Wild Night Road(8)

Owen’s mood sank deeper into despair. For the first time in his life, he felt a kinship with humans that was as unwelcome as it was honest. Their fear, his fear, in the presence of an alpha wasn’t irrational. It was the very smart, hell-bent-on-survival reaction of a lesser creature faced with a being whose power was so vast in comparison to his own; it might as well have been infinite.
He was well and truly fucked.
Still, he’d grown up with Lost Legacy’s alpha, and he knew damn well Lan’s power wasn’t anything close to infinite. The same had to be true of the Pacific Range pack alpha.
That truth didn’t make the fear roiling in his gut any more bearable. Combined with the residual pain from proximity to Tasha’s hexed mark, he felt as weak as a nursing pup.
Gideon Black was pure feral menace wrapped in denim and leather, gliding through the crowd with a ballet dancer’s grace. He’d tied his long black hair at the back of his neck, no doubt in honor of this rare appearance in public. With his high cheekbones, blade of a nose and massive shoulders, he could have passed for a million-dollar athlete slumming on the coast. However, it was the brutal energies he wielded as an alpha that rolled before him like an invisible, slow-motion tsunami, announcing to all but the most psychically dead of humans that here walked a monster who could quash their tiny lives with a gesture.
A monster to whom Owen was about to make a gift of Tasha McNeil.






 
    Nine by Night: A Multi-Author Urban Fantasy Bundle of Kickass Heroines, Adventure,   Magic
    
 


 

CHAPTER FOUR


Lilith leaned against the weathered gray siding in the alley behind Chill, her heart beating as fast as if she’d run a race. The breeze off the ocean cooled her heated skin, calmed her emotions.
What the hell had she been thinking? Forcing the were out of the bar? Normally, yes, that was what she’d do, but now?
Wrong.
For nearly two weeks since she’d hexed Tasha McNeil, there’d been no movement. Barely a ripple in the magickal link that connected her to the woman the were had marked. She’d begun the think that all her work would come to nothing. But on this night when the currents of power that flowed just outside the range of human perception boiled with intensity, Owen White and Tasha McNeil were under the same roof.
Energies like the ones loose tonight were hell on a were’s control. She’d seen more than one strong and experienced were snap under half this much pressure. On top of that, Owen wasn’t just any were—he was the brother of the Lost Legacy pack’s alpha, Landelarc Sable, and a powerful near-alpha in his own right.
Tasha and Owen had had sex at least once, Lilith knew, but for whatever reason, they hadn’t bonded yet. If she’d wanted verification, she could have accessed her hex and delved into Tasha’s memories, maybe given the couple a nudge to complete the bonding process, but the idea of tapping into Tasha’s sexual experiences with the were turned her stomach. It would be all the bad parts of a three-way without any of the benefits.
Tasha seemed to have enjoyed it, however. That much she’d permitted herself to pickup from the hex that linked her to the woman. One more fuck, maybe two, she guessed, was all it would take. The pair would be bonded mates and because of her little trick, the brother of Lost Legacy’s alpha would belong to Lilith as much as he did to Tasha.
Too cozy for comfort and slightly kinky. In other words, just what she’d planned.
She didn’t give a pack rat’s patootie about Owen White or his brother, but she cared a great deal about the Council of the Kinraven that ruled the affairs of all magickal folk in the earth realm. Through the bond with Tasha and Owen, she could, by right if not title, demand a seat on the Council of the Kinraven.
Then the great ones, weres, lyrinye, and seraphim alike, would pay the price for the long-ago banning of witches from their precious deliberations.
Closing her eyes, she leaned her head back and laughed softly, imagining the shock on the patrician faces of the lordly seraphim. Heavens! They might molt! Feathers would rain from the skies.#p#分页标题#e#
Humans would think their apocalypse had arrived and cower in their prepped bunkers.
The beastly weres would growl their fury and the hideous lyrinye would hiss beneath the cold waves, but rules were rules. The Kinraven council had proved their adherence to law and order time and again. No matter how much it would pain them to concede, they would not break the accords simply to deny her a seat. They would hate on her. They would make her presence at every convening a living hell.
But Lilith Darke knew a thing or three about hell and doubted they could teach her anything new.