The Konungr Takes a Mate (Monsters of New York #20)

Prologue

After more than a thousand years of living, Fenrir North had given up on ever finding his mate.

Even if he found her, would she want to tie her life to his?

As the only known vamwolf in existence, he was a vampire-wolf shifter hybrid who’d successfully brought together New York City’s wolf shifter pack with the city’s vampire coven.

While the two very different paranormal entities lived, worked, and partied together, they were forbidden from feeding off one another or creating new hybrids.

Fenrir was the only known hybrid in the city, or the country.

He’d grown accustomed to being alone, only taking women for an occasional few hours of sexual fun.

Then, just nights before the summer hibernation, he and his security team stopped into a bar they’d never been to before.

The meeting of the city council had run late into the night due to high temperatures outside and raised tempers inside the room.

After all the tension, Fenrir needed a few minutes to unwind and relax without anyone asking anything from him.

Entering the bar he’d never seen before called The Gin Room, Fenrir paused just inside the door to allow his security team to do a quick sweep of the room.

Looking around, he was impressed by the bar’s décor.

It looked as if they’d stepped back in time to when alcohol was outlawed and speakeasies were hidden behind locked doors and protected by secrecy.

The walls were dark wood paneling with wall sconces offering flickering light and leaving the corners darker than the center of the room where the ceiling seemed to glow from the built-in canned lights.

The bar was along the back, though instead of a mirrored wall, there were shelves and shelves of every kind of alcohol available.

The tables and chairs were hardwoods and added to the appearance they’d stepped back into the 1920s. Soft jazz played over hidden speakers, but it was soft enough that a conversation could be held without participants yelling at one another to be heard.

After Liam gave him a nod, Fenrir took three steps further into the room before he froze and sniffed the air. His entire body lit up as his body recognized the sweet scent filling the room. Taking another, deeper breath, he released it on a deep sigh as a fire burst into being deep in his soul.

His wolf jumped to its feet and howled “Mine” at the same moment that his fangs dropped into place. A second and a half later, his cock filled so painfully fast he grew lightheaded. Their mate was somewhere in the building.

But which female was it?

There were a half dozen women having some kind of loud, giggle-filled party at the table in the back corner to the right of the bar while a single woman worked behind the long bar.

She tossed the bottles, mixed the drinks, and filled glasses as fast as she could to keep up with the women placing orders for increasingly complicated drinks between pouring whiskey and beer for the handful of other customers.

He ignored the men who were sitting at the bar and scattered at tables around the room. The gods would not be so cruel as to mate him with a man. He’d been heterosexual for his entire 1044 years and while he had tested the bisexual waters, he’d always known his mate would be a female.

“Konungr? Are you all right?” Liam Hansen, his chief of security and best friend for over twenty years, asked.

Fenrir blinked and looked at the man who’d stopped beside him. “I found her. After a thousand years of looking, I’ve finally found my mate.”

Liam scanned the room before looking back at him. “Which one is she? Do you want us to grab her and take her home now, or wait for a better time?”

“For now, we’ll wait. I’m not sure which woman it is. Yet. We also don’t want to scare her. Let me figure out which one she is first and then we can figure out how to make her agreeable to becoming my mate.”

“With the hibernation only a week away, you won’t have much time to woo her if you want to claim her at the solstice,” Liam reminded him. “Better to sweep her up and carry her off like the Viking you are.”

Fenrir chuckled as he led the way to the table in the front left corner that was more shadowed than the rest of the bar. “Despite Hollywood’s portrayal, I haven’t practiced the Viking ways in nearly ten centuries.”

Once they were seated, Liam pulled the menu in the middle of the table to him and scanned the drink options. “They have mead here. Wonder how good it is?”

“How good does it have to be?” Beck Gunderson, the one who rarely spoke but was a good, strong back and deadly shot when needed, broke his silence.

“Konungr?” Liam asked when Fenrir pushed to his feet.

“I’ll get the drinks.”

The sweet, enticing scent of his mate grew stronger as he approached the bar. When the small, blonde bartender stepped in front of him, his mate’s scent grew strong enough that his wolf and vampire sides agreed that she was indeed their mate.

Now all he had to do was figure out how to claim her without scaring her to death.