by Eva Chase
Ren
Marco knifed over with a sickly gurgle. I jumped to my feet, my pulse hiccupping. My fingers dug into the biscuit I’d just taken. The salty flavor of the bacon went sour in my mouth.
The other guys sprang up to. Aaron ran to Marco’s side. “I’m fine,” the jaguar shifter protested, right before he gagged again, clutching his stomach. West eyed him, his stance rigid. Nate took a step toward him and stopped, his hand falling to his abdomen. A sudden sweat gleamed on his forehead.
“He’s not fine,” he said. “And I don’t think I am either.”
“The food,” West snapped. He dropped down by the pack we’d filled with our meal supplies, leaning close to take in a deep breath. He smelled the package of bacon, tossed it aside, and reached for the biscuits. As he pressed his nose to the bag’s opening, his eyes narrowed. He inhaled again, slow and careful.
“They’re tainted,” he said.
I hardly had a chance to wonder how or what exactly that meant. Nate barged around the fire and smacked the biscuit I’d been holding from my fingers. I blinked at him, shaking my stinging hand.
“Sorry,” he said, his mouth twisting. “I just— I couldn’t let you—”
He staggered over to the cave wall and sank down. Aaron’s head had jerked toward West.
“What is it? How serious?”
“Some kind of toxin,” West said. He pulled out one of the biscuits and broke it open to take another careful sniff. “A natural substance, not artificial. Hard to pick up if you’re not looking for it. Which obviously was the point.”
“They’ve been poisoned?” I burst out. “What are we going to do?”
“How many of these did you eat?” West asked Marco.
“A couple,” Marco muttered. He wiped his mouth, his dark hair slanting over his hooded eyes. He kept his face averted as if ashamed—as if he thought I’d feel anything other than concern and sympathy seeing my mates in this state. My hands balled at my sides.
“I only had one,” Nate said by the wall, his voice strained. A shudder ran through his sprawled legs.
“They’re not laced very heavily,” West said. “To make it harder for us to notice. You’re feeling the effects, obviously, but I’d be surprised if it’s enough to kill you.”
Marco snorted. “Oh, that’s comforting.”
If he could still manage sarcasm, he couldn’t be in absolute agony. But he was clearly feeling pretty wretched. His arm was wrapped tight around his belly. I looked from him to Nate, wanting to be with both of them, comforting them, at once. “Who could have done it? Who would have wanted to do it? Do you think—that weasel yesterday...”
West grimaced. “There’s a faint scent that says mustelid to me. They all have that oily thing going on. I’d say he’s our culprit, definitely.”
That answered the why, at least. The rogues had wanted to attack us any way they could. And we didn’t have to worry about more harm from that quarter, because the fae had taken care of that enemy yesterday. But... “When could he have done it? We all ate biscuits yesterday morning, and we were fine. They’ve been in the pack since then, haven’t they?”
Aaron nodded. “And it hasn’t been out of our sight.”
“There were times when we weren’t paying a lot of attention to the supplies,” Nate pointed out. “While we were packing up the tent. During the lunch stop.”
“You’d think we’d have scented the weasel himself if he came that close.” West set down the bag of biscuits, his eyes narrowing. “It’s almost as if he snuck around us by magic, isn’t it?”
Aaron gave him a sharp look. “We’re better off not making accusations where we have no proof.”
“No,” West agreed, straightening up. “But it’s something to keep in mind.”
Magic. Did he think the fae had helped the weasel shifter get to us? But even if they’d wanted to hurt us, why would they have killed their ally afterward and pretended to be ours?
I wasn’t sure if it was safe to ask. The fae woman had said her people were on their way off the mountain, but if they’d resort to poisoning, we obviously couldn’t trust anything they’d said. And the way she’d appeared out of nowhere—how could I be sure they weren’t listening to our conversation right now?
An eerie prickling ran over my skin.
Marco pushed himself back toward the fire, away from the puddle of sick. Like Nate, he was sweating, his face grayed beneath the gleam of perspiration. His arm wobbled as it supported his weight. But his eyes were mostly clear.
I knelt next to him, gripping his shoulder in a way I hoped showed how much I cared about him. “You should rest until you feel better.” I glanced over at Nate. “You too. I don’t want you making yourselves any more sick than you already are.”
My gaze moved to Aaron. He was the one who’d spent the most time studying. Maybe he’d gone through some medical books in his reading. “Is there anything we can do to help them recover quickly?”
Aaron’s bright blue eyes were solemn. “Every poison has an antidote, but we’re pretty short on supplies up here. And we can’t be sure of exactly what poison it is. West, we brought the first aid kit from the car, didn’t we? Do you have activated charcoal in there?”
West’s gloom momentarily lifted. “Probably. We’ve had issues with drugs among the teen shifters, so we like to keep that on hand in case of an overdose. Let me find it.”
As he shuffled through the packs, I went to Nate’s side. The bear shifter leaned his head toward me when I touched the side of his rugged face.
“I’ll be all right,” he said, a little hoarsely. “The poison will just have to run its course.”
But we were so much weaker while two of my alphas could barely sit up. I nuzzled his arm, my helplessness tearing me up inside. My mates needed me, and there was nothing I could do. Even my dragon form couldn’t burn the poison out of them. And of course Nate had to act all stoic, as if my worrying was a bigger problem than him being fucking poisoned.
I gritted my teeth. If that weasel shifter hadn’t already been sizzled up by fae magic, I’d have been tracking him down right now. And I wouldn’t have stopped to ask questions either. A nice little dragon snack, that’s what he’d have turned into.
West hurried over, carrying a jar of black powder. He scooped some onto a small spoon and offered it to Nate. “It tastes like crap, but it’ll help pull the poison out of your stomach.”
Nate gulped down the powder and made a face. He started to try to push himself onto his feet, and I caught his arm.
“No way. Take it easy for once. I need you getting better, not running yourself into the ground.”
He eased back down, but hesitantly. “We shouldn’t stay here very long. There were other rogues that got away. They might still be following us.”
“Or others who want to do us harm,” West murmured darkly.
“And we just lost a significant portion of our food supply,” Marco put in. He’d stretched out on his back, his muscled chest rising and falling with halting breaths. “Well, I guess this trek just got a lot more exciting.”
Chapter 7
Ren
The open air tingled over my wings. I swooped across the mountainside, reveling in the glide of my dragon’s body. After so long cooped up in the caves, the sense of freedom made me giddy. Part of me longed to flap those wings as hard as I could and soar all the way around the towering peaks, but I reined my impulses in. I wasn’t out here to have fun.
My sharp dragon eyes scanned the rocky terrain again. Aaron had been right to doubt the hunting possibilities up here. I hadn’t spotted anything living at this level of the mountain.
He was following me now in eagle form, conducting his own search while keeping me in view. Just in case I lost control of my shift. I didn’t exactly like having a babysitter, but it was kind of comforting all the same. I hadn’t gotten a lot of warning the last two times I’d run out of energy and had to shift back.
I swerved around to gl
ide lower down the slope, to where a few sparse trees and shrubs managed to cling on to the rock. The deepening evening dark hid my immense, scaled form from anyone who might have glanced up from the town below. All I could see of Sunridge was a faintly speckled glow amid the shadowed landscape between the mountains.
While Marco and Nate had been recovering, West, who seemed to have the sharpest nose out of all of us, had gone through the rest of our food stores. Along with the biscuits, we’d had to chuck a bunch of beef jerky and a bag of apples. My precious Doritos were safe, but they weren’t going to get us very far.
So while hunting wasn’t proving very fruitful, we didn’t have much choice but to try. Once we’d started walking again, slower to accommodate the weakened guys, we’d been lucky to find a gap in the ceiling wide enough for my dragon shape to fit through. It’d been a tight squeeze.
My attention jerked back to the present. A shadow had moved amid the sparse brush. A large hare, hopping tentatively from one shrub to the next. Not much of a meal for five, but I’d take what I could get at this point.
I swooped down, extending my forelegs. The hare froze at the sound of my descent. At the last second, it decided running might be a better strategy. Too late. My taloned foot snatched it up, one claw severing its neck to stop it from squirming.
Killing it had been easier than I’d expected. Some natural instinct had taken over. I remembered what West had said the other night after he’d killed a deer. We’re all predators here. At the time I’d thought he was just talking about the alphas. But he could have meant me too.
I didn’t ever want to be used to killing things.
My muscles were starting to twitch with the need to let go of this form. I’d held it for a while now, longer than the last two times, but I didn’t want to push my luck. I shot up the mountainside toward the crevice I’d emerged through. Aaron circled around after me, a smaller rabbit in his own grasp.
The prickling dug deeper into my muscles. My dragon’s jaw clenched. I had to hold on. If I transformed back into human form out here on the mountain slope, totally naked... If we were too far from the cave, even Aaron wouldn’t be able to get me back in time before I froze to death. And then there would be no dragon shifters left at all.
I pushed my wings through the air. It no longer felt so exhilarating. I spotted my salvation up ahead. A thin stream of smoke trickled up into the cold evening air. I plunged toward it.
The rough rock edge scraped over my scales as I dove through. I transformed as I fell, hitting the ground on knees already partly human. The impact jarred my bones.
But I still had the hare, its thick fur soft between my clutching fingers.
Nate hustled over with my clothes. The bear shifter was still moving more sluggishly than usual, but he’d regained a healthier color as the day had gone on. The charcoal West had given him and Marco seemed to have helped a lot. I hated to think what might have happened if they’d eaten more of the biscuits. Or if we all had.
I let Nate drape my jacket over my shoulders to fend off the worse of the chill and then tugged the rest of my clothes on as quickly as I could. I was shivering before I was halfway done. I hurried over to the fire, where Nate had already brought the hare and Aaron’s rabbit.
My eagle shifter was just pulling on his shirt. The glimpse of his well-muscled chest—seriously, was that an eight-pack?—disappearing under the fabric was enough to send a completely different sort of shiver through me. Okay, now I was warm.
Marco was lounging by the fire, looking a lot less pained now too. But I knew the poison had hit him harder than it had Nate, probably because he’d gotten a bigger dose of it. His mouth still twisted a little when he bent over to grab the granola bar West tossed to him. And his joking didn’t have quite the same lightness as it usually did.
“Those rogues had better not mess with us again,” he said flippantly. “I really have a bone to pick with them now. And a few I’d like to shove into various parts of their body. A nice sharp rib through the gut would be just the thing.”
West rolled his eyes. He leaned over to poke at the fire. We were getting low on wood too, I knew. It’d been too heavy for us to carry very much, and we hadn’t been able to scavenge any to replenish our supply since we’d entered the caves. Maybe I’d need to make a different sort of trip above ground tomorrow morning.
“They obviously didn’t do that much damage to you,” West said to Marco. “You’re still shooting your mouth off just as much as always.”
Marco gave him a baleful look. “It takes a lot more than a couple of tainted biscuits to take down the leader of all feline kin.”
“We don’t know what they’ll try next.” Nate dug a knife into the hare’s pelt to skin it. “We’ll have to stay extra alert on watch tonight.”
“Do you really think we have to be worried about... people other than the rogues?” I ventured. I still wasn’t sure how wise it was to mention the fae directly. West hadn’t done more than insinuate that they might be involved this morning.
Aaron clearly realized what I meant. “There are treaties between all the major supernatural communities,” he said. “Attacking the leaders from one community, unprovoked, would bring about major consequences. It would be a huge risk.”
“If it could be proven who was involved,” West muttered. “Just make it easier for someone else to do the job, and you can get off scot-free.”
“Have relations between the different communities been so bad they’d want to get rid of us?” I asked.
Aaron shook his head. “I wouldn’t have thought so. It’s possible, but West is jumping to the most dire explanation, not the most likely.”
“Easy to say when you can just fly on out of here if the going gets that tough, eagle boy,” Marco said.
His tone was teasing, but I saw Aaron’s jaw twitch. He’d told me a few nights ago how the other kin-groups tended to see the avians as something lesser—and therefore to see him as the least important of the alphas. He didn’t buy into that belief, but off-the-cuff comments like that must still carry a bit of a sting. I knew he’d never leave us behind no matter how tough the going got.
“Except he wouldn’t,” I said. “We’re all doing the best we can.”
“The best we can would be to get out of this mountain already,” West said. “I don’t suppose you have any idea how much longer that is going to take, Sparks?”
I grimaced at the nickname, but my gut knotted at the same time. I’d still been feeling the internal tug toward whatever was waiting for us—but I had no idea how much farther we had to go. If I could have just raced ahead on my own...
But that would be stupid. And exactly what anyone trying to get rid of me would want. These attacks had always been about the dragon shifters first. The rogues wanted my line eliminated. My alphas had only gotten hurt because they stood in the way.
“It can’t be that much farther,” I made myself say. “There can’t be that much more mountain.”
“And tomorrow Marco and I should be able to keep up the usual pace,” Nate said. He set the skinned carcasses over the fire. The flames licked up over the meat, sending a mouthwatering roasting scent into the air. “There’s no point in stewing over things we can’t know. We just prepare as well as we can, and we’ll be ready for whatever happens.”
I wished I could feel the same easy confidence. I couldn’t even be sure of holding a shift for more than ten minutes at a time.
But even if West’s question had been a little harsh, he wasn’t wrong. The four of them were here because of me, because of this quest Mom had sent me on. If Marco or Nate had gotten more than just sick that would’ve been on me too.
My fingers itched with nothing around to pilfer. Everything around me was an unappealing target.
Because it was all too close to being mine, I realized. Somewhere during the last few days, my mind had completely adjusted to the idea that the four guys around me and I shared an inexplicable connection, one that made the
m part of my inner circle—which until now had included only me, my mom, and Kylie. There was no relief in stealing from the people I trusted to be on my side.
The unease stayed coiled in my belly all through dinner. My hunger had faded, but I forced a decent portion of rabbit down, followed by a granola bar, just to keep my energy up.
Marco and West took the first guard shift. I went to help Aaron set up the tent while Nate finished securing the campsite.
As my fingers grazed Aaron’s here and there, as he brushed past me to fix one of the poles, another kind of hunger started to well up inside me. The need to feel that connection between us, to remind myself that it was right for them all to be here with me.
When we ducked inside, I took his hand and pulled him down to sit on top of my sleeping bag with me. He gathered me in his arms and kissed me. In that moment, with his lips parting mine and the heat of his body against me, all my worries faded. I was here, where I was meant to be, with the men I was meant to be with.
I eased us down onto our sides on the padded surface, wanting to feel him against me from head to toe. He hooked his arm around me, his thumb teasing over the bare skin of my back just beneath my shirt. I quivered with pleasure and kissed him harder.
The tent flap rasped. I eased back from the kiss and glanced up. Nate had come in, his tall frame stooped to avoid toppling the tent. Heat flared in his dark brown eyes as he took us in, but he hesitated as if unsure whether to continue forward or head back out.
Suddenly just having Aaron with me didn’t feel like enough. I needed more. I needed to be completely wrapped up in the bond of desire and affection that ran between all of us.
I’d almost given in to that urge with Marco and West yesterday. The guys thought it was normal. Why should I hold back?
I drew in a breath and held out my hand.
A smile split Nate’s face. He hunkered down at my other side, pressing a kiss to the back of my neck. And just like that, I was surrounded by warmth.