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“Oh?” I asked, confused.
The elevator pinged, and when the doors slid open, Colter stepped back. He cleared his throat.
“Have a good afternoon, Liv,” he said in a voice that was completely void of the rich, sultry tension that had run over my skin a moment before and stepped out of the elevator. I sagged against the elevator wall when he was gone, trying to recover.
Get it together, Liv!I scolded myself.
The door started sliding closed again, and I jumped forward to stop it. It hurt when I pushed it open again, and I shook my hand, stepping into the lobby. I walked through the lobby and out into the sunlight. I looked left and right, until I realized I was hoping to catch another glimpse of Colter.
Oh, no, you don’t,I told myself and firmly pushed the thoughts of Colter completely from my mind. Shaking the lingering heat from my body while I walked was a little harder, but I was determined not to think about him again.
5
COLTER
Irode the elevator down to the underground gym beneath my building. Over the past fifty years, the building had become the meeting place for the enchanted leaders in my city. When the elevator doors opened, shifters milled all around me. Some of them sparred in the different courts, a few wore out my treadmill belts, and a bunch of wolf shifters showed off to each other in the weights section.
Through the glass walls that blocked off each partition from the main hallway, they all stopped what they were doing when they saw me.
They dropped their shit and followed me into the hallway until I had a trail of shifters behind me of all shapes and sizes.
Finally, in the large cafeteria at the end of the hallway, I stepped onto a table and looked at my pack.
These guys were the leaders of their respective groups. If I had to get all my shifters together, I wouldn’t have space for them all, and I’d have to hire out a place like Madison Square Gardens. A tier-system with a hierarchy worked wonders, and I was at the very top.
They all looked up at me with reverence. I was the boss, and they knew it.
“Right,” I said. “I want feedback. Leave out the good shit. If it’s going well, you can send me an email.”
They all laughed.
“I want the bad stuff, so we know what we’re dealing with. Go.”
One of them lifted a hand.
He was a panther shifter and checked in with all the cat shifters in town. We had something of everything—panthers, wild cats, lynx, and jaguars. If it had kitty claws and whiskers, they were here.
Everyone always said New York was diverse, and it counted in the enchanted world, too.
“Are we going to have to deal with those bloodsuckers on a permanent basis now?” he asked.
I frowned. “Do you have a problem with them?”
“Besides them being lowlife undeads who can’t figure shit out for themselves?”
A few of the shifters laughed. I pushed my power over them, and they stopped laughing when they felt the ripple.
“They’re looking for shit with our women,” the panther offered. His eyes glowed amber, his cat very close to the surface, although we were all in human form tonight.
“So, deal with it,” I said. “Don’t tell me the vampires are the first to fuck with your females.”
The cat grumbled.
Another raised a hand. A wolf shifter, this time, and a woman. There were a few powerful ones. Her mate had been killed recently, and instead of stepping down, she’d taken over the faction.
“I have a problem with the dark magic,” she said. “It’s not like we can’t handle it, but we shouldn’t be getting this up close and personal with it. It’s not right.”
“The idea isn’t that the dark magic turns against us. We’re talking about an alliance,” I said.
