City Wolves: Paranormal Shapeshifter Werewolf Romance Bundle (Master of the City / Mistress of the City) (26 page)

He upped the pace, taking her in long, hard strokes and it wasn’t long before she did as told.

“
T
hat was amazing
. Thank you.” Reena smiled up at Archer as they stepped out of the restaurant to wait for the car to be brought around. It had been nice to get away from the pressures of the court and just pretend to be an ordinary couple. To talk about anything and everything. It was a chance for them to learn things about each other because in bed, talking never came into play.

She shivered as her body reminded her what they were like together. Hot. Scorching in fact, and not just in the bedroom. They rocked the back seat of a limo too, as Archer had proven on the way here.

“Cold?” Ever attentive to her every need, he shucked out of his jacket. Bending her head, she brushed her lips against his knuckles as he wrapped it around her shoulders. He tucked his fingers under her chin to lift it for his kiss. She relaxed against him, eager to pick up where they’d left off before. Who would have thought at the Choosing that things would turn out this way? That she’d find a man who got her, and he turned out not to be a wolf at all.

Perhaps because they were wrapped up in each other, neither of them noticed anything wrong about the street around them. Archer stiffened against her, his lips slack. A second later, he collapsed in front of her, sprawling on the sidewalk.

“Archer! Help! Someone call an ambulance!” She was down by his side in an instant, jamming her fingers into the side of his neck to check for a pulse. What the hell happened? A heart attack or something? Her wolf surged to the fore, concern for their man uppermost in its mind. The instant she breathed in, it snarled and went on alert.

Crouched over the fallen body of her lover, Reena curled her lips back from her teeth as the biggest men she’d ever seen emerged from the shadows, one holding a small stick. It glowed at the end as she’d always imagined a wand would.

“No one’s coming to help, beautiful.” He grinned, the expression not pleasant, and she sucked in a breath as he lifted the wand to point at her. A pulse of something…energy, because she refused to believe magic like that existed…shot from the end and hit her in the arm. “Nighty-night.”

Darkness surged up to claim her, leaving her time for one thought.

His eyes had been red. Like Archer’s.

* * *

R
eena woke with a jerk
. Groaning, she rolled to her side and tried to remember how much she drank the night before to have a hangover from hell. Then her wolf’s concern exploded in her mind, filling in all the details her fuzzy head tried to conceal.

“Shit!” She shot upright, eyes wide to scan her surroundings. In the best tradition of kidnapping, she appeared to be in some kind of run down warehouse. Sheesh, didn’t the bad guys ever watch the movies? This would be the first place the packs would look for her. If the packs weren’t behind this. But they couldn’t be. The revelation of just one hellhound had rocked lycan society to the core, so to find more and conceal them? Not happening.

“Well, fair to say she’s awake.”

The announcement came from behind her. Reena whipped around, the rapid turn making her squint as her head complained bitterly. Poking at her wolf, she got it repairing the damage, at least to a level she didn’t feel sick. Nothing more. She didn’t want to waste energy in case she needed to fight. The pain wouldn’t slow her. It made her meaner.

Four big,
big
, men sat on packing crates behind her in various stages of relaxation. One was cleaning what looked like an assault rifle and didn’t look at her while the other three sat closer and watched her with interest. All had red eyes.

“You’re Hellhounds.”

Not a question, a statement. There was no sense in pretending she didn’t know what they were. Even if she hadn’t seen Archer shift, she’d have known from their scent there was something different about them. The scent of a Hellhound was like nothing else.

The man on the left, in front of the guy with the rifle, looked at the others. Not the one who’d used the wand on her, but another one. Wand-user was nowhere to be seen. So there were at least five of them. Could be more. And they wore what looked like combat uniforms. Perhaps soldiers?

“We are,” the one who appeared to be their leader answered, his arms folded across a massive chest. She’d thought Archer was big, but this one outstripped him. He was like a damn tank, even as a human. She dreaded to think what he’d look like as a hound. “You’ve seen hellhounds before.”

She was in no mood to play games. “You know I have. The man I was with is a hellhound. Where is he? If you’ve hurt him, so help me, I’ll—”

“You’ll what, little wolf?” The hound grinned. “What do you think one little wolf can do against…” He slapped a big hand against his chest, indicating his greater size and more powerful nature.

She arched an eyebrow. Cool, play it cool. Hounds were just like wolves, only larger. And more powerful. And with abilities she didn’t have. Ignoring the tiny whimper in the back of her mind, she and her wolf gave him a stare to look at. One thing she’d learned as mistress was never show fear. Ever.

“One wolf?” She laughed, a light, melodious sound in the cavernous interior of the warehouse. Bigger than she’d thought then. “Whatever makes you think there’s just me? I’m the Mistress of the City.”

The hound shook his head. “Is that supposed to mean something?”

She blinked at that. Allowed surprise to show on her features.

“You’re telling me you didn’t check out the locality before you snatched us? Forgive me, but you appear to be some kind of military unit, so you not preparing seems…odd.”

Or just plain dumb, but she didn’t say that part out loud. She didn’t have a death wish. Not really. Unless they’d hurt Archer, in which case she’d go batshit on their asses.

The leader had the grace to look a little discomforted, but quickly shut it down. “Lycans aren’t my specialty. Tal?”

The hound at the back looked up, red-eyed like the rest, but in his case they were duller, more a banked fire type of red. Shit, were there different types of hellhounds as well? His lips quirked with amusement, apparently at his leader’s expense.

Carefully, she backed up. No sudden moves. Before she got more than a step or two, a tendril of shadow snaked out and wrapped itself around her ankle. She froze, knowing from Archer that the more she struggled, the tighter the bond would wrap. Great. There was no place she could run where they couldn’t get her.

“Looks like you just upped and kidnaped one of their leaders. Mistress of the City?” Putting the cleaned rifle down, he rose to his feet and approached her, looking her up and down with interest. “Aren’t you too small?”

“It’s not how big it is, it’s what you do with it that counts, asshole,” she snapped. Yeah, so pissing off big, mean hellhounds who could end her in a heartbeat wasn’t the wisest plan. But hey, not like they’d kidnaped her and Archer for a cup of tea and a friendly chat.

“Where is Archer? What have you done with him? If you’ve hurt him, then you fuckers are in for a
world
of pain.” She pulled power from her wolf, the creature all in for taking down as many hellhounds as they could before they got her.

“One wolf? Yeah, you can kill me, but you do and you’ll have to watch your fucking backs because
every
wolf in this city will gun for you. More than that, you take me, a lycan overlord, down and you’ll have to watch your backs in
any
lycan city. Because we protect our own, and every single overlord will be after your blood.” She grinned. Nastily. “Believe me, we’re real inventive and we hold a grudge. For years. Centuries in some cases.”

The hellhound in front of her blinked, then smiled. “Yeah, I can see why one of ours would find you attractive. You’re a right little spitfire.”

Okay, so maybe she might get out of this alive. Reena breathed a sigh of relief, one that was short lived as the hound leader stood.

“So, let’s see what you got,
wolf
. I mean, we should kill you on the spot for cross-species fraternization, but I tell you what, amuse us enough and we might let you both live.”

Reena curled her lips back and snarled at him.

She might be about to die, but there was no way on earth she was going down on her own.

“Bring it on, asshole.”

With that, she let her wolf form rip from her.

* * *

T
he sound
of snarls and combat drew Archer to wakefulness. For a moment, he lay in the comfortable darkness, listening. Some dogs outside the barracks, fighting over scraps of trash. But… the snarls and growls were deep. Too low. Those must be some fucking big dogs to make noises like that.

He sighed and tried to turn over, intending to ignore the noise and go back to sleep. The feel of cold concrete against his skin rather than the soft pillow he’d expected made his eyes snap open. Three thoughts filled his mind.

He wasn’t in the army anymore…

Those weren’t dogs he heard…

And he hadn’t been human for weeks.

The monster within him surged to life, feeding him information as he took a breath in. He was in a warehouse, that much he could tell from the stacked crates, and from the smell in the air, they were somewhere near the docks. And he wasn’t alone. There were others like him, at least four, and a lycan.

Reena.

His woman was the owner of the snarl that echoed around the high ceilings of the warehouse. There was a growl followed by a yelp of pain. She was hurt. The roar escaped his throat before the thought was complete and he leaped to his feet. The chains binding his wrists and ankles stopped him for all of a few seconds. Rage burned like a supernova as he clenched his fists. Pushed that heat and power to his skin. The metal wrapped around his limbs bubbled and melted, then fell away.

A voice came from somewhere behind him. “What was that?”

“Nothing. Just an echo from Jed. Shit…she’s fast. Sure she’s not got hound blood?”

The sound of males drew him like a magnet. Crouching, Archer used his powerful thigh muscles to propel him upward to land on the top of the crates separating him from the speakers.

What he saw made his blood boil.

Three men, big men, lounged against packing crates, their attention on a fight in the middle of the floor. This wasn’t an ordinary fight though. Both combatants were shapeshifters morphed into a form somewhere between human and…other. The bigger of the two was a hellhound. Easy to spot with the hardened armor of his skin and the wings that rose from his back as he whirled to slice razor sharp talons through the air where his opponent had been scant moments before.

Without argument, the hound was male. The scent that rose to Archer’s sensitive nose was of a male in his prime, and the overall physique, even in his weird mixed form, resembled a bodybuilder on freakish super-human steroids.

His opponent, though, was smaller and with a curvy shape that screamed female. Unlike the hellhound, she was lycan. Her body was covered in beautiful black fur that made Archer’s hands itch to touch, to see if it was as soft as it looked. She twisted and turned, evading the Hellhound’s blows with the finesse of a prima ballerina. Every so often, she lashed out, her own lethal talons parting the air, and occasionally scoring the hardened skin of her opponent.

Reena. As he’d never seen her before. And from what he’d heard, most of the lycan court hadn’t seen her this way for many years either.

Archer took a moment to appreciate the beauty of her part-shifted form. He’d seen others in the court shift, taking their wolf forms or this part-shifted form, but he had to admit she was something else. She was the biggest damn wolf he’d ever seen. He’d seen plenty of them fight—hell, most fought at the drop of a damn hat—but he’d never seen one with the speed and power she had.

He smiled with pride as she snarled and whipped out a combination move that slammed three solid blows into her opponent before she raked him across the chest with sharp claws. No wonder she’d held the title of Mistress for so long. She was lethality made flesh.

But nothing mortal could stand against a creature pulled from the fiery pit itself.