Grayslake: Furrever Yours(28)

A bolt of fear shot through Heather.

“Are you crazy? He’s going to claim me.” Heather took a step back.

“Sez you. I can smell your fear, skin. I like it.”

Now she wasn’t just scared, she was pissed. “Your Alpha told you to stay away from me.”

“No, he told me to stay out of his house. I’m not in his house. Oh, he may be mad for a little while, but he’ll get over it, and he’ll see that him and me were meant to be together. He loved me until you came along, you bitch.”

She shifted into wolf form, sinking down to all fours. She crouched low.

A cry came from the bushes.

“Heather, run!” Olive shouted.

Olive burst out of the underbrush, shifting as she went. She was small and lean and her snout was grizzled; she was probably half Sasha’s size, but she hurled herself at Sasha with utter ferocity. She leaped on top of Sasha and the two female wolves began rolling in the dirt, struggling to get at each other’s necks.

Heather turned to run, but then she saw that Sasha was getting the best of Olive. She grabbed a thick stick from the ground and ran back. As Sasha lunged for Olive’s throat, Heather brought the stick down on Sasha’s snout as hard as she could.

Sasha reared back, her jaws bloodied, and let out a rumbling snarl. Olive latched on to Sasha’s leg with her jaws, and Sasha yelped and twisted around to bite Olive hard. Heather screamed when she saw the blood flowing from Olive’s flank, and she hit Sasha again, so hard that the shock vibrated up the stick and hurt her hands.

Then a giant wolf barreled into the fray and tore an enormous strip of flesh from Sasha’s side. Sasha went flying, sending a spray of red blood everywhere.

Olive’s wolf lay on the ground, whimpering, blood matting her gray fur.

Knox quickly shifted back to human form, and Sasha did too.

“I didn’t break any laws! You haven’t claimed her yet! You can’t hurt me!” she wailed.

“You bitch, you attacked the woman I plan to claim. I’m not going to hurt you.” Sasha’s face lit up with hope. “I’m going to kill you. And I’m going to claim Heather as my mate.”

Sasha shifted back into wolf form in mere seconds, and ran for her life.

Knox knelt down and scooped Olive up in his arms.

“She won’t get far,” he growled. “Heather, you okay?”

“I’m fine. Olive. I don’t know anything about werewolf medicine. What do we do for her? Take her to the hospital?”

“No, our healer will take care of it. She’s a tough old bird. She’ll be fine.” Heather could hear the worry in his voice, though. Olive, still in wolf form, managed a wink, although the blood was flowing freely and splattering on the ground.

They ran back to the house at full speed.

“How did you know where to find me?” Heather panted as they ran up the front steps.

“I had a bad feeling that you’d be in danger, so I came home,” Knox said. “Fated mates have that kind of intuition about each other.”

The pack crowded around them, uttering cries of dismay. Knox growled orders, and issued a command that Sasha’s family was to be evicted from their property and banished from the county. Sasha was to be taken into custody; he’d deal with her personally.

“She’ll be fine,” the pack healer, Orson, assured them as he stood over Olive. She was now in human form, tucked into bed. “Just give me a little time with her. And we all need to make sure that she doesn’t get out of bed for at least the next week. You know what a stubborn old…uh…person, she is.”

“I’ll old you. Bite my furry ass,” Olive murmured faintly.

“Yep, she’s fine,” Knox said with a relieved grin.

Then he grabbed Heather by the arm and led her out of the room.

“No more delays,” he said. “I need to protect you. You’re my woman. I love you. I want to father your cubs and have you by my side forever. Do you feel the same?”

“Oh, yes,” she breathed, feeling her heart grow bigger in her chest. “From the first minute I met you. Except I didn’t know our children would be called cubs.”

He stalked to the end of the hallway and stuck his head through the door, yelling into the living room.

“Listen!” he called out to the assembled pack. “Anyone who comes upstairs to my room before tomorrow morning dies. No exceptions.”

Well, that was embarrassing. Now everybody knew what they’d be doing.

And yet, when she thought about what was going to happen in just a minute, she forgot about the rest of the pack, forgot about everything except Knox, her lover, her mate…