by SM Reine
Brutal seraphim enforcers maintained compliance with the rulings of the council among the many and various magickal beings on the planet. Supernatural cops and not the good kind. They were only too happy to set a were after a witch and then sit back taking bets on how long it would take the wolf to track the witch and tear her to bloody shreds.
Despite the warmth of the night, she shuddered.
“Any good ones out there?” Lilith asked Misty while she scanned the crowd.
“Yeah,” Misty said grinning, jerking her head toward the dim side of the bar where booths marched all the way to the back. “Couple dudes over there. They look like they’re loggers, maybe. No money, I’d guess, but they are sweet.” She gave sweet two syllables and topped it off with a sexy shimmy. “I’d do both of ‘em. For free.”
Lilith laughed, but when she followed Misty’s direction and saw the dudes in the back booth, the sound died in her throat.
It was like a bad joke. A were, a lyr and a witch walk into a bar…
Swearing under her breath, she snagged two mugs and pulled the lever for the drafts with one hand. With her free hand, she flipped over a short bar glass, dumped a scoop of ice inside and poured three fingers of cheap bar scotch. “Ginger and what?”
“Ginger and ice, genius.” Misty pulled out a wedge of cash she swiftly counted before stuffing it back in the center pocket of her black apron. She swiveled and pointed at a blond woman at one of the tables. “For her.”
Tasha McNeil.
Lilith smiled. Things might turn around after all.
The blonde had her back to the bar and seemed engrossed in conversation with her female companions, which was a good thing, Lilith considered. It was time to figure out why the idiot hadn’t managed to bond with the damned were yet. What was her problem?
Lilith was likely the only straight female under eighty who didn’t want to get cuddly with upwards of six feet of sexy muscles and the reportedly epic-sized cock of a werewolf, but that was her issue. Tasha and the were had spent one night together, but something had gone wrong. The bond wasn’t complete, which made her hex was as good as useless.
She needed to get Tasha McNeil and Owen White together again, but not here. Not now.
The wild energies erupting from the meeting of air, earth and sea were too unpredictable. On a night like this, a were in full rut could just as easily kill a woman as give her the orgasm of her life. Even the most prosaic locals stayed off the streets when the potent energies of predators meant trouble—the kind of trouble that was bad for business and bad Lilith’s personal bottom line.
She couldn’t throw the were and the lyr out of the bar, however she could engineer a few gestures that would make it too uncomfortable for them to stay, but only if she escaped to the back for a few minutes. There were a whole lot of spells she could sneak past unsuspecting humans, but one strong enough to give a were fleas was a spell even Benny would notice. A moment of quiet would also give her a chance to find out what was up with Tasha. Then she could figure out how to orchestrate Plan B—after she had a Plan B.
She loaded Misty’s tray and leaned close. “I’d stay away from those guys.”
Misty’s eyes widened. “Why?”
“Don’t ask. They’re bad news, so I’d steer clear.”
“Good to know,” Misty said and toddled off with her tray.
Lilith looked around until she spotted Benny at the far end of the bar. She worked her way in his direction, wiping up wet spots, replacing damp napkins with fresh ones and making small talk with customers until she reached him. “Can you cover for me for a few?”
“Oh, sure,” he said, getting to his feet. “Long as no one asks me to make one a’them—”
She patted him on the shoulder. “If they do, you just holler for me, okay?”
“You go out back,” Benny said, “watch out for them crows. I seen big’uns today. Whoo-ee! Almost made me crap my pants.”
“Yeah,” Lilith said, “I’ll be careful.” Benny was even more afraid of crows than Long Island Iced Teas.
She ducked through the swinging double doors, ran through the kitchen, slipped on the greasy floor and plunged through the back door into the alley.
CHAPTER THREE
Tasha McNeil leaned against the hard back of the wooden bar chair and allowed conversation to flow over her. The round table before her was big enough for two people, but six of her newfound friends crowded around it, chattering excitedly. They drank frothy pastel-colored drinks with complicated garnishes—elegant cocktails with an ingredient list longer than the stemmed glasses were tall. Rewards after enduring organic, low-fat food and intense workouts followed by yoga that had stretched her body in ways Tasha hadn’t known possible.
She’d made it through ten days at the Lost Legacy Spa relatively unscathed and had weighed-in this morning minus 4.7 pounds. So what if she’d wanted to lose a pound a day like some of her friends? That was what the spa brochure had promised (these results not typical), but she hadn’t been foolish enough to believe that kind of metabolic magick would happen for her. The weight loss officially put her that much closer to her goal, although she might have to nibble celery sticks for the rest of her life to get there, while facing the fact that, in her case, a size six might be the stuff of dreams.
During her brief vacation, she’d come to love the funky vibe of the coast, falling asleep listening to the distant roar of the ocean. Returning to her house in Portland seemed like a dull and boring prospect. A lonely one, too.
“I can’t believe we’re finally free and you’re drinking ginger ale! Give it up, girl. It’s time to celebrate.” Erin Waverly, Tasha’s roommate during her spa visit, lifted her cocktail glass, swirled the rosy liquid and touched the tip of her tongue to the sugared rim. “There is no redeeming nutritional value to this drink. I’m going to savor every drop and every calorie, and then I’m going to have another.”
“I have no tolerance,” Tasha lamented. “One drink and I’ll be dancing on the tables.”
“Seriously? That would be incredible.” Erin lifted a hand and waved for the server.
“Seriously no,” Tasha said. “Me drunk is not a pretty sight.”
After what had happened the day before she’d arrived at the spa, she wasn’t sure allowing anything alcoholic or pharmaceutical to pass her lips was a good idea. Sex with a gorgeous stranger plus missing time followed by weirdness equaled a whole lot of stuff she couldn’t wrap her mind around.
She liked knowing what was what; she was an engineer for God’s sake. If it could be measured, plumbed, piped, reinforced or figured out, she would do just that and then provide plans, spreadsheets and production schedules to back it up.
Whatever it was.
When she was on the job, shit got done.
The final project she’d managed before selling her small consulting company had been the assembly of a massive crane at an industrial site. The working arm of the machine had been nearly as long as a football field. It had been the same kind of crane that had fallen from a skyscraper construction site in Manhattan a few years ago and at another site before that in Texas. Simply putting it together like the world’s biggest Lego toy had taken months. She’d made for damn sure no accidents happened on her watch.
Still, she wasn’t infallible. That was why plans were checked and double-checked and calculations verified and nothing, but nothing, went out of the office without at least three sets of eyes going over every detail.
Even then, she’d worried. If she screwed up the specs for a platform or a structural support failed, people might die. The stress had grown more intense with every project. When a major consulting firm had floated an offer for her small shop, she’d taken the money and run, thinking all her problems were over.
Wrong.
Her skills and education hadn’t helped her deal with her encounter with Owen White. She hadn’t been brave enough to tell Erin about it because she’d worried that doing so would make her look like a g
ullible fool. After years of being the smartest person in the room, she was now without a job or calling to order her days. She felt dumb as a beach rock and about as valuable.
The high strangeness with Owen hadn’t helped.
Her attempts to find out if there was any link between him and the Lost Legacy Preserve, a corporation that seemed to own nearly everything in the surrounding community, had lead to exactly nothing. If the guy was hiding, he did it well.
If he wasn’t real or if her sexy encounter with him had been some super-real hallucination, then she was in more trouble than she wanted to believe. Since she didn’t know where to even start with that line of thinking, she ignored it.
Reality and math had always been her best friends.
After turning over in her mind for the last ten days every moment she’d spent with Owen, she hadn’t retrieved her memories of the missing time from the period after she’d exited the ice cream shop with Lilith to when she’d awakened naked in a hotel room bed.
She hadn’t been drinking that day, and she was reasonably sure ice cream was neither a downer nor an aphrodisiac. The only physiological effect she blamed on ice cream (besides getting fatter) was pure bliss.
The smart thing would be to forget about Owen and go back to her life. She wouldn’t be the first woman to have a one-night stand, and despite a few bizarre twists to said hookup, that’s what it had been.
The weirdness also didn’t change the fact that Owen knew her name.
Contact information was a Google-search away.
If he’d wanted to see her again, he knew how to find her.
The last ten days? Crickets.
But she couldn’t forget that he’d also told her to find him. Apparently, in order to do that she must figure out his real name.
Like he was Rumpelstiltskin.
She shook her head. That was bullshit, and she was better off forgetting him.
The server Erin had flagged arrived, tray on her hip and pen poised.
Tasha pointed at Erin’s luscious pink cocktail. “I’ll have one of those, but make it a double.”
Erin high-fived her, and they both laughed. Instead of dying away naturally, Erin’s laugh dragged out, echoed higher, going shrill. Her eyes flashed in the dim light. Tasha could have sworn she saw something floating over Erin’s shoulder, as if she wore a foggy, cashmere scarf tied around her neck with the ends fluttering in an otherworldly wind. She blinked and then it was gone. But still, Erin laughed, and the sound made Tasha’s skin crawl.
The woman on the other side of Erin told a joke. Erin’s laugh rolled on, but the eerie pitch faded slowly.
Right, okay. Back to reality.
Back to keeping her mind firmly in the track of What’s Important.
When her drink arrived, Tasha swirled the glass, watching the alcoholic pinkness go round and round. If she’d conducted her business life the way she had her personal life, she’d be living in a box under a bridge right now instead of relishing a healthy bank account. For some inexplicable reason, she acted as if love would only enter her life when the planets aligned.
Fuck. That.
She lifted her glass. “I propose a toast.” The six raised their glasses. “Here’s to women who make decisions. Here’s to women who don’t sit around waiting for the menfolk to tell them what to do.”
“Unless it’s in bed!” Erin chimed.
“Here’s to perfect futures that are perfect simply because we created them!”
“In bed!”
As she brought her glass to her lips, an intricate knot of red lines bloomed on the inside of her wrist.
“Fuck,” Remy said at the same moment Owen spotted Tasha. “We need to get out of here.”
Both men slid out of the booth, hugging the side wall as they made their way toward the front of the bar. The side doors were locked, and the only way out took them perilously close to Tasha’s table.
Then the crowd standing near the door shifted, blocking their path as people made way for someone…or something. Owen held up a clenched fist. Remy halted behind him.
“Too late,” Owen whispered.
He watched as humans stumbled to get out of the way of Gideon Black and the two big weres flanking him. The humans deserved his pity. They had no idea what had just walked in out of the night and likely felt anxiety and an abrupt, but irrational urge to run like hell. An alpha as powerful as the leader of the Pacific Range pack tended to have that effect on the unsuspecting.
Owen’s mood sank deeper into despair. For the first time in his life, he felt a kinship with humans that was as unwelcome as it was honest. Their fear, his fear, in the presence of an alpha wasn’t irrational. It was the very smart, hell-bent-on-survival reaction of a lesser creature faced with a being whose power was so vast in comparison to his own; it might as well have been infinite.
He was well and truly fucked.
Still, he’d grown up with Lost Legacy’s alpha, and he knew damn well Lan’s power wasn’t anything close to infinite. The same had to be true of the Pacific Range pack alpha.
That truth didn’t make the fear roiling in his gut any more bearable. Combined with the residual pain from proximity to Tasha’s hexed mark, he felt as weak as a nursing pup.
Gideon Black was pure feral menace wrapped in denim and leather, gliding through the crowd with a ballet dancer’s grace. He’d tied his long black hair at the back of his neck, no doubt in honor of this rare appearance in public. With his high cheekbones, blade of a nose and massive shoulders, he could have passed for a million-dollar athlete slumming on the coast. However, it was the brutal energies he wielded as an alpha that rolled before him like an invisible, slow-motion tsunami, announcing to all but the most psychically dead of humans that here walked a monster who could quash their tiny lives with a gesture.
A monster to whom Owen was about to make a gift of Tasha McNeil.
CHAPTER FOUR
Lilith leaned against the weathered gray siding in the alley behind Chill, her heart beating as fast as if she’d run a race. The breeze off the ocean cooled her heated skin, calmed her emotions.
What the hell had she been thinking? Forcing the were out of the bar? Normally, yes, that was what she’d do, but now?
Wrong.
For nearly two weeks since she’d hexed Tasha McNeil, there’d been no movement. Barely a ripple in the magickal link that connected her to the woman the were had marked. She’d begun the think that all her work would come to nothing. But on this night when the currents of power that flowed just outside the range of human perception boiled with intensity, Owen White and Tasha McNeil were under the same roof.
Energies like the ones loose tonight were hell on a were’s control. She’d seen more than one strong and experienced were snap under half this much pressure. On top of that, Owen wasn’t just any were—he was the brother of the Lost Legacy pack’s alpha, Landelarc Sable, and a powerful near-alpha in his own right.
Tasha and Owen had had sex at least once, Lilith knew, but for whatever reason, they hadn’t bonded yet. If she’d wanted verification, she could have accessed her hex and delved into Tasha’s memories, maybe given the couple a nudge to complete the bonding process, but the idea of tapping into Tasha’s sexual experiences with the were turned her stomach. It would be all the bad parts of a three-way without any of the benefits.
Tasha seemed to have enjoyed it, however. That much she’d permitted herself to pickup from the hex that linked her to the woman. One more fuck, maybe two, she guessed, was all it would take. The pair would be bonded mates and because of her little trick, the brother of Lost Legacy’s alpha would belong to Lilith as much as he did to Tasha.
Too cozy for comfort and slightly kinky. In other words, just what she’d planned.
She didn’t give a pack rat’s patootie about Owen White or his brother, but she cared a great deal about the Council of the Kinraven that ruled the affairs of all magickal folk in the earth realm. Through the bond with Tasha and Owen, she c
ould, by right if not title, demand a seat on the Council of the Kinraven.
Then the great ones, weres, lyrinye, and seraphim alike, would pay the price for the long-ago banning of witches from their precious deliberations.
Closing her eyes, she leaned her head back and laughed softly, imagining the shock on the patrician faces of the lordly seraphim. Heavens! They might molt! Feathers would rain from the skies.
Humans would think their apocalypse had arrived and cower in their prepped bunkers.
The beastly weres would growl their fury and the hideous lyrinye would hiss beneath the cold waves, but rules were rules. The Kinraven council had proved their adherence to law and order time and again. No matter how much it would pain them to concede, they would not break the accords simply to deny her a seat. They would hate on her. They would make her presence at every convening a living hell.
But Lilith Darke knew a thing or three about hell and doubted they could teach her anything new.
All she had to do was arrange alone time for Tasha and Owen and let nature take its course.
“You’re not going to get away with this.”
Lilith froze.
She knew that voice, and it was as sexy as she remembered.
Pushing away from the building, she straightened and stared into the darkness of the alley. Remy Lemarchal was about five yards away just outside the pool of light from a security lamp.
“Why don’t you go back to your puppy?” she asked. “You shouldn’t leave him alone inside. He might shit on the floor and then I’d make you clean it up.”
“He’s no puppy, and well you know it or you wouldn’t have run out here.” He moved forward, edging into the light, and she saw why Misty had shimmied. Remy was still the hottest thing—magickal or not—she’d ever seen. His body had long, lean lines and supple strength that only looked slight in comparison to some thug of a were. It wasn’t smart to hang around him. He…did things to her. Aroused her in ways she didn’t like to think about any more than she wanted to know what he looked like when he shifted.
