I love you, Van Longshadow. Whatever happens after tonight, know that my heart belongs to you.
She tilted her head to the sky, held her arms out wide, and presented herself to them; their Pure Soul. The Mother. With a song more beautiful than any orchestra, one hundred werewolves all howled together to honor her.
Epilogue
My love for Van had brought me to this unknown place, this forest of beautiful werewolves and bloodthirsty vampires. Who knew what other beasts lay in hiding in the dark shadows beyond the safety of Virgin Island? In my heart and in my sweetest dreams all I wished for was to spend my life with Van. I’d always felt in my bones that there was one special man out there for me, and now I knew that I was right. My unwavering belief in that one true love was to be rewarded.
But untold dangers still stood between Van, me and our happy ending. I knew that this night was just the beginning.
~~~
Find out what happens next in Drawn To The Alpha part 2 here: http://amzn.to/1Hs4TZz
Curves To Claim
Book 1
Willow Brooks
Chapter One
The inky black of the night sky was all I could see as my body scraped against the sharp edges of the rocky and root-littered mountain. Glittering stars in the sky mixed with the ones forming over my eyes as pains shot throughout my battered and increasingly sore body. Each scrape of a rock, each slide against the root, intensified the growing bruises while something dragged me higher and higher. The outer afflictions intensified, merged together into one ball of continual, growing agony, threatening an odd slip into injury-induced insanity, which I craved if it meant numbness. As dizziness descended, the sky seemed to grow closer, and my plight grew more real. I found that I could no longer wish it a nightmare, which was ironic, as I wished to lose consciousness.
Fear swirled like a tidal wave around me. My head about to explode, I swore my hair would just rip from my scalp as a large animal continued to drag me by my long tresses. I couldn’t see the long curly black strands gripped in his teeth, but I could imagine the horrific scene as I felt his or her or its saliva drip onto my scalp, while the beast’s hot breath blew periodically over my head. When my shirt caught again on yet another exposed tree root, rather than stop, the animal yanked me up toward it so that I could smell its breath, something similar to a dog yet far worse, more rancid, like the beast’s last kill. The iron scent of blood, so evident, incited panic in my lungs, which were already burning as they battled for air.
My hands gripped what was left of my tattered shirt over my chest as I struggled for each breath. The torment from the beating my body was taking mixed with the tight pull of my muscles, derived from panic. Maybe I had fallen into a delusional state, or maybe I was just losing touch with reality, moving further from consciousness, but in those moments of clarity, the times that I could see clearly what was around me, somehow the picturesque beauty of the scene got through, became some sort of deranged lifeline in my frail attempt to hold it together, to fight for my life against this thing. I’d never been this far above New York City. I’d never been one for hiking or even trail walking. My life didn’t leave time for such things, even if I’d been a nature lover. Which I wasn’t. I could appreciate it, even create it in digital worlds, but had no real desire to be actually in it at any given point in time. The indoor, virtual worlds, were fine for me.
I’d only seen such beauty as what was around me now in pictures. At night at home, my hobby of creating video games had me often researching different locations, different types of scenery that I could recreate within a computer world. So I’d seen such beauty photographed but had never found the time to explore it myself, even if I’d been so inclined. The soft irony of my situation, and how I was getting to see the vast beauty of the real world around this mountaintop while dragged by what had to be an imaginary creature, as if it had stepped out of one of my games, struck me, adding stinging tears to the ones already dribbling down my cheeks, my eyes watering from physical misery.
In the night sky, tonight only a crescent stuck out distinctly against the blackness. The lines of trees battling to stay alive, crooked, fallen, broken, sent a message to my psyche, which was damaged at the moment, giving birth to the irrational thought that nothing survived here. From what I could tell in this light, green existed only in patches. Apparently, life had to fight hard to exist in this soil.
I doubted that the altitude had changed much, but I swore there wasn’t enough air. The animal holding me didn’t seem to have any trouble though, as deep growls vibrated from its core, pushing another wave of steamy air over my head and face. With each growl it shook its head, not enough to break my spine, but enough to pull more muscles in my neck and my shoulders and my back, making each of them as they bumped over the earth, one solid pit of misery at this point. I could no longer point to a specific spot or injury that hurt. I didn’t think anything was broken, thankfully. It was more surface wounds, mere scratching and bruising, that had begun to overwhelm me.
All at once my upper body fell hard to the earth. After hitting, after the pain reverberated through me. I rolled maybe two turns of my body, due to the incline, before coming up against a jagged outcrop of rock. Hands that had only been scraped on the outside this far clutched onto the rough edge, and I let the rock cut into my skin, my last chance to hold on to my life as I found myself looking over the edge of a cliff down, to the black abyss. I assumed the shadows that teased were treetops, given the sound of trees blowing in the wind along with a rushing noise that threatened water below.
My life didn’t pass before my eyes, instead the vast nothingness that laid out before me, the dark swirl of images, began to come in seemingly crystal-clear. I looked over a forest, yet from this angle I couldn’t get my bearings. I might as well have been floating over what promised my death at this point. I felt that secure. Save for being conscious of one breath after another, letting the burn of it keep me awake, I realized with a profound sense of despair that no one was around these parts to save me even if I screamed. All I had was a frail, increasingly painful grip on a rock and the beast behind me that had brought me here.
“We are going to end this once and for all,” the animal behind me said.
It spoke!
Turning my head, my muscles each protesting the small act, I looked at the large animal now sitting there looking down at me. The basically white wolf had fur tipped with black and gray that covered its back and the top of its head. It sneered at me, if that was even possible. Eyes a cloudy blue squinted at me, glaring, showing nothing but hate and contempt for either me or humans in general. Who could tell at this point?
I was facing death with no hope of salvation, and all I could hope for at this point was that it came swiftly, that this beast would stop toying with me, dragging me around, teasing me with my own demise, which would end this torment. I saw the end of it all as my only way out; the fear was just that real. I had no real concept of how I had come to be a part of such a storybook, or grisly fairy tale, situation. I couldn’t find it in myself to figure out how life had gotten to this point, this extreme.
Not that long ago, beastly creatures only existed in the video games I created. Tonight the dangerous realm of werewolves was my reality, as that seemed the only option offered. I’d die like a hero in one of my games, only I had no magic potion to bring me back, to regenerate life so I could attempt to fight it again. Sadly, I’d yet to find a way to fight at all.
Chapter Two
My mind clicked into not distant memories, finally showing me how I’d gotten to that cliff with the beast. In the beginning, say a little over a week ago, I had heard my friends’ voices…
“Let’s go. Stop staling, Ashlyn,” Ava said, her friendly tone holding a hint of impatience, a selfish need to get where she wanted me to go.
A big-boned, as she jokingly called herself, blonde that I had met in college, her voice had sounded demanding as an excited grin had pulled up the e
dges of her mouth and sparkled in her eyes. She looked beautiful with her pale skin accented by a basic black dress that hugged each of her curves in just the right places, as if it been cut just for her. Though I knew the silky fashion had come from a rack in a store she couldn’t really afford to shop at but did anyway as an investment in finding the rich husband she desired, the one that would save her from the life she knew of struggling from paycheck to paycheck.
She leaned back against the wall in my tiny bedroom with one pointy heel popped out in front of her. Her foot shook back and forth, a telling sign of her desperation to escape my apartment. Beside her, standing upright, arms tensed straight down to her side, my other former college roommate, Brittany, a slim brunette bombshell, waited just as impatiently on basically the same mission, though she hadn’t come from quite as desperate circumstances as Ava and I had grown up in. She’d had the fortune of being lower middle class rather than just outright poor. Still, she had the same dream of marrying rich as Ava, unlike me who was determined to make it on my own. I’d not the time for the complications of a man. I could make the money myself.
“Both of us know you only have two dresses to pick from, though only one really works, so stop staring into your closet and throw the deep green dress on so we can get out of here,” Brittany added, her voice more teasing, not sounding as anxious as her body looked to get on with the evening. “It’s an after five party, not after six, and it’s getting later and later. You’re going, so just get ready. Stop stalling.”
“I know I’m going. I need to go to make contacts,” I rebutted. “But that doesn’t mean I have to like it or be excited about it or even rush. The party may start after five, but you know it’s going to go on all night. What happened to being fashionably late? I thought you guys liked that to make an entrance.”
“Making an entrance is great,” Ava refuted, “but, I don’t want all the good guys picked over by the time we make it there. There will be no one left to notice our arrival. This is the biggest party we have ever managed to get invited to. We offered to take you, so get a move on before we leave you behind.”
“Moving,” I replied. “I said I’d go, not that you gave me much of a choice. And I know I need to pull on my big girl panties and do so if I want to make some business contacts, but still… oh, forget it, I’m putting on the green dress.”
Ava and Brittany were forcing me to go to a huge after five event that would be full of New York’s most elite. To be at one of these events, I knew, was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, a chance to network and possibly get investors for the video games I created. I wanted to go as much as I wanted to stay home. It was a catch 22 when a person as driven as I was, worked as hard as I did, had to go out after work too. I paid the bills by working long days for a computer firm, slaving away, sweating for the man. Coming from the poor side of town, having the need to escape it, get as far away from it as I could manage, I never stopped working. I wanted success not just for me but for my family. I enjoyed my job as a consultant in the development of new computers, and I honestly worked without so much as a break for lunch, and then I often came home to work on the video games I loved to create at night. Being at a pivotal point in one of my games, right at the end trying to work out a few bugs, I needed to work on getting investors as much as I needed to work on the game.
There were just never enough hours in the day for all I wanted to do. I knew Ava and Brittany felt the same, even if their mission and plan of attack were different. They had spent their time shopping and makeup-ing, seeing tonight as an opportunity to meet sexy, wealthy, eligible bachelors. They wanted to hit the jackpot in the marriage pool. Landing the right guy was big business to them. Me, on the other hand, I found love nothing but a distraction. But I guess I hadn’t been opposed before, when we were in college. I’d wanted both, the big marriage and the big job. Yet, I’d found out thanks to a horrible break up with my cheating ex-boyfriend, that I’d wasted time on him that I could’ve used to finish my game.
So, my friends and I didn’t agree anymore. They were still constantly going on and on about how everything was about marrying the right guy, warning me that I needed to take some time to find the right guy before it was too late, which was the mentality that they lived by still. We’d stayed friends, running in the same circles for different reasons, though any more, we didn’t always understand each other, and I ended up the odd man out. Case in point, tonight. I was sure it had taken them hours to get ready, so my throwing on a dress at the last minute was not going over well.
By the time I’d struggled into that dress, getting it over my own curves in just the right way, Ava had fiddled with my hair and Brittany had touched up my makeup. So, we’d arrived at the party a half hour later. I’d made it to an after five thirty party, but by the time we’d reached the oversized building, excited to just be there, focus had fallen from that issue. They were in find-a-man mode.
Walking into that grand ballroom took my breath away too, though. I was amazed by the beauty and the elegance that surrounded me. It definitely wasn’t what I was used to. All three of us had stopped and gazed around us. Ava and Brittany were going on about sexy men in suits and beautiful women and their dresses while I couldn’t help but take in the architecture. Looking up until I strained my neck muscles, the latticework pattern of the ceiling had very ornate designs carved into the squares. The entire place was painted in a gorgeous beige that lent itself to golden hues, a color I’d be hard pressed to give a name to.
Adding to this color scheme, the walls housed a series of windows curved at the top, standing floor to ceiling. At this time, early evening, they allowed the far-from-fading light of the sun to shine through the lightweight sheers, utilizing the glow of natural lighting. To accent that, in between each window also cloaked in a golden-brown curtain flowing down it’s sides, duel candle sconces held fake flaming candles that gave off a beautiful maize color that glittered against the walls. Each window, twenty of which were down just one side, set the stage for a round table that seated six.
The tables were draped in a silky white clothes with flowers and crystal and elaborate settings on top that I wouldn’t even know how to replicate. Each of them in turn sat in a strip of navy blue and burgundy patterned beige carpet, which framed a wooden dance floor. Some guest sat, at this point, while others stood in the middle of the dance floor, just talking as a live band played quiet music in the background to which their conversations sung over. This wasn’t some noisy nightclub or even a busy restaurant, which these sort of events were usually in. Tonight was an elegant gathering where people seemed to speak differently, softer, more respectfully, and I still couldn’t catch my breath.
A man in a white suit with a light gray shirt and black tie walked by with a tray and offered us from his white gloved hands a flatter, wider version of a crystal wine glass.
“A Winston Martini for you ladies,” he said politely, though rather mechanically, but I figured he’d said it a hundred times already tonight.
Brittany, a gleam of excitement in her eye, practically squealed as she grabbed hers, taking a tiny sip before rattling on, “If purchased, one of these cocktails costs fourteen thousand dollars!”
“How exactly is that possible,” I inquired, taking a sip of my own.
A touch of cinnamon hit my taste buds, which I guessed was what was sprinkled over the top, only to be washed away by a warm sweet taste that offered a slight burn as it went down.
“It’s good,” I said, “but I can’t say that it’s thousands of dollars good. Are you sure you got that dollar amount right?”
“Of course I’m sure. I watched a video on it, the two day process to make it. The expensive alcohol, I think cognac, goes for one hundred and sixty thousand a bottle, and six thousand a shot.”
I should’ve known that such a thing was just a precursor, a warning, if you will, that the rest of the evening would be just as over the top. I loved the place. It was beautiful. The drink was good. Y
et, I didn’t fit into such an income bracket by far. My car cost less than the drink in my hand. In fact, the more I thought about the cost of the drink, the more my hands started to tremble. I wanted wealth and success. I wanted to live comfortably. Plus, I wanted to help my family live comfortably for the first time in their lives. But such displays of wealth I could find nothing more than, well, ridiculous.
So as I took another sip, still wondering exactly how you justified making a drink cost so much, I nearly choked seeing my jerk of an ex-boyfriend, Mason, walking through the crowd. We’d dated during college and had broken up a year ago. Still, just the sight of him made my body tense, my stomach threaten to eliminate the two sips that I’d had of the expensive drink that I now clutched to the point of breaking. I didn’t feel like doing the math, but given the size of the cup, I supposed that would create puke that cost over a thousand dollars. I had entered the twilight zone.
Curves & Alphas: A Paranormal Box Set: (BBW Paranormal Shape Shifter Romance) Page 26