by Helen Scott
Which was why I didn’t want to get blood on this T-shirt. It was one of my nicer ones, and blood stains weren’t exactly easy to get out when you didn’t have access to a laundry facility or detergent or anything like that. Still, I was going to have to go on the attack if I wanted this fight to end any time soon.
I could handle going full hand-to-hand with most guys, this guy though? It felt like things might get dicey when I got up close and personal with him again, now he knew who I was, like he felt he had something to prove. He didn’t give me much of a choice, as the next time he rushed me, I couldn’t run as far and his reach was longer than the distance I had to escape.
His hand clamped around my upper arm and yanked me toward him. My feet stumbled on the uneven gravel of the parking lot as he pulled me with more force than I’d expected. For a moment, I thought I was going to go down, but ironically, it was his grip on my arm that allowed me to keep my feet.
When he spun me and wrapped an arm around my throat, I realized why. He thought he could put me in a lock that would make me pass out. The problem for him was I knew exactly how to get out of that kind of lock.
“I’m going to have fun with you, little girl,” he snarled in my ear. I stepped forward, putting myself at an awkward angle before threading my leg behind me and dropping my weight. The unexpected movement caught him off guard, and we tipped over, rolling, and breaking his hold on my neck as he hit the ground.
I wasn’t able to get completely away from him though, as he went with the movement and rolled until he was straddling me and I was pinned to the ground. I threw a punch as best as I could and it connected, but all it earned me was a grunt and an even more pissed off wolf shifter. He grabbed my wrists and pinned them to the ground.
“I’ve got you now, bitch,” he growled out, lowering his head enough to me that it was unsettling when he sniffed me, but he wasn’t close enough for me to head butt. When he pulled back up, I bridged my hips, thrusting upward while yanking my hands down to my sides and turning my head to the side. He fell on top of me just like I knew he would, his hands forced to let go of my wrists so he could support himself and not completely face-plant. Once he was down, I wrapped my arms around him and hugged him close. Did it go against every instinct I had? Yes. But muscle memory was a beautiful thing. I pulled myself up a little before wrapping my arm around his and taking his balance once more. As he fell again, I rolled, putting me on top this time.
From here, it was easier to pop up, even as he tried to grab me. Gravity and surprise were weighing him down, and neither of those things were going to stop me. Once I was standing, I tore into him with vicious kicks to the ribs and stomach that had him rolling on his side, trying to protect his tender, soft belly. Just like when he was a wolf. Protecting the belly is instinctual, something that every animal tries to do, provided they have an exposed soft area like that. Once he was rolled, I dropped a knee onto one of his kidneys, making him cry out. I didn’t stop there though. Punches, elbows, knees, I rained them down on him like hellfire.
Blood was smearing my knuckles, making them slide off as my hits landed on his face. I knew he was down and out, but I couldn’t stop hitting him. I couldn’t let him get back on his feet. I knew if he did, it would be even harder to get him down again. Plus, I knew that the woman he’d been attacking, who was hopefully somewhere safe now, wasn’t the first and wouldn’t be the last. I felt a twinge of guilt at the fact that I didn’t know what had become of her, but it was quickly assuaged by the way my fist connected with the shifter’s jaw. The crack that sounded was more than a little satisfying.
Hands landed on me from behind, and I spun, lunging before I even saw who it was. When whoever it was released me and used their arms as a defensive shield, I felt a little guilty. Especially when I realized it was Tate.
“Fuck. I’m so sorry, Tate,” I said as I tried to lower my hands. I got them down past my elbows, but I couldn’t make my fingers unclench from the fists that had formed when I first started actually hurting the guy who’d been attacking that woman.
“You’re okay, I was just worried about you. I don’t think there’s much of that dude left,” he said as he glanced over my shoulder. I followed his gaze and saw the bloody ruin that I’d left behind and honestly couldn’t tell if the guy was still alive or not. My stomach sank, and I felt like I was going to throw up. Is this what I had become? A murderer? Or maybe a vigilante? After all, the guy hadn’t exactly been innocent.
I looked back at Tate and past him to the other guys, who were all standing, which was good, though there were some split lips and swollen eyes. They’d been victorious though. We all had, just like I knew we would, I just hadn’t expected my own actions to go quite so far. I supposed before we left, I should see if I’d left the fucker alive or if we had to dispose of a body.
17
Nina
Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on how you looked at it, the guy I’d just beaten to a red ruin was still alive, at least for now. We’d walked away and left him there with his buddies. One of them was bound to gain consciousness soon, and then it would be up to him as to whether or not his friend survived.
The walk back to the motel was long and circuitous, since we didn’t want anyone to be able to track us. We went past many dumpsters and pungent restaurants to try and disguise our scents. It wasn’t always possible, especially if the wolf tracking us had an exceptional sense of smell, but for most shifters, it would be enough, especially since we did a few loops. By the time we got back to the motel, all we could hope was that we’d done enough to allow us the night to rest before moving on tomorrow.
Some people would be too jumpy to stay in the same motel after something like that had just happened, but we knew lying low was better than being out and about right now. So we would rest, recuperate, make sure any wounds were treated if they could be, and then leave in the morning like nothing had happened. The best way to get people to overlook you sometimes was to act like nothing strange was happening.
Plus, if we were calm and relaxed, then we wouldn’t be sweating as much and getting our scents everywhere. It was a bit riskier since we weren’t putting as much distance between ourselves and Jax’s wolves, but I thought it would be worth it in the end.
For now though, we had some wounds to treat. As soon as we got into the motel room, I went back to the bathroom and began to wash my hands. Having another person’s blood on me for so long felt weird, especially since it was starting to dry and flake off. The water took forever to warm up, but I couldn’t wait, and though it was cold, I was already turning it pink from the blood that was coming off my skin.
Roman came and found me a moment later. It was only as he came in and turned the light on that I realized I hadn’t. I’d been standing in the dark washing my hands, and what I’d thought was pink was actually a deep red, like I was just bleeding directly into the sink.
“Angel,” Roman began, though he never really finished whatever he was saying, since Micah followed him into the bathroom.
“You okay, beautiful?” Micah asked once Roman had made space for him.
I nodded. “We should all get cleaned up, showered, and changed, in case we need to move. I don’t want to be caught with our pants down, figuratively or literally. We potentially alerted Jax to our general location. We should be ready to leave just in case.”
“Agreed,” Roman said, though he was watching me with concern pinching his stormy eyes.
“Do we have any first aid stuff anymore?” Micah asked.
“I don’t think so,” I said, shaking my head.
“Why don’t I go and get some ice? That way we can at least reduce some swelling and hopefully bruising,” Roman said as he snagged the stack of small towels that sat next to the sink. I thought they were supposed to be hand towels, but they were about half the size of what I was used to. I wasn’t about to touch them though, not with my hands being the way they were. I’d just get blood stains all over them and th
en Tate would be charged for replacing them, and that was the last thing I wanted, since he was already spending so much money on us.
I wondered if Roman had any ideas as to when he thought it would be safe for us to use his funds again. The man wasn’t exactly hard up, and though I hated feeling like a mooch, I knew he’d be willing to help if he could. When we’d first run, he was concerned that his old pack would track us via his credit card, so we hadn’t used it. Would they still be tracking it though? Maybe we could figure out a way around it?
At some point, we were all going to have to sit down and figure out what to do about money and where to live and all of that. I had to stop and press the pause button in my mind. I was getting ahead of myself. We couldn’t figure any of that out without my fifth mate, which was why we were here in the first place. As Roman left the room, I went back to washing my hands. This wasn’t the first time they’d had blood on them, as the guys well knew, and something told me it wouldn’t be the last either.
With that dismal thought, I turned the water off and grabbed the toilet paper. With all my scrubbing and washing, my knuckles had opened up again. I hadn’t even noticed it at the time, but I’d hit that asshole so hard and so much that the skin on my knuckles had split and I had been bleeding as well, though not as much as him.
I shudder rolled through me at the thought of the violence I’d wrought, even as a human. There was something savage that lived within all of us, and sometimes, the savage side of me got a little out of control. It wasn’t something I was proud of, but it did mean that I knew part of myself was always willing to fight to survive, no matter the situation. The only way I wouldn’t fight was if my mates’ lives depended on it.
Once my knuckles were wrapped in toilet paper, I left the bathroom, confident that I wasn’t just going to drip blood all over the place. I paused before going back and just grabbing the whole roll. I wasn’t sure if anyone else was bleeding, and if they were, we needed to mop it up, so bringing the roll of toilet paper out with me made sense. It wasn’t like we had anything else to clean up with in that moment.
I didn’t think the guys expected me to come out brandishing it and ask, “Who’s bleeding?”
“Uh, I think it was just you,” Blake said from the corner of the bed as he gently pressed on the swollen skin around his eye, which was already turning a lovely shade of purple. As I went to sit with Blake and Tate, Roman returned with some towels that were filled with ice. They each placed the ice wherever they thought they needed, and I looked them over. As I did so, I realized that they may not have been the ones bleeding, but that didn’t mean they didn’t have blood on them. Without asking, I went back into the bathroom and began wadding up bits of toilet paper, wetting it, and stacking the wet lumps together. When I came back into the room, I began using it to clean them off as much as I could. I knew they were going to shower soon, but I couldn’t just sit there and do nothing.
We were all fairly quiet as we cleaned up, while the exhaustion I felt seemed like it was pulling at my bones. The longer I sat there, trying to help the guys, the more challenging moving became, like my body didn’t want to cooperate anymore.
I must have fallen asleep though, because the next thing I knew, I was waking up. The weird thing was I didn’t even remember climbing into bed, but there I was, pulling the covers back in the dark as I tried to figure out why I was so hot. I mean, yeah, sleeping between two of my mates usually made for a toasty bedtime, but it was more snuggly than anything else. This was like I was sitting next to a fire.
As though the words had conjured the scene before me, I realized that I was sitting in front of a fire. The heat from the flames battered against my cheeks. I stared into the dimly lit area, trying to get my bearings, and I realized that it was a longhouse like the one I had slept in with Skuld. A figure on my left stirred, and I glanced over to find the woman I had seen in my dreams before standing there. As I got up, I could feel the heavy fabric of the dress that she had put me in, weighing against my skin and brushing against my legs. I moved to the end of the bed, but just as I was about to greet her, a shadowy figure moved on my right and the man that I had seen before, that Skuld claimed to be Odin, stood there with his cape and hood covering him, shadowing his face and form. The caw of ravens filled the still air, and I looked up to find his two friends sitting in the rafters watching me, their beady black eyes glistening in the light.
“Child, come and sit with us. Tell us what you’ve learned,” the woman said. If I was to believe Skuld, then this was Freya. But that seemed impossible. How could I be talking with a goddess?
“You…” I started, my tone lifting at the end and my voice sounding more like a child’s than a grown woman’s. How did you ask someone if they were a goddess?
“I told you she had met Skuld,” Freya said as she looked past me to Odin.
“Just because she’s met one of the Nornir doesn’t mean she understands what’s going on,” Odin said, tapping his staff on the ground as though he was punctuating his sentence.
“Which is precisely why I asked her to tell us what she’s learned,” Freya said, her tone almost scolding. She turned more towards me and patted the bench beside her. “Come and tell me.”
I wasn’t exactly about to deny a goddess what she was requesting, so I moved around the end of the bed and sat with her on the bench by the fire. Odin stood on the other side watching us, his lone eye glinting in the firelight beneath his hood. I couldn’t make out anything else. I almost felt like I was with a parent, and yet the man before me was judging us like he was the alpha of our pack. In a way, I supposed he was, especially if all wolf shifters were descended from the wolves in Norse mythology.
I turned toward Freya, unable to look at Odin for too long without feeling like a child in trouble, and said, “You’re right—I did meet with Skuld. She has a longhouse in the woods that’s similar to this one, only with more herbs and dried flowers. She told me that I was a descendant of yours and that’s why I’m important to Ragnarok, and that my mates are each representatives of different wolves from what we consider legends. She made it sound like I could prevent or cause Ragnarok. But that can’t be right, can it?”
She smiled beatifically as though she knew the answer but was not willing to share. “Surely she told you more than that?”
“Yes, she did,” I replied, unsure how to proceed. I sighed and continued, “Everything she said seemed so crazy and overwhelming. It’s hard to think about.”
“That’s not surprising,” said Odin, his voice seeming to come from the shadows themselves. “Your mind can only handle so much. After all, you are not a god or goddess.”
I tried not to be offended by the fact that he thought I was stupid just because I wasn’t Asgardian or of the Aesir. “So once I find my fifth mate, I’ll be able to avoid pushing the world closer to Ragnarok. I’ll be able to avoid Jax—I mean Fenrir?”
“In theory, yes,” Freya said. She paused a moment too long, and my stomach dropped. There was something she wasn’t telling me. Fortunately, I didn’t have to wait long before she made up her mind and said, “You could still mate with Fenrir. He is a force of chaos and destruction. He will eat the world if he is loosed, but you and your mates are beacons of order and hope. If your beacons are taken away, if your mates are taken from you, then you could side with Fenrir and decide to destroy the world right along with him.”
“I want nothing to do with Fenrir. I just want my mates and to have a peaceful life, for all of this craziness goes away.”
“Darling child, you will never have a peaceful life. Not with five mates.” If I didn’t know better, I’d have thought Freya was laughing at me, but she’d never belittled me like that before so I had no reason to think that was what she was trying to do now.
“You’re saying that my mates will never settle, but we’ll be fighting and struggling for the rest of our lives,” I said, trying to clarify the sentiment behind her words.
“No, not quite,”
Freya said. She glanced past me to Odin as she added, “All I mean is that living with one male is challenging enough, living with five is going to keep you on your toes.”
“If I can find my fifth mate, that is,” I mumbled.
“Of course you’ll find him. The fates have decided that you have the option of five mates or Fenrir’s scion. You’ve chosen five mates, so you will find your fifth when the fates deem it appropriate. That’s why they are the fates. They control almost everything. They see everything. Skuld being trapped in the mortal realm, in Midgard, has been challenging for us all, but that doesn’t mean that the fates are not doing what they should. They know when you will meet your fifth mate, and they know how you will meet your mate. It’s just up to you to get to that point in your life.”
“I know that Jax won’t give up. He’ll still come after us. And you said he could kill my mates and I could side with him, so how do I stop that? How do I keep order and peace and stability in the world?”
“That is up to you to decide, child,” Odin said, his voice a gruff growl from across the fire. “We chose to chain Fenrir. He was never supposed to escape, and yet his essence has descended into the shifters, into your magic, sullying it with his wicked desires. It’s up to you how you want to deal with this problem. Fenrir is now yours in the form of this Jax person. It’s up to you how you prevent him from killing your mates. How do you prevent him from forcing you to be on his side? We have no control over that. Neither do the fates.”