Moon Glamour by Aimee Easterling (books to read to be successful TXT) 📕

my head. There was dried blood on his face, as if Marina had tried and failed to force him to do her bidding. His shoulders weren’t stooped, though. And he’d taken advantage of his time in solitary confinement to assemble an armful of something I couldn’t quite make sense of.

“What are those?”

“Slats from the cot. Metal.” His eyes smiled even if his lips didn’t. “Do we know where the node is?”

“Yes, if you’ll let me take you there,” Jasmine huffed, grabbing a slat and turning back down the passage we’d come in through. She was ready to fight, even if she didn’t know anything about the danger we were facing.

Jasmine was clearly coming with us, so I provided the bare minimum of information. “Metal through a fae’s chest will send them back to the other side,” I called after her, even as the fingers of Tank’s free hand slid between mine. His sturdiness was grounding, making up for lack of sleep and far too high stakes.

And even though we should have followed Jasmine immediately, Tank used our joined hands to draw me in closer. Then he kissed me. Or I kissed him. Whoever did the kissing, it was fast and fierce. More like the meeting of wolves than the affection of a man.

My wolf and I responded, curling around our partner. Hot, intense, the rest of the world faded....

Until, abruptly air separated us, all except our interlocked fingers. I’d pushed Tank away at the same moment he’d ended our embrace. Jasmine was still in sight, fifteen feet distant.

“There’s no time...” I started just as Tank promised:

“Later.”

Together, we raced to catch up with Jasmine. The heat between us would have to wait until we closed the node. We were ready to dive into battle first.

Well, not quite ready. I fumbled to exchange weapons without unlocking our intertwined fingers.

“Are you sure?” Tank’s eyebrows rose as I offered him the sword I’d chosen out of Lupe’s stash back at the campground.

“I’ll do just as well with a stake,” I promised, taking the bundle of slats he still held in his hand. “There are a lot of these. Did you expect me to bring an army?”

“From the sound of it, it seems you did.”

This time he did smile, an expression that should have been horrifying with the new streaks of red joining old scars and twisting his face into a Halloween mask. Instead, a burst of joy hastened my footsteps. And Tank sped up to match me until we ran in perfect synchrony. Ran like pack wolves on a hunt.

Ran into air that sweetened ominously. Papaya, then pineapple. By the time the three of us passed through the shower room and turned into a passage I’d never traversed before—the one, I assumed, leading to the harem—it felt like I was racing through a human-sized bowl of fruit.

A bowl of fruit that was already rotting. Rotting into words just loud enough to hear over our pounding footsteps.

“If I help you through, you’ll be indebted,” Marina warned, her voice even more beautiful than it had been previously. Her bell-like tones rang down the corridor, carrying floral odors along for the ride.

“Understood.” The chorus came in at least half a dozen voices. All were equally beautiful, but their combination was so dissonant it set my teeth on edge.

“For one year, you will remain indentured,” Marina continued. “At the end of that time....”

I never learned what would happen on the next Samhain because Jasmine burst through the doorway ahead of us. She wasn’t waiting for backup. Wasn’t waiting for the right moment. Instead, she was bound and determined to squash the danger to her pack.

Tank and I could do no less.

Chapter 39

Inside, the harem was so pink I had to close my eyes for one split second. Pink walls. Pink furniture. Pink-clad women standing in a circle with joined hands.

Between us and them, Marina guided the portal opening like an orchestra conductor. The junction between earth and the Otherworld was a black hole that made the surrounding pink pinker. A looming pit of danger that, I suspected, was responsible for the stench I’d recently waded through.

And yet, the harem girls didn’t struggle against its opening. Instead, they closed their eyes and swayed to inaudible music. They tilted their chins toward the awfulness as if soaking up the sun.

They were in league with Marina, or at least appeared to be. Were we really going to have to take down all the McCallister females in order to save their pack?

Moralities, however, slipped away from me as Marina spun to face us. She was outside the circle of pink-clad women but she moved in time with them. Meanwhile, behind her back and within the portal’s darkness, shapes coalesced. Shimmering. Gleaming. Like clouds of floral-scented smoke.

The fae were through, but they weren’t yet solid....

Then a harem girl fell to her knees and the circle broke. Fae began materializing. There weren’t half a dozen, the way I’d assumed from their voices. There were hundreds. Far too many to count.

And Tank didn’t hesitate. He flung himself at the clouds of half-solid enemies, swinging his sword in broad arcs that whipped through a handful of fae with each stroke. The ones he cut down dissipated into nothing, but there were so many left.

There were hundreds of fae to fight...and every minute more emerged into solidity. The newcomers were feeding, I realized as the harem girls’ swaying turned boneless, on the shifters’ connections to their own subpack.

“Jasmine! You have to get them out of here!” I yelled, pressing toward the pink-clad women.

“Tell your mother how to suck eggs, why don’t you?” Jasmine shot back, wading into the spinning haze of fae. Her slat was raised, but defensively rather than offensively. “Ladies,” she said. “Follow me.”

They didn’t, of course. If they’d been in their right minds, they wouldn’t have assisted Marina’s portal-opening in the first place. Instead, they stood there, more bobbing than swaying at this point. The few open eyes were glazed