by Erika Masten
Martin Falk, fierce as he was, had never been an alpha or a soldier worthy of leadership. He had never been favored by Freya with a mate, until this, and he’d failed her. It was true. He was a flawed weapon in the hands of Odin, in the defense of Midgard and humanity and his pack brothers. In accepting this, Martin Falk was True.
The pride of having this last chance to avenge the deaths of pack brothers and kin, while also protecting the journey of his mate at the hands of his sword brother, swelled in his chest. Martin faded, and the beast rushed forward. The werewolf ran, crashing through brush and branches. He grew larger and more powerful with each step. The glory of battle and beast was so overwhelming that Martin did not question the shift when it did not stop.
By the time the dark wolf pounced on the Agency hunters, he was not seven feet of furry and furious wrath but ten. And when he took to all four legs, full wolf form, he was of a size and power that might have rivaled the Fenris Wolf himself. A true beast.
A True beast. Larger than life. Mythic. Blessed of Odin in his final battle.
The wolf that had been Martin Falk and could never be again claimed his wilding and his vengeance with a fury that snapped the Fenris chains hurled at him.
CHAPTER NINE
Rory Galloway was humming to her, a deep rolling burr like what a purr would sound like coming from a horse. It was a silly, happy thought that made Kendra chuckle.
You have a beautiful voice.
But then it stopped.
Do you hurt, sugar?
No, why would I?
No matter. Just rest, baby.
I feel like I’ve been resting forever. It must be morning by now. Kendra felt warmth on her face like sunlight and saw the glow through her the slits of her eyelids.
Morning, Rory repeated softly, thoughtfully. The light, you mean.
M-hm. Are you going to get up, too? Come outside with me?
If you want, yes. A walk in the light. The horse shifter sounded oddly weary, sad, as he agreed, that might be the best thing in the world for me. A walk out in the sun with you. We’ll go together.
What was wrong with him? It took a second for Kendra to realize, lazing there like she was in bed with him. It felt so good she couldn’t quite find the gumption to even open her eyes.
I’m not afraid of the mating anymore, Rory. You don’t have to worry.
No?
The power, it doesn’t worry me anymore. Can’t say why. And she couldn’t; she really didn’t know. I mean the power it gives you and Martin over me, but even more…. I’m not afraid of what it will do to my Tallan. I understand now, about the mating. When it’s a joining of true mates, it really does stabilize a psychic’s powers, but it also strengthens them in correlation to the strength of the bond.
Good to know.
“Rory,” Kendra said aloud as she opened her eyes to blink up at him in exasperation. “I’m telling you I won’t fight our mating anymore—you and me and Martin. Could you be a little happy about that?”
Instead of happy, the horse shifter looked stunned. And it wasn’t just Rory that struck Kendra wrong. Instead of morning in a sunny bedroom, it was dark, and this was a muddy ravine, and she and Rory were covered in blood.
Kendra sat up with a start. “Oh, Lord, you’re hurt. Rory!”
The horse shifter—oh gosh, totally naked—pulled the girl up close against his chest and ran his broad hand down along her waist, her side. “I’m not, sugar, no. You… you are. Or you were. Kendra, you’d been shot, and now there’s no wound at all. How…?” He held her tighter, stroking her face and hair and chest like he couldn’t believe she was still there with him alive and breathing.
“Rory, what are you—?” Kendra started to ask, before she looked up to scan the woods and the darkness. And she remembered. Everything.
“How many?” she choked.
“Kendra?”
“How many are dead? How many by my hand?”
The horse shifter, psychopomp, guardian of souls from life to death, shook his head as though at a loss. “Hard to tell. A lot of injury, pain. So much confusion. Not as many as you’d think, but most of that was the Agency.”
“It’s so quiet,” she said, lips trembling, body shaking as she felt bone deep what she had done.
“I think it’s over. It’s been quiet for awhile. Everyone is gone or….”
“Or dead,” she finished for him. She didn’t want to ask. “Martin.”
“Gone, Kendra.”
The flow of tears was instant. “Dead?”
But Rory shook his head no. “I can still sense him, but he’s not Martin anymore.” Taking the stallion shifter by surprise, Kendra wrenched herself from his arms and scrambled to her feet, then out of the ravine. Following, Rory called, “Kendra, no. He’s gone. The wilding has him. He is a wolf.” The shifter caught her by the arm as she tried to dash into the woods by only the dim moonlight. “He won’t know you or me. The beast is all that is left of him.”
“Then bring him back,” Kendra demanded, trying to discipline the high, panicked tone from her voice.
“It doesn’t work that way.”
“Right, and the next thing you’re going to say is that the psychopomp who is my mate can’t lead me back from the brink of death and miraculously heal my injury. Except you did. I mean, isn’t that what you do?”
“It’s not like that, Kendra. A horse spirit leads souls peaceful out of this life, not back into it.”
Kendra shrugged and held her arms out from her sides as she spun in display. “Except you did. And didn’t you save Martin from wilding when you met back in Arizona?”
Rory squinted with those blue eyes Kendra had found so beautiful every time she’d look into them. He still had beautiful eyes, just sad.. “I can’t explain that, Kendra. Yes, I did bring Martin back from the edge of wilding but not from the other side.”
“Goddammit, Galloway, can’t you even try?” Kendra blurted along with her upwelling of tears. “I made him do this. The least you can do is… is….” It took a fair amount of the man’s shifter strength to bring Kendra close and hug her and make her stay still while she sniffed and choked and wriggled. Once she had exhausted those options, Kendra begged, “Can’t you at least lead me to him? Let me see him?”
Galloway sighed. “You don’t need me to lead you, Kendra. You’re his mate as much as mine. You have the same connection with him that I do, even without completing the mating.”
And he was right. There was a sort of tingle in the center of her solar plexus, like a thread with one end knotted to her core and the other end with Martin. It led Kendra, and Rory several steps behind her, to a rocky clearing with a small stream. The woman gasped and then clamped her hands over her mouth at the sight of the tawny wolf the size of a bull crouching on a rocky outcropping while he drank. Her cry brought the beast’s massive head up and around to aim a predator’s narrowed eyes at her.
For a moment no one and nothing moved, not even so much as a leaf. Then one side of the monstrous wolf’s lips curled up over his gleaming canine tooth—and his snarl. Rory tried to step up in front of Kendra, stuffing her around and behind him.
“No,” she insisted.
“Kendra, it’s not Martin anymore. That’s one big fucking wolf.”
The psychic darted a step back and then around the stallion shifter. “No, that’s Martin inside one big fucking wolf.”
“The wilding is not reversible.”
“Yeah, and death isn’t supposed to be either, but I’m still here.” Kendra lowered the defiant jut of her chin. “Thanks to you, I am. Maybe that’s part of why I am still alive. I can try to bring him back, can’t I?”
Rory bowed his head, eyes closed, teeth gritted. “Sugar, I can’t see you like that again, hurt, dying.”
“Then keep your eyes closed and just guide me with your sense of him.”
“Kendra—.”
“Rory, please. One chance is all we’re going to get.”
Kendra
didn’t wait for his response. She turned immediately toward the huge wolf and crouched down on her heels, palms flat on the ground. Great time to realize she didn’t know anything about communication among wolves, about how to show her deference to the beast in her body language. Her default was to behave like what she was, a woman reaching out to her mate.
She still trembled as the wolf advanced on her with alarming speed.
“Kendra,” Rory warned. “It’s not working.”
“It will.” Or… or it wouldn’t, but her other choice was not to try to save the Odin’s Wolf who had sacrificed himself for her. “Come on, Martin. You’re in there. Did you really go through all of this to end up without the mate you were fighting for?”
The wolf snapped at Kendra’s hand and made her jump, sending her sprawling into the shallows of the creek. And the beast was still advancing.
The psychic held up her hand to shush Rory and halt his advance. She needed him still if she was going to concentrate on keeping herself calm. Because that wolf was still coming, step by step.
When the beast was right over her, when she could feel the heat of his breath on her face and hear the full reverberation of the growl emanating from his chest, she murmured, “Mate.” Just that. As she stared into those eyes that she fully believed still belonged to Martin Falk.
When canine teeth sank into Kendra’s neck and she was falling backward into the water, it was a very human Martin stretched on top of her.
Bliss like the moment just before an orgasm seized Kendra and didn’t let go. The mating ritual, she realized. With shifters it involved a bite, this bite, this primal pinning of the female under the male as he….
Kendra keened as the wolf shifter ripped her shorts away and thrust himself inside her to half the length of his rigid cock. Pain and pleasure blossomed from the deepest point inside Kendra, leaving her breathless. She hardly had the air to cry out for Rory, but there he was, sliding up behind her in the shallow water and cradling her back against his chest as his shifter brother drove into her body.
Flailing out, Kendra’s hands found the steely bands of flexing muscle at Martin’s shoulders, and she held on to him for dear life. Falk was fucking her like the beast he’d been. It was only when he lifted that familiar, hand-angled face from the crook of her sore neck and growled, “Mate,” that she knew he had really come back. He had come all the way back from the wilding for her.
A though the act of speaking was really the trigger for the final stage of Martin’s transformation back into a human, his passionate assault on Kendra’s body slowed by degrees until the wolf shifter had control of himself. To her mewed protest, Falk pulled back and pulled out of Kendra’s pussy.
His caress on her face was characteristically rough and utterly possessive. The growl in his voice faded little by little as he said, “Slow down, kitten. This isn’t going to be over quickly. You made us wait too long.”
When Martin rose up to his knees to collect himself, to run his hands through the mussed tangles of his brown and gold hair, the horse shifter took the opportunity to take Kendra by her waist and roll her onto those powerful equine hips. Her gasp of shock and distress accompanied the feeling of Rory’s massive cock nudging the already battered lips of her sex. This time, she wasn’t just licking that warm, velvet cock in a psychic half-world. This was real.
“Kendra, look at me,” Galloway said with a commanding tone to his voice that she would have expected of Martin more than Rory. Thrilling and threatening, nonetheless. “This is my part of the mating. Relax and your body will take me.” The horse shifter caught Kendra by the back of the head and pulled her down into a quick, hard kiss before whispering with his lips against hers, “I promise to make you feel every inch.”
The shiver that coursed Kendra’s body at this vow—this warning—was like a little orgasm all by itself, twitching and thrumming all through her groin and homing in on her clitoris. Followed by the flair of pain and panic as the bulging head of Rory’s oversized cock breached the tight entrance of Kendra’s pussy and sank in. The terrible ache rippled through the tender walls of her sex but… but did nothing to quell the throbbing need deep inside her to take and feel even more of him.
Then, feeling Martin’s hands on her ass helping to moving her up and down on Rory’s cock? A full-strength climax came up hard on Kendra but didn’t pounce. It just waited, and built, and built.
“Yes,” Martin moaned appreciatively from behind Kendra, as he rubbed and smacked her butt. “Work that beautiful round ass for it. Fuck yourself on your stallion’s cock.”
Kendra—or rather Kendra’s body, with a mind of its own—responded with a frantic little bounce that brought a sharp stab of momentary pain-pleasure from her cervix and a gut-deep groan from the shifter beneath her.
“Too quick,” Rory warned as he pushed Kendra’s wide hips upward to remove her from his cock. Martin instantly took his place. That was how her shifters, her mates shared her and fucked her, in turn. Rory opened her wide for Martin’s hard pounding, until her poor pussy was on fire with tingling heat.
Distracted as Kendra was by Rory’s hot velvet tongue and teasing lips on her nipples, with his steady sucking and flicking, she wasn’t ready for Martin’s thumb nosing into her anus. Her hips jerked away, which only pushed her down harder and deeper on the horse shifter’s impaling cock. With two thumbs working her open, Martin took Kendra’s ass with smooth, gentle, shallow thrusts that Rory instinctively mimicked in her pussy.
“Mated, Kendra. Say it,” the shifter beneath her insisted. The contrast of the cool water and his hot skin was like the hot and cold waves of fever to Kendra. She couldn’t think. Lord, she’d have promised him anything.
“Mated,” she repeated breathlessly, receiving for her obedience an extra deep thrust that ground her clit against his groin.
“And marked,” Martin coaxed, punctuating his point by finally sliding balls-deep into that tight, private passage of her ass.
“Marked,” she sighed.
“It’s just the beginning of what you’ll say for us, sugar,” Rory said with a nip to the kiss-swollen pad of Kendra’s bottom lip. “And what we’ll do to your sweet, soft body.”
Martin huffed in agreement and increased his pace. “Made for fucking. Made for taking the punishment only a shifter can give. Tell us you’re ready for it, Kendra. To be fucked and filled up as deep as you go.”
“By your mates,” Rory insisted, digging his fingertips into her aching breasts. “Only ever your mates.”
Kendra nodded.
“No, you have to say it,” Martin told her in a rough pant, “because I want to hear it.”
“F-fuck me,” Kendra struggled to say, breathless with the pressure building in her head and chest, tightening her stomach muscles. She needed to come and needed to feel them do the same from inside her. “Come in my pussy. Everything. Give me everything. I’ll take it.”
“Yes, you will,” Martin agreed before his teeth sank shallowly into the side of Kendra’s neck again—no canines extended this time to pin his mate. The wolf had her tied up with his cock deep in her ass, the tender bud of her anus burning with friction as he slid smoothly in and out of her.
Under her trembling body, Rory redoubled his pace and effort until every one of Martin’s thrusts in Kendra’s ass was two of his inside her pussy. The pearl of her clitoris ground over and over down against the coarse hair at the base of Galloway’s cock. And then the feeling of Rory reaching back to pull the full globes of her ass further apart for Martin’s pounding…. It was too much.
Kendra’s orgasm washed through her in a succession of burning waves that matched the water churned by their increasingly frenzied mating. Her climax tightened her inside, making her pussy and ass clamp down on the thick cocks working in and out of her vulnerable body. Her mates were close, too, she could tell. She didn’t need the psychic connection to know. It was their thrillingly animalistic huffs and growls, the heavy-lidded look on Rory’s boyish
face, the tension in Martin’s clenched jaw right before they each stiffened and spilled their heat into her.
For the first few moments of their shared orgasm, Kendra’s men actually fucked her faster and harder, forcing little eruptions of pleasure inside her larger climax. Kendra didn’t remember much more about the steady vibration of burning pleasure, until she gathering in a deep breath where she lay exhausted in Rory’s chest.
The lapping water lulled the triad for long moments, before Kendra finally said, “I can’t go back with you to California, not with things like this among my clan.”
“We know,” Rory said, no hesitation. But that was all he said.
Cautiously, Kendra lifted her head to gaze up at the horse shifter. It took her breath away how handsome he was with his long hair wet and swirling around him in the water. “Your herd?”
“Will have to make due with my brother. His gifts aren’t as strong as mine, but they’re strong enough.”
“And the pack,” Martin interjected, “will know I have to stay with my mate, especially when I tell them where I am and why.”
“But your clan?” Rory asked. “We don’t know how bad the repercussions will be from what happened at the gathering.”
Kendra agreed, “We don’t know, but they have to take into consideration something none of us expected.”
When Martin shifted his weight behind Kendra, it made his cock twitch, still sunk to the base inside her ass. Kendra gasped and glared over her shoulder at him. “What’s that?” he asked with poorly feigned innocence.
“The formation of triad mates. It’s the same type of connection and sharing of consciousness and power my clan has been trying to bring about with arranged matches for decades. It makes for a very powerful amplification of abilities. I don’t think anyone suspected it could be accomplished this way, between supernatural species.”
Or that anyone would have dreamed triad mates could call one another back from something like the wilding, or even death.
“Your clan won’t attack us on sight?” Rory asked.