by Fox, Piper
“How?” I didn’t ask the other question: Why?
“I don’t know.” He glanced around. “I think we only have from the stroke of midnight until that moment is over. This minute.”
“One minute? But I have so many questions. Did my magic do this?”
“Yes. I think so. And I think you’re the only one who can save me—just like I’m the only one who can save you. We have important work to do together.”
I started to ask what he meant, but he put his finger across my lips. “And I don’t want to waste time trying to talk about it when I could be doing this instead.”
With that, he wrapped his arms around me and pulled me in close for a kiss. I tucked my injured arm against my chest between us. His lips brushed against mine, then pressed more firmly, sending sparks singing through my entire body. He deepened the kiss, and it was all I could do you keep from moaning aloud.
I knew when the minute ended because my magic exploded. It flew up into the air in sparkles like fireworks, falling to the ground and dying like tiny flames in winter.
What was left swirled around us both. I felt my arm healing as Wolf pulled away from me regretfully, staring into my eyes as a blue mist curled around him, and he melted and reformed in front of my eyes into the usual Wolf who traveled with me. I reached down to touch the sides of his face as I had done when he was in his human form. “We will save us,” I promised. “We will end both our curses.”
* * *
Before we left the ranch, I considered leaving a note about the broken windows, but I hadn’t packed a journal or a pencil. I’m not really a note-taking kind of hunter. And it seemed unnecessary to break into their houses to leave an apology for breaking their windows. So instead, I vowed to myself to make an anonymous call about vandals out here—at least the owners might be able to keep the buildings’ interiors from getting weather-damaged inside.
I finished off the twitching chupacabra on the ground. Then, I wiped my weapons off on my jeans, making them my dirtiest and bloodiest pair, now. Then I tucked my knife and my gun away. But I kept the ax out, just in case the chupacabras showed up again.
I fished a matchbook out of my coat pocket, piled up the dead bodies, covered them with scrub brush, and lit the whole thing on fire.
We stayed until there was nothing left but ashes and bits of bone and teeth, and then I scattered those.
We trudged back to the van in the gray light of dawn. A couple of times along the way, I tried to pull up my magic, but I had used it all, it seemed.
No, this spell had been a limited-time special, apparently. It was a spell like nothing I’d ever done before. But it gave me an odd sort of hope—also like nothing I’d ever known before.
When we got back to the van, I tried turning the key one last time, just in case. And it started up just fine, the engine turning over instantly and practically purring.
Wolf and I glanced at each other, and it was like we could communicate without even speaking. “I don’t feel the Calling anymore,” I said, and he nodded.
Whatever had happened out on the Poltergeist Ranch had fulfilled the curse’s need to keep me fighting the monsters.
But there was more to it than that.
Something had brought us here--something that seemed almost benevolent. And the curse definitely wasn’t that.
My connection to Wolf had changed the curse—had changed my destiny. We were bound together now, and I was determined to make sure I saved him from his curse. Soon, I would begin to figure out how.
For now, though, we needed to get out of here.
I put the van into drive and pulled out onto the highway, and into a brand-new year.
About the Author
USA Today, Wall Street Journal, and New York Times bestselling author Margo Bond Collins is a former college English professor who, tired of explaining the difference between “hanged” and “hung,” turned to writing romance novels instead. Sometimes her heroines kill monsters, sometimes they kiss aliens. But they always aim for the heart!
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Claimed By The Wolf Pack
Elizabeth Dunlap
About Claimed by the Wolf Pack
The pregnant Kate had journeyed deep into the mountains in an attempt to find her unborn child’s family, but the secrets they hold are deeper than she could’ve imagined.
The wolves have descended, and once they’ve caught her scent, they don’t intend to let her go.
**Warning: For Adult Audiences 18+. Language and actions may be deemed offensive to some. Sexually explicit content. M/F/M**
Chapter 1
It started with a Christmas card.
A little innocuous Christmas card that found its way to me, whether by accident, or part of some holiday miracle scheme devised by the big man upstairs.
Holding it in my hand in the doorway of my small apartment, the envelope’s postmark was a year ago. There were many different stamps on the paper, showing it had been forwarded here and there, until it found its way to me.
It had his name on it. Jonas. Even if I hadn’t noticed the outdated postmark, it was obvious a mistake had been made, because Jonas was dead. How this Christmas card had ended up with me was a mystery.
Not only that, it was a beacon staring me in the face, finally showing me what I was supposed to do.
I hadn’t known Jonas for very long before he died, having shared a work shift with him at my job. He was a tall brown skinned man, the kind with enough muscles that you knew he could easily lift you up over his head. He was handsome, there was no denying that, and while I didn’t feel a burning attraction to him, we’d hooked up once just to try it out.
He died a few weeks later, and as the fates would have it, that one night of sex was enough to knock me up.
Given that I had no family of my own, I wanted my baby to have one, so I’d made every attempt to locate his family, with no luck whatsoever.
Several months had passed, enough that my pregnancy was starting to show, and this Christmas card was the closest thing I’d come to finding Jonas’s family. As luck would have it, the return address was still visible, even with a sticker covering part of the zip code. A quick peel revealed it, and I wrote the address down on a pad of paper.
Surely, whoever lived at that address was still there. All I had to do was go there and tell them that their son’s legacy was going to continue with the little nugget inside my belly. Maybe they’d want to be in its life, maybe not. But telling them about my baby was the right thing to do.
I hoped.
Chapter 2
With a suitcase of clothes, my cat at a sitter’s house, and a full tank of gas, I made the long trip to the address on my GPS. The city slowly faded away until the skyline was filled with trees as tall as skyscrapers, and every hour took me further into the wilderness.
The houses along the road started to get further and further apart, and by the time I wa
s beginning to wonder if the GPS was leading me to nowhere, it told me to turn off onto a driveway. The mailbox sitting at the edge of the road said, ‘The Mitchells’ in faded red letters. I sat in my car with the turn signal flicking on and off, wondering what I would find here. Wondering if I should’ve even come.
A horn honked behind me, startling me back to reality, and I turned my wheel to pull into the unpaved driveway. Muddy dips in the road made my car bob up and down until I stopped outside a log cabin. It had two stories, big modern windows, and a massive front porch. It was the kind of porch that people sat at while the sun was setting as they sipped iced tea and cuddled the person they loved.
The horn honked again, and I should’ve guessed that the one car on this road besides mine was going to this house. It pulled into the small paved drive that led to the garage, a small vintage Camaro with shiny orange paint. Its two passengers got out and surveyed me like I had rabies, or was going to produce a pamphlet on religion that they would immediately reject.
The first boy had short black hair, styled perfectly in a way that was made to look like he’d rolled out of bed like that, and he appeared irritated to see someone in his driveway.
The second boy had long black hair well past his shoulders with half of it pulled back into a ponytail, and he at least knew how to greet someone with a smile.
Both of their faces went slack with shock when I opened my door and got out of my car, which wasn’t exactly the reaction I was expecting, especially since I hadn’t dropped the pregnancy bomb yet. They’d surely have a more intense response when that happened.
I, on the other hand, was having my own reaction to the men, because getting a good look at them had my mouth going dry with desire.
Stupid pregnancy hormones making me horny all the time.
Yes, they were gorgeous, let’s not pretend otherwise, but my vagina really needed to get a clue and stop reacting at the drop of a hat over strangers.
“Elliot? Shane?” A deep sleepy voice announced from the house, and a naked buff-as-sin god walked out the front door, rubbing his eyes. I turned my eyes towards the trees, the birds, literally anything else.
“Dude!” one of the men shrieked. “As your brother, I really have to inform you, just in case you didn’t know by now, I’m not interested in seeing your dick.”
“Ditto,” the other man snarked under his breath, his footsteps coming closer to me, and I chanced a quick look to see the second boy standing in front of me with a smile that could stop a truck. He had small gauges in his ears that were decorated with skulls, and they matched the patches on his motorcycle jacket. “Hi, I’m Shane.”
I heard a low growling from somewhere. Did they have a dog? “I’m Kate.”
First boy, Elliot, rolled his eyes, and I was happy to see naked man was gone. “Shane, if you’re inviting her in, she should come inside before it snows again.” Despite his words, he didn’t appear happy about it. He started going up the porch stairs, giving me a lovely view of his ass, and let me tell you, those jeans were doing him all the favors.
Shut up, vagina!
“Ignore him, he’s grumpy. The gas station was out of Twizzlers.” Shane’s smile, and the way he stared at me with his puppy dog brown eyes, it was not helping my hormones, let me tell you.
“Xadrian!” a woman angrily shouted, mere seconds before she stormed out of the cabin, almost hitting the first boy with the front door. “You’d better not have greeted our guest completely naked!” Her long black hair was falling over her face, and she quickly flipped it all back before hurrying down the stairs so fast, she almost slipped on the remnants of ice from the snowstorm the night before. Shane moved in a blur to steady her, holding her elbow and helping lead her to me. “Hi! I’m Dot. I’m so sorry about my husband, he usually isn’t that… naked.” Shane’s hand gripped her elbow tighter, like he was trying to silently convey something to her, and she pat his fingers reassuringly before removing his hand from her arm. “Sorry, we don’t get visitors very often. Is there something you need? Directions? Gas? Food?”
As an answer, I reached into my purse and produced the Christmas card for Jonas. Dot’s eyes widened when she saw it, but she didn’t say anything, merely reached for the paper so she could look it over, as if trying to confirm exactly what she was seeing.
A shadow fell over her and Shane’s faces when she opened the card and read the small note left for Jonas. Then she closed it and slid it back into the envelope. Her fingers rubbed over the corner where the stamp had been slightly lifted off the paper, and she tried to smile at me again amidst the pain behind her eyes.
I knew it had to be weirding them out, a random girl arriving and giving them the Christmas card they mailed last year to their now dead brother. That wasn’t enough of a reason to come out here, and they probably knew it.
Dot shucked off the sadness, smiling for real this time, and she held out her hand to me. “Come inside, I’ll make some hot cocoa.”
Chapter 3
The log cabin was practically a palace, with wooden floors and beautiful stained walls. The kitchen alone looked like it belonged in a catalogue, and it wasn’t the nicest room in the house by far.
I stood in the walkway between the kitchen and the living room, watching Dot flit around the cabinets like a nervous butterfly. She dropped several things along the way, but eventually produced three mugs of cocoa that she passed to Shane and me, keeping the last for herself.
“If my other husbands ever get out of bed, Xadrian can make more, as punishment for earlier,” she muttered into her cup.
Other husbands? How many did she have??
Shane stared at me over the rim of his mug, trying not to be weird about it, but he really was looking at me like I was the present Santa brought him on Christmas morning. “So… You knew Jonas?” Despite the look he was giving me, there was a touch of sadness in his voice. Jonas had only been gone for a few months, the wound was probably still fresh for them.
Someone’s noisy feet clambered into the living room. Elliot was back, and he looked even more annoyed now, giving me an up and down perusal with an expression like I had cooties. He stomped to the fridge and got out a bottle of water that he drank while giving me a glare that made my skin burn like I was under direct sunlight.
I rubbed my neck and stared down at my mug, watching the slowly melting marshmallows on the surface of the chocolate. “We worked together. But that’s…” More feet approached, and three giant men came into the living room, one of them Xadrian from the porch, now fully clothed. With them in the mix, I had a bigger audience than I felt comfortable having for this conversation. “That’s umm… that’s not why I’m here.”
All of the eyes on me were going to make me explode, so I just blurted it all out.
“I-had-sex-with-Jonas-and-now-I’m-pregnant-with-his-baby,” I shouted in one breath, and then deflated like a popped balloon.
The room went unbelievably silent, so silent, I could’ve easily been convinced I was alone. I’d also gone deathly quiet when I first found out, and it didn’t have the same meaning for me as it would for them.
Shane broke the silence with another sip of his cocoa, muttering under his breath, “Well, that’s awkward.”
“You’re joking,” Elliot blurted out with a scoff. “He’s been dead for four months. Were you waiting to see if we’re rich or not?”
“Elliot,” Dot hissed at him.
Elliot brought my hackles up, and though I knew it probably wouldn’t wipe that expression off his face, I continued my story.
“I’ve known for a little over a month, and I’ve spent most of that time trying to find you. He was so private, no one knew anything. Not a number, not an address. Not even his last name. It was the Christmas card that brought me here. And since you asked, I’m not interested in money.”
Dot put her mug down on the coffee table and reached for mine, since I hadn’t taken a sip yet. “We should sit. Bane, can you…” She wasn’t even looking
at the men that had come in, but one of them caught the rest of her sentence anyway and went into the kitchen for something. We sat on the couches, and I clutched one of the burlap pillows to my small round stomach as Bane’s banging and rustling produced a platter with cheese squares, Triscuits, and little pepperoni slices. Dot eagerly grabbed three cheese squares and popped them into her mouth, then she also hugged a pillow to her stomach.
“Sit,” she ordered the men.
They followed her single worded command like a pack of puppies, though Elliot defiantly chose to continue standing beside Shane’s chair. Shane and I dipped for the cheese tray at the same time, and my heart skipped a beat when he smiled at me. I quickly grabbed some of the Triscuits and leaned back into the couch so I didn’t have to look directly at him.
By the time the cheese tray was empty from all of us munching on the food like it held the secret to calming the fuck down, it had mostly worked, and we were all at a manageable level of stress, albeit, Elliot was still glaring at me over Shane’s head.
What was his deal?
Bane, the largest man in the room, brought everyone a glass of sweet tea, and he gently handed me one before sitting next to Dot. “We’re all glad that you’re here, Kate. Having some part of Jonas back is a blessing I know we’re all grateful for.” He put his arm on the couch behind Dot and traced his fingers across her shoulder. “I’m not sure what your situation is, but you’re welcome to stay with us as long as you like. Even permanently, if that’s what you want.” Elliot’s eyebrows raised, but he remained silent even if he was still looking at me like I had fleas.
