While the men took care of final preparations, I dressed in my ceremonial robes and waited for the ascendants to climb the volcano, much like we’d done years ago. Until, hours later, a young woman with red hair took the final steps onto the summit of Valefire, with her mates at her side.
It was time to meet the people who would save the world.
The End
Continue the Her Elemental Dragons series with Stroke The Flame and find out how Calla helps the ascendants defeat the Dragons.
http://www.elizabethbriggs.net/her-elemental-dragons/
Newsletter
http://www.elizabethbriggsbooks.com
About the Author
New York Times Bestselling Author Elizabeth Briggs writes unputdownable romance across genres with bold heroines and fearless heroes. She graduated from UCLA with a degree in Sociology and has worked for an international law firm, mentored teens in writing, and volunteered with dog rescue groups. Now she’s a full-time geek who lives in Los Angeles with her husband and a pack of fluffy dogs.
Read More From Elizabeth Briggs
http://www.elizabethbriggs.net
Her Big Bad Wolves
Margo Bond Collins
Her Big Bad Wolves
My life is turning into a werewolf joke.
Sienna Luna always knew there was something off about her family.
She didn’t know most of them were werewolves.
Not until her great-uncle’s will named her pack alpha and she was forced to come to terms with the legacy no one had bothered to prepare her for.
Luckily for Sierra, she’s also inherited The Moon Moon, the premier werewolf bar in San Francisco, and it comes staffed with a pack of werewolves eager to teach her the ropes. And more.
But in order to rule the pack, she’ll have to choose a mate before the next full moon—and there are three gorgeous werewolves ready to volunteer.
1
“Sienna, honey, what I’m trying to tell you is that you’re a werewolf.”
Oh, God.
It had finally happened. My mother had lost her ever-loving mind.
I glanced from her to Dad, trying to gauge his response. Normally, he could be counted on to provide a thinking, reasonable influence on mom’s more creative ideas. This time, though, he was going right along with her.
“You know that’s nuts, right?” I waited for their responses. None were forthcoming. They just stared at me with slightly helpless expressions, like they didn’t quite know what to do with me. Believe me, the feeling was mutual.
“We were hoping we would never have to tell you.” Dad tugged at his collar like he always did when he was nervous.
“When you never shifted, we assumed you were one of the ones who doesn’t inherit the werewolf genes from both sides of the family.” Mom reached out to hold my hand as if to comfort me. I don’t know why—she was the one who was insane. Not me.
“Wait a minute.” My brain skittered to a stop. “Are you saying that you…” My finger wavered in the air, pointing back and forth between the two of them. “You think you’re werewolves, too?”
What the hell?
“Oh no,” Mom said. “Not that. Not exactly, anyway We never took the bite.”
I dropped my hand back to the table. “Took the bite?”
“It’s all genetics.” Dad put on his professor voice, the one he used when he lectured to his literature students at the nearby community college. “The werewolf gene is recessive. Both parents have to carry it for there to be a chance for any offspring to be full werewolves.”
“And those who aren’t full werewolves?” I asked. I almost didn’t want to hear the answer—except I wanted to know exactly how far around the bend my parents had gone.
“There are two kinds of werewolves.” Mom leaned in close, her voice earnest. “Those who are born and those who are made.”
“If you’re born with the ability to shift, then you’re a werewolf, no matter what.” Dad flashed her a look that I couldn’t interpret. “But if you are not born with the shifting ability, and yet both your parents are wolves, or even carry the wolf gene, then it’s possible to be turned if a born werewolf bites you.”
“So, what you’re telling me is that the two of you believe you carry werewolf genes, but you can’t actually turn into werewolves…because you never let one bite you?”
They both nodded enthusiastically and let out deep sighs as if relieved that I understood what they were trying to tell me. I didn’t really understand—not at all—but I was determined to.
Still, I couldn’t quite say that. Not yet. “You do realize that there is a distinct lack of evidence in what you’re telling me, right?”
“I know, sweetheart.” Mom patted my hand again. “That will come later.”
“Later?”
“Because there’s more.” Dad resettled his glasses on his nose and took a deep breath. Whatever he was going to tell me, he didn’t like it at all.
And if we were just now getting to the part that he didn’t like, after all that werewolf talk, then I was certain I wasn’t going to like it, either.
“We hadn’t planned to ever tell you this.” Tears threaded through my mother’s voice.
Great. Both my parents were insane. But I had to hear them out. I needed to know exactly how psychotic they were.
“Why are you telling me this now?” Mom had insisted I come over immediately after work for a family conference. It was unusual enough that I had fretted about it all day long.
Apparently, I hadn’t been nearly worried enough.
Werewolves. Seriously?
What had set off this insanity?
My parents gave each other one of those looks—the kind that long-married couples use to communicate silently with one another.
Or, hell, for all I know, the ones that werewolves use. I stifled the giggle that threatened to escape at the thought.
Dad drew in a deep breath. “The thing is, your uncle Desmond—”
“My uncle, really,” Mom interjected, and Dad nodded as if the precise familial connection were important right this moment.
“Your great-uncle Desmond passed away a week ago.”
“Yeah, I remember you mentioning it.” It hadn’t seemed important at the time. I hadn’t ever even met the man.
“Well, it seems he’s left you something of an inheritance.”
“Me?” I frowned. “What kind of inheritance?”
“A building,” Mom said, then paused—not in an I’m-finished-talking kind of way, but more in a that’s-not-all kind of way, so I waited.
“A bar,” Dad added. “In San Francisco.”
They both stared at me expectantly, but I didn’t know what it was they expected.
“Okay.” I drew the word out slowly. “That’s nice, I guess. I can always sell it, use the money to buy a house or something.” Real estate in California was expensive. This could be a good thing, give me a chance to get my feet under me, maybe even get a little ahead. Quit paying rent to other people.
Maybe find a job I liked—something other than retail sales.
“That’s not all,” Mom interrupted my musings.
“What else?”
Again, that shared look before Dad spoke. “He left you in charge of his pack.”
“His what?”
“You’re the new Alpha of the San Franciso SoMa Werewolf Pack.”
2
Less than a week later, I stood in front of the building that represented my inheritance.
I was the proud owner of The Moon Moon.
I’d tried to look it up online, but the first fifty entries were about a werewolf joke. Moon Moon, the stupid werewolf who could never get anything right.
I owned a bar named after a werewolf joke.
My life was turning into a werewolf joke.
The Moon Moon looked like it hadn’t been painted in a solid decade. The flecks of paint clinging to the exterior didn’t look like they were going to last much
longer. I had no doubt the paint was chock-full of lead. In my new universe, that seemed like a small problem.
What the hell? Seriously.
“At least the bar is real,” I muttered to myself. I’d checked with the attorney in charge of Uncle Desmond’s estate to be sure my parents weren’t insane about that, too.
Folsom Street was famous for its leather shows during Pride, but somehow, I hadn’t expected it to be on full display in the middle of August. It was, though, and I found myself oddly pleased by that. If I had to inherit a bar in San Francisco, I really kind of preferred the idea that it be a gay bar full of men in leather than a dive that smelled like cheap beer and the perfume of sorority girls.
I’m a bit of a non-conformist.
For a moment, I wondered if “werewolf” had some alternate, subculture meaning, like “bear.”
No. That wasn’t what my parents had suggested. They clearly believed they were descended from people who could physically change into actual wolves.
And I was descended from crazy people. Obviously.
The building itself was shabby and rundown, at least on the surface. As I drew closer to it, I realized that there were recent repairs to some parts of the structure, though none of it was repainted.
Like the whole building was in disguise or something.
Oh, hell, no. Do not let yourself think that way, Sienna.
If I started thinking like that, before you knew it, I’d be talking about my ancestors, the frickin’ werewolves.
Nope. Just keep moving forward. Sell the bar, make a mint, buy a house.
Speaking of bears, the large man standing in the threshold was hairy enough to be one. He was dressed in leather shorts and a mesh shirt with leather straps. As I reached out my hand to pull the door handle, he tilted his head to look at me with narrowed eyes and shifted his weight just enough to keep me from opening the door.
“Can I help you?” he rumbled.
“Yes. I’m supposed to be taking a look around today?” I hated that the upward lilt in my voice turned it into a question. If I was going to sell this place, I needed to be self-assured enough to actually be the owner.
The Bear-Man stared at me hard for another second.
“I’m Sienna Luna,” I said as if that would clear it all up.
Bear-Man gave me a one-shoulder shrug. “We’re not open yet.”
I finally let my voice show some of the irritation I was beginning to feel. “I know you’re not open. I am the new owner. I’m here to inspect the property. Move out of my way and let me in. Now.”
Being direct with a Bear-Man. Smart.
By the end of my mini-tirade, Bear-Man’s eyes had grown wide. When he responded, he sounded almost terrified. “You’re the new alpha?”
I rolled my eyes. “Apparently so.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said, his rumbling falling to the wayside in his haste to make it up to me. “I didn’t realize you were coming today, and you don’t smell like an alpha. I mean—” He stumbled over his words.
I didn’t smell like an alpha. Great.
Apparently, he was as deluded as my parents.
“Don’t worry about it.” I waved my hand in front of my face and spoke as airily as I could possibly manage, trying not to roll my eyes.
Bear-Man didn’t even manage to introduce himself, he was so flustered. He did, however, open the door for me and usher me into the dim, cool interior.
I blinked several times to let my eyes adjust. Even for a bar, it was dark. Black shadows gathered in the corners and even after my eyes adjusted, I couldn’t really tell what might be going on back there.
“Let me show you to the alpha’s table,” Bear-Man said.
Of course, my uncle had an alpha table.
“The manager was supposed to meet me to show me around? Please tell me he’s not late. I hate tardiness.”
“He’s somewhere close by.” Bear-Man nodded. “I’ll give him a call and make sure he knows you’re here. He’s usually here by now, the last night was the full moon, and he’s not a born wolf, you know.”
Not a born wolf. That was something my parents had said, too. I wasn’t entirely certain what they meant, so I simply nodded.
“Can I get you something to drink while you wait?” he asked.
“Just a Coke, please.”
Bear-Man hustled away and brought one back quickly, then moved off, whispering urgently into his phone.
I sipped my drink and looked around my new acquisition.
I had half expected it to be filthy when I came in, but it had been scrubbed down, as far as I could tell in the semi-darkness. I tapped my blood-red fingernail against the table of the round booth where Bear-Man had seated me.
The wood looked rough—carvings of initials, curse words, and odd stick figures stood out—but it had been varnished over, so the carvings weren’t new. Just preserved.
The whole place seemed designed to look less appealing than it could be—to look as if it were falling apart when in truth, the closer I looked, the better shape everything seemed to be.
“Seth says he’ll be here in a minute.”
“Why don’t you grab a drink, too, and sit down with me.” My suggestion seemed to carry the weight of a command. Bear-Man hunched his shoulders up around his ears, as if anxious to be following my rules, but he slipped behind the bar long enough to get a drink and moved around to sit across from me, albeit as far away from me as he could get in the circular booth.
His bulk made it difficult for him to sit in such a confined space, I realized. I almost suggested moving to a table, but finally decided it would be better to keep him off-balance. He might let his guard down that way and tell me more than he might otherwise.
“Tell me a little about yourself,” I said. “How long have you worked here? How well did you know my great-uncle?”
“Well, I’ve known Desmond since I was just a pup. I mean, he’s the alpha. Was the alpha.” He ran a hand across his forehead, and I realized he was sweating. Poor guy was legitimately worried about talking to me. I felt the sudden urge to put him at ease.
“You’re not in any trouble, you know.” I tried to reassure him, but something about my statement bothered him so much it caused his eyes to roll back in his head, showing the whites at the bottom under the brown irises.
This was weird as hell.
“How long have you been working here?”
“Since I was nineteen,” he said, with the air of someone facing an interrogation that might end in torture.
“How many other employees are there?”
He frowned. “Well, everyone works shifts sometimes. We all know we need to be ready, just in case.”
Okay. Everyone was the starting place, I guessed. “How many others are there?”
“Only the adults work here, course. It wouldn’t be right to have the pups doing anything with humans—not the born ones, anyway.” His voice turned earnest. “They don’t have the natural social skills for it.”
“Or the approval of the alcohol control board licensing, I suspect.” I spoke dryly, with a half-smile, but Bear-Man—who, I realized, still had not actually told me his name—didn’t seem amused in the least.
“There are a hundred and forty-two in the pack, all told.”
Wait.
What?
I repeated the number to him. “Are you sure?”
“Of course, only about half of them are active—a lot of them moved off to other places, sometimes to join other packs, but mostly they stay affiliated with the SoMa pack—Desmond was one of the few Alphas who actually allowed that. It’s why your parents didn’t ever have to check in.”
One hundred and forty-two. There are that many people who share this weird-ass wolf delusion?
I realized that we hadn’t said the word. Might as well go ahead and try it on for size. “There are that many people in the werewolf pack of which I am now the alpha?”
Bear-Man nodded. “Yes, ma’am. One hund
red forty-two. That’s how many.”
I was still staring at Bear-Man when an odd scratching came at the back door. Bear-Man stood up and moved to open it as if there were nothing unusual about it.
When he opened the door that let out into the alley, an enormous animal trotted in as if it owned the place.
I blinked against the darkness, trying to convince myself that I wasn’t seeing what I beheld. But even the darkness couldn’t disguise this.
At first, I thought it was a giant dog.
No, that cannot be a dog.
I would have thought it was a giant dog, except for the fact that I had just been discussing werewolves with Bear-Man.
My first thought, out of any I could have had, was, “Werewolf!”
That thought faded to a kind of gibbering inside my mind when the wolf in front of me stopped, stood up on its hind legs with its front paws in the air, and with the strangest sound of cracking bones and ripping skin, flowed upwards, growing taller, until it became a man.
3
A naked man.
A tall, muscular, gorgeous naked man.
As I stared with my mouth hanging open, he gave me a little nod of greeting, and nonchalantly strolled behind the bar, where he pulled on a pair of blue jeans and a T-shirt with the bar’s logo. I snapped my teeth together as I closed my mouth.
The Moon Moon. I still can’t believe the bar is named after a joke.
I also couldn’t believe my mind was wandering in that direction—I must have been in shock after having watched the man in front of me shift from wolf to human.
Realms and Rebels: A Paranormal and Fantasy Reverse Harem Collection Page 18