Catch Me, Alpha (God of War Book 2)

by Emilia Rose

  Butterflies fluttered in my stomach. I brushed my fingers across the silk and grinned at my reflection in the mirror. I didn’t care about my looks too often, but damn, did I look good in this dress.

  It was me.

  The alpha. The luna. The warrior. Me, Aurora.

  After I settled on the dress and Lucy reserved it for the Luna Ceremony, I collapsed onto the couch next to Elijah. “When is the soonest you can put the stone in my back?” I asked when Adrian and Charolette started chatting.

  Though I desperately wanted to give the Malavite Stone to Charolette, I didn’t want to see Mars as defeated as he had been the morning after his nightmare. Screaming, trembling, crying in his sleep, Mars had broken me down to tears that night.

  Elijah readjusted his glasses. “I think you should wait until after the Luna Ceremony. It’s only a few days away, and you’re going to need time to recover from surgery. We don’t know how your body will respond to the other half of the stone, especially after it was inside someone else. You might react poorly to it. The Luna Ceremony is supposed to be a joyous event.”

  I stared at my feet and swallowed. The Luna Ceremony was a sacred tradition held under a full moon, where people not only celebrated a new luna, but could also fight to take the place of an alpha or luna position without consequences. I didn’t think anyone would, but I couldn’t ignore the whispering around town about how I could barely shift.

  While the warriors didn’t mind, that didn’t mean everyone accepted a weakling as a leader. Ares’s pack was filled with jealous women taken from wars and people who wanted to feel important. No shame to them at all, but nobody was going to mess with what was mine.

  I’d fought damn hard to make it here.

  “Let me think about it.”

  Ares wanted me to bind with the stone as soon as possible, but what if I was too weak to even defend myself from an attack? Last time I’d had stone surgery, I could barely move for an entire week. I had been completely wiped out.

  After a few moments of silence, Elijah grabbed my hand and led me to the opposite side of the room. “I wanted to talk to you about this sooner, but I didn’t want to say anything in front of Adrian or Charolette.” He paused and looked over his shoulder, as if to reassure himself that nobody was listening. “We ran tests on the hound’s blood and found an unusual substance in it, like I’d mentioned before. We still haven’t figured out exactly what it is, but my doctor looked back through some old files, and … and your blood matches theirs.”

  “What?” I asked, brow furrowed.

  “Whatever kind of blood runs through those hounds’ veins, it runs through yours too.”

  Chapter 19

  Aurora

  “What the hell did you just say?” I asked, having heard him clearly the first time. I just couldn’t believe those words had actually come out of his mouth. I really couldn’t believe it. “I have hound blood running through my veins?”

  Elijah stuffed his hands into his jeans and nodded. “Yes.”

  “It’s not possible.”

  I paced between him and the royal-blue couch in Lucy’s Boutique and ran through everything Mom and Dad had told me about our family and about the hounds. None of this made sense. My blood was of Mom and Dad, two respected warrior wolves from the Sanguine Wilds, not of hounds.

  “Luna, are you okay?” Lucy asked from her desk.

  She, Charolette, and Adrian glanced over at us with worried expressions. And I didn’t know how to even answer that question.

  Was I okay? Who the hell knew what I was?

  Instead of expressing my worry, I gave them my best smile. “Yes, of course. Thank you for all your help today. Adrian, please walk Charolette home. I need to speak with Elijah alone.” I snatched Elijah’s hand and pulled him toward the exit. “Oh, and, Charolette, don’t forget our date tomorrow!”

  After shoving the door open, I tugged Elijah out into town. “How do you know for sure?”

  Elijah dropped my hand and nodded to a much quieter path leading to the pack house through the forest. Ruffles and Pringle hurried before us, chasing the leaves blowing in the wind and stomping on fallen branches.

  “We only have theories about the hounds. We don’t have vast knowledge about them …”

  “But?”

  “But what makes hounds biologically different from rogues and wolves is their blood,” he said. “At least, that’s the only thing we’ve found so far. And that’s only with alive hounds. Dead hounds have the same blood as werewolves.”

  I clenched and unclenched my hands. That didn’t solve anything, but it wasn’t Elijah’s fault. He was just as clueless as I was about this entire thing. Still, this wasn’t possible. We needed more information on the hounds to figure out why I had the same blood as them.

  “You don’t know any other reason?” I asked, desperate for answers. “Dr. Farral, the doctor who did my surgery, hasn’t found anything else that could be the cause of my blood being different than normal werewolf blood?”

  “The only other difference between you and regular werewolves is the stone.”

  I swallowed hard. “You don’t think the hounds have—”

  “No,” Elijah said. “There was no stone in the hound we studied.”

  A long time ago, Dr. Farral had told me that the stone changed my blood, but there had to be more to this explanation. My mind wandered to Fenris, the man who I thought was trying to take the Malavite Stone from me. While the stone was special, it might not be the reason Fenris was after me. Maybe he wanted me because I had the same blood as him; we were of the same kind.

  Who knew? Sure as hell not me.

  Though it didn’t solve anything, that was better than knowing there was another stone out there that every hound had. If those beasts got their nasty paws on any sort of stone, they’d be unstoppable.

  “We’ll study it some more,” Elijah said, stepping into my backyard. “We’re working as hard as we can. I know the war is approaching faster than we’d like. I want to have some more information before that time.” He glanced up at the kitchen window at Mars, who was furiously scrubbing a pan. “And let me know when you plan to have the stone surgery. I’ll speak to Dr. Farral about it tonight.”

  After parting ways with Elijah, I blew out a deep breath and wondered how I’d tell Ares that I had hound blood. We had so much other shit to worry about, and this was just an added problem. What if I ended up becoming one, losing all sense of reason and murdering my mate in cold blood?

  A few moments later, the backyard light turned on, and the door swung open. Ruffles ran to it, chased by Pringle, who had a brown leaf on his head. She turned around, swatted the leaf, and hit him in the face. Then, she walked right past Mars and into the house. Pringle followed after her.

  I guessed Ruffles had a boy spending the night.

  Dressed in a black T-shirt that hugged his biceps, Mars smiled at me with four pizza boxes in his hands and two bottles of soda stuffed between his bicep and chest. “Did you find a dress?”

  “Yes,” I said, grasping the sodas rom him and walking into the house to prepare for the pups to visit tonight.

  Mars had been so anxious about this all day; he had texted me throughout the dress-picking session about not wanting to fuck this up.

  “What’s it look like?” he asked, setting the boxes down in the kitchen. “I want to see it.”

  “You can’t see it until the Luna Ceremony,” I said, wrapping my arms around his waist from behind and resting my cheek on his back. How was I going to tell him about the stone and then about my blood? I didn’t want Ares to reemerge from his slumber and explode right before the pups came over tonight.

  But I needed to tell him. The sooner, the better.

  “Not even a peek?”

  I forced out a laugh and shook my head. “No.”

  Mars turned around, brow raised, and grasped my chin, immediately sensing that something was eating me up on the inside. “What’s wrong?” he asked, searchi
ng my face for any sort of response. “What happened?”

  Fumbling with my fingers, I gulped. “I need to speak with you about something that I found out today …” I stared up into his eyes, which turned more gold by the second, and grasped his hands tightly. “We’re going out for milkshakes with Charolette tomorrow.”

  “And?”

  “And Elijah said that the stone will make me weak if I put it inside of me before the Luna Ceremony,” I admitted. While Mars didn’t get angry that often, he furrowed his brows and scowled. But before he could say anything, I stopped him. “And he’s right. Last time this happened, I could barely move for a week. I was so sore.”

  He tensed even harder. “You want to wait to put it inside of you? You’ll be in danger.”

  “I’ve been in danger,” I whispered, still not sure if waiting was the right choice.

  But Ares and Mars both had been looking forward to this sacred ceremony for so long now. He’d even asked me if I could wear his mother’s necklace because he knew it’d have made her happy. He wanted everything to be perfect. And if I couldn’t attend the ceremony, there was no point of even hosting one.

  “It’s only a few days away.”

  He pulled away from me. “A few days is a long time.”

  “It’ll take me even longer to recover.” I grasped his hands to pull him back toward me. “I can fight the hounds now as I am. If I take the other half of the stone, I don’t know how my body will react. We won’t be able to go to the mountain and get information from the necromancer either.”

  “I’ll go with Vulcan.”

  “You’re not going alone,” I said, voice strong, making sure he knew my word was final.

  Ares went psycho when he was alone. He’d be a wreck, knowing that Fenris could attack our pack during his trip and that he wouldn’t be able to protect me, especially after Mars’s nightmare the other night.

  “There’s more. A bigger problem,” I whispered, gliding my tongue across my lower lip. “Elijah found out that—”

  “Elijah is just the damn bringer of bad news, isn’t he?” Mars interrupted.

  After shrugging in a weak attempt to convince myself that it wasn’t that bad, I sighed. This was bad, damn bad. I didn’t even know what this meant about our future, about possible pups, about if Mars would want to go through with the Luna Ceremony, knowing that I had hound blood.

  “He ran some blood tests on the hound and found out that whatever is inside the hound’s blood is also …”

  “Is also what?”

  Staring down at our tiled floor, I shuffled from foot to foot. “In mine …”

  Silence. Frightening silence.

  “You’re a hound?” Mars asked, a tinge of annoyance in his voice.

  I widened my eyes. “No! I just … there’s something in my blood that makes it similar to a hound’s. Elijah’s doctor doesn’t know anything about it yet, but they’re working on figuring it out and hope to have something soon.”

  Mars froze, realization darting across his face. “Dad was right,” he whispered. “The curse … you are who they’re looking for. It wasn’t Mom …”

  “The curse? What curse?”

  Someone knocked on our doors, and Mars hurried over to it. “We’ll talk about this later.”

  After he pulled the doors open, a woman with silver hair and flawless dark skin stepped into the house. “Goodness, it’s freezing outside, and it’s only the beginning of fall.” She wrapped her arms around Mars. “How are you doing, Mars? I hope I’m not late. We haven’t seen each other in a while. I usually get the pleasure of speaking with Ares.”

  Mars beamed down at her, the tenseness from our conversation still lingering in his smile. And for some reason, my heart clenched. Mars must’ve not come out as often as Ares did. But I guessed I was one of the lucky ones who had the delight of seeing Mars more than most people did.

  She walked up the stairs and introduced herself to me as Dr. Denise Davis, but she told me to call her Denise. After offering her some coffee, I glanced out the window for the kids who’d be here for Mars’s group therapy session. He walked over to me, shoulders tense and worry etched into his face.

  “Why don’t you relax, Mars?” I asked, grabbing his hand.

  “How am I supposed to relax? My mate has hound blood and keeps getting attacked by hounds. We have about ten kids coming over, who witnessed the most horrific attacks in their lives. There is no relaxing, only stressing, Aurora.”

  I pulled him down into a kiss and brushed my fingers against his cheekbones. “Stop. We don’t know about my blood yet. There is still so much to figure out. We’re going to enjoy the night with the pups, and you’re going to be great at it.”

  He grasped my hands and sighed. “What if I can’t help them? What if they’re already too screwed up, like I am, and become a monster like Ares?”

  “You’re not screwed up, and you’re certainly not a monster,” I said softly.

  While I didn’t know if he believed me or if he would ever believe me, I needed him to know that he wasn’t a burden to me; he was not a monster, and he wasn’t messed up. He was as the Moon Goddess had made him—a wondrous creation and my destiny.

  After a couple moments, I wrapped my arms around his neck and tugged gently on the ends of his dark hair. “You’re going to do great. Be who you are. If that’s Ares or Mars, it doesn’t matter. I’m sure the pups would love to meet both of you.”

  Denise glanced at us, lips set in a small smile and glasses low on her nose. Instead of asking me about my life like I’d thought she would, she looked back toward the front window and clapped her hands together. “They’re here!”

  As she hurried to the front doors, Mars froze.

  I rubbed soothing little circles against Mars’s back and ushered him to the doors. “Just breathe. These kids are like you. They need someone strong to help them get through this. And they look up to you. You’re their alpha now,” I said.

  Mars relaxed slightly and nodded.

  “And don’t forget about those pups that you want to have.” I stood on my tiptoes and kissed his cheek. “Show me how good you are with them.”

  At the mention of pups, Mars stood taller and with confidence, and walked to the doors to welcome all the pups into the pack house. About a fourth of his height, the pups waddled into the house one by one and gawked up at Mars like he was the most amazing godlike figure they had ever seen.

  Oohing and aahing, all their little murmurs made me smile. I hadn’t been around any pups for so long. Their innocence convinced me that I wanted pups as soon as we could. I’d love to have a couple little babies running around the house with Mars and Ares.

  After grabbing plates of pizza, they sat on the floor in the living room and chatted with each other. I stayed back and let Mars take control. He needed this as much as they did, knowing that he was helping pups who were just like him.

  Four hours later, Mars concluded the group therapy session and let the children run free in our living room. Leaning against our tan leather couch, Mars whispered something to the young pup in his lap, earning him a huge grin and a face full of hair from her when she nodded her head and her pigtails went flying.

  My heart fluttered at the sight. One day, we’d have a pup like her as our own. She’d fall asleep on Mars’s chest, her snores drifting through the pack house; she’d jump up onto his back, wrap her arms around his shoulders, and giggle into his ear. It was something I’d thought I wanted to wait for, but after seeing how natural he acted with the pups, I wanted it now.

  Whoever had told me that Alpha Ares was a monster had obviously never seen this part of him.

  “Mars adores you,” Denise said as Mars grabbed the girl’s hand and led her to the front doors, where her adopted mother, the owner of Moon’s Café, waited to pick her up. She walked down the stairs, a jacket draped over her forearm. “I’m so grateful that he has you in his life.”

  “Leaving, Denise?” Mars asked.

 
She gently patted his shoulder. “I’ll see you soon, hon.”

  When all the pups and Denise left, Mars shut the doors and turned to me, hands sliding around my hips. The pups’ visit seemed to have helped him almost more than it did the pups because the pups didn’t see him as Ares or as a monster; they saw him as a fearless leader and protector.

  “So, how’d I do?”

  “Goddess, Mars, that was amazing,” I said, tugging on the ends of his hair and staring up at him in awe.

  “Am I good enough to be the father of your pups?”

  I playfully slapped his shoulder. “Stop it. You know you’d be great.”

  Unable to wait to take Mars to bed, I pulled him down the long hallways. When we passed Ruffles’s yellow room, the door was closed, and she mewed. I decided not to interrupt Ruffles and Pringle because I had a sneaky suspicion that they were lying belly up on the bed with chip dust coating their whiskers.

  After pushing him into our room, I pulled on his shirt. “Take off your clothes.”

  Ruffles bellowed in pain. I had heard the agonizing sound only once before—when I found her as a kitten in the bushes. She had been gnawed on by some kind of animal and nearly died. So, my first instinct was to check up on her, just in case.

  “When I get back, you’re going to fuck me,” I called over my shoulder to Mars as I hurried to Ruffles’s bedroom.

  Another desperate yowl, and I pushed the door open. Damn, this girl sounds like she is—

  “Ruffles!” I shouted, staring wide-eyed at her on her yellow bed.

  Pringle stood behind Ruffles, doing the nasty with her, and Ruffles actually seemed as if she was enjoying it beyond belief despite her howls.

  “Girl!”

  Yet they didn’t stop; they just kept going at it like wild animals.

  “You’d better not ruin that bed,” I said, scrunching up my nose and walking back to our bedroom.

  I wasn’t about to break that up and have two cats angry with me. At least this would keep Ruffles out of Mars’s hair, so I could have him all to myself.