Binding His Fated Mates (Wolves of Crescent Springs #2)

CHAPTER ONE || DANIEL

One of the strangest side effects of being formally initiated into a pack of werewolves was that I could hear heartbeats now.

Given that I’d only ever been able to do magic—even though I was a mediocre warlock at best—this was a new and very unusual development.

One that wasn’t supposed to happen. I hadn’t told anyone yet, and I wasn’t planning to, because I had no idea what it meant or what my new pack would do about it once they knew.

And given how things usually went for me, it was unlikely to be good.

Besides, there wasn’t much to tell. It seemed completely random. One minute I was doing my own thing, and the next I was hearing a steady, rhythmic thump-thump-thump—someone else’s heartbeat.

For instance, Sally’s heart had been beating way too fast from the moment we walked into the Crescent Springs Bar and Grill and sat down at one of the tall-backed brown leather booths.

She’d given us menus and then moved behind the counter, wiping down the same spot she’d already cleaned a half-dozen times.

Her movements were mechanical and her expression was carefully neutral.

No one would’ve been the wiser that she’d just survived an attack by a literal monster from the Otherworld. But seeing us, her heart started hammering in her chest like she’d just sprinted a mile. And when she took our order, her smile was just a little too wide, but it still didn’t reach her eyes.

I was extremely familiar with papering over my real emotions with a fake smile, so I wasn’t the least bit fooled.

“We should talk about it,” I blurted out, after she’d brought us our food. “With what happened to you—”

She froze.

Then she sucked in a deep breath and said, “It’s good to be back.” Her British accent made the words clipped and brisk. “My regulars have been asking after me. That’s bollocks, though. They missed my burgers more than they missed me.”

Thump-thump-thump-thump. Even faster now.

The wide smile didn’t falter, though.

“They missed you,” Lacey said firmly, from the other side of the table. She gave me a warning look before popping several fries into her mouth at once. “Your burgers are just a bonus.”

Sally snorted, eyeing the way she was demolishing her food. “Flattery alone won’t get you a refill, love.”

Admittedly, Sally did look better than the last time I’d seen her.

But the bar wasn’t high. That had been right after we’d pulled her out of the Otherworld.

She’d been fed on by an Algea, a creature that made its victims relive their worst moments, feeding on the resulting despair.

Well, it did that and also used its razor-sharp talons to literally take its victims apart, piece by piece.

Thankfully, we’d rescued Sally before it had gotten around to doing that.

The monster was dead now, but Sally had closed her business for the better part of two months after the attack. This was her first day back.

Harris and Reed, the alphas of our pack—because the Crescent Springs wolf pack had two alphas now—had asked Lacey and me to go to the grill for lunch and get a sense of how she was doing. They’d been sending someone from the pack every couple of days to check on her.

And she wasn’t fine at all. I could hear it.

“Sally,” I said, keeping my voice light. “We’re worried about you. After everything that happened…”

She drew in a deep breath. “I’m fine, I’ve told you.”

Her heartbeat quickened again. I was still new to the enhanced hearing thing, but I was pretty sure that meant she was lying.

“We can help, if you let us.” I shrugged, trying to seem casual about it. “This isn’t the first monster we’ve ever faced. You don’t need to do this alone.”

Lacey shot me a sideways look that I pretended not to notice. The pack was a secret. But the restaurant was empty except for us and the cat was officially out of the bag with Sally. She already knew exactly what we were.

And besides, she was friends with a literal faerie and she’d managed to keep that a secret from everyone in town—including us—for all the years she’d been living here. She wasn’t going to tell anyone about the pack.

Sally studied me for a long moment, her gray eyes appraising me.

“I’ve been having nightmares,” she said, at last. She glanced toward the kitchen, her voice low.

I understood immediately. Tamrand—the aforementioned faerie—worked in the kitchen and she probably didn’t want him to hear her.

“It’s every night, the same dream. I wake up on the ground and I can’t move.

I can barely even breathe. It’s like—” She broke off, the corners of her mouth turning down.

“It’s like that thing still has its claws in me. ”

Her voice sharpened with challenge, her gaze locking with mine. “Unless you have a head-shrinker in the pack I don’t know about, how, exactly, do you lot expect to help me?”

“With magic,” I said immediately, before I’d thought it all the way through. But the moment the words were out, I decided to just go with it. “I can make you a charm, spelled to ward off the nightmares.”

It felt strange, telling a mundane about magic.

I kept expecting the words to get strangled in my throat.

But they didn’t. Not anymore, at least. I’d paid the price for that two years ago by unwittingly sacrificing everything that mattered most to me.

And I’d do anything to bring the silence back, if it meant I could undo everything else, too.

Sally’s eyes widened, the challenge vanishing from her expression in an instant. “Wait—magic?” She eyed me incredulously. To be fair to her, I probably didn’t look the part. I was dressed in a black Queen T-shirt and a faded pair of blue jeans. “You can do real magic?”

“He’s a warlock,” Lacey said. I didn’t miss the way she went tense, as though she might have to spring to my defense at any moment.

I tried not to be annoyed. I loved Lacey, but I didn’t need her to protect me at all times.

Or, correction, I didn’t want to need her to protect me at all times.

“But you work with—” Sally broke off, her gaze sweeping the empty dining room before turning back to us. “Werewolves.”

“Yeah. Sure do.” Heat crept into my cheeks. Being the subject of conversation was never my favorite thing.

“Anyway. A charm to ward away nightmares is simple. I could do it in my sleep.”

“Huh.” Sally looked at me with an unreadable expression. “Well, I’d appreciate that, Daniel.”

“I’ll bring it by later,” I promised. “And if there’s anything else I can do, I’m happy to. We’re happy to. The pack—all of us.”

Lacey pursed her lips, but when Sally glanced over at her for confirmation, she nodded her agreement. “Anything you need. We all understand what it’s like to go through something like this and not be able to tell anyone.”

“What else is out there?” Sally asked abruptly. “I knew about Tam before all this, of course. And I was raised on stories about faeries. But that thing…”

She trailed off, but I heard the note of barely suppressed horror in her voice.

Nathaniel Bailey, the vampire king of Seattle himself, had used his hypnotic abilities to take away the worst of the experience after we’d rescued her, but apparently whatever was left was still upsetting. I didn’t blame her a bit.

Lacey arched a brow at me when I shot her a questioning glance but didn’t object.

I considered our options. We could give her the minimum amount of information—which might be better for her emotional stability in the short term. But in the long term, it was definitely better that Sally knew the truth. She needed to be able to trust us. It beat her looking for answers elsewhere.

Besides, it wasn’t like she could go back to not knowing that there were literal monsters in the world.

“The short version? Most legends are real. Werewolves, obviously. Vampires, too. And then there are old souls, which are basically just humans who keep getting reborn with their previous memories intact. And the fae, like Tamrand, but they mostly live in the Otherworld.”

“The faerie world.”

I shrugged. “It’s basically a dimension parallel to ours, where most of the supernatural stuff came from originally.

” I paused. “Anyway, there are shapeshifters, who can turn into other types of animals besides wolves. They’re born that way, they’re not bitten or anything, like wolves.

” Lacey shot me a narrow look and shook her head.

Fair. Mentioning that regular people could become werewolves by being bitten was probably a bridge too far.

I faltered, then added, “And there are witches and warlocks—”

“Like you.”

“Yeah, like me. I inherited my gifts, but there are actually a lot of different types of witches out there.” I quickly danced past that, before my own words could conjure up any unpleasant memories of my family.

With the one exception of my sister, Rowan, the Henbanes were…

not nice people. I finished with, “And then there are other things out there, too. Monsters… like the Algea.”

“It’s what attacked you,” Lacey said. “Harris and Reed didn’t talk to you about it? They’ve checked on you.”

“That they have,” Sally replied. “But they haven’t said much about what happened. I think they were afraid I’d go off my trolley if they gave me too many details.”

“Well, that’s what it’s called,” Lacey replied. “It’s a legend from Greek mythology, but it’s obviously real.”

“You know, it’s strange, but having a name for it is better, I think.”

“You’re taking this really well,” Lacey observed.

“I think I’m past the point of being shocked by anything,” Sally said, a little wryly. “And if this is the world I live in, I want to know the rules. I’m not keen on being blindsided again. And I refuse to be a victim. That starts with knowing what’s out there.”

There was a whole lot of steel in that statement. I decided right then that maybe Sally was a lot tougher than any of us had given her credit for.