Once Bitten, Twice Claimed (Claimed by an Alpha Paranormal Romance Book 3)

by Bell, Lilith T.

  Power poured outward over the circle, filling it up as if the painted symbols were physically containing it. I could feel as the other wolves in the pack began latching into that power, draining the life from me as surely as they would from every other woman they hunted.

  My right hand pulled the little tranq gun from the small of my back, then pressed the muzzle of it over Christopher’s heart before pulling the trigger. He released my wrist instantly and stumbled back to look down at the dart that now projected out of his chest. The clear sedative in the dart had been replaced with something dark red and viscous.

  “You can’t poison me. I’m immortal,” he said as he wiped my spilled blood from his chin with the back of one hand.

  Behind him, Hunter got to his feet. “It’s not poison. It’s the blood of a dead wolf and you just started feeding.”

  Comprehension dawned at the same time that the effects of the dead blood hit him. Christopher staggered before he jerked the dart out, then spun abruptly on the rest of his pack. The others started to come toward us, to their alpha’s defense, but their hesitation had given me the time to reload the tranq gun and for Hunter to draw his.

  The only sound was the soft rush of air as two darts left the gun. The wolves who were hit by them were clearly far less powerful than Christopher himself, because they slowed almost immediately.

  The big bay doors to the warehouse burst open from the force of a truck ramming them. I saw a flash of a huge orange striped tiger and other shifters I’d never seen before, along with members of my own pack spilling in to attack now that the vampiric wolves were vulnerable. Every time I blinked, I saw the room from a slightly different perspective. Hunter was moving closer to Christopher. He grabbed him and drew a knife he’d carried hidden before. Through Hunter’s marks I felt as he killed Christopher, slicing through his throat savagely and taking not just his own vengeance but ours.

  I felt dizzy as I ran across to the other side of the circle and started untying the prisoners. This close, with this much magical power swimming around us, it was difficult to keep myself at all separate from Hunter. We both needed to focus on where we were as individuals, as well as keeping aware of the bigger picture. Silver bonds had been used on the shifter sacrifices, stopping them from being able to shift, so I untied Dawn and Edie first. With one of my hands almost useless, we’d be better off with people who wouldn’t be slowed down by the silver untying the others.

  As soon as Edie was free she rose to her feet like a vengeful angel with balls of flame in each hand, then threw them both at the back of one of the vampiric wolves.

  “Just be careful you only hit their guys and not ours,” I shouted to her in warning over the din of the fight.

  “I know who the assholes are who kept me here,” she reassured me.

  Dawn wasn’t much help in the fight, but she was fine at untying people, so I left her to that as I guarded her. One of the enemy wolves had shifted to his full lupine form and came at the two of us snarling. I lowered myself into a crouch to growl back, but didn’t immediately attack. He could be trying to draw me away from their prisoners so that they could kill them with impunity and increase their power.

  The shifted wolf started to gather his legs under him to leap at me. I adjusted my crouch, my own hands starting to shift to give me claws to fight with. I saw the wolf leap and then a blur of blond fur struck him, knocking him back to the ground. The two skidded across the now blood-soaked concrete together, snarling and snapping at one another all the way. The golden wolf managed to get his jaws around the throat of the other and held tightly, growling as he demanded submission. The other wolf yelped in pain, but refused to back down.

  Jean-Claude came running across the battlefield, his feet sliding just a bit in the spilled blood there. An already bloodied machete was in his hand. He paused beside the two wolves, unsure of which was on our side, if either was. I understood his reluctance, as I wasn’t sure what to think as well.

  With a shake of his head and a crack, the golden wolf snapped the neck of the first, then released the body. As he backed up, he turned to look at me and I saw familiar red-brown eyes watching me. A flash of memory struck me of a woman with the same coloring, but it wasn’t my memory. Beyond me, I saw Hunter finish off the last of the wolves still fighting, then turn to look at me as if he had sensed me plucking the memory from his mind.

  He stared at me for a moment, then looked to the golden wolf. The last of the vampiric pack.

  “Don’t kill him,” he called and I felt a flutter of panic rush through him as he came toward us. He was limping and many of the others who had come with us were injured, but none of us had been killed.

  The great tiger padded across the circle to find Dawn, then gently butted his head against her shoulder and nuzzled her with his massive head. She finished untying the last prisoner, then wrapped her arms around him tightly and buried her face in the side of his neck.

  “My hero,” she breathed.

  I cradled my bleeding wrist against my chest and slowly rose to my feet, still somewhat cautious about making movements that could be seen as threatening with the remaining vampiric wolf standing before me. When Hunter got to me, he wrapped an arm around me and held me close.

  “This is my brother James,” Hunter said.

  Jean-Claude looked up at the both of us quizzically, then back down to the wolf again. James began to shift back and his fur receded as his bones and soft tissues all changed shape. As his spine and hind legs became more bipedal, he began to rise up until a nude and handsome man in his early twenties stood before us. Well, he might have been handsome if his face wasn’t a brutal mask of blood, at any rate. One shoulder was wounded and looked as though he might have just ripped stitches out by shifting. His hair fell down over his forehead so that even without his fur he still gave the impression of an animal watching us.

  “Go ahead and kill me,” he said. “I have nothing without my pack. I just wasn’t going to let your mate die. We’re even now, right?”

  I could feel Hunter’s hesitation, his doubts. He wanted so badly to have a brother. He loved Jay and Paul as thoroughly as anyone had ever loved their family, but he longed for blood of his own. We might have pups someday, but that still wasn’t the same as having a brother. As hard as things had been between Aidan and me, I knew that. I hugged Hunter closer, unable to tell him what to do but offering my support all the same.

  “You don’t have nothing. You have me,” Hunter pointed out.

  James smiled, which looked eerily like Hunter’s smile save the blood all over it. “I took part in the last ritual three years ago and have been hunting women ever since. I’m not the brother you wish I was.”

  I looked James over thoughtfully and saw no reason to doubt him. He certainly looked far younger than a brother Hunter had known at six could be. He barely looked old enough to drink. If they had the same mother, he had to have already begun the vampiric feeding to stop his aging While I hated the idea of killing him in cold blood, welcoming a man who had killed so many people into the pack would be more difficult than I had thought before. I’d wanted to offer mercy, but the reality of it was hard to swallow.

  “If he stops feeding, he’ll eventually go back to normal,” Jean-Claude offered, his machete still at the ready. “But it’ll be like a heroin addict kicking the habit only worse.”

  “What do you mean?” Hunter asked, turning his attention to Jean-Claude.

  “It’ll be a long, drawn out withdrawal. He’ll be sick and miserable and when it’s all said and done he’ll still crave it. If he ever gives in, he’ll have to go through the whole thing all over again. And, in case you’re forgetting, ‘giving in’ will probably mean he rips someone’s throat out.” Jean-Claude paused, noticed that James had turned to stare at him as well, then shrugged. “Sorry, man. Just being straight with you.”

  “Kill me,” James said again, with more conviction in his voice.

  “You said your blood lets you contro
l vampires,” Hunter said to Jean-Claude. “Would it work on James?”

  “Yeah, it would,” Jean-Claude said, drawing the words out in his reluctance.

  “So you could keep him from harming anyone?” Hunter pressed.

  Jean-Claude stared at him wordlessly for several moments before his eyes moved to James, then to me briefly before returning to Hunter. “I’m here because it was the right thing to do and because I wanted to protect my friends. What’s in it for me to open a vein to this stranger?”

  Through our marks I could feel the rush of frustrated anger from Hunter. I hugged him to me, thinking for a moment. I had only just met Jean-Claude and didn’t really know him at all. He was human with a gift, just like Edie. It meant he wasn’t pack and would never truly be pack, so his loyalties wouldn’t be swayed just by Hunter pointing out that James should be treated like a member of the pack. I still felt a little sick to my stomach thinking about accepting as pack someone who murdered women and would have killed and eaten one of my friends or my cousin.

  But Hunter’s wish for a brother was palpable to me and James had killed his own pack mate to protect me.

  I released my mate to step forward, then touched Jean-Claude’s arm gently to focus his attention squarely on me. He was human, which meant if I lied or misrepresented my feelings he might not notice. “You are the only one who can do this,” I pointed out to him. “This is a young man who has never had a chance at being part of a healthy pack. He never had the chance to make good decisions before. You can change his life and give him a chance to be a good man. You can give him something no one else here can give him. I know it’s asking a lot of you, but if changing other people’s lives was easy we’d all be heroes. You’re the only one who can be the hero here.”

  I must have hit on the right tactic, because Jean-Claude’s entire demeanor changed as I spoke. He stood up a bit straighter, his face taking on an expression of smug contemplation.

  “We’ll see what I can do for him,” Jean-Claude said.

  Epilogue

  Sofia

  Our fingers were intertwined, my hand cradled in his larger one, as we lay on my bed together with my dog Leggy stretched across the foot of the bed. The bandage around my wrist detracted somewhat from the image and I wondered how badly it might scar. I hadn’t wanted to go anywhere with the second bite on top of the first, but Hunter had insisted I get a surgeon who worked in plastics to stitch it up as neatly as can be.

  “I don’t want a reminder of him left there,” Hunter had explained.

  It wouldn’t have bothered me much, but if it made Hunter happy I was willing to give it a shot. The surgeon had cautioned that he couldn’t guarantee it would scar neatly, though he had been optimistic. Christopher hadn’t succeeded in actually ripping any chunks of my flesh out, at least.

  “Will you make promises for the future now?” Hunter murmured, nuzzling against my temple.

  “Hm?” I turned in toward him, nestling in under the curve of his jaw. I inhaled the spicy, clean male scent of him and then sighed pleasurably.

  We both ached from the battle and if I concentrated through the marks I could actually feel his pain from where he had been bitten in the leg, but I didn’t want to do that. I worried about giving him my pain as well and bit by bit I was finding ways to control the marks, so that our emotions and thoughts could slide against one another like the most intimate of touches without sharing physical sensations and, possibly, magnifying his pain.

  After the fight there had been injuries to tend and clean up to enact at the warehouse. Autumn and the others had later called the police and said they escaped from the men who took them prisoner, then sent the authorities on a wild goose chase for dead men. I didn’t like lying to them, but I knew it was the only way to deal with it. There had been an abduction report. They had to account for their sudden return without drawing suspicion against those of us who had rescued them.

  By the time I actually got to bathe and rest after visiting the hospital—we had blamed dog bites for our injuries—it was nearly noon the next day.

  “You wouldn’t promise anything for the future before,” Hunter explained. “Will you now?”

  I thought about that for a moment, honestly unable to even picture a future without him in it, then drew back enough from him so I could meet his eyes.

  “You don’t know why I wanted to claim you as my mate in the first place, do you?” I asked.

  He shook his head with a wry smile. “No. I seem to recall you saying something about it not being because I was ‘the biggest, baddest alpha’, though.”

  I laughed softly and settled my head back against his shoulder. “It’s not,” I agreed. “It’s because of how you make me feel. You don’t make me feel like you just want me because I’m hot or I’d be a good prize. I feel like you want all of me, even the parts I didn’t know were there, and you make me better because of that. You accept the bad parts, but you’re so good at bringing all the good parts to the surface. I can’t help but be a better version of me when I’m with you.”

  “I know what you mean.” He leaned down to press a kiss to my forehead, then rested his cheek against the top of my head. “You make me feel the same way. I don’t think I realized how badly I needed you to balance me out until we found each other again.”

  “Mama said that without the marks working, us being separated left us both with wounds, as if we’d had something amputated and it could never heal,” I said.

  I felt him nod against my head. “That sounds accurate.”

  I was quiet for several minutes, just soaking up the joy of his presence. Finally as I was starting to doze I remembered I still hadn’t answered his question and roused myself enough to get back to it.

  “I want to run this pack together,” I said. “I want to finally start the family we’d planned so long ago.”

  He shifted around and slid his shoulder out from under my head so we could look eye to eye as I laid there. Hunter brought our joined hands up to his lips to brush a kiss against the back of mine. “I want that, too, more than anything else in the world.”

  I smiled, then pushed myself up so I could catch his lips with mine. Our lips stroked over one another slowly, caressing in soft brushes and teasing nips. My uninjured hand buried itself in his hair to hold him closer as I settled back against the bed again, so that I could draw him down with me. He came willingly and stretched out over my body. The warm weight of him was comforting there, like the world’s most perfect blanket.

  My plan for our attack on Christopher had been relatively simple. Hunter would distract them and ensure that they were all within the circle for their ritual before I came. Then I would trick Christopher into drinking my blood, activating the ritual prematurely and leaving them all vulnerable. Uncle Damon had used a bird call to let me know that the others were in place and it was time for me to shed blood.

  The only hard part was pulling it all off without either of us getting killed. I had trusted Hunter’s judgment that he could get through it safely and he had trusted mine. Maybe all we had ever needed was to find our trust in one another again, because that was when the marks finally kicked into overdrive.

  And now there we were on my bed, kissing and touching and losing ourselves in one another. I felt him as thoroughly in my mind and heart as I did against my skin. It was as though I was whole at last. For the last ten years I had been missing the other half of my soul, only ever experiencing one side of my own story. Finally we had found completion again.

  Further Reading

  Book One in the Claimed by an Alpha series…

  Buy Now

  As far as Luke Kapur knows, he might be the last weretiger left in the world. Orphaned at a young age, he’s only had limited exposure to other shifters and has never met a female he wanted as a mate. That is until he met curvy Dawn Biancardi, a woman who unknowingly carries shifter blood in her veins. It just happens to be something a little more prey than predator.

 
***

  Conferences aren’t generally that fun for me. Unfortunately, engineering really is a boy’s club even after all of these years. There are rules about harassment and inappropriate behavior, of course, but it still happens. Sexist jokes abound. There’s always the undercurrent that women don’t belong here. Not just at the conference in Las Vegas that weekend, but in the field at all.

  That was why while most of my associates were all clustered together in the hotel bar, I was sitting alone down at the end. The other women I knew at the conference had already left the bar and I couldn’t really blame them. It was after midnight, with more panels to attend tomorrow morning and then exhausting flights home, followed by work again on Monday. Those who used the conferences for fun instead of business were still out drinking and that crowd mostly consisted of men.

  I was not there for fun.

  There was a whiskey sitting in front of me, as well as my mobile phone. I was staring down at the text message. Then I took a swallow off of the whiskey before setting it down again.

  I picked up my phone to answer. My thumbs typed the message out with quick, angry jabs, then I set the phone down again to take a longer drink off my whiskey, finishing it off.

  “What did the phone do to you?” a rich voice like warm velvet up the spine asked. It was a familiar voice, too.

  Describing our relationship as friendship wouldn’t be entirely accurate. Friends implied we got together and hung out one-on-one, which was something we had never done on purpose. Our time alone together had always been incidental instead of a plan, at least as far as I knew. While we did work for the same company, we were assigned to different areas of interest. Our projects would occasionally cross over and so Luke and I knew each other—whenever we socialized with our coworkers we both included the other—but there had always been something there stopping us from more. Some unspoken tension that didn’t seem appropriate before. Whether it was me concerned about my marriage or his decency, we knew better than to be alone without saying a word.