Escaping Monsters: A Reverse Harem Wolf Shifter Romance (Grayhaven Book 1)

by Rita Stradling

  “Could she be in disguise as a black-haired chick with a bullnose ring? This guy here lives under her register. However, I know for a fact that woman hates me,” I said.

  “That would be Morgana, the witch,” Chad sang, as he continued to strum.

  “If you can enter Morgana’s store, she likes you,” Ace stated it as a fact. “Those she doesn’t like get flung away from the store if they even get close. But Morgana is not the goddess Freyja. Freyja is also the Goddess of Love and Fertility, and Morgana powers her drugstore on death magic. Were you especially kind to any cats?”

  “I did give a stray cat my last can of tuna as I was walking into town,” I said.

  Ace nodded. “There you go.”

  “So, is having Freyja interested in me a good thing or a bad thing?” I asked.

  Ace winced. “Mixed. The ethics of gods and goddesses don’t always line up with that of human society. But the good news is their attention spans are shorter than a two-year-old’s, so she’ll probably move on soon.”

  “Well, I don’t mind the cat love.” I leaned down and scratched behind the cat’s ears. “So, Ace… do you know a lot about Norse Mythology, or do you just know a lot about everything in general?”

  I was getting the feeling it was the latter, but I wanted to check.

  “Ace knows every random fact that you could ever not want to know,” Chad sang as he strummed his guitar.

  Ace’s nostrils flared. “For someone who has so many ex-lovers and one-night stands, Chad, I’d think you’d take more of an interest in the supernatural abilities of the enemies you’re making.”

  “Am I going to have to separate you two?” I asked sensing something a little more than annoyance between them. Maybe a past wrong. “So, Ace, are you the resident expert on Grayhaven?”

  “Yes,” Chad sang. “And, he’s got a dozen fancy degrees to prove it.”

  “One degree, in Classics, and I was going for my MA in Mythological Studies when I got a little too close to the truth and ended up becoming what I was studying.” Ace gestured down to his body. “Really, I’m just the resident bartender, meaning I come in contact with everyone in Grayhaven and learn more than I want to know about the residents of our fair town.”

  “I seriously want to pick your brain sometime…” I trailed off as the big fluffy Skogkatt cat started hacking. His stomach moved up and down as its head arched toward the pavement. “Poor guy,” I said as he continued to hack, and then a wad of paper came hurling out.

  “No wonder,” I said through gritted teeth as the cat continued to hack.

  Next, the cat spat a thick chain, tangled into a ball. After he’d expelled his guts, the feline yawned, rubbed its head against my legs, and wandered back up the driveway.

  “This looks like iron.” Ace poked the chain, and it fell apart to reveal a thick necklace with two charms on it, one of a tree with a twisting decorative trunk and another of a four-leaf clover.

  “It looks like it could double for a weapon,” I said on a laugh. The necklace wasn’t the most aesthetically pleasing piece of jewelry. The iron chain was clunky and the charms looked like worn hunks of metal.

  “I think it’s a talisman to protect you from the fae.” Ace poked a charm that resembled a twisted tree. “This is a rowan tree, which should keep the fae from tricking you, and this here…” he pointed to the four-leaf clover, “It was said that if you carried a four-leaf clover you could see past fae glamour. And… this is as close as my fingers can get to the necklace. There’s some sort of force pushing my hand away.”

  Chad set his guitar down and came to crouch over us. He reached for the necklace but yanked back and shook his hand. He nodded to me. “Feels like static. I’m guessing it was meant for you, Beautiful.”

  Next to me, Ace rolled his eyes. “I thought you were supposed to be creative, Chad. Beautiful is the most overused expression of appreciation out there.”

  “There’s a reason it’s overused,” Chad said, smoothly, and his shoulder pressed into mine.

  Ignoring the two, I reached down for the necklace and my fingers met no resistance. I wrapped my hand around the chain, and the moment I did, the driveway around me changed. Where there had only been a gasoline tank before, now there was a thick tree root piercing up from the ground and into the tank.

  “There’s a tree growing up into your gas tank,” I said as I pointed to it. “The moment I touched the necklace, this massive engorged root appeared out of thin air.”

  “I wonder if this would work now that you’re touching it…” Ace reached up and wrapped his hand around the chain, meeting no resistance this time. “And, clearly the fae have been stealing from us for some time.”

  The fae had stuck a leaf onto the monitoring system to fake out the reader.

  Chad wrapped his hand around the necklace too. “Damn it. You’d think the fae would leave our gas alone since nine out of ten times the calls we respond to are reports of fires blazing in the forest, threatening their houses.”

  “Do fae need gas for something?” I asked as I ran my hand over the root. It just felt like normal wood to me.

  “They hate anything to do with technology. The absolute only reason they’d steal gas would be to trade it to the demons.” Ace rubbed a hand over his eyes. “And nine out of ten fires we put out are from the demons being careless with gasoline.”

  Chad lifted the chain toward the tree root. “What would happen if we…”

  “Don’t Chad!” Ace yelled, but it was too late.

  Chad touched the iron necklace to the thick wooden stalk, and it yanked away, sending a stream of gasoline straight down at us.

  Acrid gas splashed down, raining over my shirt and splashing onto my chin.

  “Shit!” Chad reached up and covered the hole with his hands, but the gas was still streaming out. Ace and I both reached up and covered Chad’s hands with our own. We all stood there, soaked in gasoline and twisted up with each other’s limbs.

  My front was smashed to Chad’s back while Ace was pressed up against my backside, and every inch of me burned from the gasoline.

  “Holy shit! What do we do?” I cried.

  “Teagan, pull your hands down slowly,” Ace said, but he quickly changed his statement to, “Will you please pull your hands out?”

  The moment that Ace had given me the order, his dominance had pressed down on me, but it lifted just as quickly. The sexy nerd had some serious untapped dominance in him that rose to the surface as soon as he wanted something.

  “Okay,” Ace said through a tense voice, “I’m going to ask you to get all of your clothes with gasoline off and wash off and then get the overflow tank. It’s over on the side of the house. We can use it to empty this tank.”

  “I’m not going to wash off while you two are covered in gas.” I was already pulling my clothes off as I ran for the side of the firehouse. The overflow tank was a massive rubber container that weighed as much as a full-grown man. My skin ached as I rushed to drag the container to the tank.

  “Okay, ready,” I said.

  “You go first Ace,” Chad said.

  But at the same moment, Ace commanded, “Move Chad.”

  The bigger werewolf hopped away, and Ace quickly followed. A stream of gasoline came spurting out, and the men and I shoved the hole of the overflow under the stream.

  “Good enough!” Ace said as he threw off his shirt and scrambled for his fly.

  Chad had to tear at his buttons to get them off, so I helped with his fly and shoved his jeans down. That was all I could handle before I started running for the house. The two guys were right behind me, dashing in through the garage and running up the stairs to the bathroom.

  “Lukewarm water,” Ace called as we stopped under the line of showers. The cool stream hit my skin, barely soothing the burn.

  “Soap,” Ace said, and he held up a container and poured the gel into my hands. All three of us washed our bodies, but the burning was all down my back.

  Ma
ybe because of his long hair, Chad had the same issue, because he said, “My back burns like it’s being branded.”

  “Here,” I crossed over to his shower stream and gently washed down his back.

  “Do you want me to do yours?” Ace asked.

  When I nodded, he gently washed me until the burning subsided. My eyes slipped closed as I continued to lather Chad’s back.

  “How hot would this be if all of us weren’t suffering from gasoline burns?” Chad asked.

  My eyes snapped open as the realization hit me that I was completely naked between two extremely sexy firemen in a communal shower. Not only was I naked with them, but I was lathering soap on Chad’s muscular back while Ace’s hands were rubbing my shoulders.

  A sudden, intense lust swelled through me. What was happening to me? I just had world-shattering sex with one virtual stranger, and now I was moments away from begging two more strangers to take turns pinning me to the shower wall. On top of that, I could only tolerate Chad when he was in wolf form. As a human, he was a giant bag of douche.

  I stepped back from the men. “And, I’m clean. I’m going to go check on that tank… right now.”

  I crossed over to the stack of towels in the locker and did my best not to peek back at the two men. As I covered myself in a thick towel that wrapped around me twice over, I couldn’t resist one glance back.

  Ace had his hands on the wall and his head down. The water had straightened his black curly hair and it clung to his cheeks. Beside him, Chad was watching me through his curtain of blond hair as water streamed down his naked muscles.

  Damn.

  My legs did not want to take me from that room, but I fought through it and headed over to my bag in Jasper’s room.

  Big fat nope. My girl parts needed to simmer the fuck down.

  After a few steadying breaths, I dressed quickly in Jasper’s room and headed out to check on the gas tank.

  The stream had finally stopped as the gas emptied to lower than the hole.

  The necklace the cat had regurgitated for me was lying under the tank, and I rinsed it in the spigot in the driveway.

  I was heading back inside when I noticed the ball of paper that the cat had also regurgitated. It had unfolded on the driveway, revealing a torn flight luggage tag. On it, someone had started to write words and then crossed them out.

  I lifted the tag and saw under the pen scratches, there was the name Oliver Hunt.

  A metallic tang filled my mouth as panic flooded through me. I recognized the baggage tag immediately. I was the one who wrote Oliver’s name, only to scratch it out and toss the tag in the trash. The sight of the name made my head spin with anger and fear.

  Escaping my pack had become increasingly more difficult every time I managed it. I had always been looking for a weakness in the pack’s defenses. Oliver had been that weakness. He had a growing fascination with me, and I had used that to escape, only to realize that trusting Oliver was a dangerous mistake.

  I didn’t understand how the magical cat found a luggage tag I threw away five states ago or why he brought it to me of all things.

  “Omega?”

  I lifted my head to see, clear as day, Oliver Hunt standing at the end of the firehouse driveway. I wouldn’t have recognized him if I wasn’t just thinking of the man. He had a scruffy beard and his ash-blond hair was so knotted, dreads were forming. His handsome face was gaunt, and clothes hung off his massive frame.

  His jaw was slack, and he looked as shocked as I felt.

  Panic spiked through my system, and I turned on my heel, running for the firehouse. The crashing of boots pounded behind me, and I knew he was catching up.

  “Omega!” he roared.

  I flew in through the door and kicked it closed, locking the deadbolt just in time. A knock came pounding on the wood, shaking the thick frame. I leapt toward the stairway when Oliver yelled through the door.

  “Let me in, Omega.”

  The order stopped me in my tracks, constricting my air as I tried to push back against it. Oliver’s emotions flooded my system, longing, betrayal, seething hate. There was no resisting his will. My hands raised to let him in.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Oliver’s anger flooded through my chest, along with the sharp slice of betrayal. He longed for me just as his rage rose into a murderous fury.

  “Let me in, Omega,” he roared, reinforcing the order.

  His dominance wrapped around my chest like a steel cable, and my hand lifted. It was like I had suddenly become a puppet, and Oliver’s dominance was the hand controlling me. My fingers closed around the deadbolt.

  “No!” I screamed as I started to turn the lock. There was a rush of sound, and then hands wrapped around my shoulders and yanked me back into a wet, naked chest.

  Arms wrapped around me, stopping me from grabbing the lock, but Oliver’s order constricted around my neck, choking off my air. I had to obey him. I had to open the door.

  I fought against the man holding me, but they held me effortlessly. A ringing grew louder in my ears, and I could hear the low murmur of voices under the ringing but, I couldn’t hear the words.

  A new, stronger dominance hit me, and I gasped for air.

  “Breathe,” a low male voice said, and Ace’s fear and determination flooded through my body, mingling with Oliver’s fury.

  I gasped, choking on the oxygen. As soon as I had air, my body was fighting to get to the door again, but the man continued to restrain me. My vision cleared enough that I could see Ace’s face just before mine. As he leaned in, water dripped from his curly hair. Both men had clearly still been in the shower when they rushed to me.

  Ace ordered me to breathe again, and air flooded my lungs.

  “If I don’t open that door, it’s going to take an hour or more for his order to wear off,” I managed before I was out of oxygen again.

  “Breathe,” Ace ordered, and I gasped in once more.

  “One of us should go after him,” Chad said as he continued to restrain my wild movements. “If we catch him, then she can open the door safely.”

  “Can you order her to take breaths and stop her from touching the door?” Ace asked before he told me to inhale once more.

  “Don’t move me any further away. The further away I am, the harder the order hits,” I managed before I was out of breath.

  “Breathe,” Chad ordered, but I couldn’t.

  My vision tunneled, and I just managed to shake my head.

  Ace commanded me to inhale, and I could finally gasp in air.

  “That werewolf is more dominant than you, Chad,” I said.

  Ace looked between me and the door. “Teagan, I’m not strong enough to hold you in place without risking pushing you back. What do we do?”

  “Let her go,” Oliver called through the door, and I felt Chad shudder, but his arms stayed strong around me.

  “Command him away,” I managed after Ace ordered me to breathe once more.

  “Move out of earshot of the firehouse,” Ace ordered through the door, before he turned and ordered me to inhale again.

  Ace gritted his teeth. “Fuck he’s strong. I can’t hold both of you for long.” He shuddered. “Breathe, Teagan.”

  “Let me open the door, and then I’ll run upstairs,” I said as my body fought against Chad’s failing grip.

  “I see. If Chad lets you go and you open the door, then you can both head upstairs while I hold the werewolf at bay.” Ace nodded and then ordered me to breathe.

  Chad released me, and I grabbed for the lock, turning it and opening the door.

  Hands grabbed me around my knees and back, and Chad swooped me into his arms. He thundered up the stairs as I dragged in sweet oxygen. My eyes throbbed and my whole body felt feverish as I ached and shook.

  Chad took me straight back to the shower room I’d just exited from where the three showers were still spraying.

  “Can you stand? I need to secure the firehouse so that dickhead doesn’t come in,” Ch
ad said, and when I nodded, he set me down by the sink, and I gripped onto it as tremors wracked through me.

  I walked straight back into the showers, still in my clothes, and I let the now-cold water wash over my face.

  They found me so fast. It had all happened in the space of twenty-four hours. I’d let my raging attraction to the men in this house distract me from my mission, and now I was trapped.

  The look on Oliver’s face when he first saw me blossomed in my mind. His mouth had been slack and eyes wide like I was the last person on Earth that he expected to see.

  A memory came bursting into my mind, unbidden and unwanted. I’d felt Oliver’s emotions growing for years.

  I’d been lying in the dark of my room, hyper-aware of the fact that Kane could come in any minute, wanting his daily fix of dominating me before he passed out. It was his favorite game. Kane would give me an order to do something, like roll over, and I would fight him as pleasure flooded his system from the dominance. When I gave in and rolled over, he would spoon me and tell me about his day, like we were any ordinary couple.

  Instead, Oliver stepped out of the shadows. He was a large man with wide shoulders and disconcertingly light blue eyes.

  I crawled to the side of the bed. “You shouldn’t be here, Oliver. Kane is coming at any minute.”

  Oliver knelt before me and reached out toward my cheeks, but he came short of touching my skin. “I’ve got a plan to get you out of here, Omega.”

  “You’re going to help me escape?” I tried to sound confused, but really, it didn’t come as a shock.

  Every time Kane assigned Oliver as my guard, Oliver’s longing thrummed down between us like a livewire, and even though the enforcer had a violent reputation, I’d let his infatuation grow. My gaze would linger on Oliver’s strangely light eyes for a few seconds too long as I passed him in the hallways. I’d asked him about his day and his feelings and dreams, and he’d confide in me. His burgeoning longing was the weakness in the chains that bound me, and I’d let Oliver’s fascination turn into an obsession in the hopes he’d let me escape.