The Witch and the Wolf Pack
Book Seven
Moonlight Lovers
by
K.R. Alexander
Copyright © 2018 K.R. Alexander
kralexander.com
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Dear Moonlight Pack
Chapter 1
“I thought you said your flat wasn’t pet-friendly.”
“It’s not.” I slipped the key into the lock with caution that was clouded by exhaustion so intense I’d almost walked to the wrong apartment door.
“Is that so?” Andrew answered at my shoulder. “How do you explain the stink, darling?”
Did it stink in the halls? There were only twelve units in the building—four on each floor—and I enjoyed being top floor. Even though it meant knowing what the neighbors were cooking every time you walked in or out. I’d caught a whiff of cats now and then as well. The building was 100 years old. All things considered, I admired how little it stunk.
“Probably something old,” I told him. “Don’t worry about it. And be quiet.”
We fell silent as I inched open the door.
The light from the hallway at our backs, along with streetlights through the curtained windows, filtered weirdly through kitchen and living room. The front door opened between the two rooms, then a passageway across these with the doors for two bedrooms and a bathroom. That was the whole thing.
Rooms, furnishings, light switches—I should have known them with my eyes shut. Now, though, I had to stand stupidly on the threshold. For a moment, it seemed I’d opened the wrong door. This wasn’t my home. Yet … the key had worked.
I blinked, stepping inside to the doormat. Andrew slipped in along my backpack, turning the knob to close the door almost silently behind us.
The floor was carpeted—only kitchen, entry, and bathroom with a laminate maple—which was gross in an apartment building with all the turn-over and students. Yet carpet was down for the noise—so thank Goddess after all.
“Shoes.” I breathed the word, having to bend to unlace my stiff hiking shoes.
Andrew kicked off his perpetually unlaced sneakers while gazing around the rooms.
Shouldn’t it have been darker with the door at our backs shut? Had they put in a new streetlight? All the windows were open, soft hum of a fan audible. Still, on a Portland night at the end of August, the place was stifling. So hot it was the other top floor downside.
Why did it seem like I didn’t know the place? I should have been relieved to get back, to crash, even for a couple days. Instead … yes, this was my apartment. Only it was haunted now, not somewhere I needed to be. I needed to be “home” with my pack, working to save them.
Disconcerting feelings continued as I crept across the carpet. Andrew followed, moving like a shadow without apparent effort, while my feet seemed to have iron balls and chains attached. Mental note: thirteen hours to drive with one driver after three hours of sleep: no.
Reassured by the couch, the spotless kitchen, the framed watercolor of the Rio Grande done by Nana, I remained unsettled only by that light.
It wasn’t from streetlights. It was too bright. Too close.
There was a light on in here, soft, just a lamp, but right around the corner, filtering through a partly open door.
My sluggish brain was just processing this as I moved to the pool of light, having to pass through to reach my own bedroom doorway.
Then a door popped open right before me and someone screamed.
Chapter 2
“Preeda! It’s—”
“Oh, my God!”
“It’s just me—”
“Cassia—call out or something, for God’s sake! Do you know what time—?”
“I’m sorry. I thought you’d be in—”
“It’s after midnight! You didn’t say you were getting home tonight.”
“I wasn’t sure—”
“Who are you?”
“Andrew.”
“Preeda, this is Andrew. A friend of mine from England. Andrew, Preeda is my roommate.”
“A friend of yours from…? He’s why you went on a two-week vacation and have been gone over a month?”
“I’m sorry. We just want to go to sleep. We were trying not to wake you. Everything okay here?”
“Quiet as a mouse. Except all the dead-of-night break-ins.”
“Sorry—”
“Is he staying?”
“We’re both only going to be here a couple days. Then I need to run again.”
“How about sneaking out the window when you go?”
“Sorry, Preeda—”
“God.” In her bedtime shorts and nightshirt, Preeda uncrossed her arms and stalked past us from the bathroom doorway where she’d just emerged. In her bedroom a reading lamp glowed softly and a fan whirred. Preeda shut the door with a sharp click.
Still as if we needed to be quiet, I slunk into my own room. Andrew followed while I shrugged off my backpack and felt for the bedside lamp. I sat on the edge of the full bed, blowing out my cheeks.
Andrew pushed the door almost shut behind him. He studied the room, squinting in the light.
My desk and school laptop were dusty. The white curtains were open. The laundry basket was half-full. Papers and books overflowed the limited shelving to cover the top of the dresser and part of the desk. The window was also open in here for a cross-breeze but, with a still night and no fan, it was the hottest room in the place. Probably past 90ºF, turning hot into unbearable as I seemed to be sitting in a relatively dry sauna. It made my stomach churn, wishing for any of the previous nights out shivering in the mountains.
Andrew didn’t seem in the least troubled by the heat. In fact, I was mildly distracted from my own fatigue and suffering by his face as he looked from my desk to the books to the dreamcatcher over my bed that Nana had made for me, then a watercolor of a red-eyed tree frog.
“What are you smirking at?” I peeled off socks, stuck to my feet with sweat.
“Nothing, darling. I’ll just curl up, shall I?”
“No, really. What’s so funny?” Trying not to gasp like a landed fish, I unbuttoned my blouse to the tank top below.
“Who’d have thought? That’s all. You being the one to get a telling off? Only … refreshing, I suppose.”
“I’m glad you enjoyed that.”
“Oh, I did.” He was studying the blown glass figurines of jungle frogs on my bedside table, positively beaming. “I didn’t know you had a frog thing, Belle.”
“There’s a lot you don’t know about me. And I about you. But now’s not the time. I’ll get your she
ets, then I’m going to bed. In the morning we’ll … I can’t remember. We’ll … do whatever it is we need to do. Make yourself at home.”
Before finding linens in the hall closet for the couch, I dragged the tabletop fan from my own closet. Andrew set it up for me on the desk.
I dumped sheets and a blanket—not that he’d need it—onto the couch, then filled a tall glass with ice and returned to find Andrew still studying my bedroom. I left the glass on a coaster before retiring to the bathroom.
Damn, it was hot. This city got too hot in the summer. Even cooling at night didn’t do much in an apartment like this until morning. Then it started over. Air conditioning wasn’t the norm in the area. I’d often longed for a free-standing unit. Decent ones were too expensive and I’d told myself for the past three years in this place that it was only for the summer: I could tough it out for a couple months per year.
Then a night like tonight, when it actually made me sick—blood simmering through my veins, queasy, lightheaded, wet with sweat—and I would have traded a kidney for air conditioning.
By the time I dragged myself to bed with a hand towel to catch runoff of the ice—which I intended to rub over my skin like soap—I remembered there should be a freestanding fan in the living room as well.
I returned to find Andrew sitting on the couch with his bag and blankets, phone in hand. He looked up.
“All right, darling?”
I peered around, then went to turn it on. “Just wanted to tell you there’s a fan out here also. I’m not sure if Preeda will be up early. She’s working on her doctorate and school starts again for her this week, I think.”
“No need.” Andrew indicated the floor fan I’d just switched on. “You take it.”
“What?”
“I enjoy the heat. Anyway, your room is the oven. You have that. I’m good with the windows.”
“Are you sure? It’s still roasting in here.”
“To me, it’s pleasant.”
Indeed, he still didn’t appear bothered.
I didn’t take much convincing.
The two fans, ice, and total exhaustion, combined with the luxury of being back not only on a real bed for the night, but in my very own bed, won out over roasting. Before I could do more than worry about how much I had to accomplish here in a very short time—details of which were eluding me—or about the rest of my pack, I was asleep.
Chapter 3
I dreamed of coyotes: the shamans’ fires and stories. I knew I was dreaming. In fact, I kept telling them, This is only a dream. It’s time to move forward.
No one minded—going right on with their coyote lives around me. Frustrating because I knew they could help if they wanted to. Or maybe I was frustrated with myself: I knew I could help if I wanted to. But what to do?
I woke, hearing traffic through an open window. Roadside motel. Who had I ended up in bed with? I couldn’t remember. Since when had I been the type of person to forget something like that? Either due to too many options or any other reason?
I slid forward to feel for Isaac or Kage or Zar. Instead … fans humming, a cool breeze, voices from beyond my door. The sun was up. A heavenly aroma of coffee filled the room. My room.
Preeda was up making coffee. Something in our shared lives we agreed on. Espresso maker on the counter, both taking two cups, black, each morning.
No one else in the bed, or even in the room, as it turned out. So it had been a dream; that trip down the rabbit hole? The wolves, vampires, deaths, journeys, and coyotes? I’d come back from my trip to see my sister, Melanie, and her English husband, Henry, in Brighton, and I was ready to launch my career?
There was a moment, almost a breath, like the flash of a humming bird past my eyes, in which it seemed like the truth finding me. A moment in which I was the same Cassia Allyn I’d been in July.
Yet even then I knew. Even with the flicker came more: the endless driving yesterday, the pizza buffet, Portland heat, midnight arrival, the hostel for my pack, making my final way home like a sleepwalker. Had Andrew been able to sleep? What about the rest? Were they coping all right? Should I have brought Jed? Let him sleep in here in fur? And say what, exactly, to Preeda?
Then there was today. School, job, obligations I was here to nullify. I’d sent my supposed new boss an email from the road. This morning, before spellbooks, before dusting off homeschool paperwork from my youth, before scries or murderers, I had to put right personal matters that, for once, didn’t involve any of the above. Or wolves.
Wolves…
They’d thought they’d be coming home with me. All six.
I’d been in a daze in the rented Chrysler van as I’d realized I needed to explain this wasn’t the case. The idea of letting me go off alone like a responsible adult in my own city to my own home had never crossed any of their minds.
First, they’d decided they’d get one hotel room and half would come home with me. Then just two. We were at the hostel, the late hour turning over to the next date in the August night, the moon just about full, the travelers weary and sticky and sick of one another’s company, before they’d settled matters.
They had hoped I’d make a choice, waiting for me, looking to me. I could do no more than appreciate their respect. I couldn’t actually give an opinion.
“I’m going home. I’m going to bed. I don’t care if a sinkhole swallows me or the ceiling falls in. I don’t care what you all do. But you’re not coming with me. I live in a very small apartment with a very observant roommate who will be home right now. In the morning, I have to go to my school and deal with personal matters in-person and by phone. One of you may come home with me. One. I don’t mind who. That’s up to you. If you can’t decide, I’m going alone. I’m sorry. Maybe you should vote.” So tired, my speech nearly slurred.
With all of them out and their own bags secured—some things, like Jason’s elk antler, still in the van—I’d returned to the driver’s seat.
To my dull amazement, they had indeed, led by Isaac, taken a vote, argued, revoted under the terms no one could vote for himself, then Andrew had followed to hop in the passenger seat beside me.
I’d gazed blearily at him for a moment in the dark.
Andrew had shrugged. “What can I say, darling? Popular bloke.”
“They voted for you because they hoped you’d sleep on the couch.”
“They voted for me because they knew they were facing a losing battle. Moon herself couldn’t keep us apart, Cassiopeia. Even our pack knows that. We were meant to be.”
So I was in my own bed, alone. Andrew was on the couch. Preeda was brewing coffee.
Were they all right? The thought of them a ten-minute drive away at a hostel in a foreign country in a city they’d never seen—in a city at all, for that matter—sent my own champion ability to worry creeping back.
I fumbled for my phone, texted Isaac as promised, assuring him we were fine and I’d slept.
You guys okay?
I started to write more—assurances and advice. I deleted it all and left it at the three-word question. Asking was fine. Managing from afar was not.
Up. Bathroom. Ignoring the voices of the others—surprised Preeda was even engaging Andrew in a conversation—I showered before facing the world. A good shower. Long, only medium warm after the sweat bath of the night before.
Still so tired. But much better.
My stomach churned, feeling nauseated by the time I was out in my robe and toweling my hair. It was only a job. Yes, I’d been irresponsible waiting so long to say I wasn’t coming, but they should still have just enough time to find a replacement before term started. Luckily, this school was a post-Labor Day start.
Andrew would want to come with me. Fine for the van. Not into the school.
Maybe if I ate something I’d feel better. Coffee and toast. Did we have any blackberry jam? My favorite, yet, this morning, it only made me feel worse to think of it. Okay … no food. Just go. Get it over with and I could meet my pack for lu
nch. We’d get burgers and—
But the thought of burgers actually had me retching. Goddess, I was more agitated about this whole thing than I’d thought. I clutched the counter edge, willing my stomach to settle, then rinsed my mouth with mouthwash before I could think. I hadn’t put anything mint in my mouth for over a week. Oh well. A perk about limited company. Concerned as I was by them fending for themselves, the break was peaceful.
Christmas music and coffee: that was all I needed to settle my nerves and get out of here.
Wrapped in the robe, I returned to my room to find clothes. I did not put on my slow, sentimental Christmas music to calm my nerves, though. I kept being distracted by noise from the kitchen. Talking, laughing, clatter of utensils, and a crisp, brown smell of frying butter in a skillet. This last did nothing for my stomach. Yet the others attracted me irresistibly. Anyway, I badly needed to put in a load of laundry.
Preeda in the kitchen, giggling with a guest first thing in the morning when she should be running to her internship or doing school prep or one of her million other tasks that kept her busy as a tornado? Made me look like an easy-going, ambitionless time-waster Preeda? “I may cut one of the Slovak language courses since neuroscience is really my thing, you know? That’s what I want my weekends for.” Preeda?
This was a young woman who said stuff to me that I didn’t understand on a daily basis—often about body chemistry or brain cells. A woman who’s definition of a good time was reading an extra nonfiction book besides her regular workload. She’d never tasted alcohol. I wasn’t sure what sexual orientation she was because she didn’t seem to have an interest in such obstacles to her studies or career path as intimate relationships. Maybe she was asexual, or maybe just very focused.
I admired Preeda. She’d kept me in line and kept me from being a slob through the roughest of my own college years. No matter that her simply walking into the room made me feel my own IQ drop, I liked her. She was a good roommate and she could cook like nobody’s business. She came from a mixed-race, partly Thai-American family and she’d learned to cook Thai food from her mother. She’d made some of the best meals I’d ever had. Then she wouldn’t leave the kitchen until every dish, every pot and pan, every surface, was clean and back in place. I always volunteered to do the clean up, yet she always helped because I didn’t do it well enough. Preeda didn’t just load the dishwasher and wipe stuff down after she’d cooked. She used bleach on the counters and swept the floor in case of stray herbs.
Moonlight Lovers: A Reverse Harem Shifter Romance (The Witch and the Wolf Pack Book 7) Page 1