I’ve tried not to look each time he shifts between forms. It would be temptingly easy—shifters aren’t really known for shame around our nude forms. But no matter how careful I am, I get glimpses from the corner of my eyes. Miles of gloriously smooth skin, broad shoulders, an impossibly muscular chest. Kieran McCade is unfairly handsome, and he has no business looking as good as he does.
As Kieran disappears into the bathroom, I start gathering our supplies and packing them up. My mind wanders to last night, to the way Kieran looked at me, how he touched my face. The memory sends warmth and longing pooling in me, and I shake my head to clear it. I can’t afford to get distracted, not now.
When Kieran emerges from the bathroom, freshly showered and looking too good for someone nursing a massive hangover, I’m packed and ready to go.
“Let’s do this,” I say, heading for the door.
As we step into the hallway, I hear whispers. Pack Quartz members are huddled in small groups, gossiping and nursing their own hangover cures. A few look at us curiously, and in the morning light with their minds clear, their gazes are a little too penetrating for me.
“I thought he didn’t have a mate,” I hear one say as I pass, followed by a hissed, “Hush.He doesn’t.”
“So why are they sharing the same room?”
“I’ve heard she’s his father’s bastard child—that makes themsiblings,you know.”
“Did you see the way she looked at him? As if she has a chance. That’s Kieran McCade, you know—he’ll be alpha of Pack Jade.”
“They’re together. They shared a room, they came in together. I bet he’s just waiting to make it official.”
When I don’t overhear snippets of conversation, I hear them go silent instead, and eyes seem to avoid me everywhere we go. As the anger, resentment—and worst of all, pain—wells up inside me, Kieran’s freshly showered scent at my back just makes me more and more frustrated.
It isn’t fair. I didn’t pick this for myself, didn’t choose this mission, or this man.It was all chosen for me, and now I’m the subject of gossip and the punchline of a joke. My cheeks burn with embarrassment and anger as we step out onto the curving front drive, where my motorcycle awaits.
Whirling on Kieran, I glare up on him. He looks just as uncomfortable as I feel, although I doubt he’s this hurt.
“The way those shifters were gossiping in there… why haven’t you told them that you rejected me?” My voice trembles with barely suppressed emotion. “Or is it more convenient to go along with the rumors? To let them think that we’re together?”
His eyes flash with guilt, a small and hollow victory. I can’t quite decipher the other emotions that follow in its wake. He opens his mouth to respond, but before he can, an alarm sounds through the pack lands.
A howling alarm, to be exact.
I hear their mournful, enraged, alarmed tones go up. The howl is carried through the air from one voice to another, until it reaches our ears. I can’t explain how I know what it means, but some innate part of me can decipher the distress call: Fae have been spotted nearby.
Kieran doesn’t sound that regretful as he says, “This will have to wait.”
In an instant, our personal drama is set aside. We’re moving, racing toward the sound of the alarm. I jump on my bike as Kieran seamlessly shifts. The tension is still there, but for now, we have a job to do.
Chapter 14
Kieran
The howl of alarm pierces the air, sending a jolt of adrenaline through my system. Like all shifters, I instantly know what the howls mean: the fae are here. Based on the expression on Aurora’s face, she knows it too, which means I don’t have to explain when I say, “This will have to wait.”
My relief at avoiding the tension between us is short-lived. Howls are moving toward us, carried by the pack, and Jacen’s hungover and still-drunk friends are in no shape to face the threat. As Aurora leaps onto her bike and revs the engine, my wolf surges beneath my skin, eager for a fight. I let him out, reveling in the way the shift tears the clothing from my body and clears my head in an instant.
I can feel my wolf’s excitement and bloodlust, but also his overwhelming protectiveness. He wants to protect our mate, and resents me still for denying him the wholeness of our bond. Even rejected, that bond hums with energy and sizzles between the two of us as we head straight toward danger.
It’s the scent that hits me first, stronger than ever before to my fae-sensitive nose. An otherworldly mixture of rot and decay that burns my nostrils. The fae are said to be gorgeous,charming, ethereal, and seductive, at least through human eyes, but to my shifter nose they’re nothing but threatening.
I snarl at the scent, and can sense through the mate bond that Aurora is on edge. This is the first real test of the cold iron knives she carries on her at all times. My wolf and I make a pact as we rush toward danger: we will protect her at all costs.
Bursting into a clearing on the outskirts of Pack Quartz, we leap into a chaotic fray. The fae are unlike anything I’ve ever seen—strange and terrible, their forms shimmering and changing like heat mirages. Some appear to be almost human, with features that are off in a slightly uncanny way, painful to look at directly. Others, around half the fae in the fight, are more obviously monstrous, with strange limbs and skin and wings.
Their magic crackles in the air. It’s turned the familiar landscape into something that hums with danger. Trees bend and twist their branches toward us like snatching hands and arms. The ground beneath our feet seems to shift and ripple unnaturally.
Pack members are scattered throughout the clearing, most still smelling of booze. Some are shifted, others in human form, all struggling against the fae, their numbers nearly evenly matched. I spot Jacen in his human form, on his knees in the dirt, grappling with a fae whose arms are made entirely of thorny vines. Blood streams down his cheek and pain flares in his eyes as he tries, and fails, to shift into his wolf form.
The smell of his fear is the most alarming thing of all. The Jacen I knew, that I met several years ago and encountered again last night, was too haughty to be afraid. He was especially too proud to be on his knees as he is right now, grappling in the mud with an inhuman monster.
