Rejected And Claimed By Her Trio Alpha Mates

chapter 42

The dirt road that leads to Erik’s rundown shack is even darker in the night. A few of the sad little houses lining the strip have a light or two gleaming inside, but for the most part, the desert is silent and black as midnight.

Kian leaves the road for a patch of sparse grass next to a seemingly unoccupied house—considering its door is hanging off the hinges—and the rest of us park beside him. Instead of riding our bikes down the r oad and announcing our presence like we did earlier in the day, we walk the rest of the way.

Intense heat from the day is fading as we walk down the dirt road, and the strange chill of night is settling in. The weather here is so extreme—one moment, sunburn, the next hypothermia. But I can imagine the allure of living somewhere so secluded. So isolated.

Peace. The lack of city lights ruining the stars or pollution in the air.

It reminds me a bit of home. Only drier. More brown.

A light burns in one of Erik’s front windows like a beacon, growing larger as we head toward it. We stay off the road, slinking through the desert shadows. Even though Frost’s hair flashes in the moonlight, the three of them are preternaturally silent.

As a shifter, I’m silent too, but they’re on a whole new level.

I can’t help but wonder what the hell else is different about them.

When we reach Erik’s yard, Kian points to Frost and Malix, then points to the side of the house, before rotating his finger. A signal for them to go around the back of the house, I’m guessing, because they immediately peel away from us into the darkness.

Kian catches my gaze. The moonlight turns the gold in his eyes to a molten silver. He lifts his chin, indicating I should follow him.

It’s weird. I’ve hated him for years. I’ve wished I could rip his head off his gorgeous body since the moment he left me in that hotel bed.

But here I am. Following his orders like he’s my f*****g alpha or something.

Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

I tiptoe across the rickety wooden boards of Erik’s front porch on Kian’s heels. A television plays inside—something squeaky and high-pitched, like a cartoon. Not that I’m surprised, given how f*****g weird the guy is for a witch.

Kian pauses for a moment, his eyes going blank. I stare up at him, confused; the look on his face is almost like he’s listening to something I can’t hear. I get the strangest feeling he’s communicating in some way with Frost and Malix, but that can’t be. Mind-speak is only for when we’re in wolf form.

But I mean… they aren’t exactly normal. The very short time I’ve spent with them has reinforced that unpleasant truth on multiple occasions.

After a moment, Kian’s gaze refocuses on Erik’s dingy wooden door, then he kicks it off its hinges.

We barrel into the house to the din of another door splitting somewhere else in the house. Frost and Malix, I presume, entering from around the back. They don’t appear, though—not right away. As small as the shack is, we should see them immediately. I glance down the dark hallway, but nothing moves.

We clear the living room, where incense burns on Erik’s altar and the television plays an old nineties cartoon chock full of dumb toilet humor. The witch is nowhere to be found, though there’s a can of beer on the table, still half full, still condensing. We head into the hallway and finally run into Frost and Malix.

Next to a staircase.

I blink at the gloomy stairs leading up to a second floor that doesn’t exist. Or shouldn’t exist, anyway.

Malix grimaces. “Yeah, so, turns out this place is a lot f*****g bigger than it looks. We got lost when we left the kitchen.”

“Magic,” Frost offers with a shrug.

Kian glares around the darkened hallway. His anger is terrifying, radiating from him with a dominance that leaves no room for interpretation. He won’t be happy until Erik’s blood is on his hands for sending the shadows after him and his brothers.

To be honest, I’m not opposed. That crazy f*****g witch wanted me as payment. To carve my skin off? To eat me? To f**k me against my will? I don’t know.

But he’s never going to get the chance to do any of that s**t now.

“He’s here,” Kian says sharply. “Find him.”

The four of us split up to search—Frost and Malix going upstairs, while Kian and I handle the downstairs. I start opening doors and looking behind curtains in a dining room, then find myself in a strange kind of “grand parlor” like this place is an English manor house and not a metal shack in the desert. Erik fooled us real nice with the one shitty little living room we saw. He lives like a damn king.

I pass out of the parlor and back into the hallway near the stairs. I’m considering where I’ll go next, when I glimpse something dark slinking through the shadows toward the back of the house. A flash of shadow against the barest hint of moonlight. My first thought is, oh s**t, a living shadow.

But my next thought is, that asshole is trying to escape.

I sprint down the hall as quietly as possible, then lunge through the darkness, praying I’m not about to slam into furniture. The shadow lets out a sharp, girlish scream, and Erik the witch collapses beneath me.

I follow him down to the floor, where his head bounces off the linoleum, then wrap my hands around his neck in an attempt to subdue him.

He screams again, and magic pours from him. In an instant, the smoke is wrapped around my face and neck in an odd mimicry of what happened with Frost back at the motel, and I can’t see anything. The smoke tightens, cutting off my airway, my sight, everything.

Erik’s bony form bucks beneath me. His elbow, or something equally as sharp, slams into the side of my head. My head whirls and I slump to the side, struggling to get past the blinding pain and the suffocating magic. The witch shoves at me, and I shove back, trying to pin him down more securely, but he manages to break free from under me.

A snarl cuts through the room.

I duck as something large whooshes past me, leaving the scent of woodsmoke and whiskey in his wake. Kian. I claw at the black magic around my face to no avail, but then Erik screams over the sound of running feet, and the binding vanishes so abruptly I fall onto my ass.

I scramble to my feet and hurry out the open back door.

Erik’s gangly form sprints through the back yard with Kian’s nightmarish demon wolf right behind him. Magic smokes and wavers, then lashes out when Erik turns around and points at Kian. But the wolf is undeterred—he leaps aside, then speeds up while the witch is distracted casting his spells.