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Inside, the harem was so pink I had to close my eyes for one split second. Pink walls. Pink furniture. Pink-clad women standing in a circle with joined hands.
Between us and them, Marina guided the portal opening like an orchestra conductor. The junction between earth and the Otherworld was a black hole that made the surrounding pink pinker. A looming pit of danger that, I suspected, was responsible for the stench I’d recently waded through.
And yet, the harem girls didn’t struggle against its opening. Instead, they closed their eyes and swayed to inaudible music. They tilted their chins toward the awfulness as if soaking up the sun.
They were in league with Marina, or at least appeared to be. Were we really going to have to take down all the McCallister females in order to save their pack?
Moralities, however, slipped away from me as Marina spun to face us. She was outside the circle of pink-clad women but she moved in time with them. Meanwhile, behind her back and within the portal’s darkness, shapes coalesced. Shimmering. Gleaming. Like clouds of floral-scented smoke.
The fae were through, but they weren’t yet solid....
Then a harem girl fell to her knees and the circle broke. Fae began materializing. There weren’t half a dozen, the way I’d assumed from their voices. There were hundreds. Far too many to count.
And Tank didn’t hesitate. He flung himself at the clouds of half-solid enemies, swinging his sword in broad arcs that whipped through a handful of fae with each stroke. The ones he cut down dissipated into nothing, but there were so many left.
There were hundreds of fae to fight...and every minute more emerged into solidity. The newcomers were feeding, I realized as the harem girls’ swaying turned boneless, on the shifters’ connections to their own subpack.
“Jasmine! You have to get them out of here!” I yelled, pressing toward the pink-clad women.
“Tell your mother how to suck eggs, why don’t you?” Jasmine shot back, wading into the spinning haze of fae. Her slat was raised, but defensively rather than offensively. “Ladies,” she said. “Follow me.”
They didn’t, of course. If they’d been in their right minds, they wouldn’t have assisted Marina’s portal-opening in the first place. Instead, they stood there, more bobbing than swaying at this point. The few open eyes were glazed and faint smiles curved each woman’s lips.
And the fae swirled between us and them. Every time I tried to take a step forward, two fae pushed me backward. They weren’t solid enough—yet—to do real damage, but I still ended up being buffeted like a boat in stormy seas.
Jasmine was doing no better. The bed slats, unlike Tank’s sword, weren’t sharp enough to cause serious damage. The metal protected us, but that was it.
Still, I did have an awful lot of slats on hand....
So I did the only thing I could think of. I remembered the way Harper had gained assertiveness after spending just a few hours among werewolves. She’d been buoyed up by pack and had risen to the challenge. Was that all Rowan’s harem needed? To be shown their own strength?
Slipping the bundle of slats between my knees, I drew one out and flung it. Another. Another. Tossing them through the air.
Weapons whipped across the haze of fae, who ducked rather than trying to catch them. I tossed seven slats into the cloud of fae and harem girls, keeping only one for myself.
Metal spun through the air, seeming to catch sunlight even though that was impossible down here in the basement. A slat cut through one immaterial fae’s shoulder and he bared smoky yet still sharp teeth that were far too large to be human. I couldn’t tell if the gesture was a laugh or a scream.
Probably the former, since he twisted his smoke tighter and began drifting toward me. Randomly flung slats wasn’t the way to expel our enemies back to the Otherworld. Plus, seven slats was nothing in this battle against hundreds of ethereal beings.
But I wasn’t trying to kill the fae. I was trying to wake the harem girls. Give them a weapon. Prove they weren’t helpless to impact their own fates.
The first slat hit a harem girl on the forehead. She stumbled backwards, sinking to the ground. I winced. My ploy wasn’t working.
But Jasmine caught on and ran with it. Her voice turned fierce as she dove for the fallen slat and sent it spinning back upwards. “You’re wolves,” she growled, sounding for all the world like Ryder at his surliest. “Act like it!”
This time, the slat was grabbed out of the air by a girl Harper’s age. The next slat I’d thrown thudded into the fist of a mature woman. Four, five, six, seven. One after another, the rest were caught.
“Now fight!” Jasmine ordered, suiting actions to words by slicing at encircling fae.
Maybe the burst of command was what did it. Or maybe the harem girls were boosted simply because the handlocked circle had broken. Either way, glazed eyes cleared. Smiles turned into frowns.
“Slice through their chests!” Jasmine called, repeating my instructions.
And they did. Slats caught the air, caught fae not yet materialized. The harem girls were more successful than Jasmine and I had been. Perhaps because they were at the center of the portal? Because their energy had been used to open the node wider? Whatever the reason, hazy fae poofed into nothing beneath their onslaught. The room was growing less crowded rather than more so.
But the solidified fae weren’t so easily vanquished. One grabbed the hair of a teenager who fell, shrieking. Another swept an older woman off her feet.
The members of the harem weren’t trained in swordcraft. Like me, they had little chance of standing up in the face of outright battle....
Before I could speak, though, Jasmine was on it. “Lillian, grab Catherine’s legs,” she barked. “Minta, take her feet. You and you, help McKenzie up.”
The fallen woman was lifted. The teenager scrambled upright with the help of her compatriots. The harem girl I’d accidentally struck in the head was also on her feet.
Those with weapons formed a bristling circle protecting the unarmed from damage. Slowly but surely, they inched backwards. Away from the portal. Away from danger. Tank and I were the only ones in the midst of the fae now. I turned to help him...
...And found Marina in front of me. She smiled, the chill of her regard raising goosebumps all over my skin.
***
SHE WAS GLAD TO SEE me. That couldn’t be good.
I jabbed out with my slat, ignoring the tremors of wrongness sliding through my body. Marina had no weapon and made no move to stop me, so this should have been easy.
It wasn’t. I felt like I was trying to push a needle through a bar of iron. My arm moved a mere millimeter before freezing into place.
Marina smiled then, the fruity scent of her breath seductively awful. She raised one perfectly arched eyebrow. “Are you ready to discuss your boon?”
Behind me, the slap of bare feet against pavement promised that Jasmine and the other women were fleeing the harem. I was glad. They were safer gone. Still, I swallowed as I realized Tank and I were the only ones left to deal with the fae.
“My boon?” I asked, risking a glance sideways. Tank’s sword had been remarkably effective. There were less than a dozen fae left now, although the ones who remained were sucking up the remnants of the others. As if each fae sent back to the Otherworld left all of their energy behind.
“Yes.” Marina took a step closer, whipping my attention back to her. Her voice sweetened and I tasted elderberry syrup, as if I was an ailing child being dosed by her mother. “So many opportunities for you to consider.”
I tried to ignore her words and stab her torso just like I’d told Jasmine to do. But my arm wasn’t moving. Instead, something forced me to consider what Marina had to say.
Ideas I’d dismissed swirled around me like yellow jackets above rotting fruit in an abandoned orchard. Harper’s social network. Tank’s charisma. My place in the werewolf world.
Marina took another step forward, the buzz of yellow jackets turning into words of seduction. “Do you really want to depend on the goodwill of an alpha to keep yourself and your sister safe?”
I flinched, my bed slat drooping between us. In the midst of everything, I’d let myself forget about the future. About the fact the Samhain Shifters would disband in a matter of hours, leaving me bound by Rowan’s whims.
Rowan’s whims weren’t likely to be very friendly, either. Not after I’d led an invasion onto his home turf.
Alternatively, if I accepted the veiled offer Tank had provided, I’d become bound by the whims of another alpha. An alpha I’d never met in person. Sure, Gunner had seemed like a nice guy over the telephone. He’d called in favors to build an army of reinforcements.
But that was for Tank’s sake. Not for mine.
“Or perhaps you want to work within the system. Win a debt of gratitude from your mate. If he owed you, he’d protect you.”
I’d been stung by a yellow jacket once as a child. The wound hurt, but the terrifying part was the swelling in my throat. The way it became difficult to breathe.
I could barely breathe now. Had enough air left in my lungs for one word, if I was lucky.
Out of the corner of one eye, I caught the flicker of motion as a fae scratched a long streak across Tank’s face. The cut was deep. The beginning of another scar?
“He’ll be even more hideous after this battle,” Marina mused. She almost looked like a yellow jacket. Her waist was slender, her eyes large. “But I can fix that for you....”
Pack, my wolf whispered, a thread of longing.
So I said it. The only thing I could say. Croaked out his name. “Tank.”
Marina smiled, the facial twitch thoroughly inhuman. The scent of rotting fruit was so strong now that it choked me. She thought I was making the choice she’d boxed me into. She thought she’d won.
But I wasn’t talking about Tank. I was talking to him. And he’d been listening, waiting for my cue.
The instant I spoke, he spun away from the fae. Toward Marina....
If fae had been wolves, at least one of the newcomers would have called out a warning to his mistress. The woman they were indebted to. The one who’d brought them over from the faery world.
But fae weren’t wolves. Instead, they watched, beautiful lips curving into beautiful smiles, ready for their debts to be zeroed out the easy way.
Meanwhile, Tank’s eyes met mine, a question. Did I want this? Was I ready to trust my fate and Harper’s fate to a pack with no fae-created safety net?
There was no question about it. I nodded.
And, like Ryder had admitted doing to his alpha, Tank stabbed Marina in the back.