I let my fangs descend again and made my eyes turn wolf for a brief moment. “Daphne is mine. Daphne will be my mate. This fulfills the contract.” My voice rose up from my chest in a rumbling growl.
“Excuse me?” an indignant voice interrupted us. Daphne had emerged from her car, holding a can of pepper spray out in front of her.Brave girl. Brave and crazy, I thought.
Brave. Crazy,my wolf agreed happily.
“I don’t know who Clive is, but I’m definitely not his daughter. I am not related to any of these lunatics, and did I actually just hear you say you were taking me to be your maid?” she looked at me and burst out laughing. Actually laughed. “Well, joke’s on you, pal. I’m a terrible housekeeper.”
“Not your maid,” I said. She glanced my way, and her gaze flicked downward. My cock swelled with desire, and I saw her lip involuntarily sweep out and caress her lower lip. I could smell the scent of her arousal, which sent my wolf howling.
Our mate wants us.
Duke punched Royal in the arm. “Are you going to let him get away with this?”
“Punch me again, motherfucker. See what happens!” Royal punched him in the side of the head.
Duke let out a snarl. “I don’t care if I’m hurt. I’ll tear your throat out!”
Sweet suffering Jehoshaphat, I couldn’t believe our pack was going to be allied with these jokers. My grandfather had been the one to push it, and I had always been hesitant—and not just because I had no interest in Aurora. The Iron Claw pack is devious and untrustworthy and also dumb as a box of rocks.
I stalked forward. “Knock it the hell off!” I bellowed. “I’m taking my mate. I’m leaving. Our contract is fulfilled. Stay the hell away from her!”
“You haven’t heard the last of this!” Royal blustered, face flushing. “I’m taking it up with the Alpha Council!”
“Knock yourself out,” I snorted. Every town in the magic realm had its own shifter pack, and every shifter pack made its own rules. The Alpha Council only got involved when shifter packs couldn’t get along with each other.
A screech of tires tore my attention away from them.
“My van!” Earl howled. “Bitch stole my van!”
Well, damnation. While we were fighting and snapping at each other, while Gage and Talon lurked by the side of the road and focused on me, she had snuck over to Earl’s van, slid into the driver’s seat, and took off.
And she wasn’t headed back to Red Sands because we were all standing in the road blocking her.
No, she was headed straight for the mist—the mist that meant that the veil between our worlds was open for any person with magic in their blood.
Five
Daphne
“Where did this fog come from?” I groaned.
I slowed the van to a crawl and squinted. I needed to drive as fast as I could, but I couldn’t see a foot ahead of me. My heart hammered with panic. There were werewolves behind me. Werewolves! Men who turned into wolves!
And for some reason, they all wanted me. To be their…maid?
Clearly, these guys had never seen my apartment.
The fog cleared abruptly, vanishing. When I looked behind me, there was no fog at all, just a road stretching into the distance, with a thick forest on both sides.
Up ahead was a stretch of grassy pasture on either side of the road and then, in the distance, a town.
Exactly where there shouldn’t be a town.
When I jumped in the van, I’d been forced to head east. There couldn’t possibly be a town here because I’d only been driving for a couple of minutes and the nearest town to the east was fifty miles away.
And yet, there it was. And the landscape behind me had completely changed too. There was no sign of Red Sands, and what the heck was up with the forest that had sprouted up out of nowhere, crowding in on either side of the road? This area of New Mexico was more desert than woods.
I had no choice but to keep driving and seek help because my world seemed to have vanished. Maybe I’d suffered a bump to the head when I crashed the car? Maybe everything I thought that I’d seen was a hallucination?
