Chapter 36
CADE
“What the fuck is going on here?”
I don’t even know if they heard me because I was already shifting and streaking across the final hundred yards to the barn before the whole sentence was out of my mouth. My body turned from flesh into white-furred lightning. My brain was a seething red explosion of rage. That was Brandon—I saw him, smelled him and yet could hardly believe he would dare to approach my mate in my absence, especially in his wolfen form.
But what really ripped my mind into shreds was the sight of my own wife, who never shifted—who refused to shift for me—standing still in the yard in her own wolf form and letting another male fill his lungs with her scent.
I wanted to fucking kill them both.
I chose him to attack first because it was the natural thing to do. He had been my rival long enough. It was time to end the bastard.
I was airborne before I even hit the barnyard. Brandon rose up defensively on his hind legs and we crashed together in a vicious embrace. My claws and my teeth ripped at him, fully ready to destroy him. We’d never done battle for the alpha wolf position. Fine. We could have that brawl now.
He whined as I clawed him. I went for his throat, but he twisted away and dropped to the ground, cowering before me as bones cracked and Jess’ aura shimmered. She shifted and a naked woman crouched where a gorgeous sable-colored wolf had stood a moment before.
“No Cade,” she screamed. “He made a mistake, but not the kind of mistake you think. He’s submitting. Back off.”
He was submitting. His proud tail was now down between his legs. Despite the fury in my blood that urged me to kill him anyway—easy now when he wasn’t even fighting me—I tried to get a grip on my temper.
I whirled instead on my mate, my lush, naked, big-breasted wife who roused me to full virility no matter whether I was wolf or man. Damn her for shifting back. I wanted her wolf crouched in the dirt before me. She had shifted for another man? I’d mount her and fuck her into oblivion.
I snarled at her and herded her human body back against the side of the barn, pressing my fur against her silky skin. I was tempted to claw her, just to see my mark of ownership on that smooth white skin.
There was another groaning of flesh and bone as Brandon shifted. Now there were two naked humans, either of whom I could lunge at and kill. Fools. Didn’t they know how angry I was?
I thought of the body of the biker who’d been murdered by a shifter. The mess of blood, the wounds, the horror on his frozen face. My rage leached out of me. That was what was left when a wolf went postal on a human body—ruin and devastation.
“She’s right, Alpha,” Brandon said as he slowly got to his feet. He backed away from me. “I came over because of something I thought I saw. I realize now that I was mistaken.”
I had no clue what they were talking about, but I knew my brain would make more sense of this if I resumed my human form. So I, too, shifted. As soon as I did, I found myself beset by new feelings of anger at the sight of my wife’s bare body. How dare she show herself to another man? Such a thing had never upset me before. The whole pack ran around naked as we shifted in and out of human form. But the first words I barked at her were, “Cover yourself.”
She found her clothing on the ground, tattered and torn, which meant she had shifted precipitously. She pulled on a shirt and jacket that provided at least some modesty. Brandon made no such attempt to get dressed.
“What mistake?” My voice felt hoarse; I still sounded more like a wolf than a man.
“He saw something on Sunday when hunting. Probably a vulture or some other large bird of prey.” Jess’ eyes were intent on mine and I got that she was signaling something to me. She added, speaking slowly and clearly, “He thought he saw a mythical creature. A darkling. He thought it must have been me.”
Fuck! I recalled that Brandon and Suzanne had been in the area on Sunday when I’d taken Jess hunting, but I’d sent them off in the other direction. Not far enough away from us, it seemed.
“There is nothing mythical about darklings,” Brandon said. He was still breathing hard. “They decimated the town I lived in as a boy. But this was the first time I’d seen one in Montana.”
“Since he had never seen my wolf, Brandon came up with the theory that this creature he thinks he saw was me. Now he knows that I have a wolf inside me. How he believed anything else when he knew my grandfather, I can’t imagine.”
“I apologize.”
He looked as if he meant it, and I concluded he didn’t know there were shifters who could take the form of a darkling. Since I hadn’t known it either, I felt a brief glimmer of sympathy.
He shook his head, his eyes puzzled. “I still think that’s what I saw. It was my error in believing it arose from the same spot where you and your wife were hunting. There were others out hunting pheasant that morning. I shouldn’t have jumped to conclusions without more evidence.”
I cleared my throat as I sorted rapidly through the implications. This would cause confusion among the pack members, if it hadn’t already. Jess’ secret would not remain a secret for long. I didn’t think it should. I wasn’t going to lie about my wife’s super powers or whatever they were.
She might want to deny her identity, but I wasn’t the secretive type. I’d always lived my life defying custom and convention, acting on my feelings even when that meant I was being an ass. This is who I am—take me or leave me. And who I was now was a wolf shifter who loved a rare creature with a darkling side.
She would fucking well shift on my command now. I couldn’t believe that she’d brought out her wolf to show Brandon after refusing to do so for me. I wanted to tie her to the bed and thrash her ass until it was fiery red and then fuck her until she screamed for mercy.
“Put your clothes back on and get the fuck off my property. And don’t ever come to visit my wife again or I’ll rip out your fucking throat.”