by Moira Rogers
He hesitated, then frowned. “What happens if someone hurts me while we’re connected?”
“I’d feel it.” Sasha looked away. “It wouldn’t be smart to go into a fight without ending the spell’s effects, I just…” I’ll miss you.
“I know,” he whispered, almost as if he’d heard the thought. His hand came up and he brushed his thumb across her cheek. “Werewolf fights get ugly, Sasha. I heal pretty fast, but I’m going to get hurt. And I don’t want you to feel that.”
“I’ve grown accustomed to it, that’s all.” It didn’t even take a word to sever the connection between them. All she had to do was concentrate for a moment and he was gone. Abruptly alone in her own head, she trembled under his touch.
His fingers moved to her chin and he tilted her head back enough for a slow kiss. It felt like a reminder, and warmth flooded her as she wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him back. He cares, Sasha. Even if you can’t feel it, you should remember that.
Too soon, he lifted his head. “You should go check on Brynn. I’m going to see if they’re done with the vampire mojo. And after that…”
“Then we fight,” she said matter-of-factly, though fear formed an icy knot in her belly. “I’ll be ready.”
Chapter Nine
The air was cool enough for Dylan to see his breath as he trudged around Joe’s SUV and pulled open the back door. He glanced at Ethan then jerked his head toward the neatly organized weaponry. “If Emily wants a gun or some explosives or possibly a rocket launcher, I’m pretty sure we’ve got just about everything here.”
Ethan shook his head and unbuttoned his jacket. “That’s not how Emily fights.”
And Ethan probably wouldn’t, either. Not that Dylan had ever seen a challenge for leadership of a pack, but guns and knives had been taboo for any other challenge in Helena. Fists, fangs and claws, those had been the weapons of choice.
Dylan fought a shudder as he unzipped one of the bags and looked for a gun for Brynn to use. “You’re feeling all right, then? Whatever Adam did worked?”
“Yeah.” His jaw tightened. “I shouldn’t have let Emily do it, but more people are going to get hurt if I don’t stop Lawrence’s madness tonight.”
The look in Emily’s eyes had reminded Dylan of Abby when she got her mind set on something. He pulled a small handgun from the bag and checked it absently. “I would have liked to see you stop her.”
The corner of Ethan’s mouth kicked up. “Right. Easier said than done.” He eyed the array of weapons in the back of the Blazer. “You came prepared, I guess. Is that what you do with Sasha? Arm her to the gills and hope for the best?”
Dylan choked on a laugh. “Shit, no. I wouldn’t know how to use half of this. Joe’s the one who gets hot and bothered over the idea of blowing stuff up. And Sasha doesn’t need a gun. She’s a lot stronger witch than she lets on.” Or she knows.
“She’s human,” Ethan countered. “Humans are fragile. That’s not a judgment, just a fact.”
Dylan waited for the rush of protective anger, but it didn’t come. Instead he felt annoyance, prompted by protectiveness of a different sort. “Sasha can take care of herself. But she doesn’t have to, because I’ll be with her. And so will Brynn, who has been doing daily target practice with the man who owns all of this shit.”
The man nodded. “You know her, not me, so it’s your call. I’d just hate like hell for there to be bad blood between my pack and Gavin’s because I dragged all of you into my mess.”
My call. The responsibility was terrifying, even with the wild power pulsing inside him. He’d locked most of it away through sheer stubbornness, but he knew it was there, waiting for a chance to break free. To make him powerful.
Maybe some people might have found it to be a temptation. To Dylan, it felt not unlike Joe’s trunk full of explosives—potentially useful, possibly inadvisable and inevitably deadly.
Dylan cleared his throat as he checked the safety on the handgun before tucking it into the back of his jeans. “You’re not dragging anyone into anything. It’s our trouble too. Joe’s in danger, and Sasha’s not any more likely to sit at home and wait for us to fix things than Emily is.”
“All right, then.” Without turning, Ethan spoke to Adam as the vampire strode toward them. “Is everyone ready?”
“Emily’s changed,” Adam replied quietly. “She’s ready for you. A little unsteady, but fit enough to watch a challenge. Once you two leave, we can start around the back way.”
Ethan nodded. “If this goes south… Well, you’ve been a good friend, Adam.”
The vampire clapped Ethan on the shoulder with a wide, unexpected grin. “You and Emily are what this town needs, and they’re going to come out and support you. I know they will.”
Dylan could only hope Adam was right. Too much of their plan rested on Emily and Ethan causing enough of a division that Lawrence couldn’t rally people to his cause. Adam and his friends seemed convinced that the town would fight back against their alpha given half a chance.
Maybe they were right. Maybe there’d been a time when the wolves in Helena had the heart to fight against Alan. Maybe Ethan and Emily could save Bedagi Creek before it became another place where fear ruled.
And maybe Adam could give the people of Helena another chance to fight. Their first chance to win.
A hand touched his arm, and Dylan realized Ethan was gone and Adam stood next to him now. The vampire’s face was sober, tense with anticipation. His eyes, though…his eyes held excitement. “You going to hold together, kid?”
“Yes.” There was nothing else in the truck he needed, so he closed the door. “I always do.”
“And them?” Adam tilted his head toward Sasha and Brynn, who were huddled close together at the edge of the clearing, speaking in soft whispers. The wind teased at Sasha’s hair, which was pulled into a tight ponytail. Her manner was serious and intent, but not worried.
Brynn, on the other hand, looked tired. Tired and upset, but more herself than she’d been since the attack that had changed her. Dylan recognized the expression on her face from long experience, a mixture of stubborn determination and fierce concentration.
It was reassuring. The possibility that Sasha would have to fight wolves and Brynn had occurred to him more than once, and it hadn’t been pleasant to ponder. Whatever Sasha had done, though, had obviously worked. His friend was back, and ready to reclaim her mate.
Mate. The wolf rumbled inside him at the word, pacing anxiously in anticipation of being unleashed. The power inside him might have come from Brynn, but it had gone through Sasha and tasted of witch, not wolf. The memory of how close he’d come to taking Sasha against Adam’s door—how close he’d come to claiming her—was still uncomfortably arousing.
Adam cleared his throat. Noisily. “I was hoping for a status report, not a girl-on-girl fantasy break.”
Dylan jerked his attention back to Adam. “First off, fuck you. Second, yeah. They’ll be fine. Third…” He bared his teeth in a grin that was a little bit reckless challenge. “Once we get to Joe, I’d lay off talking about Brynn. Or looking at her. Or getting within fifteen feet of her.”
“Duly noted.” Adam jerked his head toward the front of the truck. “Ready?”
“As I’ll ever be.”
Sasha caught Dylan’s gaze, patted Brynn’s arm and walked over to him. “She’s doing a lot better. Says she feels a little bit human. That’s something, right?”
“It’s a lot.” Dylan ignored Adam and leaned down to kiss the top of Sasha’s head. “You two ready? We should be in place when Emily starts making noise.”
“The sooner the better,” Sasha whispered. “Joe must be wondering where we are.”
More likely Joe was going to kick their asses when he found out they hadn’t run for the hills. When he finds out I armed Brynn and let her walk back in there after him… Dylan tried not to shudder. “He probably still thinks they have Brynn. It’s the only reason he wouldn’t be killing his
way out of there, drugged or not.”
“He’d be glad to know she’s safe, at least.” Sasha’s eyes darkened. “Look, putting it off isn’t making this easier. Everything you’ve seen me do has been something constructive, Dylan. Something to help someone. I need to do things differently tonight.”
She seemed uneasy, so he nodded. “All right.”
“It’ll be dark, maybe even scary.”
“All right.”
She ground her teeth. “Damn it, Dylan. A little acknowledgement of understanding would be helpful. Having to do this, to let go of control… It scares me.”
Dylan glanced at Adam, then wrapped his fingers around Sasha’s arm and tugged her a few steps from the car. For all he knew the vampire’s hearing was as good as his own, but the illusion of privacy was something. “If you’re asking me to be scared of you, it’s not going to happen. I trust you.”
“Okay.” She backed away a step. “I’m ready, then.”
It sounded like a lie, but not because she wasn’t ready to go. If anything, she sounded anxious to end the conversation, and that made him nervous. “Why are you scared? Is what you’re doing dangerous?”
“Not any more dangerous than what anyone else is doing.”
Not the most satisfying answer, but there wasn’t time for more. Dylan reached to the small of his back and pulled the gun free. “I’m going to give this to Brynn, and then I’m going to change. It can take me a few minutes to recover, so I’m going to do it now. If there’s anything you need to ask, any questions at all, now’s the time.”
“No, nothing.” She dipped her head in a quick nod. “Good luck.”
Brynn was still standing apart from the rest of them. She stared at the trees around them as if she could see straight to the town. Dylan had no doubt her gaze was fixed on Joe’s location with a precision any compass would envy.
She didn’t turn around, but she spoke before Dylan got within a few feet of her. “I think they drugged him again. He was coming out of it, but everything’s gone quiet. I tried to reach him, to make him feel something, but it’s too far and I don’t know how.”
Dylan lifted his hand to Brynn’s shoulder and squeezed softly. “You’ll be with him soon. And I think Joe would come out of a coma just to yell at you for walking back into that town, so he should be on his feet as soon as we get there.”
He got the feeling Brynn smiled more because she thought she was supposed to than because she’d even heard his words. The feral power that had haunted her for the past few weeks might be muted, but her gray eyes were still wild. She reached out a hand without looking at him. “Gun?”
Dylan placed it in her hand. “Loaded.”
“Spare ammunition?”
He hadn’t thought of it. A month ago Brynn wouldn’t have, either. “Maybe in the truck. I can—”
“I’ll do it.” She glanced at him, and a shiver claimed him when he considered, for the first time, that Brynn might have picked up more from Joe than an understanding of firearms. That hardness had always been inside Brynn, but it had been defensive strength before, nothing but dull edges.
Edges Joe had known how to hone.
Dylan nodded his acknowledgement and stepped aside to let her pass. He heard her boots crunch on the dry leaves as he turned his back and bent to jerk at the laces on his tennis shoes.
Modesty wasn’t high on his priority list, even in front of a vampire who seemed to find poking at his pride to be an amusing pastime, but stripping down in the woods had its own discomforts. Dylan ignored the biting wind as he jerked off his shirt and kicked off his jeans. He gathered his clothes and left them on top of the truck, killing time because even standing naked in the cold wind was more comfortable than what came next.
He hated the change. Some wolves found it easy, but those were the strong ones, the ones whose control was perfect and who lived with the wolf close to the surface. Before Sasha, Dylan’s wolf had been a quiet companion, a silent part of himself that gave him the strength to endure but demanded little in return. Even the days before the full moon were only mildly uncomfortable, mostly due to the need to find a warm woman and burn off sexual frustration.
There was nothing quiet about the wolf today. The power inside him excited his wolf like nothing else had. Nothing except her.
He couldn’t turn to look at Sasha. With wild anticipation singing in his blood, arousal would be fast and hard. Even the thought of her stirred something dark, and Dylan forced his thoughts from sex to blood. A fight was coming, and that was new. His wolf knew how to endure, how to suffer in silence and rebel quietly.
Tonight would be different.
He crouched in the leaves and closed his eyes, preparing himself to call on the wolf. But the power teased at him instead, that wild magic that felt like Sasha, and he sucked in a breath and gave into it.
The change flowed over him like magic. Pain first, but that didn’t matter in the rush of heat that followed. He felt wild, alive and alert to the world. Awake, as if the last ten years had been spent in shadow. Paws touched the earth and he lifted his nose to sniff the air, which smelled of gun oil and witch and the cold, eerie scent of death magic, of whatever lived inside Adam that made him smell dead even though he was still alive.
Odd allies for a wolf, but with magic pounding through him Dylan didn’t care. The wind changed, brought with it the sounds of Bedagi Creek and Emily’s howl of challenge, and he answered with a sharp yip of command before leaping for the woods.
***
Even when they broke free of the woods, the streets were deserted. Nothing stirred but the cold night breeze that had followed them, and the only signs of life were the howls that drifted to Sasha’s ears from the center of town.
Dylan stalked ahead of her, growling low in his throat when the wind shifted direction.
Joe. It had to be. When Sasha loosened her grip on the magic swirling through her, she felt it, the men and women gathered to guard the prisoner. Some were angry, but most were simply scared, because the sounds of challenge that rose in the night meant the alpha they served might not last the hour.
Perhaps they could be persuaded to leave Joe, to join the formalities in the town square. Perhaps there would be no fight.
Adam lifted his hand, ignoring Dylan’s soft growl. “Wait,” he whispered, his voice barely rising above the sound of the wind. “Prudence is with him. I can feel her.”
If he could sense her already, they had no hope of a stealthy approach. “If they’ve drugged Joe, what will happen to her if she tries to feed from him?”
Brynn growled. Adam ignored her, too. “It depends on how powerful she’s gotten. She probably wouldn’t risk it, though. I don’t think I’d want to risk it, and I’m a lot stronger than she is.”
“How do you know? If Francis has been feeding her alph—”
“I’m stronger.” Adam’s voice was hard, uncompromising. “She may have raw power, but power can’t compensate for everything. You need the will to use it, and you’re born with that or you’re not. She wasn’t.”
Adam’s insinuation that he had the will to do things even a power-mad vampire wouldn’t do should have scared her. But Sasha was beyond fear. All she wanted now was for all of them to make it through the night and go home. “If I tell you not to get between me and Prudence, you have to trust me. Can you do that, Adam?”
Adam didn’t answer right away. Dylan appeared at her side, his body pressed tight against her leg, and he bared his teeth in a low, dangerous snarl.
The vampire rolled his eyes. “Settle down, puppy. I’m not insulting your woman.” Adam transferred his gaze to Sasha, his dark eyes cold. “If you tell me to move, I’ll move. But you must do the same.”
Dylan shook beside her, and Sasha dropped a hand to soothe him. “I’m trying to make sure no one gets hurt. Some of my spells can’t be easily directed, so all I can do is…tailor them. In this case, make life hard for anyone who’s supposed to be dead.”
Adam no
dded. His gaze drifted to Brynn, and that ice-cold look thawed a little, replaced by a disturbing hunger—disturbing because it wasn’t the least bit sexual. His squeezed his eyes shut and swore quietly. “She’ll do anything to get her hands on Brynn. Even with most of the power gone, she smells like…food.”
“I can hear you,” Brynn snapped.
“Good. Don’t forget it.” Adam opened his eyes and stared directly at Sasha. “If you have to choose, if I’m in the way…cast your spell. And tell Gavin I paid his goddamned life debt back.”
It was almost funny, and Sasha tightened her fingers in Dylan’s fur. “See? I told you the life debt was tradition.”
He butted his head against her hip hard enough to make his feelings on the matter more than clear. Adam opened his mouth—
—and froze when Brynn made a choked noise, her head whipping around. Her lips formed Joe’s name a second before she screamed, a furious sound that didn’t sound like it could come from a human throat.
Adam lunged for her, but his fingers closed on the edge of her shirt, and she tore free and bolted between two nearby houses, headed straight toward the source of the nervous magic that filled the air.
Sasha cursed and took off after her, blood pounding in her ears. “Brynn, no!” If she went in there half out of her head, she might be able to power her way through whatever wolves stood in her way, but she wouldn’t stand a chance against a hungry vampire.
Brynn was still a hundred feet from the front door when it burst open. A wolf shot out, and Dylan howled a challenge and darted past Sasha. He hit the wolf broadside, and they tumbled to the grass beside the porch. Two more wolves and a man rushed out of the house, and Brynn snatched the gun from her waistband and began firing.
They were outnumbered already, and Sasha wanted to stop, to help. Instead, she ran inside the house.
A man grabbed her and slammed her into the nearest wall in a practiced, fluid movement. Then he stopped, a look of disbelief flitting across his face as his nostrils flared. “You’re not a wolf,” he growled.
