Chapter Seven
Darius…
There are times in a werewolf’s life when having a hot woman drop into your lap is a good thing—a great thing, even. Now, however, is not that time.
It is the worst time.
The very fucking worst time.
The only thing that could make it worse?
If Aunt Artemis decides to tell everyone Effie is my fated mate.
She’s not. She can’t be. No matter how many times Artemis tells me (and she has been telling me for the past fifteen years) that fate has a plan for me and it involves a witch who will change my life for the better, I know it’s not true.
Life doesn’t get better. It’s just there and you survive it until you don’t, end of story.
Nikos and his fellow usurpers in training are ready to go full-moon mode vicious in their arguments about the best way to ransom Effie Sherwood.
My second-in-command is pacing the interior of the meeting gazebo, snarling and waving his hands in the air, as if the bigger production he makes of things, the more powerful he’ll appear.
Yeah, maybe he looks that way to some in the pack, but it’s all just bluster.
My closest advisor, Atlas, is sitting backward on a chair off to my side, his wiry frame deceptively relaxed and his gaze focused on Main Street’s foot traffic. He might look like he’s not paying attention, but I know better. The man never misses a damn thing.
Aunt Artemis brought her tarot deck to the leadership meeting with her and is now shuffling the oversized cards but not dealing any as she watches Nikos with a steely glint in her eyes.
There’s no love lost between those two, and I don’t have to think twice about whose side I’d take in a fight.
The woman I’ve always called my aunt even though technically the term is ceremonial can be a lot, but Nikos is one hundred percent pure asshole.
“If we contact the Council now, we can leverage the situation so that they and the witch’s family are trying to beat each other out to offer the most money for her and the spell book,” Nikos says with a sneer as if the rest of us are too stupid to have thought of a bidding war.
“Then we can get a payoff worth our time and effort.”
He doesn’t say finally, but the word’s there, hanging in the air as obvious and obnoxious as an extra-foul-smelling fart.
A witch’s jinx on our pack that has lasted four generations means money is always tight. Oh, we still have the muscle and the know-how to keep our place on top of the pecking order for the werewolf packs in Witchingdom, but it’s getting harder and harder to maintain that edge every year.
The truth is, we need the money because it’s hard to keep your people fed, happy, and secure when every big score always seems to go south at the last minute. We’ve been scrounging for too long. I’m done watching my pack survive. It’s time we thrive again. And we will. I have to believe that.
Curling up with the Council, though, is not the way to do that.
Is there an immediate benefit?
Maybe.
But long term?
Yeah, that’s how your balls get gnawed off.
“You know it’s easier to fumigate fleas from a dog bed than to get rid of the Council once they get involved in pack business,” Atlas says in his slow drawl as if he’s reading my mind. “It’s not worth it.”
The long hair at the back of his mullet sticking out, Nikos puffs his chest and shoots back with, “Just because you’re scared shitless of the Council doesn’t mean the rest of us have to tuck our tails.”
Atlas’s one-sided grin as he eyeballs Nikos from behind his sunglasses should be setting off Nikos’s warning sirens, but he’s always been more brawn than brains.
If he’d been born with more gray matter, he would have known that Atlas is the strong-as-fuck kind of wiry that will always win in a bar fight.
It’s at this moment, right when I’m about to step in and stop things from escalating to Nikos getting his ass kicked in front of his boys and all the drama that would ensue, that Effie pops out of thin air, landing her plush ass right on my lap.
“Miss me?” she asks with a flirty wink that does all sorts of things to my dick—immediately.
So fast, in fact, that I can’t pluck her off my lap unless I want to let my entire pack leadership know just how much she affects me.
It’s not because of the whole hard cock thing. Unlike some folks, werewolves don’t have a bunch of hang-ups about sex. It’s fun, it feels good, and as long as it’s between consenting adults and no one gets hurt (unless that’s what they want), then it’s no big deal.
Most of the time—the exception being anything that involves a witch like the one currently wriggling against the evidence that will be held against me.
Atlas will take it as confirmation that my dick’s work ethic is more powerful than any bad luck hex a witch could throw at it, so everything is A-OK.
Nikos will take it as proof that I’m not thinking with my brain and am therefore compromised when it comes to decision-making.
And Aunt Artemis will see it as a sign that she’s right and Effie is my fated mate, just as the cards have predicted.
And I’m not just being stubborn about that, no matter what Artemis is probably thinking.
I’m being practical. Maybe fated mates used to be a thing, but not anymore.
And the attraction I can’t seem to get under control?
Well, I challenge you to have Effie “All the Curves” Sherwood land on your lap and not be turned on.
I do not have the time or the patience to deal with anyone’s opinion about the state of my dick right now though.
So that’s why I sling my arm around Effie’s waist and hold her in place, snug against my hard cock.
It’s a little bit of bliss and a whole lotta torture, but I can take it.
The little witch in my lap, however, is already going all melty.
Sure, she’s trying to cover it by jutting up that pointed chin of hers a little higher, but I can smell her excitement and I want to lick that scent right off her.
“What the fuck,” Nikos hollers at Effie’s sudden appearance, the veins in his throat bulging.
The wolf inside me reacts before I can, letting out a low, deadly growl that would be the only warning before I went all in.
“Deep breaths, Wolfie,” Effie says, barely loud enough for me to hear over the blood rushing in my ears. “You were the one who told me to play it cool.”
No, I’d said she needed to watch her mouth, but she has a valid point—one that my wolf is intent on ignoring.
So I do what I always do in these circumstances—I shut my wolf down.
Hard. I box ’im up, click the lock, throw a couple of sandbags on top for extra weight, and then toss the whole thing into the abyss.
“She’s got a glitch with her magic,” I tell Nikos, Atlas, and the others at the leadership meeting.
“Now she can’t be physically away from me.
I thought this would be close enough to the jail—especially with the old charms above the door—but it looks like this little chaos witch just can’t get enough of me. ”
Atlas is curious but cautious, while Nikos’s expression looks like he just found a black widow spider hanging from a web in his shower.
Effie scoffs at my announcement. “You snuck a charm on me.”
“You’re both wrong, and you know it,” Aunt Artemis says, punctuating her words with a series of tuts.
Fuck me.
It takes everything I have not to groan in misery.
Now that gets everyone’s attention. As our pack oracle, Artemis holds a special place of power.
She’s unpredictable, knowledgeable, and more than a little mystical.
To be honest, she scares the shit out of everyone.
She’s been around practically forever. Even the oldest in our pack don’t remember a time when Artemis wasn’t around—one of the attributes of being pack oracle, I guess.
Nikos comes to a stop in front of me, all but invading my space. “What’s Artemis talking about?”
“Nothing,” Effie and I say at the same time, which isn’t suspicious at all.
Fuck me. By the end of this, I might be the one paying to get rid of this witch.
Until that happens, though, I am the alpha of this pack. I hold these meetings and value everyone’s input—well, almost everyone’s—but the final decision is always mine.
“The bottom line is she’s our prisoner, and we’ll send a message to the Sherwoods first for the ransom.
” I pause long enough to appreciate the feel of her ass wiggling against me as she readies to launch a protest or a smart-ass comment.
“If I don’t like their answer, then we bring in the Council as a bidder on the Sherwood witch. ”
There’s some grumbling—some days I understand why my dad and grandma went all straight dictator even if that’s not the way I will ever run things—but no one argues.
Until, of course, the witch speaks up.
“The Council won’t want me,” Effie says with a shrug.
“Oh, witch, don’t sell yourself short. Everyone wants you,” I tell her. “Especially since, according to the gossip all over Witchingdom, your family and the Council seem to be locking horns right now. I’m sure they’d appreciate the chance to have a little leverage over the Sherwoods.”
She pivots on my lap—something that is both delicious and horrible at the same time—to look me in the eye. “You don’t want to do that. It won’t work out for you. Everyone who deals with the Council gets fucked over.”
“Around here,” I tell Effie, “we just call that life.”
Because if there’s one thing we know, it’s what it’s like to get fucked over by a coven of witches—a multigenerational bad luck hex will teach you that good and hard.
“Fine,” Nikos grumbles. “But we give the Council first bid on the spell book.”
Fuck. I’m so distracted by Effie that I’d almost forgotten about the reason why I’d been trailing her sister Leona in the first place.
When the word went out through back channels that the youngest Sherwood, Tilda, who everyone thought was powerless, but it turned out was anything but, had stolen an ancient spell book, it was all anyone could talk about.