Page 54 of Shadowed Spirits

She shakes her head at him and opens her mouth to needle him further. I would’ve thought completing the mate bond would’ve settled the tension between the two of them. While it’s taken the edge off it, Bishop and Izzy are still butting heads as often as Izzy and I do.

Ever since smelling the bond and him all over her, my wolf has been constantly growling, howling, and snarling at me to make her ours too. But that’s not going to happen until she’s one hundred percent ready, which pisses him off to no end. He thinks she’s ready now, but I disagree. While she might’ve let me come down her throat, I’m still not sure she’s ready for the rough fucking I know my wolf, and if I’m honest, I, want.

“All right, you two,” Archer says through a smile. “How ’bout we figure out what we want to do, then argue later?”

“We weren’t arguing,” Bishop and Izzy both say at the same time.

They look at each other for a moment before grinning. He leans down to plant a lingering kiss on her forehead, and it feels like someone’s crushing my heart in a vise grip. I want that casual intimacy with her, so goddamn bad it physically hurts. But we’re not there yet. I know it just takes time, but it can be hard to watch her with Bishop. Not that I’d ever tell her that. Izzy’s already struggling with how to handle five mates, and I’m not going to add to that by piling my feelings on her shoulders.

“What’s the plan, bossman?” Archer asks when he can finally tear his gaze away from Izzy’s smiling face. More often than not, her gray eyes are haunted with sorrow, her delicate blonde brows drawn in worry, and her plush pink lips flattened in steely determination. To see her normally serious face light up with joy or happiness or laughter is the best gift in the world. I just wish I could find a way to make that her normal.

Scrubbing a hand over my face, I try to focus on the most immediate problem. “I think at least some of us need to see where the cave leads.” I’m the pack alpha, so I’m always expected to have a plan and know the right course of action. In reality, I’m just making it up as I go along.

Normally, alphas have guidance from the previous alpha and betas when they’re starting out. Because my parents died suddenly, I was thrown into this role without any direction, in the midst of the biggest crisis my pack had ever faced. I was angry and scared and so fucking alone in the beginning. I made more mistakes than I care to admit, and there’s a lot I would change if I could go back. But I eventually figured it out well enough to keep our pack from collapsing.

After five years, the pack now trusts me to lead them and comes to me with every single small issue they have. Cain, Archer, and Prue help handle a lot of the day-to-day squabbles, but I’m still expected to know everything and have all the answers. I rarely do, but I’ve gotten good at pretending otherwise.

“I’m good with that, wolf boy. But we should stick together. We don’t know what we’ll find farther down, and we don’t know who or what could come wandering into the cave.” Izzy juts her chin out, daring me to argue with her.

I shove my hair out of my eyes as I think on what she said. As much as I hate Izzy following us into an unknown situation, I hate leaving her here unprotected more. “You’re right,” I concede, much to her surprise, if her eyebrows shooting up is any indication. “We should all see where this cave leads.”

Waiting a beat for any objections, I take off when no one says anything. As a wolf shifter, my eyes adjust to the darkness just fine as we wander deeper. I hear Izzy bump into something behind me before she swears and mutters a spell under her breath. Soft blue light illuminates the narrow passage, which should make it easier for her and Bishop to see.

We walk in tense silence, none of us sure what we’re going to find. We trek for about ten minutes, mostly on a downhill slope, before I can see a hint of light at the end of the tunnel. Picking up my pace, I reach the end in no time and step into a huge open space with the same rough gray rock walls.

I groan at what I see. The cavern isn’t empty. Far from it. Fifteen heavily armed shifters of some kind have their weapons trained on us.

“Halt!” one of the men demands as four red laser dots appear on my chest. I grind my teeth but stop where I am as I try to find some way out of this latest mess.

CHAPTER 29

IZZY

“Ah, fuck, not again,” I groan as I assess the cavern. It’s the biggest cave we’ve been in yet. It’s probably twenty-feet tall, with a circular hole at the top that lets the morning sunlight pour in.

The people inside the cave are the main problem. There are fifteen men and women dressed in tactical gear. I’m not sure what they are, but I know they’re supernaturals of some sort. I can rule out mages and vampires pretty confidently, so I’d guess they’re shifters, which, honestly, isn’t the worst thing they could be. We’d be screwed if it were a contingent ofcurae, but shifters, I think we can handle.

“Again?” the lead man, who looks around Luca’s age, asks with his lips tilted up in an amused smirk. His voice has a light Spanish accent, and he has tanned skin, tousled dark brown hair, and deep brown eyes. “You find yourself surrounded by hostiles with itchy trigger fingers often?”

I can’t help the slightly hysterical laugh I let out. “More often than I’d like.” I rub my temples at the fact today’s already a shit show and it’s not even seven a.m. That has to be a record for me. “Look, can we just not do whatever this is? You most likely won’t be able to kill us, and I’d really rather not rip out your souls. So,how about you go run off to Lua and snitch on us to your heart’s content, and we’ll nope out of here and continue trying to fuck up her plans.”

While Doyle definitely deserved having his soul sent to the Styx, I still don’t like doing it. I’m even more uncomfortable with that aspect of my power now that I know that I condemn the souls I yank out. Who am I to decide which souls deserve eternal suffering and which deserve a chance at another life?

I don’t even know who these shifters are. The only thing that really makes sense is that these are Lua’s minions. That doesn’t mean they deserve eternal punishment, though. How she’s convinced both mages and shifters to work with her when she plans to kill everyone on Earth is a mystery. While it’s not great that Lua will know we’re looking for her, finding her goons is at least something.

Cerberus growls to punctuate my message, having appeared at some point. They have an eerily good ability to sense when I’m in a tense situation. I’m glad they’re in their rottweiler form because I don’t think the shifters would take me and my three-headed Chihuahua very seriously.

“We would never work for LuaMater,” he hisses in disgust. I guess he decides we’re not a huge threat because he slings his rifle over his shoulder so it lies on his back. He then shoves his hands into his pockets. That’s a mistake on his part because we can take fifteen shifters with ease, as long as they don’t have any protection charms from Lua.

I blink at him in confusion. “Why are you here?”

“We guard the sacred cave. We cannot stop LuaMaterfrom using our cave to consort with the mage, but we can keep it safe from her followers like you.” Lead shifter dude is confused about many things if he thinks we’re her followers. I mean, yes, we’re following her around, but that’s to kill her, not help her.

“What? We are definitelynother followers. Besides the fact that she’s tried to kill one of my mates, she also wants to destroy the entire world and probably the other realms. Why the fuck would we be working with her?” That’s what I don’t get about Doyle partnering with Lua. I don’t know how he pictured his future with the Earth destroyed and Lua all powerful, but there’s no way it would be a good one.

He narrows his dark eyes on me, like if he squints hard enough, he can see into my soul and know if I’m telling the truth. “But you’re a mage. We know the mages are working with her.”

“Yeah. And I’m also the one who ripped out her mage friend’s soul and sentenced him to eternity in the River Styx. Most mages aren’t working with Lua. In fact, most of us don’t know who she is.” That begs the question, how the heck do random shifters in a random cave in a random mountain know who she is?

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