Total pages in book: 76
Estimated words: 71067 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 355(@200wpm)___ 284(@250wpm)___ 237(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 71067 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 355(@200wpm)___ 284(@250wpm)___ 237(@300wpm)
“You know what we need?” Laura nudges me.
“What?”
“A pajama party. I still have those footsie pajamas we ordered for that video. There’s dozens of them in the boxes in the back of this place. Everyone can have a pair!”
The idea catches on faster than I thought it would, and before long, all of us are wearing onesie pajamas in a variety of rainbow colors. The original videos never went anywhere when we posted them, but Laura is right.
Someone starts making rainbow cocktails too. Midori for green, Berry Liquor for red, and something else for the other colors, I don’t really know. I start with green and just one puts me on my ass. It’s not often I drink.
“No shifting!” I call out to the others. “We need our wits about us tonight. We just crossed Regent… ah, who am I kidding.”
They’re not listening.
They’re too busy playing beer pong and videoing each other doing stunts and they don’t need to be reminded not to shift when there are cameras around. Fortunately these days, even if they did, nobody would believe that it was real. We’re in a post reality digital space. If it’s on a screen, it’s probably a lie.
I freaked out the first time one of our more reckless shifters filmed himself turning from man to animal. Everyone in the comments was arguing over whether it was CGI or straight up AI. Nobody considered for a second that they’d just seen one of the dark wonders of the world.
“Maybe we should rein this in,” I say. “If he comes and we’re all messy drunk…”
“Nobody else is worried, and you shouldn’t be worried either,” Laura says. “He came over, he… did what he did to you, and he left. I don’t think anybody is scared of anything from him.”
Her sentence barely makes sense, and her logic doesn’t track. But that’s what the particular cocktail of recreational substances she’s taken will do to you.
“We should be worried,” I insist. “Maybe it was a mistake to get everyone gathered here. Maybe I should have told them all to spread out…”
“Too late now,” she says cheerfully. “We’re here and we’re having a good time. So you might as well have a good one anyway.”
She’s right. That last bit of logic is impeccable. I can’t change what’s going to happen. We’ve done what we’ve done. Someone is putting an orange drink in my hand that has chocolate powder on the rim. It’s delicious. I have two. After that, I just stop worrying.
CHAPTER 4
Rex
I find myself standing in the moonlight, charged with intense mating energy. I’ve been horny before, but not like this. This arousal feels like an order being handed down from the dawn of time. It’s a primal need that verges on essential. If I do not breathe, I cannot survive. And I cannot survive if I do not claim my mate.
I know precisely where she is, of course. As if I would ever let her out of my oversight again. As if a day of her life will go past in which I do not know where she is and what she is doing, in which my eyes, or the eyes of those who act as mine are not on her.
I walked away in the middle of the day, left when the sun still shone, allowed her to have a small sense of victory, perhaps. But I suspect that sense of winning will not have lasted long. A mate bond is more powerful than either of the people involved. We are being drawn together inexorably across space and time and the matter of our joining is an inevitability.
The sun has set. The moon has risen. Darkness has covered us, and now I will do what must be done.
The Runaway wolves have taken refuge in a loft apartment. Amusingly enough, the building also belongs to me, albeit through a shell company. They ran from one place I own to another. An easy mistake to make, I suppose. Most of this city belongs to me, one way or another.
If they were actually capable of mounting a real challenge to the Regent pack, they would be sophisticated enough to know these things, but they keep making these amateurish mistakes.
I enter the building and take the elevator to the penultimate floor. From there, I go up to the roof. The building has fallen into silence as the night turns long. On top of the roof, I remove the sweater that Fescue would mourn as if it were one of his own children, and I take my wolf form. I lift my face to the moon, letting her energy flow through me as my body takes on another form, a truer one. My teeth lengthen, my mouth becomes a fierce maw. My muscles grow, my bones bend and extend. I grow a thick, dark pelt and I see through eyes designed to hunt and hold.