To Mate an Assassin: The Lost Alphars Series, Book 1 (20 page)

“Magnificently shaped head?” She laughed, subtly squeezing his hand back before removing it from his grasp. They stood and she followed him out of the room that time, sans handkerchief. He led her to the front yard, discussing the pros and cons of having a nicely shaped head. By the time they reached the big lawn she was debating the con of how a nicely shaped head might lure voodoo mages to shrink her head for nefarious purposes.

“Very true,” Kerrick agreed. “I guess we’ll just have to change the shape of your head to fool them. Ready?”

“What do I have to do?” she asked, knowing they were no longer discussing head shrinking.

“What is your favorite thing to do when shifted?”

She thought for a moment. “Forage for food and wash my hands in a stream.”

“Well, that’s more an instinctual thing for Raccoons. What do you like doing when you’re Raccoon with the awareness of being human?”

A small smile picked at the corners of her mouth. That was a real smile, like the one she’d given Cimby when she’d tickled her. “I play pranks on people in my neighborhood. They don’t know I’m doing it. It’s just silly kid stuff. Moving things around. Hiding their keys somewhere. Switching toothpaste with shampoo. Harmless.” Kerrick didn’t think a mouthful of shampoo was that harmless but enjoyed her enthusiasm, knowing Raccoons were instinctively mischievous. They were very much like coyotes in that manner.

“Perfect.” He shifted into a Raccoon.

She gasped, delighted. “You’re Raccoon!”

He shifted back, laughing at how she jumped up and down, covering her mouth in surprise with one hand and pointing at him with the other.

“You still have clothes on!”

“It’s an Alphar thing. As is shifting into any animal I want. I am gifted with the ability to completely empathize with my people. To fully do so, I need to understand their animals. I know the perfect person to play a few pranks on. You up for it?”

She began to strip, turning away from him in her human modesty. If she had been raised in a pack, she would never even know what the word modesty meant. As she turned he saw the fading lash marks on her back. A low growl echoed from across the lawn as she began to shift, the sound coming from the gate. Kerrick looked over at the entrance to see Zach frozen while adjusting some gadget he’d installed. He’d never seen such a fierce or angry look on the young man before. He didn’t blame him though, those lash marks would stir any man’s need to protect. An honorable man, anyway.

As Irisi finished her shift, Kerrick joined her in their Raccoon forms. It was the first time he’d ever shifted into Raccoon and he had a startling sensation that he was going to enjoy his time in the girl’s critter company all too thoroughly. He led her back into The Mansion and headed straight for Aaron’s room. Oh the havoc they would wreak.

Chapter Fourteen

Cimby pulled the SUV into the parking lot of a bar she found just over the border of Oregon. She had driven for an hour, her mind repeating Kerrick’s angry words over and over like a broken record. It was not until she passed the border did she realize she needed a drink to recover from the hellish week, even if getting drunk was virtually impossible for her due to the poison immunity training she’d been forced to endure as a teenager. But honestly, at that point she was willing to try her damn hardest to find an escape from her mental ramblings.

Irisi was safely tucked away in The Mansion, so Cimby could let herself be a little selfish. Her day had been shit. Her week had been shit. Everything she had done to become the Incendiary was pretty much for naught at this point. She was becoming obsolete and had mated with an overbearing, machismo chauvinist who clearly thought that women could not take care of themselves. Even a woman who had been trained, pretty much since birth, to be the best goddamned assassin on the North American continent. Even a woman like that was so ineffectual that she needed to be kept safe, cocooned in bubble wrap coffins and hidden away from the world. Only the best for the fucking mate of the fucking Alphar.

By the time she had actually pulled into the bar and stormed rather histrionically into the small, old-timey-looking place, she had worked herself into a tizzy. Something one of her old trainers used to say about her temper. She had been an angst-ridden child, especially once the hormones kicked in.

She was pissed, but this overreaction was too much for her. She had better control over raging emotions than this, it had been drilled into her so frequently it should have been like breathing. The lack of control could only mean one thing. The fight with her so-called mate had made her horny. Horny as hell. And it was all Kerrick’s fault. It just pissed her off further.

“Can I help you, dear?” A sweet-looking older woman asked from behind the bar. She was a short and plump woman with close-cropped gray hair. She wore a funny jean vest decked out in sewed-on buttons and pins of all shapes and sizes. There were laugh lines around her mouth and eyes. This was a woman who smiled a lot. Gods, what could that possibly feel like?

“Whiskey neat, please,” Cimby said, almost collapsing onto a stool. The space was vacant but for the bartender and an older man sitting at the end of the long wooden bar top, filling out some paperwork.

“Comin’ right up.” After a moment the woman placed two glasses of the amber liquid in front of her. Cimby raised her eyebrows in question. “You looked like you needed more than one. Second one is on the house. But only if you’re having man troubles, which is what I’m guessing put that look on your face.”

Cimby smiled reluctantly at the woman’s sympathetic gesture. She hated wearing her emotions on her sleeves and always felt like a failure when she did so. “Am I that obvious?”

“What else could put a look of fury like that on such a pretty girl? You’re the one who should be drivin’ the men to drink, not the other way around.”

“Oh don’t worry, she drives him to drink. He’ll have alcohol poisoning before the day is through,” Aaron chimed as he plunked down in the seat to her right, making the wood of the chair groan from his massive girth.

Rhiannon sat on Cimby’s other side, light as a feather, her nose stuck in her phone.

“Is Iri okay?” Cimby asked, needing to know the kid was in good hands.

“Kerrick texted saying he’s spending some time with her, said he was gonna take her out and shift for a bit.”

“If he is grilling that little girl for information about me—”

“Do you really think Kerrick would do that?” Aaron asked, leaning his elbow on the bar and turning to face her. “We all saw her, Cymbeline. A breeze could blow that little twig over and she’d snap.”

Cimby took a little offense to that even if it was true. Irisi would hate to be called a twig. “She is tougher than she looks.”

“Thanks to you, I’m sure,” Rhiannon said, running her hands over her perfectly quaffed hair. Cimby really wanted to muss that hair up. “She’s pretty much a mini you.”

“No.” Cimby rejected the idea immediately. “Once she is fed properly and grown, she will look like you,” Cimby said with a nod to Rhiannon. “Tall and elegant. She will be beautiful.”

“Well, no wonder you’re giving Kerrick the runaround. You’re—”

“Don’t say it.” Rhiannon hissed.

“—a lesbian!” Aaron looked quite pleased with his assessment, smiling at them in way that was in strict contradiction of his intimidating frame.

At that moment the old woman leaned forward on the bar, arms crossed and one gray eyebrow cocked, with no fear of his size, directly at Aaron. “You got a problem with lesbians?”

“No, ma’am.” Aaron sat up straight, looking panicked.

“You sure about that?”

“I love everyone. Everywhere. Nothing against no one.”

“Good. Now buy these ladies a drink and shut up before you hurt yourself thinking too hard.” She turned to leave with a final nod.

“Well—”

“You have something else to say?” She turned back again to give Aaron the gimlet.

“Nope. No.”

“No what, Aaron?”

“No, ma’am.”

The woman gave him that creepy, glowy side eye one more time and walked away to speak with the old man at the end of the bar. The man looked up briefly and caught Cimby’s eye with a wink. A shiver of recognition raced up her spine but she ignored it, turning to face the now cowed Aaron once more.

“You know her?” Cimby asked, enjoying how Aaron was comically curling in on himself.

“She’s a Mage. Kerrick and I have stopped at this bar a few times when he needed to tour the West Coast.” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “She freaks me the fuck out.”

“Yeah and she knows it. Way to be the man, Aar,” Rhiannon snorted into her beer.

“Shut up.”

“Why are you two here if it is not about Iri? I knew you were following. Good job at being inconspicuous.” She took a sip of the whiskey, the liquid sweetly burning her throat but had no effect otherwise, much to her annoyance.

“We weren’t trying to be.” Aaron shrugged after casting his eyes over the old bartender once more. “But can I just say, besides the fact that I’m still convinced you’re an emotional robot, you have some sick moves on the road. We thought you were gonna crash a few times, twisting around these mountains like a pro.”

“I’m trained in extreme defensive driving.”

“
Extreme
defensive? That’s a thing?”

“Apparently.”

“I’m texting Jeremiah to look into a trainer for extreme defensive driving,” he said to Rhiannon gleefully.

“I don’t buy it.” Rhiannon said, lifting a perfectly waxed eyebrow at her and ignoring Aaron. “I see the ‘I am an emotional black hole’ thing you put on in front of us, but Kerrick wouldn’t be pursuing you so ardently if he wasn’t getting anything in return. Also the whole saving a child and bringing her to the compound thing gives you away. You, my odd friend, have emotions.”

“Of course I have emotions, but Irisi is a special case. And we are not friends.”

“See?” Aaron pointed at Cimby. “She’s not even upset that we called her an emotionless black hole. She must be a robot.”

Cimby looked him dead in the eye, tilting her head to the side quizzically. “Was I supposed to care what you think?”

A bottle of top-shelf whiskey slammed on the table in front of her. “On him, wolfy,” the old woman said, nodding her head towards Aaron. The bartender must be a powerful Mage if she could sense what sort of shifter Cimby was.

“Nooo, Uma, please!” Aaron begged, getting a look at the price on the bottle. “I swear I’ll behave.”

“You that cheap, Aaron? Where’s Kerrick? I doubt the Alphar will be happy to hear his lap dog is loafin’ around my place without buyin’ anything.”

“Don’t call Kerrick, Uma. I’ll buy it.” He gave her a credit card and as she walked away muttered, “Crazy woman.”

“How are you in any position of power within shifter society?” Cimby asked, shaking her head and worrying about the fate of the shifter population in the hands of this bonehead.

“Don’t get me wrong, Cymbeline, my cousin is a class A idiot,” Rhiannon said, frowning at Aaron’s antics. “But he is an idiot who knows what the fuck he’s doing when it comes to our people. And so does Kerrick.”

“You aren’t going to change my mind on any of this,” Cimby said, staring at the back of the bar without seeing it. “Did he tell you what he said to me?”

“No, but I bet it was something along the lines of ‘I Man, You woman. Man protect woman. Woman breed children and get used as sex slave’.”

“Close enough.”

“He’s in the midst of mating, Ms. Incendiary. Of course he’s going to act like a caveman. The great part though?” Her face lit up with a mischievous glee and Cimby finally saw how Aaron and Rhiannon could be related. “You get to act like a caveman as well. You get to stake your claim on him and any action you take to get that point across really gets shrugged off after the mating is complete.”

“Is that why none of you said anything about the cuffs? That was…”

“Turned you on, didn’t it?” Aaron asked, wiggling his eyebrows. Uma the bartender smacked him upside the head as she walked behind him. “Sorry, Uma.”

“Oh, we said something,” Rhiannon went on. “Especially after you’d been with us a couple days and we could clearly see you weren’t a threat though the verdict is still out on crazy.”

“Rhiannon,” Aaron said with a tortured groan, “must our Alphar have no secrets?”

“To us, he’s family before he’s Alphar,” said Rhiannon with a certain levity that was nice to hear after Aaron’s barbs and jokes. “But that doesn’t stop him from acting on his Alphar instincts. He’s the most dominant Were in our country by right. It would have been odd if he didn’t act this way.”

“The most dominant and therefore the most overprotective.” It made sense. Dominants were, at the base of their nature, protective of their people. Having a mate took that need to protect to a whole new level. “He should have a mate who needs to be protected. I’m not some flighty weakling looking for coddling.”

“No,” Rhiannon said, slamming her beer down on the table. “The Alphar needs a mate with strength, someone who can challenge him and knows how to work with the people.”

“I’m not exactly a people person.”

“You inspired our soldiers to work harder than they have ever worked with just one day of training. And they don’t even resent you for beating the shit out of them,” Aaron disagreed with a chortling laugh. “They admire you and aspire to be as good as you.”

Cimby downed the second glass of whiskey, feeling stressed and hedged in by their insistence. “I’m not for him. He’s not for me.”

“Why?” Rhiannon asked simply. “What proof do you have that it won’t work out?”

“It’s none of your business,” Cimby said, placing her glass on the bar calmly, not giving in to Rhiannon’s questioning.

“He’s our Alphar and our kin, hell yes it’s our business. Now answer my damn question.”

“This conversation is over.” Cimby stood and threw some cash down on the bar, not actually expecting Aaron to pay for her drinks.

“Sit your ass down, woman,” Rhiannon hissed, standing and facing Cimby. “I love Kerrick like a brother and I will not watch his mate walk away from him without even bothering to try.”

Cimby looked her dead in the eye with a smile, itching for a fight. “Make me.”

Rhiannon’s growl was Cimby’s only warning, but it was enough. Rhiannon launched at her. Cimby stood in wait until the woman was within range. She grabbed Rhiannon by her hair mid jump and slammed her facedown into the wooden floor.

“You think you can take me, Lieutenant?”

Rhiannon dug her claws into Cimby’s hand, burrowing into her skin until blood leaked down her fingers. Cimby gritted her teeth and held on tighter, tugging Rhiannon’s hair harder and slamming the woman’s thick head back into the floor.

“You may be an uppity, well-trained assassin, but I have a few tricks of my own, bitch.” Cimby flew back as though she’d been punched in the chest by an invisible giant, slamming into the far wall. She got to her feet quickly, ignoring the ringing in her head. Rhiannon stood with her hands on her hips, looking way too cocky for her own good.

“You have magic,” Cimby said. “I am almost impressed.”

“You’re lookin’ dazed over there, robot,” Rhiannon taunted, cracking her neck and flipping her hair like she was in a shampoo commercial. “Need a little rest?”

“I’m fine, but thank you for the concern.” Before she finished her sentence Cimby jumped, flipping over Rhiannon and landing behind her. She kicked the bitch’s legs out from under her and placed her foot at her neck. When Rhiannon tried to jump up without the assistance of magic Cimby knew the girl was a one-trick pony, with only enough power for a one off until she recharged.

Cimby slammed her body down on Rhiannon, using her feet to keep the woman’s legs immobile and her hands to hold down her wrists. Rhiannon struggled and grappled, but Cimby just stared at her, expressionless.

“This would be my ultimate fantasy if I wasn’t related to you, Rhi,” Aaron called from his stool at the bar, content to just watch and drink his beer. Smart man.

“What goes on between Kerrick and me is our business and no one else’s,” Cimby hissed. “Stop sticking your nose in it.”

“That’s not how a pack works, you crazy bitch. I won’t stop. Neither will any of his friends or family when we see how miserable he’s been since the day he met you. Your animals, your spirits chose each other. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

That gave Cimby pause. She cared for Kerrick and did not want to hurt him. Denying him was her way of trying to protect him and his people. The job she’d been trained to do since birth. Becoming his mate would go against everything she was ever taught. She was never supposed to make connections. She was never supposed to make friends. And she most certainly was never supposed to mate. Caring for Irisi as she had over the past few years already placed her way out of bounds. No. She would not allow it to happen, no matter how much it hurt knowing she would be causing Kerrick pain. In the end he and his people would be better off without her.