Preorder Book 1, Crystal and Claws, today
Matt’s thighs burned as they walked between the pines toward the edge of the cliff to see if the rockfall was accidental or not. For Tori’s sake, he’d downplayed what happened, but he had to know. Was it an accident or an attack?
Tori surged ahead of him, and he gasped for breath and tried to find a higher gear. He knew some fitness-obsessed wolves in New York who spent large chunks of every day pumping iron and forcing their already superhuman bodies into new levels of chiseled perfection. He found the obsession a little bizarre, but was chagrined to realize he took his own superhuman endurance for granted. It was unreasonably embarrassing to be lagging behind a human woman on a walk.
Granted, they were well over a mile high, and the vertical grade was close to 20%, but he’d literally never had to work this hard in his life. He was suddenly glad they hadn’t provoked a fight. He’d have lost by not being able to breathe.
She looked back at him with a grin, and he was a little mollified by the fact that she was also gasping for air.
“You know I could’ve just flown up here?” she said.
He stopped dead. “Fly?”
She nodded.
“You can fly?”
“Technically, I can lift an object, and I am an object. Although it’s easier if I pick up something else and sit on top of it.”
“Wait, the whole witches riding brooms thing is true?”
She laughed. “I don’t know any that are alive today that would actually choose a broom, but probably yes. For some reason, it’s just easier for my brain to lift something that’s not me, and if I’m sitting on the object, I also get lifted.”
She closed her eyes, jumped, and just kept going until she was brushing the branches of the pines high above their head before floating back to earth.
“So why didn’t you? Why don’t you? Why aren’t there more reports of people levitating?”
“Because we don’t actually want to make the evening news, and this takes energy, too.” She looked around. “If I’d leaped up that cliff, I wouldn’t have had magic left for the rest of the day, and given the current situation, that would be bad.”
He experienced another unexpected sting of embarrassment. Right now, she was their biggest protection. She’d saved him. He’d almost died this morning.
Some wolves thought of themselves as protectors, as shields between them and the rest of the pack and the rest of the world. He never had that role, but to find himself in her debt and still in need of her magic was a new feeling.
“Don’t screw this up,” he muttered. He was in a new place and a new environment with new enemies, and he had a guide right in front of him.
They started hiking again, and existential thoughts of gender roles, the power of witches, and the limits of shifter strength faded in the burn of his quads and the whistling air between his teeth. There just wasn’t any air in the air.
It didn’t get easier, but it also didn’t get any worse, so alarm bells stopped clanging in his head that he was about to suffocate, and soon his bigger problems reasserted themselves. He was in a Catch-22. If he told Mateo not to come because there was a rival werewolf pack that just attacked him, he’d guarantee the alpha would be on the next plane. But if he didn’t check in at all, he would also guarantee the alpha would be on the next plane looking for him.
He tried to imagine the option where he called Mateo and lied through his teeth to convince the dude that Nonna was insane. The alpha would see right through him.
Could he mention the sushi/Boba place? That would give the alpha a serious pause, but there was no way around it. Mateo was coming. Maybe it was an actual rockfall and a stupid coincidence. He would know if they ever got to the top of the hill.
And just like that, they did. He’d noticed a slight break in the trees ahead, but they’d been marching on pine needles amid towering trees that still spelled weirdly of dessert and furniture cleaner when the trees ended, and they made it to the top of the ridge.
“Try to walk softly,” Tori said as she moved silently.
He took one step on the crunchy needles and frowned at her. Unlike the soft, lush grounds of the wet forests on the East Coast, most of the forest floor was a bed of red dried pine needles that crunched with every step.
After a moment, he realized she was floating again, this time only inches off the ground.
“Cheater,” he said and took another crunching step. There was absolutely no way to walk silently if you didn’t have the power to fly.
His wolf growled within him, and Matt rolled his eyes. Flying wasn’t the only superpower they had available.
He stretched out his senses, smelling, listening, and watching for challengers in the woods.
Something rumbled, and he froze. There was someone else around. Someone huge. Another shifter?
Something crashed through a grove of Aspen in the distance.
He tore off his shirt and flowed into the wolf, jumping out of his jeans as his legs shrank when a bush fifty feet away twitched and two gigantic antlers tore through it.
Tori sighed. “What this morning needs is definitely a moose.”
She shouted and clapped, then glanced back at him and froze. “Um…”
The moose lumbered away in an impossible crash of limbs as they stared at each other.
She’d seen his wolf last night, but that had been in the deep dark. Now it was full daylight, and she was five feet away from an apex predator.
She crunched back to earth, and he realized she’d let her magic go.
Do not move, he told the wolf with implacable fury.
He’d seen other wolves fight for control, but he’d never had to. They had a good relationship, because his wolf—a lone wolf for years—was usually more wary than he was, but all his trust was gone. He could not scare her.
The wolf sent him back annoyance and a flash of images of protecting the witch, not harming their mate.
She’s not a wolf. Wait…
Desire and confusion warred within him. The wolf thought the witch was its mate?
He felt the touch of a hand on his snout, not the smartest place to pet a carnivore, and blinked. The wolf kept still as the tentative hand dropped away, and he braced for heartache when it landed again more firmly on his head and patted through the fur.
The wolf took one step forward, and Matt hauled on the reins, but it only pressed itself against her thigh and maneuvered its head so her fingers were behind its ear.
She scratched gently, and the sensation shivered through him.
He had never been petted before by anyone. He had vague memories of another woman’s hand much larger on his tiny scalp when he was a pup, but from that day to this, no one had touched his wolf.
The sensations that lit from his ear to his tail quenched some hunger so old and so deep, he didn’t consciously know it existed.
“Oh, you like that?” Tori asked and switched to his other ear.
He thought the wolf would be insulted at being treated like a dog, but there was no room in the ecstasy.
Reluctantly, she turned toward the edge of the cliff.
“Come on,” she said, and he feared she would stop touching him, but she didn’t let go. She kept her fingers buried in his scruff, not gripping, but just touching as they walked forward.
She didn’t float again, and in this form, his paws were quieter with his weight more evenly distributed. The wolf was breathing hard, too, but it didn’t feel nearly so dire.
He rolled his eyes at himself. Why hadn’t he made the wolf do the entire climb?
The beast felt a smug sense of superiority as they navigated toward the edge, then forgot about fitness contests with the other half of its soul when it caught the scent.
The wolf immediately turned to wrap itself around her thighs.
“Whoa! What are you—”
The wolf pushed firmly and put a paw gently on her foot, trying to communicate to stay still.
She threw up her hands. “Okay then.”
Then the beast put its nose to the ground and snuffled.
The overwhelming smells immediately gave Matt a headache. His brain wasn’t designed to think in senses and identify the world with his nose, and worse, every scent was unfamiliar.
He hadn’t realized how much in New York he could dismiss because it was the same garbage, hot dogs, pack mates, and Diesel fuel as ever.
Out here, literally everything he smelled was something the wolf had never smelled before, and it was busy cataloguing and exploring.
Enemy? he asked, and the wolf homed immediately in on the scent of a shifter. What’s more, the shifter who’d left this trail wore homespun wool trousers that still smelled a lot like a sheep, and leather shoes that smelled way more like a cow than any other type of leather he’d ever come in contact with. Did they do their own tanning, too? Who were these people?
He traced the scent to the edge of the cliff, where he saw gouges in the edge.
The cliff was man-made, probably cut by Mateo’s grandfather into the side of the hill, which meant it was still subject to severe erosion. In other words, there were a lot of big rocks to choose from.
He could see the one they did choose, nicked with scratches from a crowbar or a hammer.
Were they so arrogant that they didn’t even try to hide their scent or the evidence?
He side-stepped away. He had to get to his clothes.
When he looked back, she was holding them in her hands. The woman was magic on so many levels.
He shifted back and pulled on his khakis, watching in amusement as her eyes flew to the sky and red crept up her throat.
He shouldn’t be as satisfied as he was that she was not indifferent to him.
When he hitched on his shirt, he said, “They definitely did it.”
She nodded. “The footprints and the rocks were a good clue.”
He looked back and saw the disturbed pine needles he had missed leading up to the cliff.
“Now the question is, was it a rogue actor or did they all sign off on that?” she asked.
He shook his head. “There are no rogue actors in a wolf pack. You do what the alpha tells you to do.”
She frowned. “So he couldn’t have just gone off on his own?” The thought obviously disturbed her, and he winced.
“We’re not slaves. There is free will. But no wolf in his right mind would’ve pulled an attack like this on a rival pack without the alpha’s sign-off. They were committing their pack to war. Could they really have been that stupid?”
The lovely flush left her cheeks completely. “Did they just start a war?”
He swallowed. “Mateo is not going to take this lightly. I mean, maybe we can walk it back, but it’s literally an attack on a rival pack’s territory seconds after I told them they were on a rival pack’s territory.”
“With our land right in the middle,” she said and closed her eyes.
“We won’t drag you into this!”
“That’s not going to be the question.”
They heard the roar of an engine, and somebody shouted, “Tori!”
She met his eyes. “How would your alpha feel about a witch on your land?”
He opened his mouth and closed it as another voice rang out. “Tori?”
“Make that witches.”
More voices called out.
“Make that half a coven of witches.”
He looked over the edge but couldn’t see them. He’d never get over how weird sound behaved in the mountains. They sounded like they were right below him.
She looked around. “Stay here, don’t make a sound.”
“What are you—”
She picked up a branch almost as tall as she was and, without ceremony, jumped off the edge of the cliff.
He let out a strangled cry before he clapped a hand over his mouth and dived toward the edge in time to see her dangling from the branch as it plummeted toward the earth.
His heart lodged in his throat as he fought every instinct he had to dive after her.
As a shifter, he’d probably survive the fall, but it would break every bone in his legs. Besides, she was already slowing down, which allowed him to grab some control of his wolf.
The branch dropped her gently on the ground, and she had time enough to throw it into the field before a gaggle of women came bursting over the hill.
The witches had arrived.
