by SM Reine
“Your tits are incredible,” he said into my neck, pushing his fingers underneath my bra, shoving it up to bare one breast completely. My boobs were big enough that it spilled out of his hand when he kneaded the flesh, and he didn’t exactly have small hands.
I’d been pawed by guys before—boys, really—and it hadn’t done that much for me. But I was still sensitive from having my nipple cut, and that little bite of pain had turned breast play from “kind of okay” into “oh my God don’t stop.”
The hard edge of his teeth grazed my jugular when he spoke, and the sight of Graham’s werewolf fangs flashed through my mind.
Yet I wasn’t afraid of Donne, minutes away from his own transformation.
Mostly, I was confused.
“Don’t you hate me?” I reached up to curve my hand over the back of his neck, steadying myself against his naked body. He liked having me pinned against the side of the pool. His length was thickening to press hard against my hip.
Confusion sparked in his golden eyes. His fingers dug into my breast harder, making me suck in a hard gasp. “Hate you?”
I arched my spine, pushing my breast into his grip, encouraging him to keep rubbing my aching nipple. “I heard—I heard you talking to Rage.”
The expression drained from his face, leaving him as emotive as a boulder. It was like he had completely forgotten about Rage, about Graham, about the whole world outside the lagoon, and just suddenly remembered it all.
He jerked my bra down again to cover my breast and sloshed away from me.
“Go back to your room,” Donne said.
I hadn’t felt cold until that moment. Now I was shivering without his body against mine. Guess werewolves run pretty hot, because the heated pool felt shockingly chilly in comparison. “But…”
Insane as it was, I didn’t want to go back to my room. I didn’t want to leave the pool, either.
I wanted Donne to press me against the side and force his body between my knees, shoving the entirety of his daunting length inside my aching body. I bet he would be wild and rough. I bet he would bruise me.
I wanted him to mark me with his teeth and fingertips.
That was an insane thought coming from the girl who only ever did sexy things with one ex-boyfriend—who had been an accounting major, for the record, and not a werewolf with a mohawk.
Donne pushed away from me. I thought that he was just trying to escape at first, but then I realized that his skin was rippling and that the muscles of his shoulders were straining.
“Go, Leah.” The words lisped around fangs that began to emerge from his gums.
He grabbed the edge of the pool and levered himself out of it. He just barely managed to roll over the edge before his spine bowed.
A groan ripped from his throat.
The magical wards keeping werewolves out of the pool house couldn’t exactly work if he was already within the walls, could they?
I’d made a serious mistake getting trapped in there with him.
His bones began snapping the way Graham’s had. It was no less scary to see it happen a second time. In fact, it was kind of scarier to see it happening to Donne, the man who had sworn to protect me while I was trapped in Rage’s house.
Fur swept over his body. His head whipped back, and his golden eyes fixed on me.
The skin on his face rippled as the bones rearranged underneath.
“Get out!” he roared.
It was a completely sensible command, which my body completely ignored.
He’d promised to keep me safe from everything—including himself. Hadn’t he?
Maybe I’d snapped from the stress of being kidnapped by a rock band. I just didn’t feel like I was in danger, even watching razor-sharp canines extend from his elongating jaw.
This was Donne. There was no way that he could hurt me.
Hesitantly, I extended my hands toward him.
“It’s okay, Donne,” I whispered. “It’s okay. I know you won’t—”
Another roar interrupted me. His whole body shook.
I tensed up, but didn’t run.
Donne couldn’t seem to speak now. He’d lost all the requisite mouthparts. Try getting words out around fangs as long as your thumb. But I thought he was still trying to tell me to run.
His back arched. His spine made a sound like popcorn popping as his tail extended. His sides heaved, head hanging between his shoulders. It looked like he was in so much pain.
“It’s okay,” I said again, sinking to my knees. “You’re okay.”
Donne staggered toward me on all fours, his legs still changing shape. There was no doubt in my mind he’d be capable of mauling me if he wanted to. Even with a twisted body, he was deadly.
But I didn’t think he wanted to.
He snapped at my throat. The gray fur that was growing around his face brushed against the delicate skin of my jaw. It smelled earthy, in a way—not like he was an animal, but like he was a piece of the forest, all damp soil and pine.
My heart didn’t even skip a beat.
Call me crazy, but I actually rubbed my hands over his neck. My fingers were steady as I brushed them through the fur, feeling the coarse texture interspersed with denser, more cottony hairs underneath.
Donne made a strange sound, more like a wail of pain than the furious growls he’d been snapping at me.
His skin shivered where I touched it. The growth of the fur slowed.
He smacked his cheek into mine, and I could almost hear him saying, Don’t be stupid, Leah.
Those big teeth were awfully close to my throat.
“It’s okay,” I said, because it was.
Donne collapsed against me as he finished changing. I stroked my fingers along his fur, tracing the longer, shaggier parts that ran from his ears back to his shoulders.
He relaxed in my lap, head cradled on my thighs, as the final parts of the change took him.
It was only a few more seconds, maybe a minute or two at most. I was entranced by the sight of it. Once Donne calmed down, there was almost something beautiful about his transformation into a wolf. And it didn’t look like it hurt, either. It washed over him like the cool waters of a river.
Then all hints of the man were gone, replaced by the beast.
I didn’t know enough about wolves to be able to tell what breed he most resembled, but I got the impression that he was much larger than he should have been. Most wolves were not the size of small ponies.
Donne was big as a human, but he was dauntingly huge as a wolf.
“All done,” I murmured, continuing to stroke the ruff of fur at his neck. He was still breathing hard, but at least it was starting to slow down. When I paused with my hand over his heart, I could feel the pulse decelerating, too. “Holy crap, Donne—that must really hurt. Doesn’t it?”
Of course, he couldn’t respond, but his head tipped back and he focused on me. He looked calm.
His body was one hundred percent wolf, but his eyes were entirely Donne’s.
He got to his feet—or his paws, I guess—and he shook himself off. There was some blood in his fur from the change, as though the physical changes had literally ripped him apart.
Donne stood unsteadily in front of me. I smiled at him. “Hey, there.”
He sprung forward and struck me. My back slammed into the floor. His paws braced against my shoulders.
The wolf was huge and incredibly heavy. It felt like the way he was standing on me should have been enough to pulverize my bones, shattering my body, turning me to dust.
But it didn’t. He was gentle. So very gentle.
He sniffed around my neck, my cheeks, my chest. It tickled. I giggled a little.
Amazing how quickly you can get used to insanity when insanity is standing on you with four legs and a lot of shaggy gray fur.
A sharp voice echoed through the swimming pool room. “Get off of her!”
Electricity lanced through the air. It felt like a hive of bees swarming around me, buzzi
ng over the surface of my skin. Donne ripped away from me with a howl as though he’d been thrown, rolling across the concrete.
I sat up with a gasp. “No!”
Lightning wrapped around Donne, dancing over his fur, lighting up the undercoat so that the outer coat looked like it was on fire.
I scrambled to my feet, searching for the source of that brilliant light that made him writhe with so much pain.
Instead of finding something big and electrical, I found Rage standing by the windows, his hands braced on the protective marks that were printed on the window frames. He glowed with light that wasn’t really there—the same kind of afterglow I’d seen on the gazebo. It made his tattoos look bright. The whole wall was glowing.
“Get over here, Leah!” Rage barked.
I was too confused to do anything but obey.
As soon as I was within Rage’s reach, he shoved me behind him. I hadn’t gotten a good look at his back before. The tattoos were far more abstract than those on his arms, like a necklace curving around the backs of his shoulders to drip down the hills and furrows of his muscles.
Rage had left the door wide open when he came in. He pointed at it now. “Get out, Donne!”
The wolf struggled to get onto his paws, trembling under the force of the magic that still crackled through him.
He stepped toward Rage.
The singer slapped the marks on the wall again. Fresh lightning arced between them, creating a wall that I could only half-see around the protection of Rage’s broad form.
“Out!” Rage shouted.
Donne finally, reluctantly, loped out of the pool house.
My fear for him won out over everything else. I shoved Rage aside and tried to follow Donne.
Rage’s hand locked on my arm, holding me back. “What the hell are you doing?”
“He’s injured! I have to—”
“You have to stay in the house where you’re safe.” Rage jerked me around to face him. “What were you thinking, hiding out in here with him so close to his transformation?”
My cheeks burned. “What were you thinking? What was that lightning thing? I thought wards were just supposed to protect us!”
“They did protect us. I’ve got ways to drive Donne and Graham out of any part of the house in order to keep my coven safe. Give me a few weeks, and I’ll teach you to cast spells like that, too.”
“But he wasn’t hurting me,” I said.
“You were one graze of a tooth away from being at risk of turning furry yourself.” Rage’s face darkened. “When witches get turned into werewolves, they lose their powers. You’d lose The Hierophant. Don’t you get it?”
“No, but…” I floundered for words. “Donne wasn’t going to hurt me. When he changed, I touched him, and he relaxed like… I don’t know. I just don’t know. But he wasn’t angry like Graham.”
Rage’s anger turned to fascination—and then, just as quickly, to grief. “Did you fuck?”
I winced at the nasty term. I didn’t ever “fuck.” I made love or had sex. “No, we didn’t, but—wait, what just happened?”
He slung an arm around my shoulders, pulling me to his side. My skin prickled with goosebumps. “You helped him through his transformation, Kitten. You made something excruciatingly painful much more tolerable. We’d planned that you would do that for Graham, but…”
“I did that for him?” I looked at my hands as though they held the secrets to taming werewolves. Hint: they didn’t. “What’s it mean?”
“It means we have a much, much bigger problem than you becoming part of his pack.”
“What do you mean?”
Rage’s arm tightened around me. “It means he’s picked you to be his mate.”
X
Rage’s kitchen was less intimidating at night when there was only one light on. The darkness really helped draw attention away from the torture device in the corner. If I squinted, it looked a little bit like my grandma’s kitchen.
Ravyn and Rage sat at the island with me, perched on bar stools, and we each had a mug of hot chocolate. The cozy domesticity was creepy in its own way. Ravyn was wearing her pajamas—a slinky black nightgown with lace framing her cleavage. Her hair had been let down from its funky ponytails and brushed smooth. It was a silken sheet down her back.
Pretty impressive for someone whose hair had obviously been chemically treated so many times. I was going to have to get her conditioning secrets.
The rock star, on the other hand, wasn’t wearing his PJs. I bet he didn’t have any. He was still in the leather pants. But he’d thrown on a shirt, and the three of us actually looked kind of normal for once.
I warmed my fingers on the cup. It was black with The Forbidden’s logo on the side—swag for corporate goths who need their java fix. “I have to say, this isn’t what I would have expected you guys to serve as a comfort drink.”
“Don’t judge too soon,” Ravyn said with a giggle.
I took a sip of my cocoa and almost spit it out in shock. “What is that?”
“I added a shot of brandy to help relax you.” Rage lifted his mug at me. “Cheers.”
Once I expected the burn, I drank more easily. I was careful not to do more than sip it, though. I hadn’t forgotten what Ravyn’s drinks had done to me.
“Now you’ve seen magic and you’ve seen our puppies,” Ravyn said. “How do you feel?”
I stared into the depths of my coffee mug. “I feel…okay.”
She smiled. “You do?”
“Yeah. That means I’ve gone crazy, doesn’t it?”
“Probably,” she said. “But we’re all crazy here. Welcome to the asylum.”
I only managed a half-smile in return. “Why do you guys want me for Graham? Rage said I’m the only thing between him and death, but I don’t get how I’m supposed to help with that.”
“Tarot witches—the women who receive cards like yours—have some kind of weird relationship with werewolves,” Ravyn said. “What we’ve figured out so far is that you should be able to help prevent the end-of-life decay that werewolves begin to experience after a few years.”
“They typically don’t last twenty years after they’re bitten,” Rage added. “They go crazy. They get sick. They die.” He took a long drink of his hot chocolate and set it down a little too hard.
“How many years has Graham been a werewolf?” I asked.
“Twenty-three,” Rage said.
So he wasn’t just at the end. He was on borrowed time.
“How do I help him?” I asked. “I mean, how are tarot witches supposed to help werewolves, exactly?”
Rage gestured for me to keep drinking. “It starts with you getting a good night of sleep. Finish that. It’ll help you rest.”
“That’s not an answer,” I said.
“You’re not ready for answers beyond that.”
“He’s right. This is all really, really new to you.” Ravyn stroked her fingers along my wrist. “All I can say is that if you want to be able to help the werewolves, you’re going to need to learn to cast magic. We can work on that starting in the morning. How does that sound?”
I took another sip of my hot chocolate. It tasted bitterer now for some reason. “I don’t know if I can stick around for magic lessons.” I hurriedly went on before they could argue with me. “I have a life, guys. And I’m still not sure that I’m that thing you think I am. Just because I’m seeing weird lights and Donne didn’t eat me… I’m not a witch. My family is Mormon.”
Rage stood. The warm kitchen lights should have made him look softer, friendlier, more accessible. Instead, they seemed to deepen the contrast between his natural skin color and the tattoos all over his chest. I had to tilt my head back to keep looking at him.
He felt immense in a way. Not really big physically, but his presence was huge.
His anger was growing, making the air tense.
I’d felt it earlier. I just hadn’t known what it was. Rage’s anger was somehow magical.
“Don’t deny this part of yourself,” Rage said. “You’ve denied it long enough. Shutting out magic this long will hurt you if you’re not careful, and then you’ll be no use to anyone.”
“Is that a threat?”
“Think of it as a warning.” He drained his mug and set it in the sink. “Make sure she gets to bed, Ravyn.”
The witch gave him a reassuring smile, and Rage exited stage left, taking his fury with him.
I didn’t manage to sleep more than an hour that night. It wasn’t that my bed was uncomfortable—I’d never rested anywhere fluffier. On any normal night, drowning in those pillows would have been the ticket to the best sleep of my life, especially after I’d stayed up late getting my boobs mauled by a horny werewolf.
Horny werewolf? Oh gosh, my thoughts were getting dirty. The band was rubbing off on me.
Anyway, the problem wasn’t the bed, the gothic princess room, or even the unfamiliar mansion by the beach.
It was the howling.
Donne and Graham were racing around the property. I could hear them with my doors closed.
They sounded like they were in so much pain.
It means he’s picked you to be his mate, Rage had said. I kept rolling that phrase over and over in my mind.
A werewolf’s mate.
It was frustrating that Rage wouldn’t elaborate on that point, but it wasn’t hard to figure out what he was talking about, either. Even in my cozy, mundane world, “mating” only had one meaning.
In two nights, I’d gone from being a college student eagerly anticipating finals to an alleged witch that a werewolf wanted to mate with.
The worst part? I found the idea of all of it awfully exciting.
It wasn’t easy to fall asleep.
When I did drift away into unconsciousness, Donne and Graham’s howling formed the soundtrack to my dreams. I imagined that I was at an outdoor concert in a big forest amphitheater. The music came from the trees. And it wasn’t Rage singing at the microphone, but Donne, shirtless in a pair of leather pants.
Whenever he opened his mouth, words didn’t come out. Just the howling.