by Erika Masten
Kendra rubbed her forehead, scrubbing at her skin. “They’ll find the trust on the apartment lease, but the holding company….,” she murmured to herself. Mentally, she was running through the string of businesses, non-profits, charities, and trusts that comprised the cover for Clan Nacey and their actual location. Knowing she was compromised came second to worrying for the clan, for Mama and Sage and her cousins and friends. Hell, she was good as dead to her people anyway, as soon as they realized she had run. “I don’t think the sheriffs can get through all our protections, and surely not in time.”
“In time for what?” Martin—that what the blond shifter had called the wolf—asked.
“The gathering of clans. Bradley—uh.” Kendra rolled her eyes. “The clan matriarch’s grandson has been working forever and a day to get what few of the clans we can to agree to a conclave to talk alliances against outside threats—the government, rogue packs, whatever. The wolves and cougars and some of the other psychic clans will be there. It’s happening in a few days out in the woods back in… back near where I grew up. My clan is half-crazed getting everything ready, which is why this is the only time I could….”
Shit, why don’t you tell them everything, Kendra?
Again, the shifters exchanged a somber glance, thinking Lord knew what about all this trouble and everything Kendra was telling them and about the woman herself. She was losing her good sense like she was losing control of the Tallan. Before she could spill out the answers to any more questions they hadn’t even had a reason to ask yet, Kendra pointed to a dirt road snaking through the trees off to the left. “There, I know where that leads. No tourists right now. That will get us off the highway and give us a quiet place to think.”
Us. Who the hell is us, Kendra? You stop that, girl. Remember this mate stuff is bullshit, ‘less you want to end up like your mama. Heartbroken and browbeaten, that was, ‘mated’ to a manipulative man using her to gain position in the clan. Didn’t that sound just like Kendra’s future with Bradley Wilbanks? She knew enough not to trust a Nacey male who took his father’s last name instead of his mother’s; those were the ones who deep down resented the fact that the Tallan power ran stronger in the women of their clan and granted matriarchs preeminence in leading the council.
More important at that moment, though, than how many different ways Kendra could scold herself was keeping any of them from getting caught. Up the bumpy road, with the metal beast groaning and squealing like a pissed off hog, they steered themselves away from the traffic and attention. It was a good ways back in the forested hills, maybe twelve or fifteen miles or more. The campsite was closed, attested to by the number of chains across the road the shifters either drove through or stopped to bodily rend from their posts. Kendra tried not to get all hot and bothered watching Martin and Rory—that was the horse shifter—tensing and flexing and straining those muscles, getting all sweaty, but that wasn’t working for her at all. It just made her think how nice it would be to get them into the lake with her to wash all the sweat off before getting them sweaty all over again in other ways.
Damn those dreams. And her libido. And damned if there wasn’t a lake when they did finally get to the campsite, but that was the Upcountry region for you. The tourists came for the fishing and sailing and waterskiing in the natural and manmade waterways all through Oconee and the neighboring counties. Locals like Kendra and her kin were partial to the waterfalls and meadow creeks only found far from known trails.
Still, it was stunning, Kendra thought as Rory helped her slide out of the truck. She pretended to want to stretch her legs walking around the abandoned campground, but that was purely secondary to wanting to put a few feet between her and that gorgeous, hulking body. It didn’t help that she suddenly had a paradise to herself and two shifters who looked like Chippendales Does True Blood. Rock circle campfires, wildflower meadows, wood cabins with screened-off porches, and that lake.
With her life falling to bits in the background along with her mind. And the deterioration of her powers getting worse. She’d never done anything like throwing a man through a window and couldn’t have done it again if she’d tried. That wasn’t the way the Tallan powers worked. But it was the way they went wild, when an unmated psychic was fixing to get put down for breaking the mating laws, for everyone’s safety.
“Do you need to get word to your clan that you’re safe and hold up here?” Rory asked. Kendra jumped at his sudden presence just behind her as she stared off at the blue sheet of water, darker blue than the sky and ringed with emerald green shallows that most people associated with more tropical locales.
“No,” Kendra said, her throat and voice rough with emotion.
Rory didn’t immediately respond, just stepped up from behind the woman and stood there quietly and close, with his arm lightly brushing hers whenever one of them breathed deep. Much as she didn’t need to be thinking about it, it occurred to Kendra that the horse shifter smelled different than the wolf. Both men were beasts, forces of nature, and smelled of living green things, but for Rory it was spring pasture instead of forest loam. Peace and contentment instead of sex and danger and excitement. Which wasn’t to say that Kendra wouldn’t have jumped the stallion’s bones had circumstances been different. It hadn’t been lost upon the woman that her thicker lines and fuller curves appealed to the men. In her experience, shifters tended to like their females plump, and thank the Lord for small favors. Glancing up and up at Rory Galloway, Kendra thought, maybe not so small.
“It’s a tight spot to be in, running away from people you love,” Rory told her in a murmur warm with reassurance and intimacy. When Kendra gaped, the gorgeous blond shifter dipped his head a little bit and smiled. “Some of my kind, the ones with… with something in the blood, have a sense about them, too. Extra senses, like you. I don’t need to use any of that to know you’re on the run, though.”
No wonder, Kendra thought. No wonder she felt such a strange sense of connection to the shifters, when so much of a person’s natural defense just did not come into play. No long coffee dates, intimate dinners, lingering conversations getting past the slow degrees by which people revealed themselves to another. Kendra started to think how sad it was not to have that tantalizing build-up, until she remembered she hadn’t felt anything even a little like that with anyone since her teenaged crushes. Was this how it had been with Mama when she first met Papa, her one true mate?
“Takes one to know one, of course,” Rory muttered, face half turned from her. His smile dimmed, still there but diminished, saddened. “Wanna know a secret? I’m not where I’m supposed to be, either. MIA from my herd back in California.”
“Why?” Kendra asked, and it was the first moment she felt the stir of conflicting desires welling instead the horse shifter.
He was voicing only part of what he was feeling when he said, “I’m following my instincts. That’s what a psychopomp is supposed to do, right? And they said, ‘Go east, young man,’ and so here I am, picking up stray wolves along the way.”
Before Kendra could ask about the unfamiliar term, one she felt she might have heard before in her counseling grad program, Martin walked up on them from her other side.
“I scouted the area—.”
“Knew you would,” Rory quipped in interruption, earning an appropriately snarly grimace from the rugged werewolf. “That’s why I stayed here, to guard the womenfolk.”
Kendra snickered before she could help herself. “The womenfolk? Ha!”
It was the clan womenfolk that people in these parts needed to be protected from, historically, anyway. Tallan psychics were the Upcountry alternative to witches, backwoods healers, and hexers that people sought out in the middle of the night for love spells and card readings. No props or theatrics, just results, assuming the psychic would even admit to having something of the Otherworld about her. The Hennessey women had been instrumental in driving traditional witches out of the Upcountry, so Kendra and her relatives never tipped their hands
to leading questions from hopeful humans seeking folk remedies or hexes.
“The camp looked safe enough,” Rory said. Then he nodded toward the nearest cabin, the one with the best view of the lake. “We can rest here until the road clears and maybe head out once it’s dark. Might even be a good idea to spend a whole day and wait until tomorrow night.”
“No way in hell,” Martin told him flatly, and it seemed to Kendra that the wolf shifter was deliberately not looking at or addressing her when he spoke. “We cannot let the trail go cold on that cell. You know what they’re carrying. Weapons like that? Do you know what an Agency hunter could do to my pack with that cache?”
“Same thing they could do to mine, Falk.”
The wolf took a menacing step toward his friend as Kendra took a step back, wondering if friend was the right term to be thinking. “Except I care what happens to my brothers.”
“Right, just not what happens to yourself,” Rory was quick to snipe, the first instance of impatience Kendra had felt from the even-keeled horse shifter. “We both have people waiting for us and counting on us and whole lives to get back to, yes, I remember perfectly fine, thanks.”
But it was an important thing for Kendra to think on, the fact that these men hadn’t just emerged from her dreams with no past and no lives of their own. While she was wrestling with the idea that maybe they were her mates and maybe they weren’t and maybe she didn’t want to get mated and have someone with that kind of power over her, maybe they had concerns far beyond one chubby little psychic girl they hadn’t even met until today.
CHAPTER FOUR
Every minute Martin Falk stood on the screened porch of the cabin, his spine iron-rod-straight and shoulders drawn back tense and ready, was painful effort. Effort not to race across the darkened campground to the rusted out truck and aim it back toward the highway and his duty—Rory Galloway and Kendra Hennessey be damned. Effort not to break every wooden plank and pane of glass in the empty lodge. Effort not to shift to his wolf form, his beast, and let his oath of service and the wilding finally take him. Finally.
If the horse hadn’t interfered in the Tucson desert after Martin’s fight with that random fucking lone wolf varg, hadn’t used that unnatural fucking power of his to drag the Odin’s Wolf back from the brink of wilding, Falk would have been at peace by now. For the first time in his life.
It was a passing thought, passing weakness, and Martin sighed out wearily. The Madera Valley Pack’s alpha, Ron, was halfway across the world risking his life to exchange intel with the Highland Wolves. And their second-in-command was spending half his time building alliances with the cat shifters of the Panthera and the rest of the time keeping himself from killing them. Martin had his duty, his purpose, his own price to pay as a wolf warrior of the All-Father.
“Dáinsleif is still out there,” he muttered to himself. “You’re not done ‘til it’s out of Agency hands and back with the Wolves of Odin.” He was either going to die or wild doing it, but….
A creak from the floorboard just behind Falk made the werewolf tense, and he whirled on Kendra Hennessey to find her far closer than he should have let her get to him undetected. Unnerving little witch of a woman, a psychic. As Martin stared directly down into that annoyingly delicate chubby kitten face, the werewolf growling under his breath all the while, he couldn’t help thinking of Odin’s weakness for the goddess Freya and her magic. Falk had never quite understood that kind of influence, or even stopped to contemplate it until recently. Until he saw his closest pack brother ready to die for a wolfkin girl who had barely learned to shift and who’d been working for the Agency, to boot. But now, staring down Kendra Hennessey as the woman lingered there with bare shoulders peeking from the blanket Rory had given her to sleep with, wrapped around her lusciously full body….
Martin couldn’t quit looking at the woman’s plump lips, moonlight shifting over her face, as she spoke. “What is Dáinsleif?” she asked in a low, soft voice that caressed his face and sent a chill up his stiffened back.
“It’s a sword. An ancient Norse blade. Mythic, most people would say, but they don’t know things like that and people like us actually exist. This sword…. When it cuts, the wounds don’t heal, not even for shifters.” And why was he explaining that to her? Come morning, the shifters were finding somewhere to dump Kendra off and getting back to their hunt for the hunters. Fuck Rory if the werehorse wouldn’t agree; Martin had started out tracking this Agency cell alone, and he’d just as soon go on without the stallion shifter.
The stab of subtle pain Martin felt at even thinking this, the penalty for a True man lying to himself, was more annoying for what it was trying to make him face. An Odin’s Wolf couldn’t just walk away from the kind of debt he owed to someone who had saved his life. Part of Falk didn’t really even want to.
Galloway melted forward out of the gloom of the bare cabin as though he’d heard Martin thinking about him, and maybe he had. Fucking psychic horse shifter. Now there were two of them reading the wolf’s mind when the werewolf himself would have been happy to be free of human thought.
From just behind the girl, Rory settled his fingers lightly on Kendra’s shoulders, making her tremble as he said, “I was following my instincts east when I met up with Martin in Arizona. I had assumed his mission to retrieve the weapons cache from the Agency hunters transporting it was related to what I was feeling. But now….” Galloway dipped his head forward to brush his lips against the curve of Kendra’s shoulder, his thumb hooking one lacy bra strap and dragging it down her arm. “Now I’m thinking it’s just as likely I’ve been following the trail bringing us both to you.”
For a long moment, Martin himself couldn’t breathe or move, as Rory kissed his way up the side of Kendra’s neck to whisper in her ear. “My mother raised us on stories of horse goddesses and fey mares, Epona, Rhiannon, but I’d never seen a real goddess… until now.”
That was Rory Galloway, all right, a lover when Martin was a fighter, and Kendra swooned for it. As she sank slowly back to rest her weight on the horse shifter, Martin’s restlessness swelled until his wolf was ready to burst through his skin. How could he be so hungry for a woman when his mind should have been on his duty? When he knew the human days remaining to him were so few? Perhaps that was part of the intense need Martin felt, the undeniable magnetic pull toward the psychic. The pleasures of human sex would soon mean nothing to him—once the wolf had devoured the man.
Falk’s beast was just as eager as the man was, though, as Martin reached out to grasp Kendra’s broad, heart-shaped face. He wasn’t as gentle as the horse would have been, and she gasped. But not in pain or fear. The werewolf smelled her arousal emanating from her, felt it bone and balls deep like sweltering heat. Too long without a woman, Falk, he thought to himself, and never a woman like this.
Martin slid his hand from Kendra’s cheek to the back of her neck, to grip and pull steadily on the hair at her nape. He didn’t need to see the shiver run up her spine and shake her shoulders; he felt it, too. At the end of his patience, with his wolf at the ready and starving for pleasure if not blood, Martin used his free hand to jerk the blanket from Kendra’s grasp, where she held it clutched to her nearly naked chest. He cast the plaid material aside. It pooled in careless folds on the wooden floor as both she and Rory groaned low.
Kendra wore only her pale underwear, delicate and light and satiny. Martin had never wanted to tear anything to bits with just his teeth so much in his unnaturally long life. As he reached for the clasp at the front of her bra, he felt his shift flushing his body with pricking heat and watched it spreading a silvery sheen along his skin. If Kendra saw the subtle metallic glow light Martin’s eyes, she didn’t show it or just didn’t fear it. In fact, she looked as intoxicated as he felt, as she laid her head back against Rory’s shirtless chest. The fey girl looked like she was offering herself as willing sacrifice. Martin’s wolf, as the man reached for the button on his straining jeans, was ready to eat its fill of her.<
br />
The werewolf stepped forward, flush with that yielding body, to kiss Kendra slow and deep but with demanding swirls of his tongue inside her mouth and against her moans of distressed pleasure. She hardly had a moment to gasp a breath before Rory leaned around to take the next breath, the next kiss. Then Martin again. Falk never would have thought he’d share a woman’s body with another male, a predator sharing his meal—unthinkable. Yet he was tasting and smelling the stallion shifter on this woman and thinking the scent of the three together, the sweet salty musk of their need, was the most natural, primal thing in the world.
“What do you want, Kendra?” Martin demanded, his lips moving against hers as he snarled and tugged harder on her hair. She had to bend her head back farther, opening her mouth with a moan, baring her throat to the wolf. “What do you want with us?” Martin heard his own accusing tone, angry, resentful, brooding. Damn her for having so much influence over his body, his mind, just by looking like that, sounding like that, being like she was. Falk ripped the front of Kendra’s bra in two with a quick, hard snap and instantly took one of her full breasts in a firm, possessive grip. Rory palmed the other more gently, kneading. She was panting equally for both rough and tender handling as Martin nipped her lower lip, then bucked his hard-on against her and demanded, “What do you want us to do with you?” Save her? Release her? Ravage her? Mate her? So many hungry possibilities swirled through his mind, his fantasies.
“I….” She sighed haltingly as the wolf shifter flicked one of her rigid, sensitized nipples with a calloused thumb. “I can’t think…. I don’t… know. I….”
“You know,” Martin growled, and he pinched the tiny rosebud until she mewed and squirmed. His torment was just as great, with the want to suck and lap at her nipple, to taste her skin. To taste all of Kendra. “You know.”