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

by Jade Alters

  It’s a terrible risk, and I don’t even look around in the chaos to see if I’m vulnerable to another attack.

  I just charge straight at Ted.

  He’s standing on the wide rim of the cauldron, and I understand now that he recognizes the protective blood all over the ground, and he’s trying to avoid it. He’s determined to finish his spell, but I get up on my hind legs and with one swipe, I’ve got him toppling over, falling like a rock into the dirt. He shifts quickly, but it’s no contest. I get Ted between my jaws. His blood tastes sour, and his fur is gritty. He struggles and howls, and I don’t hesitate to bite through his blood and sinew, taking his life from him. I’m not sorry. It’s nothing but a relief for my thirst for vengeance to kill Ted.

  When it’s over, there are a bunch of wolf carcasses littering the forest floor. The rest of us are standing around, catching our breath. A few of the bears are injured, but nobody’s life is in danger. I’m pretty sure several wolves just took the coward’s way out and ran off. That’s what you get when your men aren’t loyal to you. I don’t know what this spell was for, but whatever it was, it wasn’t enough to keep them here.

  Jesse

  I haven’t been in many fights, even if Nathan has always kept us prepared and well-trained, just in case. The life of any shifter is nothing if not predictable. But now I feel as if I could have gone on to battle for days. I’ve never felt so strong and agile. It’s as if I’m filled with some new strength. I felt the four of us, bonded together, united in our love for both Dora and for each other. When I saw the glowing blood on the ground, I remembered reading about veils of protection. That must have been in it. Perhaps it was a spell for shared fated mates. The knowledge that Dora cast it to protect us made me love her even more, and I let it fuel my strength.

  Now I shift back into human form and stand there, catching my breath. I have a minor wound to my shoulder, but nothing too bad. All of us inspect each other for anything life-threatening, but everyone seems okay. All of our enemies are either vanquished, or they’ve fled.

  But victory doesn’t give me any sense of triumph. Not with Dora tied to a tree and looking limp. Her arm hangs from a branch, oozing blood like she’s some sick puppet on a string.

  I run over with Grant, who pulls a knife from his pocket, and it takes us a frustratingly long time to cut her ropes and get her down from the fucking tree. She seems so much smaller now as Grant cuts the last rope, and she slumps into my arms. I kneel on the ground and my heart is racing. Her skin feels so cold, and she looks so unnaturally pale and gaunt.

  “She cast a veil of protection,” one of our friends says in surprise. It’s Wilson. He’s a mechanic on the other side of town. You would never know he’s a shifter or that anything even slightly unusual or magical was going on with him. He just looks like a regular guy who fixes cars and likes to drink a beer and watch football. But he’s actually really knowledgeable about magic. He comes in to buy supplies for spells with the same attitude as he would to the hardware store. “This veil is amber,” Wilson says, rubbing his beard. He kneels down and presses his fingers into the still glowing blood. He looks at us in surprise. “That’s fated mate stuff. Is this a shared fated mate thing?”

  Dora stirs slightly, but she’s still unconscious. I’m afraid she might be permanently damaged, so I’m having trouble following the conversation, but I hear Grant confirming to Wilson that it’s true. To hear it so casually validated makes my eyes well up with tears, and I swallow the lump in my throat.

  Yes, she’s our mate. And she’s dying, I think to myself.

  The others kneel around me then, and I see the same fear in their eyes too. We might be losing her.

  “Wilson,” Nathan says. His voice sounds so different. He sounds so scared now that the fight is over. There’s no one else to kill or take down or scare off. We can’t fight off death. Can we? “Is there anything we can do? If we wait till she gets to a hospital, she could die first.”

  Beside me, I hear Grant choke a little and while holding Dora in my arms, her body limp and white as a sheet, I reach over to squeeze his hand.

  “I...I don’t know.” Even Wilson sounds shaky now. He’s a big man, but when I look up at him, I see his eyes shining too. He takes off his ball cap and scratches his head and then says, “Wait, your blood. That’s why the veil worked so well. It’s her blood protecting you. If you give her a taste of your blood, it might be as powerful for her. It may work to heal her. Quickly! All four of you, give her a taste of your blood. The power of shared fated mates may save her.”

  Wilson kneels down to take Dora from me, and the rest of us work quickly. Grant takes out his knife again, and Brett wipes down the vial that held Dora’s blood. Grant cuts his palm, only wincing slightly at the pain. He holds the vial beneath his hand and lets a good amount drizzle inside before handing off the knife and the vial to Brett. Meanwhile, Nathan takes off his shirt and rips it up, tying off the awful gash in Dora’s arm and wrapping it up. The bleeding has slowed, but it seeps through the fabric so quickly, it makes my own blood run cold.

  One at a time, each of us cuts ourselves and bleeds into the vial until all our blood is mixed together. I try not to think about it too much. I’m not squeamish, but the thought of feeding this concoction to Dora does gross me out just a little. But if it will save her, I’d do a lot worse.

  When we’re all done, the vial is nearly full again, and Grant grimaces, stirring it up with his finger before wiping the blood off with some leaves. Wilson holds Dora up, and Nathan holds up her head. Everyone crowds around, nine bear shifters surrounding Wilson and our mate, the four of us waiting with bated breath as Nathan slowly pours the vial of blood down her throat. He pours a little, but not so much that she could choke, and then we wait.

  “I don’t know how long it takes,” Wilson admits.

  I glance at Nathan and see his conflicted expression. If we carried her as fast as we could, all the way back through the woods and took her to the hospital, it wouldn’t take less than an hour. She might be dead by then. One of us surely has a phone. We could run her up to the main road and call for an ambulance there, far enough away from the wolf bodies to avoid the wrong kind of questions. But I’m pretty sure the main road is at least a half a mile away. There just don’t seem to be any good options here, but I see the gears in Nathan’s mind turning as he tries to decide.

  “Let’s get her home,” Nathan finally says. He takes off his jacket, and we cover her with it the best we can, but it’s not much. She still feels far too cold. “The house is still closer than anywhere else.”

  I don’t remember much about the journey back home. Everything is a blur, but Dora remains unconscious. Nathan carries her and the rest of us run after them. But we don’t want to hold up our six bear friends, and we let them go back home as the sun is still rising and the day is beginning. I’m sure we don’t thank them nearly as well as we should. I know I barely say a word as we hike through the woods, moving as fast as we can back to the house. I’m not great with niceties on a good day, much less when I’m this upset. But I think Grant took care of it well enough. That’s kind of what he does.

  Once we’re down the hill and onto flat ground, Nathan throws Dora over his shoulder and takes off at a run. It’s not like she weighs much, and Nathan is a lot stronger than average anyway. If it was feasible we’d carry her on one of our backs, but there’s no way to secure an unconscious woman to the back of a bear. Might be funny to look at, but it’s asking for trouble.

  Eventually, Nathan is running fast enough that I don’t bother to keep up. He’ll get her to the house safely. I keep my nose open. Brett is running at a trot after them, but Grant hikes beside me as we go. I feel exhaustion, suddenly, deep in my bones. But I feel a little better with Grant at my side. The two of us have always been inseparable.

  “You think she’ll be okay?” I ask him. I stuff my hands in my pockets. Sometimes Nathan massages the truth to get us where we need to be, and Brett is lik
ely to avoid an answer if it’s something he thinks somebody doesn’t want to hear. Grant is always good with people, and he’s easily able to charm them, but I know he’d never lie to me. So I dread asking him, but when he looks at me, he’s smiling.

  “I do,” he says, nodding. “I have a good feeling. I think we’re going to be okay.”

  “So optimistic,” I say to him. But I can’t help smiling. A lot of times, that’s how it is between us. One of us is optimistic when the other is feeling down—we kind of balance each other out. I think the entire sleuth has that kind of dynamic actually, and now Dora is a part of it. I try to just accept what Grant is saying, but I’m so worried about Dora, I’m having actual physical reactions. Like panic, I guess. My hands sting. It’s a strange phenomenon. I shake my hands out and take deep breaths, and I can tell Grant is reading my emotions all too well because he comes up beside me and throws an arm around me. I really do appreciate the comfort, and we walk through the woods, both of us still worried about Dora, even if we do feel good about our odds.

  The woods are beautiful as we make our way back. The rising sun turns the faintly cloudy sky a beautiful hue of peach over our heads.

  I haven’t seen a dawn with Dora yet. There are so many things we haven’t done together.

  “We should go camping,” I mutter as we make our way down the main road towards the house.

  Grant looks at me funny. “What are you talking about?” He looks so amused that I blush a little. I didn’t really mean to say that aloud.

  “When she’s better,” I say. “We should take Dora camping. If she likes camping. Do you think she likes camping?”

  “Don’t worry, man,” Grant says, squeezing my shoulder. “You’ll be able to ask her yourself in no time. I really do feel good about it. I think if she was going to die...we’d just know. Like we’re scared, but that’s different. I mean, don’t you feel it? The thing? The bond?”

  “Yeah.” I smile softly to myself. It feels like a really intimate secret, this feeling. Even though all five of us share it, and it involves all of us. “Do you think she loves us?”

  “Yes,” Grant says, and he seems to get the same soft smile on his face that I’m wearing. “It’s the fated mate thing. That’s why she could do the veil. You can’t cast something like that without true love. God...I just want to feel her in my arms again.”

  “Me too.”

  “But you’ll do for now,” Grant says, giving me one of his patented smirks.

  I roll my eyes at him, but at least he’s making me smile as we make our way home.

  When we get back to the house, Dora still isn’t awake. By the time we get there, she’s upstairs, lying in her bed. She’s still unconscious, and Brett is furiously paging through a spell book looking for a healing tonic for her arm.

  She does look less pale to me, but she’s so still, lying there under the covers. I have to watch really carefully to be able to tell that she’s even breathing.

  When Brett finds the spell and asks me to help him put it together, I’m only relieved. We raid the ingredients from our stock in the magic shop, and it doesn’t take long after that to throw everything in a cauldron according to the brew instructions. Then, it’s just a light recitation, and we carry the cauldron back up to Dora’s bedroom. Grant is leaning in the corner, watching. He looks more serious now than ever. I can feel the doubt coming off of him in waves, and I try to throw him a reassuring look. Nathan is sitting at Dora’s bedside, quiet and stoic, but he hops right back up when we bring the cauldron in and set it on the nightstand.

  Brett goes about unwrapping Dora’s arm, and all of us can’t help but wince at the sight of that awful gash. He uses a paintbrush and paints the tonic on. It’s thick and goopy, and I watch, even though there’s not much to see. I sit at the foot of the bed and that’s when I feel the magical energy between us fold together. It’s a subtle thing. If anyone was talking or even moving more than Brett is right now, I’m not sure I would have noticed it. But in the still and quiet, I feel us reaching out to Dora with the strength of the magic that we can lend her. I pray it will help her and lean on my hand as I watch Brett paint the tonic onto her skin. Finally, almost her entire arm is covered. There’s not much to do now but keep waiting.

  Grant mutters, “She might’ve—” He doesn’t finish his sentence, and we all look at him expectantly but he just shakes his head, frowning. “Nevermind.”

  I think he was going to say, she might have bled out. None of us know anything about regular medicine, honestly. We’re all just hoping that our strength and power and the connection between us will save her. It’s all we’ve got.

  “Should we give her more blood?” Brett says quietly.

  “We can’t,” Nathan says quietly. “She can’t swallow; she’ll choke.”

  “Jesus…” Brett gets up and I watch him pace back and forth before he finally announces, “I’m going to wait in my office. I’m going to, I don’t know, work on the books or something. I can’t just sit here and stare at her, waiting for her to wake up. It’ll kill me.”

  “What about...?” Grant looks at him and looks at her. “Didn’t you feel that power between us?”

  “Of course, I did,” Brett says, his mouth an angry little frown. “Don’t worry, Grant. I feel it as strongly as anything. I’ll feel it in my office too. I’ll send her all the strength I have in me.”

  “Yeah.” Nathan nods and gets to his feet. “Okay, look. We should go in shifts. We’ll lose our minds if we sit around here.”

  “I’m taking the first shift.” I say it louder than I intended. I just don’t want anyone to argue with me. Grant looks like he wants to say something, but he just nods and takes one final look at Dora before he leaves the room.

  But I know Grant. Sure, he’s optimistic sometimes. But if he is really worried he doesn’t compartmentalize as well as Nathan or Brett. He’s just going to go to his room and mess around on his phone and pace because there’s nothing else he can do for Dora.

  Meanwhile, I sit on top of the covers next to Dora and stretch out my legs. Grant brings me my phone and that helps, I guess. I can’t really concentrate on anything though. I just keep looking over at Dora to see if she’s stirring at all. I mainly just look at Instagram, scrolling by the same photos over and over and searching tags I don’t even care about.

  “Hey.” It’s an hour later when Nathan appears in the doorway with a cup of coffee that he brings to me. “Cops left us a message. There are no charges on Dora. Said it was all fabricated evidence.”

  “Well, that’s good news.” I take a sip of the coffee and almost groan with how satisfying it is. I already feel more awake. I didn’t even realize just how tired I was.

  “Yeah, it was all just Ted’s bullshit, so...I mean, that’s taken care of.”

  “One less thing,” I murmur. I’m stroking Dora’s hair now, lacing my fingers through those beautiful burgundy waves. She’s been out too long. It’s not just stressful, it’s depressing. I could kill to see her pretty eyes again. I take a long swig of coffee, and just as I do, Dora breathes a little differently. It’s slight, but my ears automatically perk up.

  “Hmm…” Dora hums in her sleep and Nathan dashes to her side. The both of us hover over her waiting for some other sign of consciousness. “Mmmm...please…”

  “Dora,” Nathan says softly. “Dora, sweetheart, please wake up. Open your eyes and talk to us, darling.”

  Dora’s eyes flutter and my heart flutters with them. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a joy this intense before as she opens her eyes and looks up at us.

  “You’re alive,” she says softly. She smiles and sighs as if in great relief. “Oh God, Ted!” She looks around in fear, and I stroke her hair.

  “He’s gone, baby,” Nathan says, squeezing her good hand. “He’s gone for good.”

  “Did you…?” She raises an eyebrow.

  “Yes.” He nods, but he looks at her steadily, not flinching from the truth. “We had t
o. He would have killed all of us. He definitely would have killed you.”

  “Good. I’m glad.”

  “How do you feel?” I ask her.

  “Oh…” She frowns down at her arm.

  “Does your arm hurt a lot?” I ask her. “We put a healing tonic on it, but I don’t know how well it worked. I haven’t checked.”

  “It doesn’t hurt at all,” she says in surprise. “It feels fine.” She raises her arm and flexes her fingers like normal, and I gently take her wrist and wipe away some of the gunk near the gash. When I do, I realize it isn’t there anymore. She’s completely healed as if it never happened.

  “Oh, thank God,” Nathan says, chuckling. “That was so ugly.”

  “Yeah, I wasn’t a fan of it either,” Dora says.

  Nathan goes to the bathroom and grabs a wet washcloth and a hand towel, and we wipe away the gunky tonic and all the blood with it. Soon, Dora’s arm is as good as new.

  “But you lost so much blood,” Nathan says, marveling. “How—”

  “I think it was us,” I say, hardly believing how powerful our love is. I kiss Dora’s hair and she smiles up at us, eyes shining.

  “Holy shit!” Grant appears in the doorway, and Dora only laughs at his wide eyes.

  Suddenly, everything feels good again.

  Dora

  I remember Ted cutting my arm, and sensing that the bears were near, and then I don’t remember much at all. I fell into a dream. Nothing hurt anymore, and I was walking through the woods with my four bears. They were huge and beautiful with thick, rich brown fur. Nathan was the biggest, and I could ride on his back as they led me to their favorite spot by a little stream. I’ve never felt such complete peace and contentment as being with my four bears in that dream in the woods.