Charmed Wolf by Aimee Easterling (best ereader for pdf TXT) 📕

of whom I knew personally. They fought and fell beneath...tree limbs and roots?

The Guardian had stopped protecting and started attacking. I gasped, hand reaching out to steady myself against the doorframe. I’d made the wrong choice, leaving my pack so I could descend into Faery. I’d hoped Kale would reach his quarry before the Guardian realized what was happening, that I’d return triumphant with everyone’s problems solved.

Instead, I’d abandoned my role of Alpha and left my clan to die alone.

Because, through the mirror, I watched people I knew and loved being swept off their feet by what should have been inanimate objects. As I watched, the earth opened and my old nurse fell in....

“Aw!” The moan of the first fae I’d heard betting was disappointed but not empathic. “Thought the old crone had more time in her.”

“Too bad. So sad,” the being with spaniel ears and fingers made of eels crowed beside him. Then its voice hardened. “Pay up.”

Despite the ebullience of the crowd, the Queen remained still and silent. Her scent surrounded me like frosted flowers. I blinked. How had I gotten nearly close enough for her to touch?

Planting my feet stopped my forward momentum. Her words, however, made everything worse.

“Not what I would have expected my son to be up to,” the Queen observed. “But he is, at the least, good for entertainment.”

Which is when I saw Rune on the vast silver mirror. Rune, hacking with his sword at errant bits of the Guardian’s forest. His eyes were wild. He appeared lost in a berserker rage.

And yet...where he hacked, the ground reopened. My nurse popped out, her face contorted as she coughed out dirt and chunks of rock.

“Not paying!” the male faery roared. “Told ya she’d last fifteen minutes.”

“You’ll still pay,” the spaniel-eel faery retorted. “Nine minutes left.”

Unlike the uncaring fae in his audience, Rune paused for one split second to pound my nurse’s back as if she was a diner choking on a chicken bone. Then he leapt for a limb that threatened a child. Steel swept through plant matter. The girl scurried out of reach.

“A shame he’s only half fae,” the Queen continued, trailing one finger through a bowl of amber stickiness. The sweet aroma of honey curled toward me, competing with her own signature flowers, as she popped a cube of honeycomb into her mouth. “Good for only an hour of entertainment. Honey?”

I blinked and a bowl hovered in front of me. The contents were so sweet and seductive I couldn’t look up from the glistening surface.

My gut rumbled, empty. Not craving food. Craving solace. A replacement for pack bonds. Anything to cover up my knowledge that the devastation being unleashed in Clan Whelan was entirely my fault.

I couldn’t lie to myself, though. And the only way out was forward. So I forced words through lips that felt frozen. “An hour of entertainment? That’s enough?”

I was speaking, but I wasn’t able to draw my gaze back to the mirror. Instead, I watched in horror as a line of drool slid from my mouth onto the honey. A cacophony of tinkling laughter proved that several fae thought I was even more amusing than the battle on the screen.

And, somehow, their awfulness gave me the strength to elbow the hovering bowl away from me. To raise my eyes to the Queen, who watched with greed on her face.

Not greed for food. Greed for my embarrassment.

“You, I’m sure, will provide more than an hour of entertainment.” She leaned toward me, flowing robes curling away from her like wings even though the air was still against my face. “You wouldn’t have been able to pass through that door if my son wasn’t enthralled with you. What will he do when he realizes you’re now my pet?”

And...a chain snapped into place around my throat. A choke collar. It hadn’t fallen over my head. It had simply been magicked there.

The bitter end was in the Queen’s hand. When she tugged, links tightened my breath away. It didn’t help that a haze of magnolia, rose, and lily choked me the closer I was dragged to her throne.

At the same moment, in the mirror, Rune glanced down at a puddle of water. Glanced down, then froze.

And no wonder. Through the mirror, I could see myself there. Myself, the collar, the Queen gloating behind me.

I’d left Rune to protect my pack while I dealt with his mother. But I was flubbing it.

No wonder he dropped his sword.

IMMEDIATELY, A VINE lashed out from a tree and lassoed my pack’s sole defender. Rune’s face contorted in a roar as he was dragged backwards toward the animated greenery.

Meanwhile, the Queen cooed. “Yes, he can see you now. Isn’t this amusing?”

She yanked at the chain again, but this time my hands rose to claw out breathing room. Blood settled beneath my fingernails, leftover from the wound at my throat. The tiniest hint of persimmon broke through the cloying floral awfulness that clung to the Queen’s body. That scent gave me the ability to speak.

“You want your son to lose to the one who betrayed you?”

On the mirror, my image disappeared. I saw rather than heard as Rune sucked in a deep breath and lost the last shred of his humanity. One blink and he’d gone entirely wolf.

His animal form was beautiful, but the haze in his eyes promised no rational thought was present to guide it. He lunged at a tree, biting at bark he had no chance of gnawing through.

Then the Queen was in my face, blocking my view. “Betrayed me?”

I ached to check on Rune. On my pack. But this was my moment. This was why I’d come here.

So I focused...then I reeled the Queen in. “You remember her.” I kept my voice low, an Alpha trick. It worked, too. I had every fae’s attention as I told their Queen what she hadn’t wanted to hear.

“The country girl you brought to Court centuries ago. She tricked you then left you. In retaliation, you forced