“It was minor and I’m healed. I shifted, it took care of the injuries.”
Tristan nodded and released his brother. He put out his arm and the redhead who’d entered before him moved to his side slipping under his arm. She placed her head against his chest like a woman who was used to fitting against him.
Abruptly, Tristan turned his head to stare at Leah. She gulped under his gaze, which even through the sunglasses she could feel the heat from.
“You thought it was a good idea to bring one of them into our meeting room?” She knew he wasn’t speaking to her.
Theo answered. “It’s complicated, Trip.”
“Explain it so it’s simple.” He regarded the room for a moment. “Why is everyone speaking aloud, is someone having a problem with the link?”
“The wolf is my mate and her name is Leah St. James.” Az stepped forward, placing himself between Tristan and Theo. She wasn’t sure why he did that but maybe it was one of those male things. “I’m sure you know who that is.”
Tristan pulled off his glasses. Leah took a step back and banged into the wall behind her. His eyes—even in his human form—were wolf eyes and they screamed one word: dominance.
Leaving the redhead, he stepped forward to Leah. Az followed close in his wake, a growl sounding from his throat. Leah didn’t know much about these kinds of things but she would guess it wasn’t a good idea to growl at one’s Alpha.
Tristan turned around to look at his brother and when he turned back to Leah he had an amused smirk on his face. “Relax, Azriel, I am not going to wound your she-wolf.”
“She didn’t ask for this.”
Tristan had been the only one in the pack not to remark on her name and he hadn’t called her ‘made’, which made her disposed to like him even if he was a little scary.
“I know that.” Tristan nodded and stood up. “No one knows better than me what it is like to be trapped as a wolf.” He reached out his hand and she shook as she braced for what she was sure to be a blow. Instead, he patted her on the head. “And no matter what she is she’s ours now.” That last phrase seemed to be directed to the room. He turned around to the pack. “She’s pack.”
In unison, everyone in the room answered. “She’s pack.”
Tristan nodded as if he’d expected no less. “Alright, Azriel—brilliant mind of our pack, now we just need to figure out how to get your woman out of her wolf body and into her human one.”
Cullen moved forward. “It begs the question, my Alpha, is she a shifter trapped in a phony wolf body or is she a non-shifter human who is trapped in a wolf body that she would never have otherwise?”
Az cleared his throat. “We aren’t going to get answers about that since she doesn’t seem to remember anything other than who she is and even that is hampered by the ‘episodes’ of lunacy that overtake her.”
How do you know I can’t remember?
Because you didn’t know you were the Senator’s daughter.
That made sense. Did you have to call it lunacy? She didn’t know why but that word bothered her. It was bad enough he had seen her like that and that now his brothers had. The whole pack would think she was a lunatic.
Az cocked his head to the side. That was not a choice word. I apologize. Wow. He apologized?
The redhead stepped forward. “Tristan, if I may offer a suggestion.” “Of course, little one.”
The woman smiled and shook her head. “Some day you’re not going to call me that any longer.”
Tristan laughed. “Not possible. I’m going to call you that in this life and the next one.”
Walking toward Leah, the ‘little one’ crouched down. “My name is Ashlee Morrison Kane.” Ashlee looked behind her at the pack. “I think it’s rude that no one is introducing themselves and Leah here has to try to figure out who we all are through osmosis.”
Leah liked her already. Ashlee continued. “Anyway, Tristan, I think that I may have a solution. I’ve been trying to think this through using my own knowledge of magic coupled with the lifetimes worth of knowledge I acquired from the aunts before they died. I don’t see why we can’t do the same thing with Leah that we did with you when you were trapped in your wolf form.”
A brown haired woman who had been leaning on Theo’s arm stepped forward. “I wasn’t here yet when that happened. What did you do?”
The blonde who stood next to Cullen laughed. “No women were here. It was just Ashlee and all of them.”
Theo laughed. “And Ashlee was holed up in Tristan’s room forced to shift by herself thanks to our carelessness that night. We’re lucky anybody made it through that time. Are we sure we want to pull that out again?”
“It won’t work.” Leah really hated the sound of Gabriel’s voice. It was so hostile. “Tristan was already a shifter. The magic just called him out.”
Ashlee stood. “The same concept applies here. She’s pack so whether she’s wolf or
not Tristan will call to her. If my father were alive, Tristan would call to him and he was human. Pack is pack. It just is.” Ashlee took a deep breath. “Not to mention we don’t know that she isn’t a born shifter. She might be and,” Ashlee put her hands on her hips. “I don’t think, Gabriel Kane, that you are in any way qualified to argue magic with me. It’s a female thing.”
Tristan growled, which drew the attention of everyone in the room. “Whatever you’re going to say, Gabriel, don’t say it. I like Ashlee’s plan. In any case, it can’t hurt Leah. We’ll do it tonight. Almost the whole pack is here. Michael, Damien, Kurt, and Reggie are off island but it’s enough souls. Rex,” Tristan turned to address a man Leah hadn’t noted earlier. He quietly stood in the corner without making a sound. At the mention of his name, he raised an eyebrow.
That’s our youngest brother. He’s…troubled.
She grinned. Seems to be that way for most of your family. The unmated ones anyway.
Leah was tempted to ask Az if that meant that he was now no longer going to be ‘troubled’ but Tristan continued talking.
“I want you to go with Faith and figure out the best way to contact Leah’s father.
One way or another, we have to tell him she’s alive.”
Theo shook his head. “All objections I have to Faith spending time with little brother over there aside,” this earned him snickers from the pack and a look of angry dangers from Rex. “Are we sure we want to contact Senator St. James if we can’t be sure we’re going to return Leah to her natural state?”
Tristan sighed. “You’re not a father, Theo. I’m here to tell you, the man needs to know she’s alive. Besides, he might be able to shed some light on some of this.”
“Or expose us and we’ll all have to go into hiding.” Theo was clearly not going to let this go.
“Look,” Az interrupted. As sexy and warm as she found his voice when she heard it in her head, aloud it was rough and demanding. She wondered if he knew he had that effect when he spoke. “We’ll leave it up to Leah to contact her father. She’s not a child. We’re not going to make decisions for her like she can’t conduct herself.”
Rex stepped forward. “Any interest in seeing what your mate actually looks like Az?”
Az shook his head. “What?”
Rex held up his cell phone and Leah’s heart sped up. “I did an internet search. Here’s a picture of Ms. Leah St. James, beloved and missing daughter of Nathan St. James, senior senator from the state of Maine.”
Without another thought, she rushed to Az’s side to look at the photo. If anyone was going to see what she looked like, it was going to be her. Az took the phone from Rex’s hands and crouched down so they could look at her picture together.
Leah’s heart fell. The woman whose mischievous smile stared back at her was a complete stranger. Would there ever be anything about herself she would remember?
4
Az stared at the woman in the photo displayed on his brother’s phone. She stood on a grassy hill, leaning up against a large tree. Dre
ssed entirely in black, which meant that she wore black slacks and a black turtleneck, except for, of all things, hiking boots, she grinned at the camera. Her hair, black as midnight, hung stick straight to her shoulders where it suddenly curled under towards her neck. Blunt cut bangs completed the effect. The look might have been severe was it not for the fact that she’d also dyed about one third of her locks hot pink. Ultimately, the look worked for her where on other women he might have found it akin to looking at an oddly striped zebra.
On Leah, however, it fit perfectly. He suspected it had something to do with the funny glint in her eyes or the way her thin black eyebrows lifted slightly like she was secretly laughing at the cameraman. His heart pounded in his chest as he was nearly undone with a completely unreasonable hate for whoever it was on the other side of the camera who had made her laugh. It should only be he who made her laugh.
Shaking his head, he forced the adrenaline-induced frenzy back down from whence it came. Theo had warned him, he was going to be extreme until he actually ‘mated’ with Leah. He placed his attention where it belonged: on the picture in front of him.
His mate’s eyes were a striking blue-grey in color, like a rainstorm just before swollen clouds rolled in to obscure the sun.
Her skin was pale, almost porcelain white, with a sprinkling of freckles over her nose. Belatedly, Az realized she was skinny, not just thin and curvaceous, but actually super thin. Looking at her wolf self out of the corner of his eye, he wondered if she came by that look naturally or if it was a starvation attempt that achieved it. If it was the latter, they were going to have to do something about that…
I don’t know that woman at all. Leah’s husky voice sounded so despondent, he reached out to stroke her soft fur.
Your memory may return when your physical form does.
He heard her sigh in his mind. Just ‘may’ return?
Until we know exactly what it is that was done to you, we won’t know when or if your memory will come back.
Az thought he’d known frustration caused by his inability to save the lives of his father’s created wolves. None of that was anything akin to this. He was a person who got things done, he solved problems. Hell, he had inserted a tracking device into Cullen and Summer that had allowed the pack to track them to Mexico. He’d climbed a building in the middle of a rainstorm to reinstall a more efficient lightning rod that let them harness some of their energy supply from lightning strikes.
Yet with his own mate, he couldn’t bring her back to her human form—he was going to have to rely on Tristan for that—and he couldn’t help her with her memory problem. If he were Leah, he wouldn’t want to mate with him at all. Out of the whole pack, he was the most useless member for her.
“Let’s move.” Tristan nodded to the group. “Maybe once we get her back into human form she can give us some answers.”
Az looked down at Leah. “Want me to carry you? I know you can walk. I just kind of want to.”
Don’t you get tired? I must be heavy for you to cart around.
He shook his head and tried to keep his amusement out of his voice. She didn’t know, he shouldn’t find that adorable, only he did. “I’m a shifter. We can carry roughly two and a half times the amount that a regular person can. So, no, I did not get tired and I can do it again easily.”
His wolf’s voice sounded in his head. Show off. Even if you did get tired you’d want to carry her now that you’ve seen what she looks like. Admit it, you think she’s hot.
Az smirked. He did and he’d gladly admit it but not to his wolf. It would give the damn canine way too much laughter at his expense.
Leah leapt up, surprising Az but he still caught her. Pulling her against his chest, he followed behind the pack, which was moving to what they referred to as the ‘east lawn’. In reality, it was a grass filled clearing just east of the main residence. Surrounded by trees, it was the easiest place to do the magical spells hidden away and protected by the natural forest.
Magic had always irked Azriel. His mind—at least his human mind—didn’t like the ambiguity of the whole process. Sometimes magic worked, sometimes it failed miserably and it all seemed to rely on the personal knowledge of the person in charge of the ceremony. The pack had its own magic that depended entirely on the strength of the Alpha. Only women could perform the ceremonies necessary to ‘call’ on magical forces and yet you could never be sure which women held the powers to do what since none of them came into their abilities until they were mated.
He rolled his eyes. It would have been nice to have been able to just snap his hands and stop all the wolves his father created from dying on his lab tables.
What are they going to do to me?
“It’s a magic circle where Ashlee, Summer, Faith, Jana, and maybe some of the other women will call you to the pack. It will literally force your wolf to shift into its human form then to your wolf form repeatedly until you are in control of the shifts yourself. I’ve only ever seen it once before and it was on my brother Tristan, before he became Alpha.”
Will it hurt?
He thought about her question for a moment. “If this is your first shift, meaning you have never been from wolf to human before then yes, it will hurt. However, I think that is highly unlikely. I think you’ve probably been made to shift a lot.”
Which would mean it won’t hurt?
“I’m not sure, Leah. See this is the trouble with magic—I just don’t have any solid answers for you. In science, if you can create something once, you should be able to duplicate the results. We know the first shift hurts; I know that from personal experience.” The image of his first time filled his mind’s eye. He’d been alone except for his father. It had been pitch black outside in the middle of winter. He hadn’t eaten for days…He shook off the memory. Leah needed him to stay in the here and now.
“Some people find some discomfort from it later on too. I think it kind of depends on your own tolerance for the reshaping your body goes through and how willing you are to give into the white light that surrounds you.”
Were you able to do that?
Az nodded, not wanting to elaborate more. “After a time. I have a tendency to over think things.”
What if I’m not a wolf? What if I’m a human?
“Then I’m not sure what will happen after you regain your body. It may stop right there.”
Leah closed her eyes. I’m so confused about all of this. I don’t even know how this happened to me.
“How could you not be?” Really, she was being remarkably calm. No screaming, no hysterics to indicate that all of this was driving her to the brink of losing her mind. How much should he tell her? He didn’t want to make her upset.
Everything. That was his wolf’s advice. How would you like to be kept in the dark?
“Okay, so there is a lot about you we don’t know but there are some things that we do.”
Leah’s eyes opened, her wolf gaze excited and trusting. Tell me. I remember nothing outside of your lab.
“You were brought to us from New York City by Malcolm and Jana.” Az looked for the couple off in the crowd. It still amazed Az to see Jana back. He’d known her his entire life, she’d been one of the ‘hot’ unmated females who the young males liked to look at and hope they were mated to. One day she’d been there, the next she’d been gone, and all the mated females were dead. It had been that fast.
How did they find me?
“You were part of a wolf pack that attacked them on Valentine’s Day. Presumably, you were being controlled by Jana’s former boss who had aligned himself financially with Kendrick.”
He felt her shudder in his arms. I attacked them?
“No one blames you for that. You’re under my father’s control. I tried to save all the wolves that had been part of your pack but only you survived. After that, when you were separated, your incidences of what you didn’t like called ‘lunacy’ started.”
Why am I under your father’s control? Az, I hear voic
es telling me to kill.
“That’s got to be all part of the same magic, which is why it drives me crazy. I have no idea why that is happening to you. My father is Kendrick Kane. While I was growing up, he was the Alpha of this pack. We were a huge number back then, several hundreds of wolf shifters. We resided on all these islands.” Az nodded off in the distance to show her the direction of the other islands. He didn’t know if she cared or not but to him life existed in the small details that made up the large whole of the universe. He would have wanted to know where the islands were.
She didn’t remark so he continued. “Dad was never very wonderful to me. The pack, however, loved him. We grew strong and prosperous. One day he met up with this man named Claudius. We’re not sure exactly what happened except that Kendrick—Dad— and Claudius hatched this plan to turn us over for scientific testing. Dad thought he could create an army of mindless wolves that he could control based on us. Somehow, he thought this would let us come out of hiding.”
And you’ve already told me the Alpha’s world is law.
She sounded so forlorn; he smiled and ruffled her fur. “There is a way to disobey the Alpha. You can challenge him for leadership. Only problem? Westervelt has to be led by a Kane. We’re magic controllers, meaning we’re strong in it, even if we’re men and can’t use it because only the women control magic. But male strength, specifically Kane strength, makes the whole pack better. So one of dad’s brothers, my uncle, was going to challenge him.”
Obviously he didn’t win or you wouldn’t all still be talking about your Dad. “He never got the chance. Dad went and found a witch—”
She interrupted. A witch?
He raised an eyebrow. She was too cute. “I admire your skepticism. However, I have to point out that you’re trapped in the body of a wolf. You want to argue about the existence of witches?”
Good point. He heard the amusement in her voice.
“So I don’t know where he found the witch—turns out there are a lot of them—but he found one willing to place a curse on us. All mated men were cursed to kill their mates, the women they loved. You see, mating is a little complicated for a wolf shifter. Once we mate, we mate for eternity. When one dies, the other is driven to die too through a process of ritual suicide. We simply cannot live without the other one.”