.

  A Restless Secret

  I recovered first and moved off him with great care. My body hurt, sharp and raw. I smelled sex and blood, and my thighs were streaked and smeared.

  We didn’t speak. We didn’t say a word.

  I went to the shower to wash.

  It seemed like the thing to do. A necessary thing. I was bleeding and... slimy. And sticky as everything dried.

  The Bond smoldered, fat and smug and gloating. A fat worm that attached both of us, binding us, latching into us like a cosmic, double-ended
leech.

  I started to cry.

  I didn’t want this. I didn’t want him! This wasn’t what I had chosen. He wasn’t the one I would have chosen.

  I sobbed under the water.

  Stupid, arrogant monster. Pathetic mortal, manipulating the gift of a goddess for his own amusement.

  All my sobs and tears from when this whole thing had started tumbled forth, and I just let myself weep.

  Stupid.

  Horrible.

  Awful.

  Monster!

  Each thought punched the Bond. I cried with each blow, and I knew he felt it, too. He’d probably like it. If I went and punched him with my fists, he’d just laugh. This might get somewhere.

  Stupid.

  Horrible.

  Monster!

  I eventually got out of the shower, blinded by tears and steam. My Mark throbbed. My private parts stung and ached. My left breast was bruised and bitten.

  Gabel’s shoulders were ripped and clawed, blood drying across his back and chest. Except he hadn’t acquired those because I’d fought him off.

  He confronted me in the doorway, as cold as a blank slate.

  Where was his arrogance now? His delight in this last challenge worth having? That no mortal could stop him, so he’d pit himself against the Moon’s most powerful mandate?

  He hadn’t even held out half a year.

  Before I could savor the contempt. Now I mourned the truth: I had fallen right along with him.

  “No one can know,” I blurted out.

  He twitched all over with surprise. He’d been going to suggest it for a lot of obvious reasons, but I’d beaten him to it. “An Oracle saying that?”

  “Shove your arrogance, Gabel. You lost.”

  His jaw ground.

  “The final step is swearing it to the pack and Moon,” I reminded him. “If no one knows that we... we...”

  “Fucked.”

  “Then no one’s going to try to get us to set the date. So. You keep screwing around, and I’ll keep despising you, and nobody will think anything has changed.”

  A pulse of anger and betrayal. Somewhere in there I’d hit a nerve, but only Gabel could say which one. He shifted his weight between his feet. “You don’t despise me. No matter how much you want to.”

  I growled. “Drop the arrogance. Has this taught you nothing? You lost. Am I not proof the Moon’s power is real and you are not Her equal? You don’t know anything about me, and you don’t care, you never have. I’ve just been your damn toy.”

  He approached me. “Those things can’t be true—”

  “You have said them!”

  “That does not make them true.” He pushed two fingers into my Mark with one hand. With his other, he seized my hand and placed it on his own bicep, over his own Mark. “If those things were true, these would have festered and rotted like all animal wounds do.”

  “What’s your point?” I rasped. Of course I couldn’t hate all of him. He was all any she-wolf could want. Strong, powerful, clever, capable. Even smart, and apparently well educated. The Moon had fashioned us to covet those qualities in our mates.

  Even, apparently, if they were balanced against an equal measure of cruelty.

  “That is my point.”

  I laughed as the tears started again. “You don’t even know what to do, do you? You just come in here and try to be the big wolf. Like you get any say in this anymore.”

  Gabel’s fingertips pulled across my skin, over my breast, and his hand returned to his side. “Disbelief from an Oracle. A she-wolf finding a male’s power attractive is no grounds for a Bond. There is more to it than that.”

  “You made it perfectly clear to me from the first moment that is all it was to you. Let all the unspoken niceties you’ve trampled over remain unspoken.”

  He said nothing. This had ceased to be an amusement to him.

  I couldn’t even enjoy the perverse pleasure of seeing him caught in his own trap, because now I was in here with him, and there would be no escape.

  He mulled it all over, and came up with. “So. A secret.”

  “There’s no other option. I won’t take those vows. You Marked me by force, but you can’t make me say words I won’t mean.”

  “How long will the secret keep?” He pondered.

  “You want to take the vows?” I exclaimed.

  “As I told you before. If there was no risk of failure, there’s no point to a challenge.” His smug arrogance wasn’t there. He was frighteningly matter-of-fact.

  Him acting normal seemed a trick unto itself. No more games, no ego, no flamboyance, no smirks. Suddenly I became the crazy and emotional one, while he set his usual cockiness aside to plan his next move.

  “One day we’re going to get asked what our plans are,” Gabel continued, “or we’ll get caught, or we’ll find a way to separate. I do like having a plan.”

  “Get caught? This was a one-time deal, Gabel. I’m not fucking you again.” Every time we had sex the Bond would strengthen.

  He tilted his head a half-degree. “We also swore it would never happen at all.”

  I laughed bitterly. “I won’t deny it when we’re found out. But I won’t take those vows. I swear on my Moon-touched skin, I won’t take the vows.”

  He pondered this and nodded.

  A thoughtful Gabel unnerved me more than the sadistic Gabel.

  I could love a thoughtful Gabel. I could be won by a thinking Gabel.

  I licked my lips. My tongue discovered a crack. He had nipped me in our passion. Was that what I called it? I had always thought of passion as a beautiful thing. A thing you wanted and welcomed. Not some sloppy, clawing, groping tangle of bodies and tongues.

  Gabel picked at one of the gouges on his bloody shoulders. He rubbed the crumbling, drying blood between his fingers.

  “Are you going to lie if we are discovered?” If he was going to lie, I wanted to be prepared for it. My fingers trailed over the raised ridges of my Mark.

  “No. Will you?”

  “I don’t know.” I pushed my finger into a sore spot and frowned.

  “You should decide before the moment comes.” He went to shower the blood off him.

  The Cold and the Heat

  I held out some hope that Gabel would have forgotten about the remainder of my vision, but of course, he hadn’t. Why did I keep hoping Gabel would suddenly become the stupid, base, blunt instrument everyone wanted to believe cruel creatures to be? After breakfast he led me upstairs to his office. I took my usual place on the couch and winced, shifting my abused body, and trying my best to hate him.

  He watched but said nothing until I stopped moving. “What else did you see?”

  “What makes you think I saw something else?”

  He raised one eyebrow. “My question, my vision, my answer.”

  Except how much of that vision had been for him? I hugged myself across my aching lower body. “Usually.”

  “Don’t change the rules. Or are you trying to be sly?”

  “I don’t care about Anders or his games or your plans,” I told him bitterly. “It was a large vision, and the Moon got a word or two in edgewise.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I don’t know.” I shook my head. Had the Moon seen how things would happen? Was that why I’d been wearing a necklace of souls? I shuddered.

  Oracles almost never had mates. The only Oracle I knew who even had a relationship at all was the SableFur Oracle, Kiery. SableFur was so powerful and large they had three Oracles, making them a one-stop-shop for all your scrying needs. Kiery was first among them, and she had some kind of ongoing complicated mess of a relationship with their First Beta.

  Anita, who had been Kiery’s predecessor and now trained all the Oracles in this part of the world, had only had cryptic words for us about how we were other to our packs, although she’d never voiced disapproval or warned us.

  The Bond had fused Gabel and I, burrowing into us like a two-ended parasite. This entwined our fat
es. Now he and I were on the same cosmic path, and I’d no longer be able to scry for him because I’d essentially be scrying for myself.

  Limited utility to Gabel would end very, very badly.

  Cold clenched my heart.

  “What did you see?”

  Automatically, I blurted, “Your balls.”

  “My balls? You saw my balls?”

  Before I could answer, Gabel sprang across the floor and swept low over me. He shoved his face into mine, slammed his hands down on either side of the couch, and raked the slick fabric to show how easy it would be to rip my skin.

  “My balls,” he growled.

  I wilted and shook all over. He growled, deeper, lower, looming. The couch cushions ripped. I didn’t dare look down at his hands to see if the fingertips had extended to claws.

  “Now I know you’ve seen all I have to offer from the very start, given how much you squealed over it, but you had a vision of them? Did you see what happened yesterday? Did you know what would happen?”

  I yanked my head to the side and whimpered. Fury, anger, betrayal burned through me. The Bond writhed and thrashed.

  So much for thinking the Bond might protect me from his murderous rage.

  Shaking, I forced myself to meet his brilliant, sea-blue eyes. The rage built and built, the Bond swelled like a tick.

  I had to be brave. I wouldn’t show my throat.

  I grasped for something in my mind, just like I would if the Tides had swept me under. I grabbed at the throbbing pain, the pounding in my arm that made my fingers numb.

  You don’t get to blame me for this!

  It gave me a shred of courage, just enough to meet an Alpha’s gaze.

  He shook as well, eyes wide and bright. A vein crossed his forehead. His body shivered in rage and... pain.

  “I can’t scry for myself!” I gasped. “Don’t you think if I’d have known, I’d have avoided you? I might have your spawn in my belly right now! You think I want that?”

  His fury sparked my own into a fire. It burned away at my fear like it was paper. I shouted, “Your balls weren’t even there! The Moon didn’t even care about them. Your balls were missing!”