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His warning in the car played back in my mind, along with his promise to help me. He knew his pack better than I had imagined. Everything he had expected to happen did happen. The possibility of one of the pack members attempting to harm seemed very real, though not a single one dared to make a move.
His pack ranked themselves by strength. The strongest was Alpha, and the second strongest tended to be Beta. It differed from many of the packs I had heard about who passed packs from parent to child. Alphas tend to be a hereditary group, but in the cases of bites, it was a fifty-fifty chance, which was why Nyte’s pack had forgone the tradition of passing packs onto their children. A bitten wolf could be alpha, but a bitten wolf’s children only had a fifty percent chance of being werewolves if the bitten wolf took a born wolf as a mate. Otherwise, they would all be just as human as the bitten wolf before the bite.
The only time a former human has ever been known to pass a werewolf gene onto their children was in the case of curses; and as with all spells, there were stipulations to that.
“You choose to turn away the position that you pledged to take on just last night in front of the entire pack?” The alpha asked Nyte, snapping me out of my head and silencing the angry pack around us.
Nyte shrugged. “I didn’t know I would have a witch mate today. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have pledged at all.”
The alpha closed his eyes, pressing his fingers to the bridge of his nose as if he could feel a headache forming. Looking back at the pack, he sighed. “Very well, since the pack refuses your mate as their future Luna, you are relieved of your responsibility to take over as pack alpha. Now get your ass up here; we have some business to discuss.”
“Alpha!” one of the men called out in shock, looking up the stairs. “You’re allowing him to remain in the packhouse after refusing to choose the pack?”
“Alberto, to be completely honest, I don’t give a flying fuck that he picked his mate over taking on my position. There are far more pressing matters to handle, and since Nyte is still the strongest wolf within Coronado, I would be an idiot to kick him out of the pack right now. If you don’t like it, there’s the fucking door.”
Alberto dropped his head, backing up a step in submission. I could almost hear the whine of his wolf as he retreated. Nyte looked down at me and then behind me, beckoning the girl behind me to come forward.
“Madilyn, take care of my mate while I go with the Alpha. Don’t let anyone come within five feet of her,” he instructed. She bobbed her head in response, hooking our arms together.
“No one will lay a finger on her, Nyte. I promise you that.”
He turned back to me, brushing a purplish strand of hair out of my face. “Stay with Madilyn. Don’t let her small size fool you. She was primed to be my beta if I had become Alpha, so she’s the second strongest wolf in the pack; she can protect you just as easily as me.”
I looked over at the girl whose arm was linked to mine. Her blonde pixie cut accentuated the sharp angles of her face. She smiled at me brightly, a twinkle in her light blue eyes. She had been the one who tried to remind the pack of the two witches known to be Lunas in the world. One is my friend Grace.
As I looked back at Nyte, I nodded. “Okay, I’ll wait with her for you.” I wasn’t dumb. I wasn’t going to argue with him. I had no business listening to whatever his alpha had to discuss with him, and I wasn’t about to turn down a babysitter while sitting in a house filled with werewolves aching to kill me. Never once had I considered the possibility that asking Nyte to pretend to be my mate would be so dangerous. I thought it had been a foolproof plan to protect myself, but it looked like I was the fool.
Nyte turned away from me and made his way up the stairs, something inside me feeling vulnerable with the disappearance of his strong arms around me. Madilyn led me to a room just under the stairs, a low growl vibrating in her chest whenever anyone attempted to approach us or came too close.
The room was bigger than I had expected. And very, very pink. I stared in shock and awe at the collection of stuffed animals piled on a plush chair in the corner, turning to look at Madilyn for an explanation of why this had been the room she chose to bring me to.
“Sorry for the mess,” she sighed, walking around me to pick up a few items of clothing I hadn’t noticed off the floor. I had been too shocked by the bright color of the room and the decorations to notice what she considered a mess. “I wasn’t expecting company in my room today.”
“Oh,” I gasped, looking around. “This is your room?”
Madilyn smirked, dropping down on the edge of her bed. “Yeah, I haven’t redecorated the room since I was ten. It’s a little jarring, I know.”
“No, no. It’s not that bad.”
Madilyn let out a chuckle as she shook her head. “Has anyone told you that you are a terrible liar?”
I felt my face drop, a heavy stone of fear dropping into my stomach. “What?”
“You don’t have to be polite. I know my room is bright and very girly. It doesn’t match the room of the second strongest wolf of the pack.”
I let out a sigh. I had been worried she saw through my and Nyte’s lies. I knew that some wolves could smell lies and deception, and given that she was a powerful she-wolf, I was worried that she would be one of them.
“I mean, yeah,” I admitted reluctantly. “It was a little hard on the eyes walking in. I almost pulled out my sunglasses to keep from going blind.”
Madilyn laughed; the sound was pure and joyful. “Well, I’m glad it didn’t blind you. Now, I smell some familiar magic from your bag. Would those be tarot cards?”
I smiled, the faint whisper of my cards promising a reading for the she-wolf. “They are. And they would like to read you, if you don’t mind.”
Chapter four
Nyte
I wasn’t surprised by the pack’s rejection of Paige as their Luna. I would have been prepared to step down had I been the Alpha when she was ready to accept me as her mate. If anything, this made things less messy on my end. I also wasn’t surprised that Alpha Alexander didn’t force me out of the packhouse. Instead, he brought me in for this meeting.
