Into Their Woods (The Eerie, #1)

He sucks his lower lip between his teeth, and his angel-kissed face looks up at me with a beseeching expression, one I’m not going to fall for.

These men have played me.

“What were you thinking? You just bit a complete fucking stranger! You all knew this bite came with a countdown. You knew this contract had an insanity clause. And yet, you decided to rope in some woman you’d never met because of what? My tits?”

Ruger clears his throat, the sound entirely too amused, but I swing an ice-cold gaze in his direction.

“Fuck the hell off!” I tell all of them. “Not one of you told me about this moon sickness shit. You left it to fucking Roy Kent over there”—I point at Gannon—“to tell me the truth.”

“Roy Kent?” Gannon asks, perplexed.

“Ted Lasso,” I snap at him, rolling my eyes when he still doesn’t know what I’m talking about. “The guy’s a gruff asshole, that’s all you need to know.”

“Listen, kitten, I think you’re being a little unfair,” Gannon argues and, I swear, he must have a death wish, because I’m about one more arrogant brow flick away from doing my best to make his insides his outsides.

“We really want to talk about fair, Gannon? Because I don’t know if it gets more unfair than being jumped as I was trying to leave town, thrown into your Hunt, and then bitten against my will.”

“Valid. But we didn’t know about half of that equation when we bit you. We’re trying to do the best we can with what we’ve been dealt too,” Perth offers, but that argument doesn’t hold as much weight with me anymore. “We thought you chose the Hunt and knew the rules. Since then, we’ve been trying to handle all the other—”

I raise a hand to stop him. “I get that. I do. But it’s so fucked-up that you weren’t honest about the stakes for me. Why is the prick of the den the one that’s more than happy to feel me up and spew all the bullshit I should have been told?”

“What the hell?” Perth turns on Gannon, peering at him across Ellery’s torso. “You felt her up?”

Ellery ignores the daggers currently flying back and forth between the other two men’s gazes as he leans forward and says, “Noah, we weren’t trying to keep anything from you.”

“Like fuck you weren’t.” God, if only he was wearing a shirt, I could grab him by the collar and shake him, then I’d see if I could throw him like he threw that rock earlier.

A soft, deep honeyed voice speaks up from the side as Ruger does his best to calm me down. “You have more time. It didn’t make sense to stress you out over something outside of your control, not when you were dealing with so much already. We all knew we didn’t want to influence your decision or add unnecessary pressure.”

“We weren’t hiding it from you, but we didn’t want it looming over your head until you were in a place where you could deal with it,” Ellery adds.

I fucking hate how reasonable they both sound right now. How every word just seems to pop one of my little pissed-off bubbles. I deflate slightly, only to puff back up like a dangerous puffer fish when Gannon relaxes into the sofa like he’s won this round.

“No, seriously, did you cross a line?” Perth demands, his angry stare still fixed on Gannon.

“You know me better than that,” Gannon defends, a flash of hurt sparking in his gray eyes. “Not that it’s any of your business, but she kissed me. How was I supposed to know she wasn’t in the loop?”

“Forget the kiss. It doesn’t mean anything.” I stare down at Gannon, and it’s oddly satisfying to see him drop his eyes, chagrin etched in his features.

I turn back to Ellery, the leader of their den. His bright blue gaze is fixed unwaveringly on me, accepting my glare. “So explain it to me then. Tell me everything I need to know,” I press, folding my arms in front of my chest as though the protective stance will fend off the blows I can feel are coming.

It’s always like this. New place. New people. And boom. Some unknown rule. I had a foster mother slap me once for getting second helpings at the dinner table, a rule she only told me about after the fact. Another who made me sleep on the bathroom floor for two nights because I touched towels that were for guests only. But nothing, nothing I’ve experienced, compares to the fact that I’m apparently on a one-way track to lunacy.

“As pack animals, our bonds are integral, not just to our mental health, but to our magic,” Ellery says. Then he sighs and runs his hands through his hair like he’s struggling with how to explain everything so it will make sense to someone who barely knows anything about their world.

“So we explained about how a mate claim bite creates an instant link, right?” the sheriff asks, and I nod. “It links us mentally, but it also bonds our magic. If that bond isn’t made permanent by the next full moon, it breaks. It’s like a mate failsafe in a way—but if the bond is severed and there’s not a new one to replace it, it can damage your magic and your mind. It more or less leaves you untethered, and then your magic goes a little feral. That’s where stories of werewolves come from. They were moon sick shifters.”

Monsters that are half wolf, half beast, howling to the moon as they slaughter villages and lose themselves to chaos and violence, flash in my mind. I shudder and try to banish that terrifying image.

Fuck.

“As a naif, as a lone wolf outside a den, you’re more susceptible because you don’t have any other connection to help stave off damage if our link is severed,” Perth adds.

“That’s why it’s especially important for you to make sure that your magic has what it needs before the next full moon,” Ellery finishes, and his words have me feeling like my stomach is suddenly made of rocks.

Everything he’s saying feels strangely like the rock slide from earlier, all of it just careening through me, smashing and obliterating everything in its path. Silence slips into the room like thick fog, hiding my reeling thoughts from the way that they’re studying me, worrying about how I’m going to take this.

“So if our bond breaks, does it hurt you too?” I ask, looking at each of them.

“Not in the same way, no,” Perth answers. “Mostly because our bond as a den helps, and then of course our connection to the pack protects us too. The severing of a mate claim can be dangerous for a den, but it’s usually a claim that’s older and has been established for a long time. Then the loss can be catastrophic.”

“Okay, so how do I join a den then?” I counter, trying to find some loophole, some workaround that gives me more time to figure this all out. “Not as a mate, but how you guys are with each other,” I tell them, gesturing to each of them on the couch. “Wouldn’t that solve the problem?”

“You could Blood In to a den, but only before you’ve been given a mate claim bite,” Ruger answers.

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