“It’s the mark for empty,” Aeron said, shifting slightly and scooting even further onto Whitney’s lap. As I watched them, I had to wonder if they’d consummated their union last night. They hadn’t smelled of sex this morning, but then, I’d been a little distracted myself …
I had a threesome! I thought, biting my lip and flicking my eyes briefly up to meet Jax’s blue ones, Tidus’ gray ones. The situation was too dire for me to take more than a split-second of joy from the memory.
“There’s no magic left in his mark,” I said, tracing a fingertip over Silas’ scar, the ghost of fear flitting around inside my chest. What might’ve happened to him if I hadn’t broken that spell circle? Hell, I had no idea how I’d even done it in the first place. Our magic was wild and unpredictable, and if I didn’t get control of it soon, everything I knew and loved could fall apart. The future we were fighting so hard for would float away like a songbird, leaving nothing but beautiful notes where pretty feathers once nested.
“So we should make some,” Nic said quietly, his dark eyes flickering more purple than black for a moment before he turned away and ran his fingers through his hair. “We should make some,” he repeated, glancing back at the open front door and my mother’s naked form, dripping blood from her alpha silver. I had yet to take up wearing any permanent pieces, but with the mark on my arm, and the cauldron in our possession, maybe it wasn’t as urgent?
Looking down at Silas … maybe it was? I had no idea if the silver could’ve protected him, but perhaps it was worth a try?
“How do you suggest we make magic?” Che growled, his voice low and dangerous. He was still covered in blood. In fact, he had a decent amount of red smeared across his mouth. Not good. Vampire blood was poison to a werewolf and he was covered in it; most of us were. “You want to, what, have an orgy or something?”
“Sexuality is power,” Whitney said, her voice husky and low. She curled her arms around Aeron’s waist and leaned her chin against the faerie girl’s silver-skinned shoulder. They made a beautiful contrast, one of them light and the other dark, like a cup of cream and a square of chocolate. “Stir some up. What can it hurt if he’s not waking up?”
“If you guys are going to …” Harlem twirled a single finger in the air and then reached back to tuck some white-blonde hair behind one ear, her ice-blue eyes focused on the floor and not on my face. “Can I excuse myself?”
As if on cue, Lana appeared in the doorway, bowing respectively and deferentially past my mother and waiting for us to invite her in. Normally, she’d just walk right in—Lana didn’t have a lot of boundaries with her children—but she was making sure to put on proper airs with Nikolina around.
“Lana, can you take Harlem back to your place for a little while?” I said, my heart pounding. I wasn’t sure that an orgy—wouldn’t Faith just have a fit?—was the answer to this problem, but we might as well have some privacy. Harlem clearly had no idea what was going on with Silas, and even Aeron and Whitney seemed to be at a loss.
“We can stay,” Whitney told me, meeting my gaze from across the room. “But it looks to me like he’s just been sucked dry. Give him a little juice and he should rev right back up.”
“You can go,” I told her, making a sudden decision. Every time the boys and I mated, magic happened. It was the way of nature. After all, what was pregnancy and birth? Making new lives out of pleasure. Sounded like magic to me. “I can always send for you if we need you.”
I stroked my hand down the side of Silas’ face again and then leaned down to give him a kiss on his still, quiet lips. I could’ve sworn that he stirred when I did it …
Standing up, I started to strip my bloody shirt over my head. It had spatters of vamp blood on it. Not as much as Montgomery or Tidus, but I wasn’t going to waste another second sitting around talking about what to do. That was a Blood thing to do; werewolves acted, we didn’t chat.
“Go get in the shower,” I told Che, Jax, and Anubis. They were all naked, the poisonous crimson streaks across their skin alarming me. I was surprised they all looked as battle ready and alert as they did considering they were using teeth and claws to tear the Ironbound Bloods apart. “And take Silas with you. Strip him down. Get him in the water.” He wasn’t bloody like the others, but a warm shower couldn’t hurt, right? Fuck, maybe that’d be enough to wake him up?
Montgomery and Nic stayed with me, stripping as they went and not giving two shits that Harlem, Aeron, and Whitney were still within sight of the Pairing House. They all noticed us getting naked as they left with Lana and gave completely different reactions: Harlem blushed furiously while Aeron scowled and Whitney wrinkled her nose.
I smiled, but it didn’t quite reach my eyes. How could it, when one of my mates was passed out in the shower?
“What do you need from me, Alpha?” I asked, dipping my chin respectfully and waiting for Nikolina to look back and acknowledge me. Merliah and Charlene—her beta females—had taken off on whatever chore she’d chosen for them, but the alpha herself remained.
“Nothing right now,” she said, gazing out at the forest, almost like she was looking for something.
Or someone?
Wolves tended to bond pretty closely with those they mated, and my mother had given up a full litter of pups to mate with the Forest Spirit and have me. Maybe she liked him in ways even she didn’t understand?
“Nothing?” I asked, kicking off my shoes and dropping my jeans. Nic collected them all and tossed them into a pile with his and Monty’s, retrieving a few pieces of wood, some lighter fluid, and matches. As we stood there, naked on the Pairing House porch, he lit them up and watched them burn.
Orange flames danced on my mother’s stern face, her pointed chin so much like mine, her high cheekbones like looking in a mirror. I still needed to do that, take a moment and really look at myself. If I couldn’t recognize that strong, beautiful woman in Anubis’ drawing then perhaps I had a few self-image problems? I’d always thought of myself as strong, powerful, capable … But right now, I felt like I was falling apart. My life was out of control and full of secrets; I didn’t like that.
I didn’t like that at all.
“Nothing,” Nikolina repeated, turning back to look at me. The way she smiled just then … was terrifying, more like a shark than a wolf. “Clearly, we have a problem named Allister Vetter, but it’s almost Rusalnaya Nedelja. I’m not worried about him.” My mother flipped the heavy length of her bloodred hair over one shoulder before descending the steps and pausing next to Nic’s makeshift bonfire.
Rusalnaya Nedelja, Rusalka Week. The one week a year that the vengeful ghost known as a rusalka could leave their watery graves and seek revenge. And we just happened to have both a rusalka and a man who rightfully deserved her vengeance.
“Take care of your mate and come see me in the morning,” the alpha added before shifting forms and melting into the glorious shape of a red-brown wolf. At least now I knew why my coat didn’t match hers or my sisters’ or my grandmother’s.
I was a demigod.
Shaking my head to clear it, I turned back toward the house and both the Alpha-Son of Pack Ivory Emerald and my Ebon Red guard—my mates—fell into step beside me.
“Are we really going to try sex first?” Monty asked, his voice low and even. I looked over at him, those eyes of his such a bright green that it was impossible to even pretend he was human. Humans were not blessed with eyes that beautiful, the color of a snowbrush’s shiny leaves. Earthy. That’s what his gaze was, resonating with this sense of calm and kingliness that made me subconsciously seek his council. Like, on fucking everything.
“What do you think, Monty?” I asked, giving Nic’s warm hand a squeeze to let him know that I wasn’t disregarding his opinion, just getting a second one. When it came to Silas’ health and safety, we had to look at all the angles. On the outside I was calm, but on the inside, I was trying not to freak out. Montgomery knew that, I think. Out of all my new m
ates, he was the one who understood me the best; we were the most similar by far.
“It’s like he’s just sleeping,” Monty said as we moved into the warm, foggy heat of the bathroom and paused at the edge of the tiled shower. Silas was still out, but he was at least mumbling. Anubis was beside him, keeping him upright and in the spray of water without letting too much of it run over his face.
Nic climbed into the water and started to soap himself down as Montgomery and I knelt down next to Silas. We both checked his pulse, put our ears to his chest. Our hearing was good enough that if I focused in on it, I could hear any of the boys’ hearts thundering behind their rib cages. But getting in close like this made our assessments more accurate.
Everything about Silas seemed fine—except for the fact that he was still out.
“Let’s clean up,” Monty said, meeting my eyes over the Obsidian Gold Alpha-Son’s comatose form, “and get upstairs.”
So, Nic and Monty were in agreement.
We’d try sex and see if that couldn’t wake my mate up.
Because if it didn’t … No, I wouldn’t let myself think about that, not yet.
I was Zara Wolf, and although I was more than capable of working alone … I’d rather do it with my mates. All seven of them. Losing even one … might just kill me.
Upstairs, we laid Silas out in the center of the bed and took up positions around him.
“This seems so … wrong,” I said, but Che was staring at me with heavy lids and violet eyes, the fingers of his right hand already wrapped around the base of his erect cock.
“You sound like a human,” Jax scoffed, leaning back against the headboard with one knee propped up, his elbow resting against it. We were all nude, and the air was charged, but there was so much more going on right now than just sex.
“You know what I mean,” I told him as Montgomery sat next to me and fixed my messy hair, re-braiding the red strands into a perfect fish-tail. “It just seems weird to mate with Silas like this. He lost his mom and his dad in one fell swoop.” As soon as Monty finished with my hair, I sat up and crawled forward, straddling Silas’ pelvis with my naked body—not in a sexual way, though. I just touched him, put my palms against his bare, tattooed chest and wished he’d open his gold eyes and look me in the face.
We were wolves, Pack, and skin-to-skin contact was everything. Mammals, social mammals like wolves and humans especially, they were meant to be touched. That’s one of the things I’d never understand about human society, how strange people were about showing affection to one another. Teenage boys didn’t hug each other enough; toxic masculinity was rampant. What was so wrong with showing love to somebody else—platonic or otherwise?
“He lost everything, and now this. What did your father do to you, Silas?” I leaned down and gave him another kiss on the mouth before scooting off and onto Che’s lap instead.
It suddenly didn’t seem quite so difficult to adjust the mood in the room.
Che’s body was big and muscular, he was hard in all the right places, and Mother Earth, he smelled good. His signature Pack Violet Shadow scent of lavender, bergamot oil, and vanilla mixed with the sharp scent of fresh sweat and the heady musk of arousal. His cock teased my ass crack as I looked into his face, his expression feral and wild and far too dominant for my wolf’s liking.
I growled at him, couldn’t help it.
He just cocked a single dark brow at me, just a few shades lighter than the ebony darkness of his hair.
“There are so many things I’ve dreamt of doing to you,” he growled right back, the slightest hint of a challenge in his words. If the situation weren’t dire, I’d have probably chosen to dominate him. As things stood, we didn’t have time for that.
“Like what?” I asked as Nic let out a low growl of his own. He was the type who’d start a fight with Che, put him in his place for me. But I didn’t want any of my alpha males to have that sort of relationship with each other; they needed to work as allies, not enemies. Besides, the last thing I wanted to see was a battle royale between Nicoli Hallett and Che Nocturne.
“Like this,” Che said, rolling us so that he was on top. Every instinct inside of me said I should fight him off, bite his throat, let him know with a snarl and a sharp nip that he was out of line. But also, a little part of me liked it, too. A deep, base need inside of my human half liked the feeling of him on top, between my legs, his bodyweight pushing me into the bed.
It liked it even better when he drifted lower and put his palms on the insides of my knees.
“Let’s wake this asshole up,” he told me, putting a slight amount of pressure on my legs, seeing if I’d open them or not. I resisted, but only for a moment, spreading my thighs and exhaling at the same time. I had to relax. Otherwise, this was going to be a chore and that’s not what I wanted, not at all. The connection between me and the boys, and all the magic we could drum up with our intimacy, it was too important. “I’m the last one to get his Zara tat, so I figure it’s just best if I go first, right?”
Che smirked and I felt several of the other alpha males stiffen slightly. He had a point, and he was right, but I had feeling that he’d be doing this even without a valid excuse. Still, I was going to stop the boys from fighting, but subtle displays of dominance like this were their business to work out.
The Alpha-Son of Pack Violet Shadow slipped low and put his face near my suddenly throbbing cunt. It wasn’t difficult to put my body in the right state of mind. If only I could get my chaotic thoughts in order, too. Closing my eyes, I concentrated on the feeling of Che’s muscular arms curving around the outside of my thighs, his fingertips digging firmly into my hips.
His breath was warm as he kissed the inside of my thigh, the low rumbling sound in his throat vibrating up through his chest and into me.
“You smell incredible,” Che whispered, running his tongue from my knee all the way up to the crease between my thigh and hip. He licked along the length of it, up toward his right hand. Sensation coiled inside of me, making my stomach muscles clench, my breath hitch.
I opened my eyes and found Anubis lounging next to me, on my right side, opposite Silas. His crimson eyes were heavy-lidded as he gazed down at my face, the dark navy of his hair wet and yet somehow managing to stick up all over the place anyway.
“This’ll work,” he told me, which made me feel heaps better. Nic was my trusted right-hand man … err, left-hand man. Montgomery was a coolheaded king. And Anubis was a scholar. Three different ways of looking at the world and in this, they were all in agreement.
Of course, we were all horny young adults, so our judgment could be considered clouded … but I didn’t think any of the guys would leave Silas in danger if they really thought this wasn’t going to help.
“It’ll work,” Anubis repeated, sliding his left arm under my crossed ones, resting on the pillow above my head. He trailed the fingers of his other hand across my rib cage, his gaze locked onto my breasts as they rose in fell with the slow, steady movements of my breaths. As Anubis leaned down toward me, his own unique scent teased my nostrils, that sweet mix of gardenias and jasmine layered over the musky smell of werewolf.
Our mouths touched, just our lips, no tongue. We brushed them together before Anubis turned his face to the side, rubbing his cheek against my own. The tanned bronze color of his skin made a beautiful contrast to the paleness of my fingers as I dropped my left hand down and teased my fingertips along the side of his jaw. With a simple, easy touch, I turned him back to face me and leaned up slightly to kiss him again. This time though, I used my tongue.
And so did Che.
He flicked the hot, slick tip of his tongue against my opening, causing my hips to buck up, my breath to exhale in a rush. He wasn’t as patient as Montgomery. As soon as he tasted me, he was making these little growling sounds in his throat. His fingers slid between my folds and into the slickness of my core, my muscles tightening naturally around him as he readjusted his mouth
to my clit. Che’s tongue chased the sensitive little nub with sharp, quick movements.
It was almost too much, the fingers of my left hand dropping to his hair automatically, curling in the dark strands and squeezing hard. He wasn’t going to last long down there, was he? As soon as Che tried to push up and move, I took a more firm grip on his hair and kept him still. He didn’t like that at all, but he acquiesced and kept doing what he was doing, working me with his fingers and his mouth.
Meanwhile, my mouth was busy with Anubis, tasting him as he palmed the heavy weight of my left breast with his right hand, squeezing the tender flesh with slow, easy movements. His style was so different from Che’s that they seemed to highlight each other’s strengths, mask each other’s weaknesses.
I like that, I thought, groaning and wiggling slightly against the sheets, beads of sweat sliding along the undersides of my breasts, dampening the arch of my back. I like that a whole hell of a lot. I was starting to really appreciate having more than one male at a time.
It reminded me of a passage in Majka’s book, the one written in Seraphim that only Anubis could read. Had I ever mentioned how sexy I found his scholarly pursuits? If I hadn’t, I needed to. Your brain is sexy, I thought and then fought to hold back a small, nervous giggle. But your hard pecs and warm mouth don’t hurt either.
Anubis worked my breast as our mouths met with easy, practiced movements, like we’d done this dozens of times before, like we were old pros at it. Nobody would ever know we’d only had sex once. The sensual, easy foreplay of Anubis’ mouth sent swirls of pleasure down to meet the hot, angry thrust of Che’s fingers and the wild fervor of his mouth. The two differing sensations mixed together in places low, my belly muscles tightening as I fought my way toward an orgasm.
“Alpha,” Che whispered huskily, lifting his face up from my throbbing core. Anubis moved back just enough so that I could see Che, violet eyes nearly black with lust, his pulse thundering in the side of his throat.
Pack Ivory Emerald Page 2