Pack Obsidian Gold

by C. M. Stunich

  I turned away before I got myself into trouble and sat on the couch, Nic on my left as usual and Anubis on my right. Silas perched on the couch's arm while Jax settled into one of the chairs.

  “I'll make a fire,” Montgomery said, moving over to the fireplace and moving the decorative metal screen aside.

  “I think,” Che began, moving over to the sheepskin rug in front of the fireplace and stretching his beautiful body out across it. “that we're going to need more seating in here—especially if we keep having guests.”

  He was right, too. Because the room had been set up to entertain an alpha female and her seven mates, just for me and the boys. It wasn't really expected that we'd have a lot of company. Apparently, we were a different sort of breed, a new era—we had a lot of fucking company. Humans, witches, faeries, vampires … vampire/wolf hybrids.

  “We should visit the flea market,” Anubis said, tucking a leg up onto the sofa and flicking his eyes up at the ceiling in thought. “I always see these beautiful-.”

  “The flea market?” Che asked with a caustic laugh. “Werewolves? At a flea market? Thanks, but no thanks. The last thing I need is a squirt of Advantage on the back of my neck. That stuff burns like hell.”

  “Wow,” Anubis said with a growl and a roll of his eyes. “you're hilarious. Or at least I hope you're trying to be funny and failing—do I really need to explain to you what a flea market actually is.”

  Che just chuckled low and deep, a rumbling sound under his breath that made me think of chocolate ice cream with dark fudge swirls. I would scoop it with a spoon and eat it if I could.

  “The flea market,” Jax purred from his chair, lounging in it with his ice-blue eyes locked on mine. I stared back at him as I sipped my coffee. “Craving normalcy, are we.”

  “Maybe,” Anubis said as he looked over at me and smiled. It was a real smile though, and it went all the way to his eyes. “Just a moment to breathe. I think pawing through used antique chairs could very well serve that purpose.”

  “Or put us to sleep with sheer boredom,” Che added, giving Anubis a shit-eating grin. “which would be fine because then at least, I could snag a nap.”

  “You're impossible to talk to,” Anubis growled back at him, but I was pretty sure they were just playing. Well, I hoped so anyway.

  “As far as the documents,” I started and Harlem exhaled sharply, glancing away with eyes like chips of ice. “That's the deal. You explain how you found out about the slow drain spell, and I'll let you hear what I was going to tell my men.”

  “It's a deal,” Harlem growled out and Aeron made a sound in her throat.

  “A deal isn't a deal until it's bound and sealed,” she hissed and the vampire gritted her teeth in response.

  “I don't need magic and whimsy to seal my bargains; I keep my word.”

  “Until it's no longer convenient,” Aeron purred back and I could see things were about to escalate.

  “I was training with my grandmother,” I explained to the two women in the room, interrupting their squabble and handing my coffee over to Nic so he could grab a drink. If I let Anubis and Che pick at each other, they might go on forever. “Well, I intended to train with her,” I continued, putting a bite of crepe into my mouth and closing my eyes. The thin pancake was buttery and warm, and paired with the chocolate-hazelnut spread … it was as close to heaven as I'd been since I was underneath Jax on the kitchen floor.

  I flicked my eyes open and swallowed as Montgomery put a lighter to the logs in the fireplace, the dry kindling igniting with orange and yellow flames.

  “Instead, she gave me this.” I reached into the pocket of my gown and extracted the pearl, letting it sit on my palm so the girls could see it before I handed it to Silas. His tattooed hand touching mine did absolutely nothing to cool the heat in my belly, and I started thinking about ways I might be able to get the boys upstairs for a while ...

  Although I in no way though I had enough swagger yet to take on seven men at once.

  Oh goddess above.

  Seven of them … sexually aroused and wanting me?

  I doubted I'd be able to take that on with any sort of aplomb anytime soon.

  “What is it?” Silas asked, his voice slightly husky, like maybe he'd been napping upstairs. Or doing something else. Surely, the guys must masturbate, right? Most everyone did, didn't they? I guessed they'd be having some problems finding a private place to do it in the Pairing House though. Maybe that's what all those 'runs' were for in the forest? Taking off in wolf form, shifting in some distant copse of trees, and ...

  I chuckled and everyone flicked their gazes over to me.

  “It's a pearl,” I said, gathering my composure and fighting the smile that wanted desperately to crawl across my face. “And I got it from a rusalka.”

  “A rusalka?” Aeron asked, and then she laughed, this cruel dark sound that promised that fancy glamour of hers was a lie. She might look human, but that faerie blood ran thick and dark inside her veins. “Where.”

  That was one question I was not going to answer in front of either woman though.

  “She coughed it up,” I continued, taking another bite of my food as Tidus settled in the chair opposite Jax's, putting his elbows on his knees and watching as Silas passed the pearl into the Azure Frost Alpha-Son's. “Literally, coughed and choked and spit it into her hand. My grandmother wants me to eat it.”

  “What's a rusalka?” Tidus asked, flashing a grin. “And sorry I'm always the last to know this shit.”

  “I don't know what a rusalka is either,” Che said, yawning and turning onto his back. He was swimming in a big, oversized hoodie, but as he adjusted himself on the sheepskin, his sweater rode up and I caught a nice flash of bare skin between his sweats and belly button.

  At that point, it almost felt like the boys were teasing me on purpose.

  “It's a dead thing brought back to life,” Nic said, his rough. He sucked back the rest of the coffee and stood up abruptly, the sweet scent of pine and honeysuckle drifting in his wake. “I'm just getting a refill. Anubis can explain.”

  “Rusalki,” Aeron purred instead, perching on the edge of a wooden chair near the fireplace. “Are dead girls brought back to undead. Like a vampire. Only … not quite so lucky.”

  “They're bound to the water,” Anubis explained, curling a hand around one of his knees. Now that I was sitting closer to him, I could see that the pattern on his pants was made up of kitsune—fox shifters. Girls with nine tails smiled and waved and winked from the fabric.

  Interesting choice of clothing for a werewolf.

  There was as much animosity between wolves and kitsune as there were between wolves and coyote shifters.

  I didn't have much experience with either—if our numbers were in a bad place, theirs were a hundred times worse. Five hundred thousand wolves living in North America sounds like a lot, but really, it's only a fraction of a percent—one tenth of a percent, to be exact. To put it in perspective, green eyes are the rarest color in the world and people with eyes as pretty as Montgomery's only make up about two percent of the population; that's twenty times as many people with green eyes as there are werewolves.

  And there were probably twenty times as many wolves as there were kitsune or coyote shifters.

  “Depending on the lore—because rusalki show up in the history of several different cultures from around the world—they can't leave the water. Or at the very least, they can't travel too far from it. A rusalka is always female, always a spirit who was wronged at the end of their life … most often at the hands of a lover.”

  “Do you know what Rusalnaya Nedelja means?” I asked and Anubis paled slightly.

  “Rusalka Week. It's the one week a year a rusalka can leave her watery grave and seek … revenge. The story goes that if she finds the man who wronged her—or his descendant if he's already died—and manages to drown him in the place she's trapped, that her soul will be set free.”

  “So rusalki are vengeful g
hosts then?” Nic asked as he sat back down beside me and handed over the coffee. My first cup was black—probably because Montgomery assumed I was stressed from training—and now it was flavored with peppermint mocha creamer. This was one of Nic's signature flavors he teased me with when I needed to stay awake.

  I smiled into my mug.

  “Not ghosts, no,” Anubis began, sighing as he tried to figure out a way to explain. “Like … vampires. They're in the same bodies they occupied during life, but their biological functions are shut down completely. Rusalki are kept alive not by their own magic like a Blood, but … vengeance and hate instead. Strong emotions can keep someone from moving on no matter what species they are—rage, fear, melancholy ...”

  “Love,” Nic said, and he sounded like he was choking on the word. He didn't look at me when he said it either, glancing toward the door and swallowing hard, like he was on the verge of an emotional breakdown. “That's what kept me here last night,” he continued, and I was surprised to hear him keep talking.

  I set my plate and mug down on the coffee table.

  “Nic,” I started, curling my arms around his and leaning my head on his shoulder. 'I love you, too, you know,' I said, projecting my wolfspeak to him and only him in that moment. He needed to hear it, for his ears only.

  “So, the rusalka,” he choked out, leaning his head against mine, his body shuddering slightly. I couldn't decide if that was because of last night, or because it was still so new for us to touch. We literally hadn't been allowed to do something as simple as snuggle before the Bonding Ritual. Touching Nic still sent impossible thrills through me that made my throat ache and my heart soar. “She puked up a pearl. So what.”

  'Nice bid for casual, Nic, but I'm onto you,' I told him in wolfspeak and got the tiniest chuckle in return. I could feel it vibrate through his chest and into me.

  'You know me too well, Zara Wolf,' he said, and then planted a little kiss on my forehead that made my mud covered toes curl.

  “Majka—my grandmother,” I clarified in case either Harlem or Aeron wasn't familiar with the term. “wants me to eat it.”

  “Eat it?” Jax asked, giving the pearl to Montgomery next. The boys purposefully passed by Aeron with the little jewel, and I didn't blame them. It was one thing to talk turkey in front of the faerie princess, a whole other to let her actually hold the magical artifact that the previous Ebon Red Alpha had given me. “Why.”

  “She didn't say,” I continued, sighing deeply. That was the way with Majka. She wanted me to make connections and figure things out on my own. Nothing had been or ever would simply be handed to me from the older woman. “But if there's one person on this earth that I trust, it's Majka.”

  The pearl made its way to Che next, but he didn't bother to take it from Monty's hand. Instead, he just grabbed his wrist and sat up slightly, peering at the shimmery marble for a moment before shrugging his broad shoulders and letting go.

  Montgomery passed the pearl over Harlem's lap and into Tidus' hand.

  “It's pretty,” he said, ever the optimist. He lifted the pearl to his nose, the only man besides Jax to check the little bauble with scent. “Doesn't smell like anything.” Tidus paused and then flicked his tongue out to lick it. I stifled a chuckle. First man to use that particular sense to investigate the pearl. “Doesn't taste like anything either.”

  He handed it back to Nic who dropped it in my palm.

  “You're going to swallow some random jewel that a dead girl vomited up?” Harlem asked with one pale brow cocked up.

  I looked her straight in the face, stuck the pearl between my lips, and swallowed.

  The pouring rain gave the Sunday afternoon a gloomy sort of look, like the sky was weeping. To me, though, it was a joyous occasion, the first real tears of Spring—tears of happiness. Nature was glad to be done with winter and although I enjoyed romping in the snow as much as the next wolf, I was excited to see the seasons change.

  “Don't let yourself get overwhelmed,” Montgomery said, letting the screen door swing shut behind him. “There's a lot to do but what we managed last night ...” I saw his nostrils flare as he choked back a surge of emotion. “What we managed is huge.”

  “I'm just sorry we couldn't save them all,” I said as the Ivory Emerald prince strode over to the edge of the porch and watched the water come down in sheets. Lana had stopped by shortly after our meeting in the living room to give us a little update. Three of the rescued wolves died last night, two were already dead when they were taken from the warehouse, and six more were in critical condition—even with the demon blood I'd managed to procure.

  Most of which was gone, by the way. We had a single dose left. Just one fucking dose.

  And I'd unleashed those monsters—Sutannoc and Eanimeg, Noc and Nim—into the world.

  Two weeks and they'd be free to roam before they came back to collect our blood.

  I should've asked for more.

  “And I'm sorry about your parents, your grandparents ...” I added, but Monty was already shaking his head, turning back to look at me. His shock white hair was in a fishtail braid today, loose but still meticulous. He was like anime/manga incarnate, a slice of fantasy that made me pull my knees into the rocking chair and hug them. He was just that beautiful, almost hard to look at.

  “Don't be sorry,” he told me, sounding years older than the seventeen he'd lived. “We'll find them now.” He smiled and moved over to me, kneeling down like a knight, reminding me of our first time in the bedroom.

  Goddess, I wanted to fuck him again.

  “As soon as I finish this coffee,” I said, tapping my fingers against my third mug of the day. It wasn't nearly enough either. I could've used a dozen more. Yesterday was exhausting, both emotional and physically. Nic had fucking died. I'd lost him, and the only reason he was still walking around was because some creature I hadn't even known existed had shown and up saved the day. “I want to know how Harlem figured out the slow drain spell existed. Something that powerful, that damaging to our people and she just happened to stumble across it.”

  “It is quite the coincidence,” Monty said, his sweet rose smell drifting over me. “But however she came across it, we need to find the rest of our pack members and then we need to break it.”

  “Right after we fight alongside Kingdom Crown Aurora, take down Kingdom Ironbound, rid our pack of a traitor, and figure out what the hell that white stag was and where he came from.” I lifted up my wrist for Montgomery to inspect and he took it in long, white fingers, bringing it to his lips for a kiss.

  “One thing at a time. And remember—even if there are eight important things that need to be done, there are eight of us. You don't have to do anything alone.” Montgomery paused for a moment and looked away. “Did you mean what you said?” he whispered after a moment, looking back at me and then reaching his hands under my dress. My breath slipped from my throat in a small gasp as his warms hands found my thighs and carefully pushed them apart.

  I seriously almost dropped scalding hot coffee in my lap.

  “What did I say?” I asked, because for the life of me I couldn't think of anything beyond what Montgomery was doing to me in that moment. He trailed the fingers of his right hand along my inner thigh and teased at the scalding hot wetness between my legs.

  I set the coffee mug aside before I ended up burning both of us with it.

  “That you couldn't choose,” he murmured, and then he slipped two fingers inside of me. My head fell back against the wood of the rocking chair and I closed my eyes, groaning as Monty curved his fingers and teased at my G-spot.

  Impressive for a guy who'd literally just had his first time.

  “I know we've only just met, but ...”

  But he was werewolf; I was werewolf. We were bound with magic and sex, and wolves mated for life. It was in our blood and what little magic we had left. It was in our very nature.

  No, I couldn't choose.

  Because I was the alpha female and these mal
es had been given to me. I'd mated them, fucked them, claimed them, and I was supposed to hand them over to another female? The thought turned my blood to molten lava, filled with a violent, seething sort of rage, something primal and bestial.

  Montgomery leaned down and pressed a kiss to my left knee, flicking his tongue along the smooth, sensitive flesh of my thigh. I grabbed a handful of his beautiful hair and yanked his face up to look at me.

  He made me feel like a queen in that he felt my king.

  I liked that.

  If I'd let myself be bullied into choosing, I probably would've picked Montgomery. He was born to lead.

  Plus, you know, I also liked him.

  “Why should I have to choose? If I'm the alpha ...” I started and then licked my lower lip in a flirtatious gesture. “Nobody can make me. But I also won't make any of you stay either—whoever wants to leave at the end of the Pairing, I'll release with my full blessing and the right to choose their own mate.”

  “Good,” Montgomery said, sliding his fingers from my heat and curling both hands around my ass cheeks. He yanked me off the wooden chair and pinned me beneath him, against the cold wooden boards of the porch. Monty swooped down and took my lips with his as I curled my fingers in his white t-shirt. His black trench shrouded both of us as our tongues danced together and I raised my hips to meet the hardness behind his jeans. “But can I tell you a little secret?” he growled after a moment, less human than wolf.

  I kept my eyes closed, but I could feel his warm breath rushing against my lips.

  “What?” I asked, cracking one eyelid.

  “I don't intend on leaving.” He put his cheek to mine and then gently bit my earlobe.

  I was a tad surprised at his aggressive behavior—but in a good way. It spoke of confidence and trust, less as dominance like when Che or Jax did it. I didn't think Monty wanted to dominate me. I think he wanted to be equals.