Mates & Magic: A Reverse Harem Paranormal Romance Box Set Collection

by Jade Alters

  I’m rubbing some lip balm on my lips, feeling a little chilly in my sleep shorts and cami. I’ll miss the tiny little nighty I was wearing last night, but the hot sex was definitely worth it. Nathan’s even insisting on replacing it. I think he’s a little embarrassed by the extent of his...aggression, even if I’m not.

  When I hear a tap on the bathroom window, I think it’s a tree branch, blown by the wind. The bathroom window is big, and a blue curtain hangs in front of it. It faces out onto a tree, low to the ground. I don’t think anything of it until I hear the tapping again. I part the curtain to look but the glass is pebbled and makes everything blurry. I’m thinking it’s a confused bird or something, and I open the window to look when a snarling wolf jumps right through the window, knocking me back against the wall.

  I’m too shocked to react. This is the nightmare. This is exactly what I was afraid of. I open my mouth to scream and almost instantly, the wolf shifts and it’s Ted, looking absolutely murderous. I don’t even get a sound out before he’s got a hand clapped over my mouth, and he’s grabbing me. He’s much stronger than he looks. But then if he’s a shifter, I guess he’s got some enhanced strength.

  “You say a word,” he whispers in my ear, “and you’re fucking dead and all your teddy bears with you. Hear me, Dora? Nod if you understand.”

  I nod once, already trembling.

  “Good,” he whispers. “Good, that’s good. It’s gonna be fine, Dora. Okay? All your problems are about to go away, I promise you. You just gotta come with me first. You give me even a little bit of trouble and I got a huge pack of wolves surrounding the place that will tear your four boyfriends apart. Okay?”

  I nod again.

  I’m frozen with terror as he keeps me locked in his arms, even as he drags me out the window. He directs me to climb down with him, and I tremble, too afraid for the well-being of the guys to step out of line. I know they’d want me to scream for them to save me, but all this is my fault in the first place. It was even my fault for opening the window. I can’t keep dragging them into the nightmare that has become my life when it really has nothing to do with them. Yet even now, I feel that bond between the five of us, and I start to cry as I jump from the bottom branch to the ground Ted clamps his arm around me again and starts walking me away from the house.

  I focus on putting one foot in front of the other even as I’m paralyzed with fear. I tell myself this will end. Ted clearly wants something from me. I’m scared to know what it is, but all I can do is pray that he won’t hurt me and that this will end. I remember the defensive spells I learned with Grant, and I try one, reciting under my breath. But Ted hears me, clamping a hand over my mouth again.

  “I told you not to try anything,” he says, growling in my ear.

  He’s walking me down the street and up ahead, I see a big furry lump that I soon realize is the body of a dead bear. The fear that it’s one of my guys makes me scream into Ted’s hand, and he squeezes me tighter, painfully, as he pushes me to walk on down the dark street.

  “That’s right, Dora,” Ted says in my ear. “Forgot to mention, I killed one of them already⁠—”

  I moan into his hand, fighting him off now, hysterical. I feel like my heart is tearing in two. I try to fight him, biting his hand, and clawing at him. But he gets a hand around my throat, choking me until I finally give in, afraid he may actually kill me. When he lets me go, I collapse to my knees on the ground, sobbing despite his warnings. I don’t care anymore. One of my loves is dead. It’s so clear to me now in the shock of grief: whether or not I was way too much trouble for them, we were all meant for each other.

  Now one of them is dead.

  Ted yanks me to my feet and backhands me across the face until he finally grips me again, forcing me to look him in the eye. “You pull yourself together, Dora. I need you for tonight and then you’re free. Make this hard on me, and I’ll kill the rest of them too. Got it?”

  I bite down on my tongue, hard enough to redirect my brain away from hysteria, and nod mutely. I wipe my eyes and let Ted hold my arm, and he drags me into the woods away from my beloved bears, away from the place that’s felt more like home than any place I’ve ever known.

  Brett

  I don’t have significant dreams often and when I do remember my dreams, they’re usually boring. But tonight is different. For the past day or so, I’ve just been appreciating Dora from a bit of a distance. I guess I’ve always been the quiet one and I’m comfortable holding that position. So when Dora laughs at Jesse and Grant’s joke or practically melts under Nathan’s gaze, I’m honestly happy enough just to watch her. Besides, we did kiss. The memory of it is still fresh in my mind. If nothing ever happened between us again, I would still have that kiss. Only I truly believe that Dora is our shared fated mate. I believe she’s meant to be ours just as we’re meant to be hers. I’m more than happy to shower Dora with affection and undying loyalty for the rest of my days along with Nathan, Jesse, and Grant. For now, I don’t mind being quiet and watching.

  But tonight, I have a terrible dream. It’s nothing specific, yet it’s visceral. Dora is in some kind of agony in a dark place, and I can’t get to her. The four of us are running through the woods to save her, but her screams seem to come from everywhere and the longer we run, the farther away she gets. We’re full of terror, our hearts shatter knowing our love is being hurt somewhere, and we can’t find her.

  I wake with a start, jerking in my bed and suddenly alert. It’s the middle of the night. But I don’t think I’ve been asleep long.

  Something is wrong.

  I spring out of bed and grab my glasses, stumbling out of my room in only a pair of briefs. I hope against hope that I’m wrong. This is all just some combination of a bad dream and the empathetic connection I feel toward Dora going haywire. Bears can be unpredictable that way. Sometimes we overreact based on our sense of others’ emotions. Even as I dash down the hall to Dora’s room, that’s what I tell myself. This Dora connection is still so new. It’s like a new muscle that needs to be exercised. I hardly know how it works.

  At Dora’s door, I pause. I take a deep breath and count to ten.

  This will be fine, I tell myself. She’s right behind that door, peacefully asleep in her bed.

  I open the door, my heart pounding, and find an empty bed. Now my heart starts beating so fast, it’s actually painful. I race to her bathroom and that’s when it feels as if my heart starts to crack. There’s been a struggle here. The shower curtain is askew like somebody grabbed it. Her toothbrush and its holder are on the floor. But worst of all, the window is wide open. When I look out of it, I see nothing.

  Oddly, now that I know something has happened, I feel slightly calmer. Because this is something that needs to be dealt with. This is no time to panic. I close my eyes and sniff the air. I would’ve sniffed for her before if I’d thought of it. Her scent has become as familiar as that of any of my sleuth mates.

  She’s not here, not in the house anyway. I don’t smell her nearby. I can make out the scent she’s left behind if I concentrate. It’s faint, but it’s there. I can smell her floral body lotion, her moisturizer, and toothpaste. But then I get the pungent scent of fear on the end, like the sharp note of a perfume that takes a second to make out.

  She’s gone, and she’s afraid. Just in case I doubted my own natural senses of empathy and whatever mystical instinct clued me in to her disappearance, I know for sure that she didn’t go on a walk in the middle of the night.

  She’s afraid.

  I swallow and then finally spring into action. I run to Nathan’s room first, but as I throw open his door I find him already awake and scrambling to put on a pair of jeans. He must have woken up with a bad feeling too and now he looks at me with alert eyes.

  “What happened?” Nathan barks.

  “She’s gone,” I say. “Bathroom window’s open, and she’s not here and I smell fear.”

  Nathan makes a face I’ve never seen him make before. It’s
as if he’s angriest at himself. But that’s Nathan. If anything happens to Dora, I know he’s going to blame himself like crazy and get all quiet about it. Now he grabs a shirt and gives me a curt nod.

  “Get dressed,” he says sternly. “I’ll wake the others.”

  In my room, I throw on black jeans, a sweatshirt, and boots. I hear Nathan and the other rumbling around. I hear the sound of Jesse and Grant shouting, likely just having realized she’s gone. They would have woken up with the sense that something was wrong eventually too, I’m sure. Nathan and I are just a little more sensitive to that stuff than they are. I hear them all going to Dora’s room and raised voices again as they realize what most likely happened.

  I keep sniffing the air, again and again, hoping I’m wrong and I’ll get her scent and find that she’s actually close by. I think about it as I tie my boots tight. She could have gone out. Maybe she’s a sleepwalker? She’s afraid because...she was having a nightmare?

  You know better, I tell myself.

  Yes, unfortunately, I do.

  This is Ted. I know because as I dash back out into the hall and pound down the stairs behind Grant, I can smell him. It’s just a whiff, underneath our scents and Dora’s. But it’s there on the air, and it’s musky as hell. It’s a wolf. Once I smell it, I can hardly smell anything else. A wolf was here, and Dora is gone.

  When we’ve all gathered downstairs in the shop, Nathan looks us over. I know that look. He’s already completely focused on the mission and on whatever fight might be in our future. He’s looking at us as if to make sure we’re all alert and as focused as he is. I think we are. Jesse and Grant are standing there, eyes fixed on Nathan and looking ready to kill whoever has hurt Dora.

  But we all know who it is.

  “I smell wolf,” Nathan says sternly. “You?” He looks at each of us.

  We all nod except Grant who says, “Not just any wolf. It’s definitely Ted. I got his scent at the firm, remember.”

  “Right.” Nathan nods, running a hand through his hair. I can sense his anger even as he’s trying to remain calm. “We have no time to waste. We don’t know exactly when she was taken. Let’s search around the perimeter for any clues. Grant, I want you to text whatever bears you can think of who’d be willing to help. Wake up whoever you can. Let’s go.”

  With all of us clear on our mission, we file out of the house and shift, except for Grant, who starts making his calls. Shifting makes our senses more heightened. We move as quickly as we can, sniffing out anything out of the ordinary and searching for tracks. I head straight for the area under Dora’s bathroom window, and I find their tracks there. It’s a little hard to make out in the grass, but I think they walked down the road and then into the woods. The silhouette of a big, dark lump lays by the side of the road up ahead, and I start to run over even as I see Jesse heading to the same spot. Soon enough, my nose picks up on the stench of dead bear shifter.

  My heart tears in two, and I catch Jesse’s eye as we stand over the carcass. I recognize the shifter as one of our acquaintances from town, a friendly bear by the name of George. We’d told him about Dora when we were putting out the call for help with the spell. Though it was mainly to ask all our bear friends to keep an eye out for malevolent wolves in the area after we caught wind of Ted.

  Nathan and Grant finally find us, standing over George’s corpse and we all shift back into human form and glance at each other, sadly.

  “Looks like an attack,” Nathan spits out. He looks out to the woods and down at the faint tracks in the dirt and grass. “He did like to go on runs in this area, especially in the middle of the night. My guess is, he happened to be out and caught onto Ted, followed him out here…”

  “Do you think Ted has help?” Jesse says, his hands fixed on his hips. He looks away from George, and I see his eyes shining. He’s trying to keep it together, but us bears can be emotional, and George was a friend. “One wolf took him down? I don’t know about that.”

  “George wasn’t much of a fighter,” Nathan says softly. He’s not being mean about it. It’s just true. George was an older man, the type who can be helpful in a fight that requires sheer numbers or big enough to be able to scare off an enemy through intimidation alone, but he wasn’t any kind of warrior type. One wolf might have taken him down.

  Nathan glares in the direction of the woods and cracks his knuckles. “Grant, who’s coming?”

  “About a half dozen,” Grant says, shrugging. “I mean it’s four in the morning. It was hard to get anyone out of bed. But they might recruit more people later. We’ll see how things go, I guess. I left one of Dora’s shirts on the front porch for them too so they can go there first and get her scent and then go search the woods.”

  “That’s good thinking,” Nathan says, and Grant looks vaguely pleased even as he crosses his arms, looking stoic.

  We shift again and start heading into the woods, carefully following the faint scents and tracks left behind. Soon enough, our friends join us.

  I find myself moved when bears like Henny, who’s only about twenty-years-old and who I’ve known around town since he was a kid, come out to join us in the search alongside older folks. Bear shifters can be funny. We’re very brave and loyal and closely tied to our emotions thanks to our sensitive empathic abilities. But we can also be cantankerous.

  We also hate being shoved out of bed in the middle of the night. I think the only reason it was so easy for my sleuth to rouse themselves so quickly was because we all sensed the danger Dora must be in. Otherwise, even with some impending danger near, getting a bear out of bed can be like pulling teeth. Yet here are six bears, who have never even met Dora, all willing to help before the sun has even risen. I don’t know how we’ll make it up to them, especially if we manage to rescue Dora.

  The thought that we might not rescue Dora starts to take shape in my mind now as we spread out into the woods, following the tracks and the scents of Dora and wolf.

  I feel as if the five of us were just getting started. There’s so much we have to look forward to, and every time I think about it, I get even angrier at Ted not just for daring to hurt Dora in any way but for attempting to steal that future from us. It’s as if the four of us were an incomplete set. We didn’t know it. We’ve been fairly contented with our lives together as a sleuth. But I’ve often felt restless as if there was something missing, and since Dora’s come along, I’ve felt a sense of completeness in our little family that I didn’t know was possible.

  It’s hard not to imagine a future where we share in our love together every day. Maybe we could even have kids someday. I know Nathan has always wanted to be a father. Grant is great with kids, and Jesse has a sweetness about him that I think would make him a good dad. It’s crazy early to think about that kind of thing, I know. But my emotions are all a jumble just as I know they are for Nathan, Grant, and Jesse. All of us have to work harder to focus on our mission and rescue Dora. To do that, we have to simultaneously fight an inner battle with our hearts, or we’ll lose the thread.

  Even now, as I lumber through the woods, following a whiff of Dora’s scent that’s so faint, I think I might be imagining it, I see Grant come running up beside me. When he looks at me, I don’t need to hear his human voice to know exactly what he’s thinking. I can see the love, fear, anger, and uncertainty in Grant’s eyes, and I try to meet his expression with some sense of comfort and confidence.

  We’ll find her, I try to say to Grant without speaking.

  Grant only gives me a nod and we plod on through the mud, following after Nathan and keeping our eyes and noses open for the slightest clue. All of us are driven by loyalty and love for the woman we’ve come to care so deeply for. We’re searching for the future we didn’t know we wanted more than anything and didn’t know we could possibly lose.

  Dora

  I have this stupid hope in my heart that Ted lied. When I saw the body of that bear on the ground, I assumed it was one of my men. Why wouldn’t I? It’s not as if
I know any other bears, and it was right outside the house. I’m also all riled up and terrified right now. Even as Ted grips my arm hard enough to bruise as he drags me through the woods, I’m biting hard on my lip in an attempt to stop myself from crying and whimpering. I don’t like looking so weak and fearful in front of him after everything he’s done. But if I think back, I didn’t feel that kind of connection to the dead bear that I’ve felt with my guys. Maybe that’s because he’s dead? Yet, I didn’t feel as if this thread that’s been humming between me and the bears had been severed. I feel like whatever is between us has been strong enough that if one of them died, I would surely know it.

  “Pick up your feet,” Ted snarls in my ear as he drags me further through the woods.

  That’s easy for him to say. I’m walking on dirt and pine needles and rocks and my feet are bare. It’s also autumn and not even dawn yet. It can’t be more than thirty degrees, and I’m wearing a little cami and shorts. The asshole could have brought a robe and some shoes if he was going to kidnap me and drag me through the woods for fuck’s sake. I’m freezing cold and shivering, and I’m getting my feet cut up as I try to walk faster to keep up with his pace.

  “Why did you make my life hell at the firm?” I say, my voice shaking as he drags me along. “Why were you such an asshole to me? What was the point? Why did you try to have me arrested for stealing? I’ve never stolen a fucking thing.”

  “Because I wanted you,” Ted hisses in my ear, his grip tightening so hard that I taste blood as I bite my lip and my eyes well up with tears.

  “Ted, please,” I say, unable to keep myself from crying. “You’re hurting me⁠—”

  “I wanted you and you didn’t want me,” he growls.

  I sniff, and my entire body is shaking, my arm hurts so badly. I think he’s going to bruise the bone. He’s using all his strength to hold onto me, but it’s not just to keep me with him. He wants to hurt me. But I’m confused by his words.