Their Shifter Princess 3: Coven's Revenge

by May Dawson

  I had fantasized so many times about having him within arm’s reach. But now here we were, and maybe Maddie was nearby.

  The thought made me want to run out of the house, leaving him behind, and find her. I'd turn around under the trees, trying to catch her scent on the wind. The familiar scent of her from once upon a time, the smell of earth and fresh green things and wood smoke and strawberry shampoo. As a little girl, she'd been half-wild and half-ordinary. She’d been magic.

  "Can I help you?" I demanded.

  That was what I said when I finally had the chance to strike down the man who had stolen my daughter. Can I help you. Bile burned in the back of my throat.

  "I certainly hope so," he said. "I do believe there's nothing like a mother's love for her daughter."

  I jerked my head in a nod. His words, his actions, made a mockery of that love. This man had pretended to be my daughter's father, but he hadn't loved her like a father should love a daughter.

  Piper's face rose up in my mind. Her cheeks were flushed pink as she stumbled to tell me about her life with Maddie. When she'd leaned against the counter, pausing to choose her words carefully as she told me how my daughter had suffered for years, I'd been overcome with rage.

  I hated Piper for being one more person keeping her from me, but the worst part was that I had come so close. I’d been yards away from the house where she slept. I'd longed to fold my little girl into my arms, nestling my face into her blond hair like I used to.

  Instead I found myself trapped again in this lonely house, with that awkward colt of a girl telling me about my daughter, as if Piper knew Maddie better than I did. And the worst thing was, she probably did know Maddie better than I did. I hadn't been able to bear it.

  I wanted to do a lot more to Rippedthroat than just slap him.

  "And?" I prompted him.

  He was smiling as if he was in control. I supposed he was. If he knew that I fantasized about tearing his head from his shoulders, he also knew that I wouldn’t act on the desire.

  "I want you to find her," he said.

  "Why would I ever give her back to you?" My voice sounded dull, far-away. The very idea was laughable, but I couldn't laugh.

  "Of course you wouldn't," he said smoothly. "You would keep her."

  My heart hammered in my chest, as if it were a bell ringing out a warning, as if it were beating out of control with desire.

  I shook my head. He was saying exactly what I wanted to hear. He was a liar.

  He held up his hand to halt my disagreement, then gestured to my own couch. "Sit, please. I have a proposition for you."

  "What's that?" I shouldn't take his invitation to sit on my own damn furniture, but I still perched on the very edge of my seat, ready to throw myself up and at his throat at a second's notice. When I sat down, I realized that my legs were trembling. With adrenaline, with bloodthirst. Not with fear.

  This man could not hurt me any more than he already had, could he?

  "I made a deal with the Shenandoah pack," he said. "I take Piper home with me. They take control of all the pack lands in Virginia, including, well." He gestured expansively, his hands taking in my home. "And also, they take Maddie."

  Over my dead body, was on my lips, but I wasn't fool enough to say it. Neither he nor the Shenandoah alpha would care if they took Maddie over my dead body. A born shifter female was worth too much.

  And none of them knew the real secret about Maddie. He didn't know her real power, or he wouldn't risk gambling her away. She had lived in that house for so many years, and he hadn't realized who she was, right under his nose.

  Maddie and I had snuck one past the witch who thought he was so smart. Giddy lightness bloomed in my chest.

  "But I don't much care about the Shenandoah pack's wishes and wants," he said. "I'm content to let you take Maddie. Raise her. I've got no time for the child."

  "So I'd look after my own child until you decided to bleed her magic like you did Piper's?" I demanded.

  He sat forward in his seat, and his eyes met mine evenly. He had narrow blue eyes, as if they had formed into a perpetual squint. "Yes. You would care for her and look after her. Even after I began to bleed her, as you say. She might not shift, but she would be safe and free and, dare I say, happy, with her own mother."

  He sat back as my mind raced, and his expression was even more self-satisfied than before. "Is it better than your daughter being mated over and over, as soon as she's old enough to bear a child? Never allowed to nurse so that she can conceive again as soon as she stops bleeding, giving the pack one powerful child after another as her womb grows thin?"

  "Maybe," I said. "Better than being with you."

  But my heart wasn't in it.

  "But is it better than being without you?" He winked at me. "Maddie does need her mother. You know she has nightmares in her sleep? Well, I suppose you wouldn't. So I'll just tell you...she cries out for you at night, and then in the daylight, she doesn't even know you exist."

  "You're a monster."

  "Yes," he said, rising from the couch. "I suppose I am. But if you don't help me, the pack will take Maddie, and you will never see her again."

  He flashed me another one of those smiles. His gaze took in my knotted hands, and for the first time, I realized my fingernails were cutting bloody half-moons into my palms as I held myself back from throttling him. His smile did not dim.

  "Find her and bring her to me at the alpha's house," he promised me, "and I will save you both."

  "How do I know you'll keep your word?" I ground out.

  He didn't answer until he reached the door. Then he turned back and said, "I intend to do exactly as I've said. I would prefer to keep Maddie myself, and I would prefer not to be burdened with her day-to-day care. If it makes her happy to be with you, well...that's fine. But I'm not going to offer you anything. You can trust me and hope to see your daughter, or you can know that you will never see her again."

  With that, he opened the door and went out.

  I wanted to throw back my head and scream. I wanted to tear things apart. But in reality, I uncurled my fingers and sat heavily on the couch.

  My daughter. Here, on this island. My chance to save her.

  My pack. Her past.

  All of it dropped away to have a chance at the future.

  "Wait," I said. "I might need help."

  Chapter 15

  Caroline

  I’m almost invisible. The two men who fancied themselves alpha now—Inzel and Tuck—and the witch wouldn’t care about anything but the food I was serving them.

  But my chest still hitched as I drew in an anxious breath. My nerves would give me away even if nothing else did. Oblivious to my suffering, Ellie was on the other side of the long stainless steel table, muttering to herself as she set out dishes.

  Fiona and I had to be ready to help Piper and the pack when we could. That meant staying here, serving the witch who would press our lives out under his thumb if we looked at him wrong. I would have been scared of him no matter what my intentions.

  But it felt like my desire to cross him was written across my face. Maybe a witch could read me that easily.

  “Gloves on. Take the tray into them and try not to put your thumb in the soup,” Ellie muttered.

  According to legend, no witch would eat something a wolf had touched.

  I lifted the gloves from the island. My fingers trembled slightly as I examined the thin white gloves, which Ellie had salvaged somehow from someone’s formalwear. The gloves had clearly been worn; they were yellowed at the palm, by someone’s sweat, and dirtied gray at the fingertips. What had they been doing that they’d been so hard on these gloves and stained them? There was little scent on the gloves; they smelled freshly washed. But they were still unpleasant to tug on.

  Maybe the gloves would help hide that my hands shook.

  “Well?” Ellie prompted. Her tone was rude as ever, but there was something kind in her eyes, under her tussled brown curls. “
There’s always going to be shifts in power, girl. It’s part of the nature of things. But we go on.”

  “But our alpha,” I said softly.

  “Don’t tell me you cared for him,” she said, but her voice was fondly exasperated. “You girls did nothing but complain.”

  I bit my lower lip. Arthur was not a comfortable kind of man, but I knew what he’d done for Fiona. And while Logan watched over and chided Fiona and tried to steer her out of trouble, I had known that Arthur wanted the same for her. Arthur and Logan were the same, closer than brothers, no matter how different the packages: the bossy taskmaster who wouldn’t suffer a fool, and the flirtatious, charming guy who was kind but untouchable.

  “We go on,” I repeated to Ellie, trying to sound as if I believed it.

  We go on, and we fight to bring our alpha and his best friend home.

  No matter what I’d said in the past, I’d be loyal to them now that it mattered.

  I lifted the tray and carried it out of the kitchen. Ellie hurried ahead of me and pushed the door open, and I swept past her toward Arthur’s office, where Rippedthroat had taken up residence.

  I’d been sent in earlier to clean the office. Arthur’s letters and papers had been sifted through and left on the floor, some of them crumpled or trod over. There was nothing that Rippedthroat had found to his liking, apparently. I had swept the room clean, shoving the papers all together in a black plastic bag, and then I’d hidden it in the back of the utility closet instead of taking it out to the trash. I believed my alpha was going to come home.

  Now the room was nearly empty, like a model of an office instead of a place that was actually used, as I carried in the tray.

  Tuck, the stand-in for the Shenandoah pack’s alpha, sat stiff and uncomfortable in one chair before the desk. Tuck’s face under his sandy hair was a handsome mask that gave nothing away, but his eyes shifted constantly.

  Inzel, on the other hand, lounged in the other chair looking completely comfortable. Delighted, even. As if our pack hadn’t suffered terrible losses in that battle.

  I tried not to look at the witch, but I felt the weight of his gaze on me as I set the tray down on the edge of his desk. There were papers on his desk, and he reached out a lazy hand and flipped them over, so that I couldn’t see whatever was written on them. From the corner of my eye, I caught glimpses of his cool expression and the scarves wrapped like bandages around his neck. People said he didn’t really have a throat anymore, just the unsevered knots of his spine and strips of ragged flesh. And magic. Magic held him together.

  “So you’re telling us the little girl will try to rule?” Inzel asked, his voice amused.

  The little girl? Maddie? Or were they calling Piper, of all people, a little girl?

  Rippedthroat put a finger to his lips, silencing him. I set a bowl of soup in front of the two shifters first, then went to serve Rippedthroat.

  Inzel glanced at me, a lazy smile flickering at his lips. He didn’t think I was any concern.

  I lifted the last bowl of soup from the tray. It was very full, and I took care to hold it level so it didn’t slosh out the sides.

  Rippedthroat caught my gloved wrist in his hand. “How thoughtful,” he murmured. His thumb and first finger pressed against the glove, carefully avoiding the bare skin that gaped between my sleeve and the glove’s loose cuff.

  I flashed a smile without meeting his eyes. Hopefully he would deduce that we were trying to please him as best we could.

  “I won’t be here long,” he promised me. “But the hospitality is much appreciated while I am.”

  He said that as if I should feel honored when I just felt repulsed. We wore gloves because the witches hated the wolves so much that a bizarre protocol had developed when we made contact with each other. Wolves pretended now that they preferred these rules, because they didn’t trust a witch’s touch. But the truth was that the witches hated us, and we humored them like we were the weak ones.

  I stared mutely at the tabletop, avoiding his eyes. What was I supposed to do? My heart was hammering so desperately in my ears that I could barely think.

  “You don’t seem much older than my daughter,” he said. “Did you get to know her?”

  “A little,” I said, and my voice came out more even than I would have expected.

  “She’s a wonderful girl, isn’t she? I miss her.”

  “Yes,” I said softly.

  “Did she tell you about me?” There was a playful note in his voice. Playful like a predator toying with his food.

  Tuck said, “I’d like to get back to the part where we get our cubs back. You said that—”

  “Once we find my daughter,” Rippedthroat said impatiently. “She’s gone to ground with those wolves of hers. I can’t believe it’s so hard to track her. It makes me wonder what your intentions truly are.”

  “We’re trying.” Tuck had gone pale.

  Rippedthroat’s fingers had tightened on my wrist, and as if he realized that, he released me and leaned back. He flashed me a smile. “What did she tell you about me?”

  “Nothing,” I said, and this time my voice came out as a whisper. “We mostly just talked about life here. Nothing important.”

  He regarded me with small, light blue eyes. They were the kind of watery pale blue that looks not quite human, at least that’s what I’ve always thought. Funny that he and Piper and Maddie all had blue eyes—it must have aided in the illusion he was their father. Lucky them. I pulled my gaze away from his, with difficulty. I couldn’t shake the superstition that he could read my thoughts, even though I knew it was ridiculous.

  “Did you talk about the boys?” he asked, and his casual tone, and his choice of word—boys—warned me to dance with the words I chose.

  I glanced toward Inzel and Tuck, appealing for help. I hadn’t expected that Rippedthroat would interrogate me. So much for being invisible. Tuck shot me a look that was sympathetic, but said nothing.

  Inzel leaned forward, surprising me. “She’s just a fool of a girl. That’s the only kind that Roderick brought back to the island.”

  “Oh, you were Roderick’s girlfriend?” Rippedthroat looked into my face curiously.

  “That’s a generous way to put it,” Inzel said drily, and I felt my face heat as Rippedthroat smiled.

  Rippedthroat released me. “After raising two, I have to say it seems hard to find a shifter female with much sense. But maybe this one thinks about more than you realize.”

  Inzel’s lips widened, as if to say that he doubted it.

  “May I go?” My voice came out low. I sounded frightened as a rabbit in a den of wolves.

  Rippedthroat waved me toward the door impatiently. It wasn’t until the door had closed behind me that conversation rose. Although my heart shuddered in my chest, I couldn’t hear the murmurs of their voices from here. I cupped my hand to the door and pressed my ear to it.

  “Believe me,” Rippedthroat said to Tuck and Inzel. “If you don’t find the girl and give her to me, you’ll regret it. To protect your packs, you need to get rid of her somehow, and you might as well please me. We might as well have an alliance.”

  “Why would we trust a witch’s readings of our own prophecies?” Inzel asked, his voice lazily insolent. “I don’t doubt your careful study of the texts, but surely our own people would have—”

  “Been too arrogant to realize what a woman could do to your packs?” Rippedthroat cut in. “You know we witches live differently. Men and women are equals in the covens. Only power determines who rises above.”

  “I’m sure,” Inzel murmured.

  “If you don’t give me the girl,” Rippedthroat said, “she will rule you. Mark my words.”

  I had to tell Fiona about this.

  The door suddenly fell open, creaking halfway open before I caught myself. I froze, hoping I was out of sight, but I could see from the corner of my eye Tuck’s surprised face and Rippedthroat’s knowing one. Had I inadvertently pressed my weight against the doo
r and opened it? Or was this Rippedthroat’s magic?

  Whatever it was, I desperately wanted to reverse time by one minute. I could be scuttling down the hall to the kitchen.

  “Come here.” Rippedthroat waggled his fingers toward me, and I couldn’t help but step forward on shaking legs. “I’m not mad at you.”

  His tone was soothing, but I didn’t believe him, and yet my galloping heartbeat was already beginning to slow as if by magic. My panic faded as I stepped to the edge of his desk, just as he had bid me.

  “You just want to help your friends,” he said, his voice conciliatory, as if he understood. “And I’m going to make sure you do.”

  Chapter 16

  Piper

  I had drifted off to sleep, more-or-less in Arthur's arms even though the bars divided us. Or maybe I should say I passed out, because the pain was so intense that I wasn't exactly drifting anywhere.

  But my father was in all my dreams.

  I startled awake, jerking to sit up before my brain woke up. Oh no, I thought just as my abs contracted and pain spiked through my body. I sagged back down to the ground. Tears rose in my eyes from the agony.

  "Piper." Arthur was right there, tenderly touching my face with his fingers. "Bad dream?"

  "I'm not sure it was a dream," I said. "Maybe it was a memory."

  Arthur hesitated. The night seemed deeply silent all around us. The others must be asleep. "Do you want to tell me about it?"

  I shook my head. Although maybe he couldn't see me in the dark.

  "It might be better if you talk about it," he said.

  A reluctant smile that curled across my lips. "Would you tell me about the worst days of your life, Arthur? Your weakest moments?"

  "I meant that it might be better if you talk about it, because every time you recognize one of those false memories, it seems like you break more of those magical chains." He shifted even closer to me against the bars, as if he wished he could kiss me. "You healed Sebastian and Josh. The magic is failing. Imagine what you can do with all of his lies stripped away..."