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BRAXTON
Iwoke up in the middle of the night. I lay in bed, blinking into the darkness.
Something had woken me up. What was it?
I strained my ears to listen for a sound.
Nothing.
When I sat up in bed, I became aware of magic. It filled the room, hanging against the ceiling like smoke. It wasn’t the kind of magic I usually had around the house. The magic in the cabin changed depending on who came to stay for a while. Dagger was always here, and Cal was here most of the time, although I hadn’t heard from him for a couple of weeks now.
The asshole was still pouting like a child since the auction.
I tried to figure out if it was Uma’s magic I was feeling. The fae didn’t usually stay for a long time, but she’d been around longer since Kinley had come to stay with us. The two of them seemed to hit it off, and I was glad Kinley had someone to talk to.
The magic had nothing to do with the fae, either.
I got out of bed and walked to the window. Outside, everything was pitch black. It was a new moon, and in the darkness, all kinds of creatures could hide away.
I hated the new moon. All the others seemed to prefer it because the full moon brought the shifters who couldn’t control themselves too well out to play, but I could deal with those.
The darkness brought foreboding, it brought the echo of my mother’s screams.
Movement outside caught my attention. A shadow slipped from the house toward the trees.
Fuck.
I ran through the house, moving quickly without making a sound. Kinley’s door was shut when I passed it. Good. She had to stay out of the way if shit was about to hit the fan.
The front door was open, and the icy night air made goosebumps race down my arms and my back. I always slept naked—it was more comfortable and easier to shift on a dime if I had to wake up and fight for some reason.
When I stepped outside, the magic was thick and cloying. It felt like tar, and it was heavy to breathe in. The shadow stood not too far off. My muscles were tense, my body vibrating with magic, ready to shift, ready to fight.
When it looked at me, its eyes glowed a deep blue.
“Alpha.”
It was Dagger. His voice was so low, and he spoke so softly, a human wouldn’t have heard him speak at all.
I relaxed, the dread slowly uncoiling in my stomach, and the tension bled out of my muscles.
I crossed the driveway to reach him, and we stood on the edge of the property. He was naked, ready to shift and fight, too.
“What is it?” I asked. My voice was just as low as his had been, my words barely more than a breath.
“I don’t know. There’s something here.”
“Magic,” I said.
Dagger nodded wordlessly, and we stood together, drinking in the night. We tasted the magic, swirling it around like fine wine, trying to ascertain the flavors that told us where it would be coming from.
“Something’s wrong,” Dagger said. “It shouldn’t be like this. Not here, inside the perimeter.”
Uma had put up a magical fence for me when I’d first become alpha, and Dagger had become my beta. Her magic should have acted like a trip wire, waking us all when someone trespassed. When Kinley had come to join us, I’d asked her to add another spell to keep Kinley in.
None of that was this. None of what I’d prepared for was here tonight, but somethingwashere.
Braxton?
