by Leigh Kelsey
Everything started to stack up quickly. The fact I’d been devouring food so quickly. The lone wolf stalking me and, when faced with a whole pub full of threats, refusing to be budged. Even Cas’s reaction to me being threatened. It was mating season, and whatever scent I was putting out was screaming female in heat, come and get it. I was an all you can eat freaking buffet.
I seethed but, loathed as I was to admit it, the bacon took the edge of my anger. It wasn’t my pack’s fault I was breeding, but they could have given me a little warning. “How long?”
“Since Wednesday.” Gray’s chair scraped as he took a hesitant seat across from me at the kitchen table. Silence, except for the tacky melting clock replica ticking on the wall. Gray’s nervousness and dread were palpable.
“Two days,” I exhaled. Not that bad, as far as lengths of deception went. “Alright, I guess I forgive you.”
Gray slumped over the table, the strands of his brown hair fanning around him. “Thank god.”
“So that’s why the rogue came for me,” I said, finishing the last of my food. “He didn’t find me because of the red light.”
“Not necessarily.” I jumped as the voice seemed to come from nowhere but as I vaulted out of my seat, more than a little on edge, Jack gave me a reassuring smile, shutting the front door behind himself. Jack. Smiling. Reassuringly. Did this bitch in heat stuff mean everyone had to be nice to me?
Jackpot.
I matched his smile, feeling a lot softer toward him after this afternoon … until his words hit and my stomach curdled.
“Not necessarily?” I repeated, scowling. “So the rogue did come for me because of the light flare?”
“Maybe.” Jack stripped off his coat and took a seat, running a hand over his face. Stress showed in the creases on his forehead, the tightness of his shoulders. “The lone’s name is Max Jackson.”
“Poor guy,” Gray muttered.
I snickered. I was glad my name didn’t rhyme, though I suppose Max Jackson was better than some of the names I’d seen. There was a Russian kid in my class in year ten called Semen. Not pronounced the same but still. Semen.
We both earned reprimanding stares from Jack. “He’s from Nottingham. I managed to track him down, spoke to his old alpha, and he only left last night.”
“Huh?” I sat forward. “That makes no sense. A wolf walks away from their pack and comes straight for me?”
Jack nodded. “What I was thinking at that point was he’d come in this direction and happened across your scent.” He took a tight breath like he was bracing himself and levelled a serious stare on me. “You’re in season, Lyra. That’s the reason he came after you.”
Holy shit, someone who told me the truth. I gave Gray a look to say, look, this is how it’s done, buddy. To Jack I said, “I know. I figured it out.” I guess he’d only heard the very end of our conversation when he came through the door, if he didn’t realise I knew.
Jack looked relieved that I hadn’t gone off on him to say the least. My temper was legendary in this house. “I thought it was a coincidence, but his alpha said Max was acting strange. Turned his nose up like he’d caught a scent, and then started packing his bags.”
“That’s…” I scowled. “Not being funny, but my scent can’t get all the way to Nottingham.” Wolf senses were good but not that good.
Jack scratched a hand over his brown head. “It was around the same time we felt the pulse, in the middle of the night.”
“Um,” Gray said, summing up my thoughts exactly. “No. That’s not a thing. No chance.”
I was giving Jack a look that questioned his logic too. “You’re saying that red pulse threw my scent all the way to some random wolf in Nottingham? Why?”
Jack shrugged. His hands flexed on the table, halfway towards becoming fists. “I’m just stating the facts. Max Jackson caught your scent in Nottingham at the exact same time we felt an unknown power from Whitby. And the same time something happened that was bad enough to demolish the church and take out a corner of the abbey.”
I frowned at the battered surface of the table. All our names were caved there, along with the other wolves who’d been part of Cas’s pack before us—there were four but I’d only got to know one, an insufferable bastard who I’d accidentally fallen into bed with last year. “I can’t see where there’d be a link.” I sighed. “But I can’t see why a random wolf I’d never met would ditch his pack to claim me, either.”
“Why would it pick him?” Gray asked sourly. “Of all the wolves between here and Nottingham, why pick that one guy? Why not all the others in his pack?”
Jack’s mouth twisted. His frustration was obvious—his eyes a tinge darker than usual. “I don’t know.”
I sat back in my chair, puffing myself up to make myself feel bigger, less scared. A trick I’d learned from my wolf. “So, what now? Is it just this one guy, or can I expect every eligible bachelor in the north of England to turn up foaming at the mouth?”
Jack’s mouth flattened into a straight line. Even Gray tensed. Guess I knew the answer to my question.
JACK
I would never say it out loud, but I knew the lone wolf tied up in the Moonlight’s beer cellar wasn’t the only male wolf we’d see this week. Or this month. Female mating cycles were as varied as female wolves themselves. The shortest recorded was a few hours, the average a month, the longest a year.
God, don’t let it be a year.
I hated what it did to me, what it made me into: a horny male, desperate for a touch, a look, a taste of her scent. It pissed me off that my instincts were riding me hard, that whenever I looked at Lyra now I didn’t see the tough as hell, dangerous, intelligent woman I was proud to call my friend and fellow pack member, but someone to mate with.
It pissed me off a fucking lot. But I wasn’t about to let that show, and I wasn’t about to let my salivating wolf change the way I treated Lyra. She deserved better than that. She deserved better than me. If it were an option, I’d go live somewhere else so she didn’t have to deal with me while she was in season, but I had nowhere else to go. No one else, except these three wolves. My pack. My family.
I hadn’t been able to talk about my biological family, so no one knew how alone I was. And lonely, the ache beating at my chest like a tide surging. It shouldn’t have been possible to feel so lonely even when I sat at a table with three other wolves, or when I was chilling out in front of the TV with them, or even in a pub full of other people. That yawning hole of loneliness and longing ate at me no matter how surrounded by people I was. But it eased, for a few seconds, whenever Gray clapped my shoulder, or Cas slung his arm around my shoulders, or Lyra punched me playfully on the arm.
And this afternoon … she’d hugged me. I hadn’t wanted to let go. The wolf in me had surged to the surface, wanting to brush her cheek with his jaw, wanting to lick, to nuzzle, to lay beside her, tails overlapping, and never move. It was a constant struggle, that need.
I needed more, contact and touch and comfort, needed it all the time, needed it constantly. It was a base need for the presence of another wolf, that physical reassurance of being part of a pack, but I could never find the courage to ask for it. And everyone else had so much to deal with, even without this new trouble, that I didn’t want to ask too much of them. Or become a burden again. The sound of my sister’s raised voice crashed through my mind like a bolt of thunder, telling me to get out, go, as she lifted her fist as a threat. I shied away from the memory.
Focus on the immediate problem, I told myself. An unexplained pulse of power had swept through Whitby and its surrounding areas, all the way to Sandsend in a precise arc. A lone wolf had attempted to claim Lyra. And not just that—he’d packed up and left his pack at almost the precise second that red light swept through the town.
If the pulse had stopped at Sandsend, how the hell had a wolf in Nottingham scented Lyra? I was missing something, and it was only adding to my frustration.
Tomorrow, as soon as the sun
rose, I’d return to the beer cellar and the lone wolf. I needed answers—it was the only way to keep Lyra and the rest of my family safe.
LYRA
After a pointless two hours trying to sleep, I climbed out my window and trudged through the soggy grass to the bench in our back garden. Not that we really had a back garden—we had a cottage in the middle of a sea-swept field, right beside the cliffs to Saltwick Bay—but the wrought-iron bench sat against the back wall of the cottage, along with a few plants in solid terracotta pots. The height of our garden design abilities.
It was fucking freezing since I was still in my pyjamas—a deep-cut distressed vest and black shorts—but I stretched my legs out in front of me, my bare feet in the grass, and soaked in the moon. Power tingled down my arms, along my spine. It would be even more powerful if I was in wolf form, under the full moon, but that was still a few days off. And thank fuck. After the lone wolf, the revelation of him being linked to that pulse of power—however the hell that worked—and the tiny fact that I was right in the middle of mating season, the last thing I needed was to be put through agony.
Shifting was never easy, but it did have its benefits. The moon’s cold power filled my veins. Even now, my senses heightened, my ears able to pick up a lazy car on the road a few minutes away, and I could pull out the individual scent strands in the air around me. The salty brine of the sand, the coolness of the sea, the dense musk of the rainforest where we changed. But that strand was faint, muffled by the portal that contained it. From inside the house I could smell Jack’s aftershave, the soap Gray used, and the cheap air freshener someone had sprayed in the front room earlier. Through my bonds to each of them, with the strength of the moon heightening everything, I could sense the relaxed sleep of two of my pack and the agitated worry of my alpha.
I heaved a sigh and stood. As much as I wanted to stay outside and bathe in the moon’s power, I was shivering, and Cas was anxious. It wasn’t a difficult choice to trudge back inside and rap my knuckles on his bedroom door.
Cas pulled it open, his icy blonde hair messy—not from sleep, I could tell, but from running his hands through it. He needed a haircut. The shaved sides were nowhere near as clean as they should be. I lingered on this to distract myself from the fact that he was half naked, his wide chest bared and catching the moonlight, black swirls and dips of tattoos stark against ivory skin. My mouth watered. “Lyra?”
I dragged my gaze up to his face with effort. Bad Lyra. “I could feel you worrying. Figured I’d come keep you company.” I didn’t need to, but I added, “I can’t sleep.”
He swung the door wider and invited me into his room. Cas’s room was a lot like him—tidy, organised, everything in its place. His collection of books—battered and worn mysteries—were all lined up on a shelf next to DVDs and about a million X-Box games, and all the surfaces were dusted and clean, which was more than I could say for my own room.
I plopped down on his bed—a single, even though as our alpha he was well within his rights to claim the largest room—and stretched out my goose-bump-covered legs in front of me. I thought for a second I saw Cas’s eyes trace them, from my calves to my thighs, but when I blinked, he was looking through the crack in the curtains and I was sure I’d imagined it. Maybe it was a mirage; I was so starved for intimacy and sex I was hallucinating it.
“So what are you worrying about?” I asked, fighting a shudder as my frozen body adjusted to the warm bedroom.
Cas sighed, his mouth thinning the way it did when he was irritated. “Did you go outside? Like that?”
I shrugged. “Felt like a walk.”
“Lyra.” He said it the same way he’d say for fuck’s sake.
He sank onto the bed beside me, the whole thing dipping under the immense weight of his giant frame. I was about to say something snarky until I saw his face—his silver eyes shadowed and deep worry written on his face. I rolled onto my side and caught his hand, squeezing it tight. “You are supposed to stay safe,” he said through gritted teeth. He sounded so … raw. I’d heard him like this only once before—earlier today, at the Moonlight when he’d held me close. My heart squeezed so tight it hurt.
“Let me guess. By staying safe, you mean I’m not allowed to leave the house.”
He raised an eyebrow, looking more like himself—stern and amused and full of love. “Would it work?”
I snorted. “Not a chance.”
He rubbed his thumb across my knuckles, sending my heart skittering into overdrive. “That’s what I thought.”
“And plan B is to have one of you guys with me at all times?”
His mouth flattened again. He didn’t answer.
“Yup, that’s what I thought.” I thought my eye roll might get some reaction, even if only a lecture about how unsafe it was for me right now, but he didn’t even draw on the Alpha Glare to put me in my place—something he was very skilled at.
Great, now I was worried about him. “Fine,” I allowed.
Cas blinked, lifting his head to look at me. “Fine? Just like that?”
I shrugged a shoulder, trying to be casual. Trying not to look below his chin at the broad expanse of pale skin. Fighting the urge to touch.
Cas squeezed my hand, a smile flickering at the corner of his mouth. “You never agree easy.” The smile died. “You must be scared.”
I rolled my eyes again, this time earning a narrowing of his eyes. Good. This I knew how to deal with. I settled lower into the pillow on his bed, letting my back sink into the plush duvet and crossing my ankles in front of me. “Maybe I just didn’t feel like arguing, tonight.”
“Who are you? Where is Lyra?”
I snorted. He had a point.
The mood changed before I could even attempt to grasp back the joking lightness. “I only think of two ways to protect you,” he said. The rawness was back, his voice eroded down to a harsh rasp, his accent both soft and jagged. “I can only think of two ways,” he corrected, frustration and anger flashing in his eyes at his mistake.
I looked up at him. I was almost horizontal now, with him sat on the edge of the bed above me, his hand in mine. I should really let go. Soon. When he stopped sounding so un-Cas-like. “And?”
“I hunt every wolf in this country and kill all unmated males.”
“Sounds totally possible,” I said, sarcastic. “Or?”
His face tightened. Oh, I was not going to like option two. “If you had a mate, the lone wolves would still come, to challenge your mate and kill him, to claim you.”
I knew that. “Fun,” I said in a flat voice. This was exactly what I didn’t want to talk about.
“Every time you come in season, lone wolves near us will hunt you, the way they do other females.”
“It’s so great being a woman,” I groused. “So what’s the big plan?”
Cas looked away, his shoulders hunching as he pulled his hand from mine. Goddamn, that hurt more than I thought it would. “Divide and rule.”
“Beg pardon?” I pushed myself until I was sitting and frowned at the side of his face. “Explain.”
“It was done before, and worked.”
“You realise I have no bloody clue what you’re on about.”
He nodded once, tense. “If you take a mate, you’ll be safe for how long your mate can protect you.”
“And after that,” I seethed, “when the army of lone wolves you think is hunting me has killed him? I’m forced to submit to a man who just murdered my mate? I’m fucking sick of this.”
I used the force of my anger to propel myself off the bed and paced the carpet in front of his window. The moon wasn’t helping—its power still coursed through my veins, inflaming my fury. “It’s two-thousand-and-fucking-eighteen. Feminism isn’t a bad word anymore, women have votes, rape is a crime people get sent down for—and I’m having to put up with antiquated bullshit like this just because I’m a wolf.”
“Lyra,” Cas tried.
“No. I won’t just roll over and accept this bec
ause I’m a wolf and it’s expected of me.”
“I think of four female alphas without even trying—”
“It’s bad enough that I’m in season and none of you fuckers bothered to tell me.” Cas flinched. I didn’t slow down. “And that a rogue came out of nowhere to try and claim me, but now you’re telling me I have to take a mate who’s probably going to be killed by the army of horny males—”
Cas slid off the bed and grabbed my shoulders in one smooth movement, halting my pacing. “That is not what I say. If you took a mate, that would happen. If you took a mate.”
I blinked. “Okay, now I’m lost.” And confusion was eating at my anger. If that’s what he’d intended, it was damn effective. And the feeling of his hands on my shoulders … holy burning hell. It felt so good. I sagged, scowling.
Slowly, choosing his words carefully, he said, “Like I say—said—it was done before, and no lone wolf, even a desperate one, would dare claim a woman with three mates.”
“Uh.”
Three mates. Okay, what the hell?
“Um?” I blinked at him, wondering if he’d lost his mind when I ‘accidentally’ hit his head carrying him inside earlier. “What?”
“I told you.” He locked eyes with me, snaring me with those pale silver irises until my heart thudded against my ribcage with longing, not anger. “Divide and rule.”
“I’m still confused, Cas.”
His face softened, his thumbs sweeping over my shoulders. Despite myself, the last of my anger dissipated. It took some of my fear with it too. “Max Jackson left his pack and came to you after only hours. One mate won’t be enough to keep them away. Not when they are … I don’t know a word to fit. Fixed, called, caught…”
“And you…” This was a hell of a lot to ask my head to wrap around. “You want me to take three?” Okay. Okay, ignoring every single goddamn reason why I shied away from that… “Where the hell do you expect me to find three mates, Casimir? Werewolf Tinder?”
He valiantly ignored all the acid in my words, still massaging the stress from my shoulders. “Look around, Lyra. I would protect you. I would do anything to keep you safe.”
