Chapter Twelve #2
Sort of. The whole thing was complicated.
“Can you feel Rory?”
“Not in human form, no. But even as a wolf, there’s distance. I won’t be able to pinpoint her location or anything. However, I can call her to me. If she knows I’m calling and answers, I’ll at least know if she’s okay—and she might be able to send me sensory information.”
“Do you need to be alone to do this?”
“No.”
I wanted to ask him why shifting hadn’t been the first thing on his list to try—if I was being honest, I’d been wondering that for the last two hours—but when the moment was upon him, I read it in his expression.
He was afraid it wouldn’t work.
“Ronan, can I help? I could cast a focus spell. It’s similar to a demon containment circle, except opposite.
” I tried not to look distressed at the word demon.
“Instead of keeping things in, it pushes everything out. I put you in a circle—I’ll need to go downstairs and get some soil for that part—and there’s a chant, but I’ll probably just use intention and soil magic and—”
“Not this first time. Thank you, though.” He reached for my hand, lifted it to his lips. “I need to try this my way. Can I take a raincheck?”
“Always.” I stepped into my boots and zipped them up. “I’m going to give you a moment to yourself while I go down and grab some soil—just in case.”
“It’s good to be prepared,” he said.
“At this point, I think it’s imperative to be prepared.”
He toed out of his running shoes and stepped out of his jeans. “Yeah.”
The soil wasn’t only for a focus spell. I also wanted to strengthen the protections on the pub and apartment.
Margaux and Bronwyn had helped renew them a couple weeks ago, but it wouldn’t hurt to check.
I had that itchy feeling between my shoulder blades again, the one that told me something was off. Something more than Rory missing.
I took an indulgent moment to admire the naked planes of Ronan’s body as he stripped all the way down.
Everything about him appealed to me, and not only in a conventional way.
He was beautiful and strong, and so important.
Looking at him, eyes aglow with his wolf, I felt a sense of pride that he was mine.
Shifters didn’t process nudity the way the rest of us did.
For Ronan, my giving him an under-the-skirt show when I stood on his bar and told everyone he was the sexiest man in La Paloma was far more sexual than my stripping completely nude.
The man was all about intention—well, that and red camellias, black thigh-high stockings, and tiny gasps moaned directly into his ear.
So, my blatant stare snagged me a muted smile but didn’t affect him otherwise.
“I love you.” I said it with my whole self and willed him to feel it.
He must have, because his eyes, still as gold as a noon sun, softened at the corners. “I love you, too.”
I paused at the door as he dropped to all fours and a mix of yellow, red, gray, and black fur rippled over his expanding body in a smooth wave. As a human, he was just under six feet tall. He gained two extra feet as a wolf. That, and over a hundred pounds of pure muscle.
And his physicality wasn’t even his biggest asset.
Ronan had power. Alpha power. Alpha leader power. In the past, he’d done his best to suppress it in front of his birth father and the pack, but now it emanated from him in shockwaves, as if it were a thing apart from him, traveling at the speed of sound.
This was not a wolf to be taken lightly.
I descended the stairs, musing over Ronan’s ability to downplay his power—itself a strength—when I spotted someone standing beside the pollinator garden Cecil had designed for Ronan in the lot beside the pub. The person had his back to me.
The itch between my shoulders intensified. I rolled them back to ease the feeling.
This was all wrong.
Three wolves jumped me the second my foot touched the bottom landing. All were in hybrid form. One held each arm, and another grabbed the back of my head, sinking talons into the thin flesh of my scalp.
“Scream, cast, or otherwise call upon your minions, and I’ll crush your skull,” the wolf said on a snarl.
I’d expected Floyd. This wasn’t him. This wasn’t anyone I knew.
The figure in the pollinator garden spun on his heel and faced me.
It was done with a flair for the dramatic—the man’s chin jutted up, shoulders went back superhero style, hands thrust on hips, feet spread apart.
If he’d been wearing a red cape that billowed out behind him, I wouldn’t have been surprised.
Disappointingly, he wore loafers, professionally pressed jeans and a white, long-sleeved shirt. Sure, it was evening, but long sleeves in Smokethorn County? In mid-May?
Definitely not from around here.
“Lilibet Lennox,” the man said, in an ambiguously highbrow, mildly threatening voice. The accent was affected, giving the speaker a faux aura of intellectual superiority.
I knew that obnoxious voice, but from where?
“Who are you?” I asked.
The wolf holding my head sank his claws in a little deeper. A trickle of blood ran behind my ear, down my jaw, and splashed on the concrete pad.
“Not Lilibet. You go by Betty, right?”
That damn voice. So familiar.
It was a recent memory, for sure. My brain flipped through the last few hours, days, weeks—no, not weeks. Back up. Hours?
Message over a cell phone.
Bronwyn.
Mason Hartman.
The Esteemed Order of the Removal of the Blight on Humankind.
Hell.
“Miles, I presume?” I sighed. Wasn’t it just my luck to run into this fool tonight?
The claws sank in a little more. Wolf One was into hurting me. Conversely, Wolves Two and Three were holding my arms loosely, almost as if they were trying not to hurt me.
Time to test that theory.
“Hey, I’m not screaming, casting, or whatever else you said. I’m talking to this guy. Get your claws off my head or I won’t follow your rules anymore.”
Wolf One bent his head next to my ear. “You’ll follow—”
I threw my head back. The crunch that followed was cringe-inducing. The other wolves loosened their grips at the exact time they should’ve tightened them, and I deftly pulled my arms free and did a half-somersault tumble into the dirt.
Dry soil coated my arms, immediately vaporizing and sinking under my skin—into my blood. Power charged through me. Magic crackled like pop rocks in a can of soda.
The wolves growled and shifted from hybrid to full animal.
At six o’clock in the evening in a chain-link fenced yard. Where humans could easily see.
“Get away from the street, you dumbasses,” I snapped.
To his credit, Miles seemed to recognize the problem as quickly as I did. “Get out of sight. Now.”
The wolves ducked their muzzles, looking almost comically ashamed. The one who’d had his claws in my scalp snapped at me as he went past, and I responded without thinking.
“échate.” Magic flew out of my mouth in sparks.
Splat. All four legs went out from under the wolf, and he instantly fell to his belly, hitting the cement with a wet slap.
He whined.
“That’s what you get for being so handsy—clawsy.” I felt my scalp for the wounds he’d left there, hissing in pain as my fingertip glided across one of the deeper ones.
Miles stood a few feet away, in my peripheral. He was holding a gun, aiming it at my head.
“Oh, please,” I said. “If I’d intended to attack, you’d already be down. Put that away before someone sees you. What’s with you fools? It’s as if you’ve never had to hide who you are from humans. Bunch of doofuses.”
Miles lowered the weapon but kept it in his hand at his side. He seemed flustered by my lack of fear.
“Where’s Mason Hartman?”
“How the heck should I know?” I snapped. “Ask Alpha Pallás. He’s Mason’s best pal.”
“Hartman hasn’t been heard from in over forty-eight hours.” Eyes as cold and blue as the center of a glacier glared at me. “He was to have checked in with the,” he cleared his throat, “with me, first thing yesterday morning.”
“Geez, you can say you’re with the Org. I already know about you people.” I gave him a deadpan look. “Anyway, I don’t know why you’d think Mason would be with me. We’re not exactly sipping mimosas at Sunday brunch together.”
“You know who we are and why we’re here.” He eyed me with blatant suspicion. “Who else would want to harm him?”
“Probably everyone he’s ever come across in his life up to this point. Mason isn’t the most charming person in the world. He’s an asshole. In fact, he’s such an asshole that he’d probably embrace the insult rather than be offended by it.”
“No. You’re the obvious culprit. He was preparing to bring you in.”
I thought it over. Shrugged. “I mean, that’s honestly a pretty good reason for me to have offed the guy, and if he’d tried anything like that, I might have. That doesn’t change the fact that I haven’t seen him in days. Not since he begged me not to kill his alpha leader.”
Miles’s smooth forehead creased. I couldn’t figure out the guy’s age. He could’ve been in his late twenties or mid-forties. His skin was like an unfolded sheet of printer paper—almost alien in its smooth paleness.
“You didn’t kill the alpha leader.” He said this as if trying to convince himself that the words were true. I recalled what Bronwyn had said about him being a truthseeker, and figured he was reading my honesty the way a telepath might read my thoughts.
“A decision I regret daily,” I muttered, before continuing aloud, “Mason asked me not to. He had compelling reasons.”
“You listened to him?”
“Duh. Keep up, Miles. See, logically, I knew Floyd needed to die, but Mason spoke to my heart by invoking the wellbeing of the man I love, which caused what I think of as a rude jolt of sentimentality directly into my soul. My brain was no match for my heart and soul, and I ended up letting the asshole go.” I sighed.
“Has that ever happened to you? The second guessing is brutal, isn’t it? ”
“No, that’s not correct. Your kind doesn’t respond to reason. You are demon.”
“Only on my father’s side,” I said. “Mom’s people are elemental witches. Earth witches. We’re pretty down-to-earth people, pun intended.”
Miles wore the expression of a man with a mouth full of questions he didn’t want the answers to. “This makes no sense.”
“Look, I’ve got an interesting and somewhat scary ancestry—even I’m not sure how scary. I’ve only recently found out about some of it.” I shrugged and stared down at the wolf splayed on the ground at my feet. “But mostly, I’m just Betty.”