Page 96 of Mate

And they had this ‘never again’ sort of bully-fighting energy. Many of them had pain that seemed to leap to their surface with their wolves, and they were fighting like trapped, insane animals.

I think they were doing better than they expected because of it. Sure, these rogues were huge, but we were a family, and a lot of these wolves had shared trauma, too.

As the struggle raged on, the scent of blood and the frantic beating of hearts filled the air. In the midst of the frenzied battle, a sudden hush fell over the room, and I turned my head towards the entryway of the ballroom.

Standing in the doorway, Madame Juana lifted her chin expectantly.

She exuded an eerie aura of mystique and power. Her sheer presence sent a chilling blade of ice right down my spine.

Striding in gracefully by her side was a massive grey wolf that was at least as large as Ry. The energy between them crackled with a sinister synergy, and I could only guess it was the pack’s alpha, Bruce.

I had a bad feeling the battle had only just begun.

I had gone into tonight thinking that there were going to be rules like in human battles. Perhaps a meeting between leaders, a little chit-chat. Like in the beginning of Braveheart, where each side would send their leaders, and then they would come back and let their guys know it was on? That wasn’t going to happen today.

Everything looked pretty clear. There was even a smell in the air—if you were a Lycan—that said clearly from the other side, ‘Submit and join our pack, or we’ll kill you’, and none of my pack was having it.

Shit, that sort of thing was exactly the type of demand that all the guys had been fighting against their entire life. They weren’t just another pack. They weren’t going to surrender to anyone. These weren’t just any Lycans—they were Lycans that could use their fucking brains. Their wolves would listen to their human sides and realize that they had a point. And now that I was a wolf, I could tell you, that idea wasn’t an easy idea to get through to an animal. It took trust, and it probably took years of understanding.

My wolf, at least, only thought, ‘Howrude. Who do these fuckheads think they are? I’m from the House of Old!’ I didn’t even fucking know what that meant, but my wolf was pretty intensely from a different world. Whatever blood was in me, coupled with whatever Little Mama’s spell performed, was really channeling my wolf’s inner Proto-Lycan badassery.

I knew I wasn’t going to enjoy this fight. This had trouble written all over it.

You know that moment when you realize that things in your life have really gotten off-track? Like when you turned into a Lycan because of your Lycan boyfriends claiming you and then you find yourself in the middle of a fucking boss-fight with a millenia-old witch?

This was that moment.

Madame Juana was annoying to me instantly because she didn’t look concerned. If I saw me, I’d look concerned. I was much bigger than a normal wolf, and I felt like I could use the whole world as a squeaky toy.

Unlike my wolf, normally Iwasthe type of person who found it easy to communicate myself out of certain situations. I’d talked myself out of an ‘F’ on my calculus grade. I’d talked myself out of having to go to the district chess competition. Talking was my fucking superpower.

Now, my superpower was not just nerdy. It was because I was a badass wolf with really, really sharp teeth.

Why wasn’t she concerned?

Caelum had found himself the beta of the pack, and Ry had found the alpha. The alpha was a big mother fucker, but so was Ry. I felt like everyone had been paired off fairly well, here.

So, I went to Juana. She was dead center of the room with resting bitch face, so I thought this whole fight was much ado about nothing. As soon as I bit this bitch in half, my life was going to get a lot easier.

I know, I’m not really the type of person that thinks about biting people, let alone biting people into pieces, but it wasn’t really me, anyway. It was my wolf. My wolf was sort of a badass bitch,and the witch looked like she would have a satisfying texture. Like a Twix Bar.

But she looked at me, and the power radiating off her got a lot fucking worse.

The floor started to shake.

Okay, so now we were fighting in an earthquake. I lived in Louisiana, so earthquakes weren’t one of those things they drilled us on when I was growing up in school. Our emergency preparedness normally centered around flooding and gunmen. I was really out of my element here.

The wolves scattered and stopped fighting for a few very long moments, all of them thinking ‘what the actual fuck?’ to themselves on both sides, and for a while, Ry and Caelum came to my side, as if to make sure that I didn’t get hurt from all the bullshit. The floorboards peeled up and rolled, literally, like the way I fluff my sheets out after a wash. If they were thinking about anything except howbadthis was, I would have been surprised. But then the rogues regrouped and attacked, and our pack went forward once again.

Lots of things became very obvious, very quickly.

First of all, her pack was smaller than ours. However big these wolves were, there was only nine of them besides Juana (well, eight now that we’d already been kicking ass), who was standing very tall and queenly as she wielded her magic. Sure, their wolves were big, but there were fourteen of us. Those weren’t horrible odds.

Secondly, they didn’t know how to navigate this earthquake any more than we did.

So, this was going to be inconvenient all the way around.

“Don’t worry about me, do what you’ve got to do. I’ve got Juana,” I said, because Wendy had spent a few moments earlier today talking to me about what I’d have to do. Mostly bite Juana’s face off and incapacitate her so that she didn’t become an even bigger pain in the ass.

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