by Roxy Mews
“She is the reason your mother was killed. You would abandon your Family, for a mere mongrel?”
Yeah, that was a great thing to say in front of a bunch of battle-called werewolves. The outcry and momentum that built behind me was intense.
“The mongrels can show them how a battle is won!”
“Mongrel my ass!”
My father silenced the crowd behind him with a growl and a low bark. Then he addressed the Matheo. Talk about a hell of a way for the in-laws to meet.
“You come to my den and insult my Pack. Are you just stupid, or are you trying to start a war? Our deal was offered and accepted. The wolf’s life for your son’s. We both agreed no further retribution would befall our children. You coming forward to take my daughter’s life—the life of the Alpha’s child—it is you who bring this upon yourself and your Family. She is no longer a member of this Pack.”
The vampires seemed a bit surprised by this tidbit. I saw a few change their attack stance and look at the Matheo. Good. Doubt was good.
“Your son has declared his intent, and he has formed another Pack. He is already an Alpha. We may not be Pack, but wolves help their own, and I still lay claim to my side of the treaty. War against my daughter is war against my Pack.”
The wolves stood taller. Daddy should have been a lawyer. He was making one hell of a compelling argument, and both sides were taking notice.
The Matheo turned to his Family. He needed to do some serious damage control to get the bloodthirst back up to where it had been. I wasn’t sure he could. “I know you are confused. This is not as black and white as it seems. We all know our Protectors are valuable and essential to us as a Family. To have my son, a hybrid, leave, how do we know the miasma would find another host? What if it can’t detach from him? We don’t know. All we know is that it has worked as it is. Jacob Meyers…” He toned it down. I wasn’t gullible enough to buy the change in tactic. “You choose to stay with this Family and let us remove this troublesome mate for you, or you choose to start a war. Look at yourself.” Without meaning to, all of us did just that. Jake continued to decline.
The fur began sprouting from his hands again. I could feel Jake’s wolf. He was crying out to defend his mate. Too bad the vampire was trying to take control to do the same.
”You can’t embrace both sides of yourself.” Scorn laced his words. “It’s too much magic for one man.” The Matheo was back in his showman form. He fought to regain the sway of the vampires behind him. “Look at him! He’s falling apart! There’s no time. We take him back.”
Daddy wasn’t the only one who was one hell of a speaker. The vampires didn’t want to think that their leader would lead them astray. They didn’t want to think about what they were doing any other way than as reclaiming what was rightfully theirs. My death, Jake’s head—it didn’t really matter. They rode the wave of battle forward.
Chapter Nineteen
We stood between two impending waves. The tides of strength rising from both sides would obliterate us all. Wolves and Vamps? Oh, hell, this was going to be bloody, and getting blood and skin bits out of clothes was not the way I wanted to spend my honeymoon. If my honey and I ever got a chance for another moon.
Then it came to me. Someone needed to take action. Now. So I did what any good mate would do. I bit my husband. I jumped on his back and sank my teeth into his neck.
I am no vampire. It wasn’t neat and tidy. I slurped at his throat and tried to catch as much of his blood as I could. I drank from him like a cub on her momma’s teat. His blood was warm and salty, but it was more than a taste. I could feel his power pulsing into my body. My insides were filling up. Like a water balloon being stretched to its limit, I was getting too full.
Was this how Jake felt? I didn’t know what was going on, but my mate did. He grabbed one of the arms I had wrapped around his chest and took it to his mouth. His fangs had come out. I couldn’t see them, but I sure as hell felt them as he tore my arm open.
The relief was immediate and dizzying. I felt what I used to be flooding from my body, and the last bit of human began to trickle with it. My heart rate raced and then I let it all go. That last human weakness began to wane. It was working. My pulse began to slow, because there wasn’t any blood left to push through my body.
“Keep drinking.” Jake’s words traveled through what seemed to be ten layers of cotton that had somehow jammed my ears.
His blood began to taste better and better. It wasn’t a drug I was consuming anymore. It tasted like fine wine. He was better than that. Better than chocolate even, because each bit I took in carried a little bit of my mate. My brain began to process the world in a way I never knew existed. I sensed the blood in my body, not as a pulse or flow, but I swear if I took the time, I could count each individual blood cell. There went about fifteen bajillion or so.
Like it or not, my body was changing, but it wasn’t a happy buzz. I was overdosing on all the new sensations. I felt like I was floating. Then my arms and legs grew heavy and started to slip off Jake. He tried to hold on with a punishing grip, but it wasn’t enough to stop me from falling. Not that it mattered. I couldn’t even feel the ground as I fell.
My heartbeat picked up the pace. The poor organ was trying desperately to grab more blood to push through my veins—too bad there wasn’t enough left to fill me up. Every beat was important, because it was all I could feel at this point.
It skipped one beat.
Then two.
As my heart stopped—and I knew that was what it was doing—I watched with an indifference I couldn’t explain. I was either dying or being reborn in a new life.
Neither scared me.
It was inevitable. I just was waiting for it to play out.
The blackness came then. Wake up or die, either way, this Amber was over. I told her goodbye as I lost consciousness.
Chapter Twenty
How long had the blackness lasted? The world wasn’t quite back up and running on full power for me yet. Hazy. Broken. Sounds filtered into the space around me, but I couldn’t grab them close enough to make my brain process them. Nothing about the sounds felt real. But the blood that I couldn’t stop drinking, the sweet taste that filled my whole world right then, that was real.
I focused on the blood. It wasn’t Jake’s. Should I want blood that wasn’t Jake’s?
I couldn’t think about that. Instinct was driving me. There was no room in my head for thoughts of propriety and right. Only need.
All of a sudden the blood changed. I knew that if I took more, I’d kill her.
I was drinking from a girl?
I unlatched from the warm, soft flesh and licked my lips. I’d had enough. I went to take a breath, but realized I didn’t need to.
I could—my lungs were still there and still worked to sense the world around me—but breathing wasn’t necessary. How strange to not need the air. I pushed my blood through my veins. It was a physical movement. I could feel the magic too. The same magic that had healed me as a wolf now was mine to push wherever I wanted.
Forcing the blood over my arms made my skin began to tingle. Wow. My skin was different. Instead of just sitting on top of my muscles and bones like it did before, it was like an armor that held my body together. My skin was heavier, stronger. I was stronger all the way around.
But if I was so much stronger, why couldn’t I make myself get up? I tried to open my eyes, but there was just too much. The light was brighter. I wished someone would turn it off.
“Let’s go get Jake, she’s coming around.” Shelly was the one who spoke, but there were more than one set of footsteps that walked away from me.
Well, at least Jake was alive. So was Shelly, since it had been her voice I heard. Who else had made it? Did our dads kill each other? I wished I hadn’t lost consciousness.
At least I wasn’t on the pavement anymore. Blacktop wasn’t as soft as the pillow beneath my head.
“You are so on my shit list for this one.” That was
Mary’s voice.
My eyes flew open, harsh lighting be damned. Mary jumped back from me. She was holding a towel to her arm. Had I been feeding from Mary? My human friend Mary. My friend who was supposed to be under Craig’s protection.
I was killing Craig. I sat up so I could get started on that as soon as I figured out how to make my legs work. I was still a bit dizzy.
We were on a giant bed. Mary started crawling toward me, staring at my eyes.
“What?” I didn’t like the way the girl was looking at me. I know I had been gnawing on her arm, but she didn’t have to look at me like a museum exhibit.
“Your eyes are so cool. How did that happen? Is my blood magical, too? And you so suck for not filling me in on this whole fairytale creatures crap, by the way. Jake said I’m a witch. How freaking cool is that? Now we can be supernatural besties!”
“Er…what’s wrong with my eyes?”
“Amber.” It was Jake.
My head whipped to the left. He stood in the doorway. There was light from the hallway pouring over his shoulders. He looked like an angel, and I ran to him because I couldn’t wait another second to wrap my arms around him. He was alive, and he felt good. He felt better when his lips possessed mine.
He sizzled against me. The sparks were palpable. Best part about the new me so far? I didn’t need to breathe. Neither did he.
Our tongues entwined and danced. His hands tangled in my hair, and he held me so tight, I knew he was never going to let me go. My mate was with me. I was alive. I never knew I was missing something in my life, until the nanosecond before I was in his arms. This was where I was supposed to be. I didn’t need my old Pack anymore. I didn’t need the old cabin. I didn’t need my old room in the apartment building. I needed Jake.
He didn’t back off as I pressed my body against his. This was my mate all wrapped up in a hybrid package I didn’t even know existed until a few days ago. Maybe longer. I still wasn’t sure how long I was asleep.
“That is the coolest color wash I have ever seen.” Mary’s words filtered through the lust that was starting to take over my body. I kept kissing Jake.
“Color wash?” Leave it to Craig to ask questions. He needed to be quiet. I was kissing my mate. Or better yet, they could both leave, and I could really celebrate the fact that both Jake and I were alive.
But Craig and Mary stayed in the room with us. Craig said something about auras.
I didn’t care. I had my hands tangled in Jake’s shirt. The fabric gave at my nails, and I was ready to just finish the job and rip it from his body. Shirtless Jake. Yummy. But before the fabric could give, and my mind completely left me, I got a cold wash of libido drain as I heard Daddy and Doc enter the room, making enough noise to help me realize I didn’t want to embarrass myself by taking my mate in front of them.
“Oh my gods, we get it. You’re mated. She’s alive. Blah, Blah, Blah. Now can we get to the relevant part?” Leave it to Vampire Barbie to pull me the rest of the way out of my happy moment. I glared at her. “You know, the part about the rest of us and the crap you’ve left us to clean up. And holy hell, what happened to your eyes?”
“Okay. Somebody get me to a damn mirror. What is wrong with my eyes?”
“It’s called heterochromia.” Craig said. “It’s a mutation of the iris that—”
“Why is he calling my eyes ‘mutant’, Jake? Did I grow another one?”
Jake laughed. I would save amusement for when I saw what they were talking about myself. “Your eyes are stunning, baby. Come on. The bathroom is in here.”
I whipped my body into the small room to the right and realized we were in a hotel. There were little bottles labeled shampoo, conditioner and lotion neatly stacked on a fancy folded towel. But that wasn’t what held my attention. My eyes had been brown when I was human. They had lightened to a hazel color that flashed to gold when I became a wolf. Now I had eyes that a goth kid might buy fancy contacts to achieve.
Inside my new vamp-gray—the same silver as Jake’s—was a starburst of gold. It looked like my eyes had exploded with color.
Jake’s face appeared over my shoulder. His eyes had stayed gray.
“Are they supposed to look like that?” I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to blend into the human scene as easily as I had before. Not without some serious colored contacts anyway.
“You are the first of your kind. It appears you are going to make your own rules in every aspect, even with your eye color.” I wrapped one arm over his shoulders to hold him there and my other around his middle. His arms had already found their way around my waist.
I closed my freaky new eyes and rested against him. His arms were so solid, and he sniffed against my hair.
“I have so many questions, but I have a feeling nobody has any answers. It’s a little unnerving.”
“But you are here. You are with me.” He kissed my head. “I thought I lost you. I thought I was watching you die. Your skin sunk in. It was losing color. It was like you were just disintegrating before my eyes. I thought that you might cease to be by my own blood…”
“Shhh. It’s over.” I wiggled around in his grip and just held him. I could feel the bond between us, and I fed my strength through it. I’d fed on Mary, and gotten a bit too much rest for my taste. I could send some power his way.
“I am not the one who needs strength, Amber. You keep every bit of that. We will work on expending it in a much more pleasurable fashion when it is a bit safer.”
Safer? Suddenly, my eyes weren’t the most pressing matter. I realized there was a lot that I needed to know. When I passed out, vampires and werewolves were about to kill each other.
“Jake, what do you mean safer? And we’re…where the hell are we? And what the hell happened? When I went down…oh gods. How many are dead?” I looked around the room, and no one really seemed to want to jump into storytelling mode.
Mary sat me down on a brown microsuede sofa that was in the entry of the suite we were in. I was glad that I was sitting. I was surrounded by the people I loved—which made the story of how my almost death had stopped the war slightly easier to hear.
Mary stayed on the couch with me, holding one of my hands. Her blue eyes were wide and terrified as she listened. I don’t know how much she understood or believed, but she was taking it all in.
Daddy sat perched on the low dresser in front of the TV. Doc was a few feet away—never relaxing his stance—with his arms folded across his chest. Shelly was between them perched on the same dresser with her legs tucked up and resting her cheek to her knees. She didn’t look scared, or excited or mad. Her face was blank. Even if she’d stood behind the Matheo, I was glad to have her here.
I was even more glad when Daddy told me she was the reason I woke up at all. He smiled at her when he told me that. I would have told her thanks as well, but my brain was a bit overloaded with the descriptions of my eroding body.
Apparently, after my little bloodsucker stunt, the epic battle kind of fizzled, because the Matheo had a lot more trouble convincing his people that we were going to sell their secrets to my Pack. Shelly had been the one to break through the lines. She had been the one to give me her blood. I wasn’t sure how to take that. I wondered if this connected us in ways I didn’t know yet.
Vampire Barbie didn’t bother to comfort me. She just told me a story. Whether she did it for my benefit or her own, I don’t know that I will ever know, but I was grateful for the emotional space. She had convinced Craig to bring in Mary. I wanted to ask if she had compelled him with more than words, but it didn’t seem to matter.
The Matheo had tried a few more times to rile the troops up, but when his own daughter crossed the lines as well, he must have realized he needed to regroup. Shelly had stayed.
“So did the miasma split?” Now that my brain was rolling into full reboot, I took notice of the fact that Jake was a lot less about to explode. “When I turned, you were claiming leadership of my vampire half to make it split. Did it wo
rk?”
“Unfortunately.” Shelly was so succinct with her words.
“It worked,” Jake turned to look at his sister. “Shelly received the miasma for the Meyers Family. She’s their new Protector.”
“And on that note, I have to get back, before I am also accused of thievery. I like my head attached to my shoulders.” She hopped down from her perch. “I’ll be in touch. With everyone.”
Daddy stood in front of her to block her from leaving. “You know I am in debt to you for saving my daughter’s life.”
“Don’t make promises you can’t keep, Alpha.” Shelly pushed him aside. Her next words were for me. “This isn’t over. Whatever set this change in motion isn’t done. Now that you’re caught up with where we stand, those of us staying in town need to be getting home.”
“Who’s leaving?”
Daddy came and knelt in front of me. His brows danced, which meant a major revelation was on its way, and it wasn’t one he was happy about. “You’re leaving. This area isn’t safe for you right now. This whole scene rattled a lot of people. As much as I am trying to keep this in our Pack, the word about what happened is spreading. Other Packs won’t be thrilled that ours almost started a battle between species.”
Doc put a hand on Daddy’s shoulder. “We had quite a few people leave the Pack, Amber. Your father can’t control someone who’s not under his authority, and not everyone agrees with what happened. Purists are everywhere.”
Purists felt that integrating with other species—be it humans, vampires, or any other supernatural beings—was against our nature. Being that I had voluntarily become a hybrid and prompted an inter-species battle, I would not be their nomination for wolf of the year.
“Our Pack will survive, sweetie, but we have been spreading word that you are no longer here. According to your father’s word at the Council, you’re heading east. That’s what everyone took away from that meeting.” Doc turned to Jake. “You do with that what you will.”