“Maybe it’s a different shaman with him,” Nate offered, but without much conviction.
“The pack only has one.” Jessica bit her lip. “I don’t know what to think.”
“I guess we’ll find out when they get here, but Arik, keep your guard up.” He rolled his eyes at me, as if to say,When do I not?Fair enough. “No one’s going to be coming inside the pack house. We’ll meet out front. You’re at the back of the house here, so you should be completely out of sight. Okay? Don’t worry.”
“I can’t believe how lucky I was, crashing my car on your land,” Jessica said, and glanced at Arik as if for moral support. He nodded, lips pressed tight. “Thank you. I’ll try not to be afraid.”
“Don’t worry about a thing.” Nate grinned at her and wiggled his fingers. “I’m highly caffeinated and I haven’t slept all night. Anyone who tries to get through me is getting finger lightninged. It’s my trademark. You want to—”
“No, they do not want to see.” Arik got up, shoving Nate down into his vacated chair. “Sit down, shut up, and behave.”
Nate started to protest, my phone beeped in my pocket, and I pulled it out. Ian. “No time for that, Nate,” I said, and he subsided, for a miracle.
They’re here. Heading back to house. ETA 5 min. Total assholes
We’ll meet you in the yard. No one’s coming in the house, I texted back.
Ian replied:Roger that
“It’s time,” I told the room at large. Nate huffed, and that seemed to sum it up.
Arik and I went out and down the hall, pausing at the top of the stairs. He looked up at me, pale and worried. I ached to spend the rest of the day kissing away the furrow between his golden brows and the downturn of those pretty lips.
“I’m sorry,” he said tightly. “I know I don’t have the right to speak for—”
“You have every right. You’re my mate.” I leaned down and pressed my mouth to his, letting him feel how much I meant it. “You speak for me, always. And you’re also simplyright. I know that, even if I’m not happy with the situation. Okay? I know what this means to you.”
That was the closest I could come to mentioning Taft, and I’d sworn I’d never say his name to Arik again.
But he understood. He tilted his head and kissed me back, a soft, lingering caress that told me everything about how much my mate loved and trusted me.
“Let’s go kick their asses,” he said, and bared his teeth, demonstrating once again why I loved and trusted him in return.
We went down the stairs, the assembled pack council falling into place behind us by the front door, and stepped out onto the porch together, the pack leader and his magnificent mate. If we couldn’t kick their asses, no one could.
Chapter 8
Arik
If the tableau that formed on the gravel drive of the pack house had been the final standoff of an old Western film, then we totally would’ve kicked their asses.
Roger Diaz and his three hulking idiot friends, all wearing track suits and the kinds of tank tops that showed unnecessary tufts of chest hair, obviously thought they were hot shit. To be fair, they could probably handle themselves in an average fight. Against Angelo the dainty bowtie-wearing vampire, possibly—although I’d seen him in action. I’d give it 6-4 if I had to run the book on it.
But against Matthew, Ian, and Calder? Even Jared, who wasn’t an alpha and couldn’t shift anymore but made up for it with how he’d grown up play-fighting with Matthew and Ian? Please.
Diaz’s deep bench, two shifter lawyers who smelled like they might be ferrets—and way to lean into the fucking stereotype there—were both standing as far from Calder as possible, seeming to seek protection in Angelo’s tiny shadow. Clearly they didn’t know what the rest of us did, that Angelo would be more likely to eat them and then go have a cocktail with Ian to wash them down than protect them if things went south.
Jared and Ian had taken up positions at the foot of the porch stairs, left and right. Calder glanced up at me and Matthew, nodded approval of the way my mate had me close and safe, and put himself a step in front of Jared, doing the same. Paul, Jennifer, and Matthew’s other councilors fanned out around us as we came out onto the porch and down the steps. I had to squint against the glare of a high overcast sky. Nosnow was falling, but it lay in damp clumps all over the ground. Overall, not an inspiring landscape.
But it made an appropriate setting for our uninspiring visitors. Roger Diaz sauntered forward flanked by a muscled and flat-eyed track suit clone on one side and his thin, twitchy little shaman on the other. The shaman’s eyes kept darting back and forth—small wonder he was nervous, if he’d helped Jessica escape and then had the gall to help Diaz find them—and he had a mustache that had to be a crime in multiple jurisdictions. I didn’t have the best history with other shamans, so I might’ve been biased…but something about the texture of his magic reaching out to probe mine nauseated me in a way that had nothing to do with my stomach.
Diaz stopped six feet away, close enough that I could smell every molecule of his cheap, cloying cologne. It had an acrid note underlying the sickly sweetness.
An acrid note that had the same skin-crawling, off-putting feeling as the shaman’s magic.
Matthew moved restively at my side. Not much. Subtly. As if something had made him uncomfortable. I looked over at Calder and found him staring, nostrils flared—but not at the shaman. At Ian. I followed his gaze. Ian’s eyes glowed, his hands flexing as if his claws were about to make an appearance.
Of course. Of course these motherfuckers hadn’t shown up to play fair. They might not have intended to deal with us—and that’s when it twigged.
