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They knew though. I couldn’t say how it was so clear to me, but it was. These wolves had been as badly treated as I had, the Light Kingdom threatening to rip Night from me. Would it kill her? Kill me?
One moment, I was stroking them, and the next, I was thrown free of the place we were, and something was happening. The wolves were free as well, in the bedroom, where the guys slept peacefully. How was this possible? Wolves did not appear outside their person. They simply took her place from time to time. But all three of us were there, and I crept out from under the tangle of arms and legs to stand facing them. I thought of grabbing a robe off the chair, but when I shifted, I was always naked, and the wolves for sure weren’t wearing clothes, so why bother?
They moved closer to one another, dark fur against bright. They bumped muzzles and looked at one another for a long moment. The air was charged, and something was going to happen. My mates were still sleeping, so was this a dream? And then they began to pace around one another. Faster and faster. Their feet left the floor and they spun in midair, their light and dark furs blurring. I blinked, trying to see what was happening, but my sense of balance was gone and my stomach roiled. I blinked, trying to keep them in my sights, but I couldn’t make out where one ended and the other began, and then when they were nothing but motion, an explosion knocked me back onto the bed.
My head was spinning faster than they had been, and both wolves were gone. I was in pain from head to foot, and everything in between. The limp, relaxed sleep I’d been enjoying before we got this message was gone, replaced by the migraine from hell. I felt as if my skull was about to explode. And then it did…brain matter splattering everywhere but in psychedelic colors that added nausea to the whole experience. I screamed and fell, spiraling and bleeding, my brain in chaos.
And then darkness.
I woke to sunlight and the concerned voices of my mates. “It’s already an hour after she’s supposed to be in class,” Adan said.
“Do you think we were too rough? She didn’t seem like this when we went to sleep.” Cas’s rough tones cut through some of my brain fog, but I still floated in the rest, exhausted and bruised and wondering why they didn’t notice all the blood coating my skin and puddling in the sheets. I didn’t know why it happened, just that I’d been through something horrible in the night. But my mates didn’t do it. It was…was it the murderers? No, they could not have gotten here and hurt me without my mates fighting them off. It had to be a dream, but would a dream leave me so sore?
I squeezed my eyes tighter closed, not wanting to know if my body looked as bad as it felt.
Then Blaze spoke close to my ear. “Mate, if you don’t wake up, we’re going to have to take you to the infirmary and explain a lot of things.”
I jerked to sit upright, banging my forehead into something hard.
“Oww. She’s up.”
My eyes snapped open to reveal blood streaming from Blaze’s nose and over his chin. Was it mine? Oh no! My own fears were momentarily pushed to the background. “Mate, I’m so sorry.”
“I’m all right.” He tried to reassure me, but the skin around his eyes was darkening. “Did I break your nose?”
“Doesn’t matter.” He waved aside my concerns and stripped off his shirt then stepped out of his boxers. They had all been nude when we went to sleep but weren’t now. Except Blaze, of course. He did a quick shift, landing on all fours and furring out, sending blood splashing in the process. Blaze shifted back, his nose its usual straight self again, and his eyes unbruised. I felt so much better and threw my arms around him. “I’m so relieved you are all right! And so sorry I hurt you, but I was in shock from…from what?” A glance at the bed showed a few splatters of blood from his formerly broken nose. No gore from when I… “No!” Suddenly I realized what had happened to me. Why I woke up hurting all over and what was missing. “They’re gone!”
Then I corrected that. “No, one of them is gone…”
Chapter Eighteen
Casimir
We finally calmed Karelis, bundling her into her robe, reassuring her and getting her to reach deep inside and find her wolf. Her wolf 2.0 because she said it was not Night nor was it Sol. But it wasn’t a third; it was somehow both of them. My wolf spoke to me through the entire process. I’d never heard of anything like this happening, but nothing with my relationship with Karelis had been a normal mating, and I kind of loved it that way.
Everything except the danger she was in and the merging of her wolves. I never expected that, but now, there was one wolf speaking to mine instead of two. Gods, I wanted more than anything to see her shift. Her wolves merging would result in a wolf like one we had never seen before; of that I was sure.
It broke my heart into a million pieces to see her in pain. And there wasn’t a damned thing any of her mates could do about it.
“She’s okay now, I think,” Adan said. He hadn’t let go of her hand since she sat up.
“It hurt me through the bond. I didn’t know that was possible, for us to feel her physical and mental pain through a mating bond, but if sharing it with her meant that some of it was taken away, then I’d gladly take all of it,” Blaze commented, but his focus remained on our mate.
“We all would,” I said. My phone buzzed from across the room, and momentarily I considered not answering it in favor of being at Karelis’ side. She had been through so much. The phone stopped ringing and then started up all over again. If someone was calling me over and over, it surely wasn’t some bullshit call. “Hello?” I barked.
“Casimir, I have news of your mate,” my father’s voice, so much like mine, bellowed from the other end of the line.
“I’m putting you on speakerphone, Dad. We all need to hear this,” I responded.
“Good. Your mate is going to need all the help she can get if what I found out about where she came from is correct.”
I pushed the speaker button and told my dad to continue.
“Here’s what I found out, and it took a while to find someone who actually knew about this pack, if you can call it a pack. From what I know now, they are more like a group of medieval tyrants. The first thing is that this Light Kingdom believes themselves to be better than all other shifters. They keep themselves hidden away because they think the Moon Goddess blesses them above all other shifters. They have different fur than us, and some of them have supernatural powers other than the shifting. Snotty bunch of fuckers if you ask me.”
We all grunted. “What else? Anything about Karelis specifically?”
“They don’t have an alpha or betas. They have a king and he’s a tyrant and holds up the monarchy all on his own. Apparently his queen was barren and so he has no heirs to take his place. Brace yourself for this next part.”
