AllFreeNovel
Share Us
And the wolves were part of it.
* * * *
Kirsten
The first time I experienced the magic of the Pack, Randall had been Alpha, and I’d thought it the most magical thing ever, when at the time, I wasn’t comfortable with that word. I was anti-woo despite the fact I could project lasers out of my fingers and kill people with my thoughts. I preferred the term metaphysical, meaning it could all be explained scientifically, it just seemed like magic.
Now, the term doesn’t matter. I floated back up to the boulder when the Pack ran as one into the woods, the vampire easily loping beside the wolves, and I contemplated how the coterie’s energy had changed the pack, had changed the land.
Had changed my home.
The humans and other shapeshifters eventually left the meadow, so it was just me on the boulder. I wasn’t of a mind to leave yet, so I sat, and I meditated, and I enjoyed the magic of the night.
Eventually, my logical brain interrupted, and I contemplated, again, how the energy of the vampires had affected our home. I sensed a disturbance in the air near me, but I didn’t need to look to know Mordecai was now sitting beside me.
“You’re usually all about the balance,” he noted. “Why are you picking it apart on this night?”
“It isn’t death magic the vampire brings to us, as one would expect. It’s a different kind of life magic. Am I sensing it more tonight, when the night and day are all about balance?” He didn’t answer, and I breathed in the air, fully night now, no longer day. Marco had most likely taken the bodysuit off and stowed it somewhere by now.
“He’s good for her,” I noted. “She’s happier. Better balanced. I don’t want to call it light energy and dark energy, because that implies good and bad, but it’s like the life that thrives in the sun and the life that thrives in the night? No, that isn’t it, either, because Cora is a little of both from the start, mixing human and wolf.”
“A rose by any other name? The labels aren’t important. They balance each other, wolf and vampire, and they now help balance Homewood. Breathe it in. Feel it.” He took a deep breath, let it, out, and I sensed a change in subject before he spoke again. “I find that I want to string you up between two trees and beat the ever-loving fuck out of you tonight, my beautiful nature spirit. Will you scream for me?” He cradled half my face in his huge palm. “Will you absorb the pain and make it part of the forest for me? Part of the night?”
My clit swelled and throbbed, the dueling lust and fear responses setting my endorphins up so I itched for the whip I knew I would soon feel all over my body.
Our land is large, plenty big enough for a wolf pack to run and for Mordecai to have his way with me in private. He’d pick the place, and we’d have our privacy.
And no one would rescue me from whatever it was he needed to do to me on this night of balance. It seemed fitting, to experience pain and pleasure on this night, to merge the yin and the yang in yet another way.
Chapter 7
Nearly two years later
Cora
I felt overwhelming pain and angst coming from Kirsten, and I ran through the house at top speed. I heard her talking to Mordecai when I hit the main floor, and he was trying to tell her he couldn’t find someone — couldn’t go to them — either.
“It’s as if she no longer exists!” Kirsten replied, panic saturating her voice and the air I was now breathing.
I ran into the kitchen and asked, “Who?”
“Lauren’s gone!” Kirsten’s eyes were somewhere between wild and panicked, and I had no idea what we’d do if she lost control. I’d talked to Nathan about the fact Kirsten wasn’t a danger unless something happened to Lauren, and then all bets were off.
And now, something had happened to Lauren, and I shut down all emotions and put myself into work mode. Drake Security had trained me to handle any security situation that arose, and the first thing I needed to do was to gather as much information as possible.
Rather than call the control room, I told Mordecai, “Control room, now!”
He flashed the three of us into the underground of Homewood, and I sat at a console and pulled up cellphone data.
Kirsten’s twenty-five-year-old daughter had recently moved to Branson, Missouri, and she was having what we all hoped was a short fling with a Master Vampire no one at Homewood liked, but we were kind of forced to accept him as long as Lauren wanted him in her life.
I ran the data backwards and forwards until I was certain I understood what had happened and where — Lauren had been with Nick on the road between the coterie house and the town of Branson when her cellphone had dropped off the map. She’d been in the vehicle with Nick, sitting behind him rather than beside him, and then she wasn’t, but Nick’s phone was still on the grid.
“Don’t call him,” Mordecai told us. “Nick doesn’t know what happened, either. They were in a caravan, headed from the coterie house to the theater, when all prey animals and humans were taken. Flashed from the vehicles.”
The blood had drained from Kirsten’s face, and she looked as if she was in shock. She grabbed my arm and said, “She’s gone. I can’t go to her. I can’t feel her.”
I stood and pulled her into my arms, and I met Mordecai’s gaze over the top of her head. On a disaster scale of one to ten, this was a fifty. Kirsten would end the world to save Lauren, and she could do so because she could take her daughter to other worlds to live, once she was safe.
