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chapter 34
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2022-06-28 16:21:20Related chapters
FEMALE APHA'S STOLEN BIRTHRIGHT chapter 35
“This is new to me as well.” He grinned at her, a flash and gone. The oddly boyish expression managed to make him look sheepish despite a certain sharp edge. “I’m not used to being jealous, or having so little control. It’s not just the bullet wounds, though they don’t help.” They stood there for a while more, his hand under her chin. Lauren was afraid to move for fear she would provoke the rage that kept his eyes wolf yellow or do something that might hurt him the way she’d hurt him with her flinch. She didn’t know what Toby was waiting for. He spoke first. “My father told me that there was something bothering you when you lethe church this morning. Was it Asil? Or was it something else?” She took a step sideways. He let her go, but his hand slid from her face to her shoulder, and she couldn’t make herself take another step and lose that touch. He was going to think she was a neurotic idiot if she didn’t get a better grip on herself. “Nothing was bothering me. I’m fine.” He sighed.
Last Updated : 2022-06-28FEMALE APHA'S STOLEN BIRTHRIGHT chapter 36
Toby was a monster. His father’s assassin. She wouldn’t allow herself to believe a lie again. If Brian had told him to, he would have killed Jack. Killed him knowing that the human was only a victim, that he was probably a good man. But it wouldn’t have been casual. She’d seen the relief that had flowed over him when Brian had found an alternative to killing the human. Her mate was a killer, but he didn’t enjoy it. Looking at it clearly, she was a little awed at how he’d managed to be so civilized and still meet the demands of who and what he was required to be. The water was cooling off. She shampooed her hair, enjoying the way the soap rinsed away so easily; Chicago water was much softer. She conditioned her hair with something that smelled of herbs and mint, recognizing the scent from Toby’s hair. By that time, the water was starting to become uncomfortably cold. She took a long time combing out the tangles without looking at the mirror and concentrated on feeling nothing. She was
Last Updated : 2022-06-28FEMALE APHA'S STOLEN BIRTHRIGHT chapter 37
She was forced to push her back a little so she could get a clear sense of what he was trying to tell her. “And I would do this why?” Did he want her to refuse him? Her throat was dry as dust. She, human and wolf both, craved him like a junkie just as she craved all the things he seemed to promise: safety, love, hope a place to belong. She rubbed nervous hands on her thighs as if that would soothe her tension away. He whispered, “I hope you don’t. But you need to be told of your options.” His hands were fisted on his thighs. She smelled something sharp in his scent that she hadn’t before. Dadmn Leo that he’d left her crippled by ignorance. She’d give her right hand to know what Toby was feeling, to know when he was telling the truth—and when he was just trying not to hurt her. He was waiting for her answer, but she didn’t know what to say. “Options.” She tried for neutrality. What did he want of her? Evidently not neutrality. His fists opened and closed twice. Nostrils flared wide, he
Last Updated : 2022-06-28FEMALE APHA'S STOLEN BIRTHRIGHT chapter 38
ASIL dreamed of a familiar house: small and well made, a house built for a warm climate with carefully tended orange trees by the door. He paused beside the bench positioned where it would catch the shade of the biggest orange tree when the sun was high in the sky. Running a finger over the clumsy jointing between two of the pieces that formed the back, he wished vainly that he’d had time to fix it. Even knowing what was going to happen, he couldn’t make himself stay by the bench, not when Sarai was in the house. He had no photographs of her, nor had any of the paintings he’d attempted ever done her justice. His artistic talent was plebeian at best. Only in his dreams did he see her. He took only a step and found himself in the main room. Half shop, half kitchen, the room should have been utilitarian, but Sarai had hung baskets of plants and painted flowers on tiles set in the floor, making it feel welcoming. On the worktable set near the back of the room, his mate ground a cinnamon s
Last Updated : 2022-06-28FEMALE APHA'S STOLEN BIRTHRIGHT chapter 39
Toby continued to rock the porch swing gently back and forth. Encounters with Asil usually started with a power play of some sort. After a few minutes, Asil walked past the porch swing to the railing that enclosed the porch. He hopped on it, one bare foot flat on the rail, leg bent. The other fell carelessly off to the side. He wore jeans and nothing else, and his wet hair, where it wasn’t touching his skin, began to frost in the cold, matching the silver marks that decorated his back; Asil was one of the few werewolves Toby had seen who bore scars. The marks sliced into the back of his ribs where some other werewolf had Dadmaged him—almost exactly, Toby realized, where his own wounds were. But Asil’s scars had been inflicted by claws, not bullet holes. He posed a lot, did Asil. Toby was never sure if it was deliberate or only an old habit. Asil stared out at the woods beyond his house, still encased in the shadows of early morning before Dadwn, rather than looking at Toby. Despite th
Last Updated : 2022-06-28FEMALE APHA'S STOLEN BIRTHRIGHT chapter 40
Toby rinsed out his cup and turned it upside down in the sink. He was not usually so careless. Asil’s mate had died, tortured to death by a witch who used her pain and death to gain power. For all that he found Asil irritating— especially his latest and most effective method of torment: Lauren—he’d never deliberately use Asil’s mate’s death to torment him. But more apologies would accomplish nothing. He muttered a soft plea for blessing upon the house, as his mother’s brother had taught him, and left. LAUREN was glad Toby drove this time. The icy roads gave him no apparent concern, though they slid around enough that she dug her nails into the handle conveniently located above the window of her door. He hadn’t said much to her this morning after he’d returned from consulting with the forest ranger. His eyes were distant, as if the teasing, gentle man she’d woken up with was gone. Her fault. She hadn’t expected to feel so much after she’d sent her wolf to sleep while she showered. They
Last Updated : 2022-06-28FEMALE APHA'S STOLEN BIRTHRIGHT chapter 41
As their road narrowed into a white scar between steep hills crowding in on both sides, she wondered if “highway” was the right word for it. “Our mating bond didn’t become permanent last night,” he said out of the blue. She stared at him, feeling the familiar flutter of panic. What did that mean? Had she done something wrong? “You said that all we needed to do was . . .” She found she couldn’t quite get the next few words out. In the cold light of Day they sounded so crude. “Apparently I was wrong,” he told her. “I assumed since we’d gotten the most difficult part of being mated out of the way, all we needed was consummation.” She didn’t know what to say to that. “It is probably better,” he said abruptly. “Why?” She hadn’t known if she’d be able to get out a word, but she sounded, to her ears, merely curious, none of the panicky feeling that had closed over her at his words evident in her voice. But she didn’t come anywhere near the disinterested neutrality he brought to his voice. “
Last Updated : 2022-06-28FEMALE APHA'S STOLEN BIRTHRIGHT chapter 42
When he’d tightened her straps to his satisfaction, he’d told her that the old beavertails or bearpaws had been almost as much trouble as help. The new snowshoes were one of the few inventions of modern life that he seemed to thoroughly approve of. She had to scramble a bit to keep up with him. If this was slow, she wondered if he normally ran when he was in the woods, even in human form. None of his wounds seemed to be bothering him much, and there had been no fresh blood on his bandages this morning. She pulled her thoughts away from why she’d had such a good look at the banDadges this morning. Even so, she couldn’t help but look at him and smile, if only a little to herself. Out in the snow and covered with layers of clothing and coats, she felt insulated from the terrors of intimacy and could better appreciate the good parts. And Toby had a lot of good parts. Under his coat she knew exactly how broad his shoulders were and how his skin Dadrkened just a little behind his ears. She
Last Updated : 2022-06-28
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FEMALE APHA'S STOLEN BIRTHRIGHT chapter 61
When you failed, you and that other wolf—Brian would send only the best. You lie and lie as if it were the truth.” “You don’t want to believe me,” Asil said. “But you can taste truth—your link to Sarai is strong enough. You were a danger to yourself and us. We did it for your own good. It was that or kill you.” She flicked a trembling finger at him. “Shut up.” Asil’s face lost its cool composure, and he grimaced. As he continued, his voice was breathless with pain. “What you have done is an abomination. This thing you have turned Sarai into doesn’t love you, she serves as a slave serves, without the ability to choose, just as I do. Brian is more than you can handle. He will kill you—and it is your own fault.” “I won’t die,” she shouted at him. “I didn’t die when Linnea tried to kill me —she didn’t know how powerful I was or how much my mother had taught me. I killed her and her pet students and studied the books she left behind— for months I wrote to you and signed the letters from he
FEMALE APHA'S STOLEN BIRTHRIGHT chapter 60
Brian would hold out for a while. First, the witch could make a mistake— especially if she didn’t know whom she held. Second, he was afraid that this time no one would be able to kill him. It had been Samuel who brought him out of it before . . . and Samuel wasn’t as certain of himself as he used to be. The control the witch asserted over him had to be won by blood and flesh, and the only flesh and blood bonding he’d done was to his own pack. She must have used Asil to insert herself into his pack—but how? While she looked him over, he searched his link to Asil for something that touched a witch. He paid very little attention to the witch as she talked at him. With the dexterity of a very long lifetime, Brian slid through Asil and found a dead woman—it could only be Asil’s mate. It was an impossibility. No one could link to a dead woman; he knew that because when Blue Jay Woman, Toby’s mother, died, he’d tried to hold on to her. But, impossibilities become possible when you added a wi
FEMALE APHA'S STOLEN BIRTHRIGHT chapter 59
Since the cabin hadn’t kept him out and he didn’t feel the need to leave, he could only assume that the circle was the latter kind—which meant that there were more dead things under the floor. He took a deep breath, but the dead animal he’d already seen might account for the scent of death—and nothing was rotting. Either the animal she’d killed to draw her circle hadn’t been dead long—it had frozen in the cold— or she had a spell to disguise it to keep away scavengers. Changing what the senses of others perceived was one of the major powers of the witch. His father said that Toby might have been a witch if he’d chosen to study. Brian hadn’t urged him to do so, but he also didn’t discourage it, either; a witch in his pack would have given him even more power. But the subtler magics of his mother’s people suited Toby, and he’d never regretted the path he’d chosen less than he did right now, standing in the middle of this poor cabin stained with evil. The scent on the sleeping bag on the
FEMALE APHA'S STOLEN BIRTHRIGHT chapter 58
THE darkness bothered Brian not at all as he followed Tag’s directions to the place he and Toby had thought would be the best starting point. He passed Asil’s Subaru and hesitated—if Asil had been going after Toby, he’d have known the fastest way there. But Toby would be headed back to his car if something had gone wrong. So Brian kept driving. Other things he might do ran through his head. There were witches in the pay of the wolves. Not his pack—he didn’t deal with black witches, and most white witches weren’t powerful enough to be useful. But there were witches available to him. If he had a two-hundred-year-old witch capable of holding and torturing a werewolf for two dadsys—he had no intention of advertising the fact and encouraging other witches to imitate this one. Especially since she, like Brian’s mother, might have gotten her ability through some kind of binding to a werewolf. No. Best keep the witches out of it. He could call Toby back. That was a harder thing. Telepathy was
FEMALE APHA'S STOLEN BIRTHRIGHT chapter 57
LAUREN opened her eyes in the dadsrkness, certain that something had wakened her again. She raised her head from Toby’s warm, sweet[1]smelling skin and looked around. Dennis was nowhere to be seen, and sometime in the night, she and Toby had reversed positions, so he lay between her and dadsnger. The wind and snow had ceased, leaving the forest silent and waiting. “Me transmitte sursum, Caledoni,” she murmured. Too bad Scotty wasn’t around to beam them to safety. There was something about the heavy atmosphere that was frightening. She listened hard but heard nothing. The weighted silence pounded on her ears and made the beat of her heart even louder in the stillness of the winter night. Her heartbeat, her breath was the only thing she could hear. “Toby?” she whispered, touching his shoulder tentatively. When he didn’t respond, she shook him. His body fell away from her. He’d been lying on his side, but he rolled limply out from under their barely adequate shelter and onto the snow. Th
FEMALE APHA'S STOLEN BIRTHRIGHT chapter 56
AS soon as Toby went out to talk to Asil, Lauren had begun her change. She needed to deal with that wolf with her tongue rather than fang and claw. He was too good at riling her mate—and Toby was still volatile from his encounter with the witch. She didn’t give any thought to Dennis until she was naked and panting in the cold night air. She might have had three years to get used to being nude in front of people she didn’t know well, but he hadn’t. She glanced at him, but he had his head turned away from her and was staring intently at a nearby tree trunk, the perfect gentleman. She quit worrying about him and scrambled into her chilly clothes and boots because she could sense Toby’s rising rage at Asil; Asil had put the Marrok and his pack at risk. But more than that, she was worried that neither Toby nor Asil realized how close Toby was to his breaking point. She found it curious that she did. Boots on, coat on, Lauren rolled out of their sleeping place and onto her feet. She didn’t
FEMALE APHA'S STOLEN BIRTHRIGHT chapter 55
He called the magic to him and let it rip through his body, changing as he walked. It hurt, but he knew it didn’t show on his face or make his limp any worse. If he’d been healthier and the spirits willing, he might even have been able to conjure up a new pair of snowshoes instead of having to wade. At least the snow on the bench, regularly scoured by the wind, was only a foot or so deep most places—half of that had fallen tonight. Asil smiled a little, as if he recognized Toby’s power play for what it was, but he dropped his eyes. Though Toby knew better than to trust the submission in the other’s body language, it was enough for now. Toby kept his voice low. “How did you find us?” It was an important question. They were nowhere near the place they’d have been camping if he and Lauren had followed the trip as he’d outlined it with Tag. Had he done something stupid that would let the witch find them, too? The oddities of the past twenty-four hours had badly shaken his confidence—and t
FEMALE APHA'S STOLEN BIRTHRIGHT chapter 54
Afterward, she lay panting and miserable on the ice-crystal-covered snow, too tired to move. Even cold, she discovered, had a smell. Gradually, as her misery faded, she realized that for the first time since last night, when Toby had curled around her and surrounded her with his warmth, she felt toasty-warm. As the initial agony faded to aches and pains, she stretched, making her claws expand and lengthen like a big cat’s. Her back popped and crackled all the way down her spine. She didn’t want to go back and curl up with a strange male only feet away. The wolf wasn’t afraid of the male. She knew he wasn’t likely to behave like the Others. But she didn’t much like the idea of touching anyone other than Toby, either. Near but out of sight, a wolf, Toby, made a quiet sound, not quite a bark or a whine. Wobbly as a newborn foal, she staggered to her feet. She paused to shake the snow off her pelt and give herself a moment to get used to four paws before starting back, her clothes in her
FEMALE APHA'S STOLEN BIRTHRIGHT chapter 53
Did she still regret that? Toby was overcome with the wild desire to kill them all again, Leo and his mate, the whole Chicago pack—but at the same time he was pathetically grateful that his mate was a werewolf who wouldn’t fade and die the way Samuel’s wives all had. Brother Wolf stirred and settled down, just like Dennis had. “The wolf who attacked you didn’t come back to you, then, after you Changed?” Toby asked. Usually when a wolf Changed someone, it was drawn back to the new werewolf for a while. Mostly, Samuel had theorized to him once, some genetic imperative to make sure that an untaught, uncontrolled werewolf wasn’t going to draw too much unwanted attention. Dennis shook his head. “Like I said, I tracked her down myself, after the first full moon—she and that woman. What is she anyway? She sure as hell ain’t human—sorry, ma’am— not with the things I seen her do. She tried to call me to her the first time I Changed. I didn’t know what she was, only that she smelled bad—like th
