My Two Wolves: A Paranormal Menage Romance (Double Desert Shifters Book 2)

by Mia Wolf

  I roared, feeling every fiber in me vibrate with my rage at these creatures, thinking they could attack me. I swiped at them, catching two of them with my long claws. They yipped, and I could smell blood as they danced away. Three more replaced them as I lashed out at them again.

  They were too much for me. Pain was overwhelming me as their teeth sunk into me. Their claws dug into me as they struggled to stay attached to my flesh. I swung my body about, trying to free myself from them, but to no avail.

  I was getting weaker. I wasn’t going to give up. Not to a bunch of Coyotes. I threw my body down in a last effort to thwart those on my back. I heard cries of pain and felt their teeth remove from my flesh. I know I crushed at least one of them. But the move was a gamble. I knew it was a gamble. With my belly exposed and low to the ground, I opened myself up for further attack. I tried to grab at another, to squeeze it as I did the first one, and use it as a shield for my vulnerable areas, but there were too many, too fast.

  They were all over me, biting, snarling, scratching.

  My strength was waning. I was losing focus … losing sight … someone was coming. I could see their outline. Wolf? Coyote? I never knew.

  Chapter 12 – Jordan

  “She’s not going to make it,” Max whispered.

  I hardly heard him. I wouldn’t let myself hear him. I couldn’t bear the idea. I watched her, struggling to breathe, her face pale, her blood soaking into the layers of towels and blankets on my bed. She had lost so much blood already by the time we got to her.

  I’d never experienced such fear in my life. Max and I heard her. We didn’t need to question what we heard. We knew it was her and no one else. We shifted right then and ran for her.

  Emily was in bad shape when we got there, nearly seven Coyotes on her, with three dead nearby. She’d put up a fight, but there were just too many of them for one of her.

  And they were angry. It wasn’t just about whatever it was that they were attacking her for. She had taken three of their own. They were in do-or-die mode, and Emily was their target. Even as we were fighting them, we needed to keep them away from her to prevent them from finishing her off.

  But something switched in me. I don’t think I’d ever fought so hard for anything or anyone in my life. An extra surge of energy took over me, an instinct as if she were my own, my cub, my …

  We nearly collapsed when we finished them off. But somehow, aside from the exhaustion, we were relatively unscathed. She was transforming back to her human self. She was alive somewhere in there, somehow conscious enough to know that she needed to transform back if we had any chance of helping her.

  But at what cost? How much of her little energy had that cost her? The fear swept over me that she wouldn’t have enough to heal herself, that she wouldn’t have enough of her own energy to bring her back from wherever she was.

  The thought that she might not come back horrified me.

  I wanted to keep a blanket from being laid over her. I wanted to watch her wounds, make sure they were healing. But Max was right. She needed warmth, all the warmth we could give her. Max put a kettle on to boil while I lit the fire in the fireplace in the living room. I should have brought her down to be next to it, but I was too afraid to move her.

  So, I watched. I watched the blue creep into her lips, the color fade from her face, wondering if this was it. Were we about to lose her?

  “I can’t stand here and watch this,” Max said, turning away from the bed. He put his hand on his forehead, his elbow out while he shook his head back and forth. His eyes darted about, uncertain as to where to settle. “There’s something we should be doing. I know there is. Jordan, what are we supposed to be doing when one of us is injured this badly?”

  I couldn’t answer him. I had no words, no thoughts. All I could focus on was watching the struggling rise and fall of her chest, listening intently for each breath to make sure it came. I was terrified that if I turned from her even for a second, that I would miss her last one, and that would be it.

  “Wounds. I should be cleaning her wounds,” he said finally, leaving the room. I strained to hear past the sound of his weight going down the wooden steps into the living room and around to the kitchen where the pot of water was boiling.

  He was right. Our focus should be on the wounds, cleaning them to ensure that once they healed, they wouldn’t get infected by trapping bacteria in them.

  If they healed.

  I took her hand in mine and pressed it to my lips. It wasn’t cold, which was a good sign. I could feel her pulse faintly beneath my fingers. I pressed the back of her hand to my cheek and felt a tear fall from the side of my eye onto her.

  Max swore somewhere in the kitchen; he’d most likely burned himself.

  “Please don’t leave us,” I begged softly. “Come back to us. We’ll leave you alone, we won’t bother you anymore, but please, just come back. Don’t leave us entirely. Live. Choose life.”

  I squeezed my eyes tightly, trying to prevent more tears from coming. I wouldn’t cry for her. Not yet. She wasn’t gone. I refused.

  “Leave?”

  Her voice was soft, weak, distant. I opened my eyes to see her face pulling together as the pain of her healing body accompanied her consciousness.

  “Oh god,” I said. “Oh, thank god you’re alive.”

  I wanted to scoop her up in my arms and hold her close to me as tightly as I could. I wanted her to feel the relief washing over me, the joy that I felt at her one word.

  But I didn’t. I resisted. I stayed as still as I could, not wanting to disturb her. She was alive.

  “What do you mean, leave?” she mustered.

  “Shhh,” I cooed. “Save your strength. Don’t try to talk.”

  “Water,” she murmured.

  “Of course. Stay here,” I said daftly. Where was she going to go in that state?

  Reluctantly, I tore myself away from the chair by the bed. I practically danced down the stairs as Max was rounding the corner with a bowl full of water and a cloth.

  “She’s awake,” I said, my voice catching in my throat with joy. “She wants water.”

  Max’s face lit up in a moment of realization before he laughed. “Water! Of course, she wants water!”

  He carefully rushed up the stairs with the bowl of cleaning water while I went for a glass.

  “No,” she was saying sternly as I returned. “I’ll clean my own wounds. You’re not seeing me naked.” She was still lying back, her eyes barely open, but with more energy to her voice than when I left. I could listen to her scold Max all day.

  “But—”

  “Max,” I warned. “leave her alone.” I offered her the glass of water, which she weakly reached for. “Here, let me help you.”

  Max angled her head up as gently as he could while I brought the glass to her lips. She drank as much as she could manage before her eyes met mine, signaling that was enough.

  “Rest up, okay?” Max told her, his hand petting her hair away from her face. “You stay here until you’re strong enough to go home. I’m going to stay on the floor downstairs, and Jordan will sleep on the couch. If you need anything, you just holler, alright?”

  Emily nodded as best as she could before her eyes closed again.

  Max stood and patted me on the shoulder as we shared a smile. She was alive.

  ***

  As daylight approached and the compound woke up, word spread of what happened to Emily. Alex was the first to let himself into my house, waking us as the door bounced against the interior wall.

  “Where is she?” he demanded, worry lacing his voice.

  “She’s alright,” I said, half-asleep. “She’s healing, but she’s upstairs in my bed. Just try to let her rest.”

  But my words fell on deaf ears. By the time I finished my sentence, he was already nearly at the top of the stairs and in my room.

  Half an hour went by before Alex reemerged and made his way slowly down the stairs. He looked exhausted with his shoul
ders and head slumping forward. He let his heavy, muscular body fall on the couch beside Max.

  “Is she still doing alright?” I asked, worried by Emily’s brother’s body language.

  Alex rubbed at his face. “She’s fine. I can’t thank you guys enough for being out there when you were. I nearly lost her once. I don’t think I could go through that again.”

  “When was that?” Max asked.

  “She didn’t tell you about that?” Alex said. He turned his head and glanced toward the door at the top of the stairs that he had left ajar. He lowered his voice. “When we were younger, she and I went out on a run. We thought we’d try hunting on our own, without our parents. We found a bunch of sheep along some of the hills north of here. Well, Emily went chasing after a sheep and got lost. To this day, she doesn’t know how she did it, but after looking for her for hours, I had to come back to the pack and tell them what happened. We looked for her for days before we finally found her.” Alex paused, clearing his throat and taking a few breaths before continuing. “When we did find her, she was nearly dead. She’d hardly had any water at all the whole time she was out there.”

  Max clapped a comforting hand on Alex’s back as he cleared his throat again.

  “I’m alright,” Alex said softly.

  “Is that why she’s obsessed with water?” I asked.

  “Noticed that, did you?” Her brother smiled. “Yeah. After that, she developed a weird fixation on it. The pack is lucky that she does. Our water system was a mess before that. I don’t know if you remember.”

  I shook my head. I didn’t remember much of the important stuff about how the pack was run when Max and I were cubs. We were too caught up in learning about how things worked rather than the practical things that the Alphas needed to worry about.

  “Do you know any more about that pack of Coyotes?” Max asked.

  I had been wondering about that too, though I wondered if it was best that we didn’t know, seeing how angry we were.

  Alex leaned back on the couch, rubbing his chin. “No, not yet. River and Aaron were tracking them, but the trail went cold. They got the slip on us. But I assure you, we’re going to find them.”

  “Do you think it was them who destroyed the solar panels?” I asked.

  “It could be. It would make more sense than wild animals doing it,” Alex agreed.

  From the corner of my eye, I could see Max’s hand on his knee tighten into a fist. It wasn’t just Emily they were attacking. It was the pack. Messing with the panels had led to a massive expense, which, thankfully, Emily was up to figuring out. But had we not had the money, the winter would have been more difficult for us to handle.

  “Well,” Alex said, putting both his big hands on his knees. “I’d better get off. I’ll be back later today to check on her.” He offered us each his hand to shake. “Thank you again for saving her. I am personally in your debt.”

  Throughout the day, visitors came to check in with Emily. Andrea was in and out the most, alongside Alex, Lewis, and Sandra. The parents of the cubs she worked with came to give her food, clothing, whatever they could spare for her. Some of it made little sense, but it was something they could do to show they were thinking of her. Duncan and Terrence, the only two Dragons in the compound and the only two shifters here who for some reason had lost their ability to shift, brought firewood for the stove and fireplace. I always forgot how big they were. While they were no taller or stronger than Max or me, they carried a presence with them that filled the room. It must have been the Dragon in them.

  In little groups, the cubs arrived with their crafted get-well cards for Emily, leaving them with us to give her. Even the Elders, one by one, made an appearance at the bedside.

  Andrea returned with Sandra for a final evening visit, bringing plates of food for the three of us.

  “I know she won’t want to eat much,” Sandra said. “But she’ll need her strength. When Alex and Lewis were healing after their fight with Denis and Victor, they ate twice the amount they usually do. The delivery guy thought we were prank calling them when I put in the order.”

  “We’ll make sure she eats,” Max said.

  “You guys need to eat too,” Andrea said, pointing a warning finger at both of us. “You’ve been through a lot yourselves. I know you’re worried, but eat anyway.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  The girls left the cabin, and we reveled in the moment of stillness. Almost the whole of the Moonstone pack had been through my cabin during the day, and I needed just a moment to take in the peace.

  “We should check on her,” Max said softly after a few minutes.

  “Let’s give her a few more minutes of peace before we do,” I suggested. “I think she’ll need the quiet more than us.”

  We busied ourselves, putting the food away and discussing quietly what we thought should happen next, trying to take our time, relax, and give Emily at least an hour to herself.

  I made a pot of tea and brought it with us when we decided we couldn’t wait any longer to check on her.

  I knocked softly on the door and opened it, peeking my head in to see if she was awake. Emily looked so much better now, from what I could tell of the soft glow of the two lanterns in my room. She still looked tired, but no more tired than she did the morning after … well, in San Francisco. She was at least sitting up now, ready to face the day, even though it had faded into evening.

  “We brought you some tea,” I said quietly, still testing the waters. “Can we come in?”

  She yawned and nodded. She had one of my shirts on to cover her nakedness. Andrea had brought her some of her own clothes for when she was strong enough to get out of bed, but she hadn’t yet changed into them. I liked the look of her in my shirt. She looked at home, comfortable. A moment of feeling like I was bringing her breakfast in bed on her birthday flashed into my mind, and for just a second, I felt hopeful toward the future.

  “How are you feeling?” Max asked.

  “Better,” Emily answered. Her voice was more like her own, stronger, and as though she could direct the cubs at the water station from my bed. I liked that idea. “I’m tired. There were a lot of people in this room today.”

  “You’re a popular girl,” Max laughed. “We couldn’t keep them out!”

  She smirked. I handed her the cup with the tea poured in for her, then set the pot down on the bedside table and took the chair next to it. Max sat on the bed beside her.

  “Emily,” I said, trying to sound as if I knew exactly what was going to come next. But I didn’t. I had no idea how to start. Max and I had discussed it just before we came upstairs, and I had been so sure about what needed to be said, how it needed to be said. But now that I was sitting in the situation, I didn’t know that I could.

  “Emily,” I repeated. “We really need to talk to you.”

  I prepared myself for the backlash. We had expected for her to be resistant, to be told to piss off. But she didn’t. Instead, she lowered her cup, cradling it in both hands and looked back and forth between us, expectantly.

  “Andrea told us why you don’t want anything to do with us,” Max said. “She said that you feel like we’ve betrayed our friendship and made ourselves out to be something that we’re not.”

  I watched as Emily lowered her eyes, concealing them with her eyelashes. Her thumb moved along the handle of the cup, and I wanted to know desperately what was going through her mind as Max spoke.

  “We know how we seem to you,” I went on. “At least, I think we do. But we really want you to know that who we were when we were in college—that isn’t us. Not anymore, anyway.”

  “We were so bummed after we failed to find our mate during the competition that we just wanted this trip to be like old times.”

  “And before you ask,” I said hurriedly, “you were not a reenactment of that. That night we all spent together, that just happened. We never intended to sleep with you.”

  “Something changed in us, Emily,” M
ax said. “You changed us. Whatever ideas we had going into the trip completely changed that night when we went to dinner.”

  Emily continued to look down at her tea, but I caught the glint of a falling tear in the light of the lantern. I could hear the slight change in her breathing as she tried to conceal her weeping. What I couldn’t discern was the emotion behind her tears.

  “After that night, all we wanted was you,” Max went on. “We went to the club, trying to get our minds off you, and we just couldn’t. You are it for us. You are our everything.”

  I reached over and put my hand on her wrist that was now trembling with her sobs.

  “Emily,” I said softly. “We believe that we found our mate in San Francisco. You are our mate.”

  Chapter 13 – Emily

  My eyes shot up to meet Jordan’s.

  He’d said it. He had said the very word that had been rattling in my head and that I had tried so desperately to ignore. I couldn’t let it be, wouldn’t let the idea permeate my brain that they were my mates. It was just an ill-guided hope.

  Except—except now he’d said it. That meant they felt it too.

  I searched both of their faces in the fading light in the room, the dim orange glow of the oil lamp on the bedside and the dresser casting shadows across their faces. I couldn’t tell if they were genuine. Andrea had said they seemed it when she spoke to them, but was that enough to judge their earnest now?

  “You can’t just throw that word around,” I said finally, trying to keep the emotion out of my voice, trying to sound indifferent. “That is too strong of a word for someone you just had a one-night stand with.”

  “We’re not flinging anything around,” Jordan said. His hand was warm on my wrist, and it felt riveting to have him touching me. I hated myself for enjoying the feeling of his skin on mine, after spending the last couple of weeks trying so hard to forget them. “Emily, we love you. Truly. We will do whatever it takes to show you that we’ve changed, that we aren’t frat boys from college.”