All she’d wanted was for them to accept her for him. For them to like her. She wanted to fit in and be like everyone else. Even if it was just for one day, or two days, she’d needed the break from the suck so badly. And now She-Devil would ruin everything.
“You gotta beast in you too, girl,” Willa said, squatting in the sand. Her eyes were glowing now, the same bright green as Jax’s when he got worked up.
“Willa?” A tall man layered in muscles with long, horrifying scars all over his torso asked. “What’s happening?”
“Your son brought home a monstah kitty.” But Willa was smiling eerily, and other shifters were starting to gather around them.
Too many bodies. Too many people. Too heavy. The scent of fur and dominance was everywhere, and She-Devil couldn’t be contained anymore. She ripped out of Annalise with a roar, and it hurt so bad for that blinding moment of Change.
Time slowed. She wished it hadn’t because what she witnessed in the three seconds it took for She-Devil to recover from the Change was horrifying.
Willa shifted first into a towering she-grizzly. Jax and Jathan’s bears exploded from them, and behind the trio of monster brown bears, the others, who had been relaxing in chairs, shifted. Bears and boars and gorillas came rushing toward her.
Annalise was too small in this body. She didn’t have control. She barely had a loud enough voice to warn She-Devil. Don’t attack or they’ll kill you.
With another scream, She-Devil charged Willa because she was the dangerous one here. Jathan’s dark chocolate bear was confused and backing away, and Jax’s bear stood there on its hind legs with his eyes locked passively on She-Devil, waiting, but Willa would be a fun fight. She would be a challenge. She would be even more fun to bleed than Barret.
Full of mindless red rage, She-Devil leapt through the air and hit Willa in the chest, but then was promptly tossed into the center of all the monster animals of Damon’s Mountains. She’d just been fed to the bears.
Fine. She would just kill them all.
Annalise was panicking at She-Devil’s stupid plan. This was like all the other times she stole her body. She made the worst decisions for their survival. Stupid panther.
She connected with a blond grizzly and was swatted back down to earth. Pain slashed across her back end as she took a set of vicious claws there. This wasn’t fun. She was losing. Not only losing the Blood Game, but for the first time in her existence, She-Devil realized she had even more to lose. Like her life. There were too many of them, and more were pouring onto the bank from the river. When a pitch-black grizzly charged the circle, She-Devil crouched down on her belly and backed up, almost into Willa, who raked a massive paw right across her backside. It hurt so fucking bad. She-Devil spun and hissed, swatted out a paw, which Willa ducked neatly. The others were closing in, and it would be a dog pile soon. She-Devil flattened her ears and let off a warning growl as the Black grizzly shouldered his way into the circle. His black eyes were full of fury as he barreled down on her. She flattened herself to the ground in terror. His gigantic paws rivaled the size of Jax’s, and he slammed them down on either side of her body and roared in her face.
She-Devil rolled over on her back and lay there, stunned. And bleeding. And angry, hurt, and confused. The black grizzly would kill her now. She could see it in his eyes. They’d gone dead. Alpha. Creed. He was so dominant, like Willa, like Jax.
She wasn’t in Red Havoc territory anymore. She was in Hell! This wasn’t fun anymore, and she wanted out of here.
A deafening roar sounded from the circle, and she hunched at how pissed-off Jax sounded. Even he was scary right now. All of She-Devil’s bravado left her, and then she did something she’d never done before.
She ran.
Not literally, but she shrank and gave Annalise back her skin like a scaredy-cat.
Aching all over, Annalise lay between those giant paws with her arms flung over her face, just waiting on the death blow.
Growling with every breath, the bear eased back, though, and left her there. The other animals backed off, too, all except Jax who paced close to her, eyeing the others.
She didn’t know what to do as everyone started shifting back to their human forms and talking low amongst themselves. They’d all been having a good time at the river until she’d come along and ruined it.
“That’s a bad kitty,” a dark headed behemoth said from where he stood by a grill. Apparently he hadn’t felt threatened enough by her to shift with the others. He wore an orange apron that had music notes on it and said let me see the pizza roll. “Shifting here like that will get you spankings. How’s your butt feel?”
Annalise didn’t even want to see the claw marks. They stung so bad, and now they had sand in them. Already she was angled on her side, resting on one hip, trying to give it relief. She’d gotten a public bear spanking? And from the mother of the man she loved. She was blushing from head to toe with mortification. “My butt feels not great,” she admitted.
“Cool,” he said, his dark eyebrows lifting high. “Are you hungry?”
Mostly she was naked, embarrassed, sore, and she had sand in her crack, but okie dokie, her stomach growled at the scent of cheese and meat and dough that wafted her way. “Yes?” she said in a small voice, more question than anything.
“Bash will get you fixed up with food,” a very naked Willa said, holding her hand out to help Annalise up.
Annalise hesitated, not understanding. Willa had just hurt her, and now she was helping her?
Willa huffed a sigh and reached down, grabbed her wrist and yanked her upward with surprising strength. “You’re a violent little beasty.” She cracked a naughty grin. “I like that about you. Plus, I heard a rumor you took Almost Alpha in the Red Havoc Crew.”
“No, just Second.”
“Potato, tomato,” Willa said, shrugging one shoulder up and searching the ground for something.
That wasn’t how the rhyme went, but okay. Jax had Changed back and was cracking a smirk. Bash shoved a paper plate with a dozen pizza rolls into one of her hands and a fruity beer with a miniature pink umbrella into the other, and everything was weird.
“Everyone,” Jax called, cupping a hand on one side of his mouth. “This is Annalise of Red Havoc. She’s mine.”
“Hi, Annalise,” the butt-naked shifters said in unison as they went back about their business like they hadn’t all just shifted for battle.
As he passed, Jathan clapped Annalise so hard on the back she coughed. Bash tossed him a pizza roll through the air, and Jax’s twin caught it in his mouth like a circus poodle. He turned and walked backward a couple steps, grinning at her as he chewed. “I always wanted a sister to torture,” he said around the bite. “I mean a sister besides Jax.”