Shifters After Dark Box Set

by S M Reine et al.

  If she went back the nightmares would only continue. Her brothers would be safe; they were each alphas and ran as their own pack, they had power enough to keep anyone away from them. But she was a female, one slip-up, one moment where she was out of their sights, and that would be it.

  Even though she was an alpha, her will would never be stronger than a male’s. They would dominate and destroy her.

  Pack law would not allow any mated wolf to molest another, so even though no one within her community cared for the fact that her mother and father were together, no one could ever harm Violet because of the way the laws of magic worked.

  She, however, was under no such protection. As much as her family loved her and would do anything to protect her, they weren’t omniscient, and at some point somewhere she would be found and raped and made a slave to the perverse whims of the victor.

  And she would rather kill herself first than to ever allow that to happen.

  Staring at the shack, wondering if Giles had fallen asleep again, Lilith debated whether to spend the night outside camped under the stars. She’d not be bothered this night. This was sacred ground to shifters. Unless there was a bitch in heat pumping out her pheromones to every male wolf in the vicinity, the males generally left the clearing alone.

  She could gather some moss and make herself a nice little nest, perhaps glamour herself to appear as something as deadly as a basilisk, who with a mere glance could turn any living thing to stone. No one would dare approach her then and she could sleep without being forced to share the knight’s presence.

  Perhaps a little time apart would do them well. With any luck by morning she’d be able to plaster on a mask of antipathy and continue on as though nothing had happened between them.

  Shifting quickly, she gathered up large clumps of moss and arranged them into a plush nest of sorts.

  The bed was far from comfortable, but it was serviceable at least. Calling her magic she wove an illusion of a small green lizard with bright red eyes and then settled onto the spongy, cool bed.

  “I hope you do not mean to sleep outside alone tonight. Especially when the bed is more than adequate.” Giles’s voice caused her to jerk in surprise.

  He stood directly before her, gazing into her burning red eyes.

  “I’m a basilisk—you should show a little fear,” she hissed.

  His lips just twitched. “One,” he held up a finger before sitting cross-legged before her, “basilisk don’t talk, they hiss.”

  She snorted.

  “Two,” he held up another finger, and this time she could see the ugly red wounds he’d acquired from his fight with the wolves last night, “I saw you change.” He dropped his hands to his knees.

  Lilith’s stomach curled with tendrils of heat at the sight of him. His hair looked tousled and his face was lined with exhaustion. The way the moonlight played off the darkness of his skin reminded her of the glimmer of India ink. She wanted to swirl her finger upon his flesh and feel its heated smoothness once more.

  As much as she told herself repeatedly to not allow the man anymore footholds in her heart, every time she saw him her caution flitted right out the window like birds in flight.

  It was almost painfully hard to look upon him, especially with the memory of his rebuff so fresh. She was grateful to be in an altered form where he couldn’t see the play of emotions on her face. Right now she was a lizard without much in the way of facial expressions to judge her by.

  He reached out a hand and his fingers brushed hot against her shoulder blade. She inhaled deeply at the spark of touch, her already-rioting insides turned to jelly, and she hadn’t a clue whether to bolt off or sit still and let him fondle her.

  His hand continued its slow exploration down her bicep and forearm until he feathered the slightest of caresses against each fingertip. She shivered under the onslaught.

  Finally he pulled his hand away.

  “Why did you touch me like that?” she whispered.

  Dragging his knee to his chest, he hugged his leg and shrugged. “Your illusions intrigue me. I see nothing but air, and yet you’re tangibly all there.”

  So he hadn’t really wanted to touch her? Just experience a taste of her magic. Feeling like a deflated balloon, she sighed. “I’m tired tonight, Giles, why are you out here?”

  “I wanted to tell you thank you for the meal, it was good. And I was…unkind. For that I’m sorry.”

  She shrugged. The words were nice enough, but hardly mattered to her at the moment. What she felt now went beyond the fact that he’d not liked her meal. And she could tell. It’d sat too long and grown cold and overcooked; if he’d been awake when she’d finished cooking it earlier it would have been much better. “Doesn’t matter,” she muttered and then gave a feeble chuckle. “It really was awful.”

  “No.” His hand shot out and once again he unerringly found her hand through the illusion. “It wasn’t nothing,” he said with a gentle squeeze of her fingers that caused her already-splintered emotions to go haywire. “You took the time and I fear I can be quite bullheaded when on a mission. It’s always been that way with me sadly.”

  When he let go of her hand it was on the tip of her tongue to tell him that he could continue to hang on to it, but she’d already suffered quite enough rejection for one day.

  Irritated by her feelings, she shoved her hand under her butt. That way if he tried to grab it again he’d be unable to find it. Lilith clenched her jaw. The point of an illusion was to not be seen, and she didn’t want him touching her so casually anymore.

  She should ask him to go back to the shack so she could get some rest. But they’d slept the afternoon away, the last thing she was was tired. Engaging him in conversation was a bad idea. It would only serve to strengthen the emotional attachment she felt for him and it was better for all involved to just sever it now. Her wolf would have to find a compatible shifter at some point that she could mate and be happy with. Lilith needed only to give it more time.

  Allowing herself to become entangled with someone outside of her species was a death sentence. Why couldn’t she seem to get that through her thick head?

  But against her better judgment, she murmured, “What way?”

  Leaning back on his hands, he appeared to be settling in, and she wasn’t sure whether she liked that or not. Her stomach was a painful mess of quivering, dancing butterflies and her throat felt much too thick. Her tongue swollen, she had no idea what was the matter with her. Why all her wits seemed to have suddenly fled.

  Nibbling onto the corner of her lip, she glanced at her toes.

  “I was born from a pit of flame in a world called Delerium.”

  Brows gathering into a tight vee, she peeked at him from the corner of her eye. She’d been asking him for weeks to tell her more of himself and he’d always seemed to have one excuse or another not to. Now suddenly he wished to share?

  Not that she minded, but what had brought about the sudden change of heart?

  “It is an old world full of old ideas. We live in a caste system, immediately born into it. Our lives and our roles in society are dictated from the moment we open our eyes and take our first breath.”

  Wetting her lips, she stopped wondering about the why and decided if he was going to share than she would ask the questions that’d been gnawing at her from the moment she’d first spotted a demone.

  “The wolves are much the same way,” she admitted hesitantly. When he smiled back at her, she felt bolder to continue. “Alphas are not made, they’re born. And they’re usually terrible, demanding everything, thinking of no one but themselves. I much prefer the company of real wolves over my own kind—isn’t that terrible?”

  “No.” He picked up a twig and toyed with the dried edges of it. “Not so terrible at all. I found during my life there that I was good at what I’d been created to be, but I wearied of the life.”

  “You were a warrior?”

  His lip twitched just slightly. “Indeed I was. I even
bore a moniker.”

  Laughing, she played with the pile of loose moss strings by her knees. “Aye? And what was it?”

  “The Black Death, for I brought it wherever I roamed.”

  “My father would have been impressed. He, too, was a bred warrior for a dark queen many, many years ago.”

  Snapping the twig in half with his blunt fingers, he tossed them over his shoulder. “And what made him walk away?”

  She snorted remembering the stories her parents always told. They were an unusual pair in that they’d truly fallen in love. Many wolves married, not for love, but power. “Father fell in love.”

  “You make it sound like he contracted a disease.”

  “Well.” She shrugged. “To my kind, it is. Love is a weakness.”

  He sighed. “I do wish you’d change. This conversation loses something when I’m forced to speak to the beady eyes of a reptile.”

  Chuckling, she dropped the illusion. Mostly.

  His jeweled eyes narrowed as he reached for a tendril of her hair. “Blonde?”

  She shivered as the end of it slid through his fingers. It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him she’d done it in hopes of discovering what his preferred form for her was, but instead she snapped her jaw shut. There she went again. Forgetting why flirting him was such a bad idea.

  “I prefer you in your natural form,” he whispered it so low, every cell inside her body stilled.

  Surely he’d not said what she’d just heard. It’d been a trick of her subconscious. “Excuse me?”

  “We are alone in the woods, Lilith, no monsters can attack us this close to the safety of the shack. Be as you are.”

  Not a declaration of his heart, but…not so bad, either.

  Banishing the illusions completely she wriggled her wrist. “There. I am who I am.”

  “Better.” He grinned.

  And she clamped a hand to her stomach. “Knight, have you been bewitched? You’re acting quite unusual.”

  Immediately the easy banter and smiles ceased. He leaned back and gazed up at the stars, exposing the long column of his throat. It would have been impossible to rip her gaze away from his posture even if the woods were burning down around them.

  If he’d been a wolf, she would have understood the position to imply his wish to mate her. Exposing his weakest point to her and telling her without words that he trusted her wolf to come out and play with him.

  Squeezing her eyes shut, she turned her face to the side and swallowed hard. Giles was no wolf, and what he’d done he’d done unknowingly.

  Clenching her fingers into her mother’s cloak, she bunched the fabric tight in her fist and counted slowly to three in her head, doing her best to ignore the primal urge to crawl onto his lap and suckle at the base of his throat with her teeth and tongue.

  “You are right.” His deep, barrel-chested voice sliced through her thoughts. “I know I am acting differently. I’ve been debating what to do about a certain situation for over an hour now.”

  Her eyes snapped open. That was not at all what she’d expected to hear him say. “What do you mean? Debating about what? Our journey?”

  “Yes.” He finally glanced at her. “But more than that.”

  She blinked. He seemed to be struggling with the words, and that sign of hesitation only served to increase her curiosity. She’d been gone for a little over an hour—was he referring to her, then? And if so, why?

  “What about?”

  Scrubbing his jaw, he peered at her intently for several tense seconds before saying, “Perhaps it would help if I started from the beginning.”

  She nodded for him to continue.

  Taking a deep breath, he gazed at the flat meadow spread before them. Cicadas and grasshoppers added a gentle melody to the night’s breeze, which rolled with the redolent scents of honeysuckle and wild roses.

  Lilith wanted to urge him to continue, but for once she held her tongue. If he wanted to share, he would. It wasn’t as though she’d been very forthcoming with him about her life, either.

  “As I said before I was born a warrior. Trained from the moment I could hold a wooden sword, all to serve King Dionysis—a power-hungry tyrant who thought little of the subjection of his people in his constant quest for more. And while a part of me didn’t like it, I figured I had no voice. It was who I was. Who I’d been created to be. And there was nothing more to it.”

  Lilith bit down onto the corner of her lip, wanting to ask him so many questions, but not wanting to veer him off course again.

  He lifted a brow, as if noting her struggle. She waved her hand. “Continue.”

  Shrugging, he stroked the grass beside him absentmindedly. “The changes in me didn’t occur overnight. I am a creature of habit and anything that takes me outside of my comfort zone makes me uneasy. It’s a flaw of mine. I struggle with doing what’s right—”

  Unable to hold her tongue, she shook her head. “You seem entirely honorable, Giles. Look what you did for me with the girls, and the merry band of thieves. You’ve—”

  “You mistake me.” He gave her a tight smile. “My desire to keep you safe is tied into my desire to see this journey to its end as quickly as possible. You are in my charge and so therefore your safety is of paramount importance to me.”

  Duty.

  Nothing more.

  Nothing less.

  It was like jumping into an arctic pond to hear it. Swallowing hard, she nodded. Trying desperately to pretend his words hadn’t bothered her in the slightest.

  “By ‘right’ I mean stepping beyond my line of duty, making a decision of my own that benefits no one other than myself. Though I was bred a warrior, in many respects I’m a servant. It is the role I’ve adopted here in Kingdom to my prince. I do as I am bid.”

  “Don’t you have any feelings on the matter?”

  “That’s just it. I am demone, the role comes so naturally to me that emotions rarely play a part in my life. It isn’t that I don’t have them, it’s that I’ve been so trained to ignore them that it is second nature. My desires and wants mean nothing.”

  “They mean everything. How can you truly be happy without them?”

  He sighed. “Happiness, joy—I’ve felt them. I’ve known them, but as a warrior they were always tied into conquest. Winning at all costs.”

  “The joy of a child. Of a wife. Of a home—those mean nothing to you?” Why was she so adamant in pointing those things out in particular to him? She couldn’t understand that someone wouldn’t wish to know love or to be loved; the concept was entirely foreign to her.

  Even with all the bullying she’d experienced as a pup, her one constant had been a loving and nurturing family life. Without it Lilith feared she might have become just as mean-spirited as the rest of her kind.

  “I don’t know, Lilith. I’ve thought of those ideas in an abstract sense, but my life was always too busy. Because I cannot give all of me to anyone else, Rumpel already has it. I must be there for him whenever he needs me, whenever he calls me. Ready at a moment’s notice to carry out his every whim. Whether as a warrior, or valet, or game master.”

  “Which leaves nothing for anyone else.”

  He spread his arms. “Exactly. So though I’ve on occasion wondered what my life might be like were I born someone else, it is always fleeting. Even as far-removed from Delerium as I am, the caste system still remains alive and well inside me.”

  She clenched her jaw. Lilith didn’t want to read between the lines, but this felt an awful lot like someone giving her the hint that it would never happen between them, and that burned her because she’d not asked it of him. In fact, she’d only just determined that she would let up on her pursuit of him.

  “But that isn’t true,” she surprised herself by saying, “because you did break away from the king, obviously. You live here now, on Kingdom. You serve a prince, not the king you were destined for. You can break out of the mold.”

  “Yes,” he growled, but not at her, his eyes w
ere distant, staring far off into a memory she could not see, “and it nearly broke me to do it. The only reason I did was because Dionysis would kill our species off in his madness. We are an immortal race. But we can die, though it isn’t easy. Disease will not take us, but the cruelty of our king could. It is difficult for my kind to breed. Children are rare and valued, treasured. So to kill us off meant he’d extinguish our flame, our species, eternally.”

  “So Rumpel fought him?”

  “No.” His lashes fluttered and he finally looked at her, laughing softly but not sounding as though it were funny. “Dionysis was too powerful, and most warriors did not do as I did. They remained loyal to their king. Rumpel was banished for daring to speak out against his father. A few of the royals felt as he did, and the murmurings of a revolution were enough for Dionysis to kick him out of Delerium and all who followed him.”

  “Why not just kill him?”

  “Because royals are powerful, imbued with magics beyond imagining. And, should the king have taken a sword to the dark prince, he’d known the revolution would have risen. It was one thing to brutalize the serfs, but quite another to attempt the same with a sovereign.”

  She sighed. “It makes no sense to me. So Rumpel spoke out against a wicked king and only those of you at the castle in the sky were bold enough to agree that the king was evil? Here in Kingdom we call it like we see it, and should I ever come across the Red Queen, I’ll cut off her head with my claws.” She flicked her fingers at him.

  Her silly threat failed to illicit even half of a chuckle from him. “Kingdom is entirely different. It is why I’m not surprised that you do not understand me.”

  “It’s not that I don’t want to, knight,” she said, looking at him gently, “it’s just that I can’t. Rumpel seems to have adapted well here, so why can’t you? Why must it be duty or nothing? There is more to life.”

  “Rumpel was born a prince. What he wanted he always got. But when you are born to believe that you are owed no more than what’s been given, and everyone believes as you do, you cannot break away easily.”

  “And yet…” She touched his cheek briefly, trying to make him understand her point. “You did. You followed Rumpel. And…all things considered, he seems a helluva lot better than Dionysis.”