Page 69 of Hunted Mate
“My son has not taught you any manners,” Orion says. “But I will. I will beat you bloody before you warm my bed.”
“I will stab you in the throat,” she says. “But that’s enough foreplay for now.”
Orion is done hearing her mouth off. He jerks his head toward her.
“Get her, boys.”
Callie laughs. It’s a sound that starts out mockingly feminine, but deepens into a terrible chuckle as wolves flow toward her, bounding on strong paws.
This is a mistake. A big one. They think they can take her down through numbers. They don’t want to kill her, but they are trying to subdue their prize.
Callie, on the other hand, has no qualms about killing. They’ve forgotten that. They’ve neglected the fact that when you come for the queen, you can’t just come in numbers, you have to come smart and tactical.
Callie shifts.
I’m surprised she has it in her. Usually a werewolf who just shifted for the first time would spend days recovering, but she slips out of her human form as if it was an inconveniently small bathing suit. There is a sudden cascade of fur, and a display of white fangs that are not close to the ground but nearly six feet off it. She lets out a roar of pure feral glee.
There is no fear in her, and like a group of attacking dogs suddenly realizing that their prey may not be prey after all, the pack panics.
The sounds of startled and shocked wolves fill the air. Some of them fall out of their wolf forms entirely and just start scrabbling around in desperation. Callie throws back her head and howls, a deep, primal sound that creates fear in some and submission in others. Belly crawling toward her, making soft whines that are designed to make her take mercy on them.
I am impressed, and I am slightly horrified as I realize my father is losing his pack to my mate. She has no interest in being alpha, and if she is, she will invariably lead her followers astray.
By the time the moment subsides, there are at least eighty naked shifter men in various states of confusion and adoration.
“What the hell just happened?” One of them asks me the question, his face contorted with confusion as he finds himself naked and suddenly very much obedient to a beast he never imagined existed.
“You found someone more worthy than my father,” I say simply. “A female with more strength, more power than any old alpha.”
“Oh,” he says.
Oh, indeed.
It’s fortunate we rented such a large house. There is actually enough room to accommodate those who came to capture or destroy us. There aren’t enough snacks to go around, not at first, not until Callie has some air dropped in from the helicopter she mentioned earlier.
My father is left standing on the driveway with his car. Karl is still beside him. The two of them have managed to keep their senses because they did not shift with the rest of the pack and experience the frenzy of animal submission that has claimed the minds and hearts of those he sent after her.
I stand facing what feels like the dwindling remnants of my family, feeling quite, well, smug.
Orion wants to save face. He wants to let me know he has not lost the game, even though it is quite obvious he has lost the game.
“We’ll make more of them,” he says. “She’s nothing more than the product of a process. You know that. She’s not special.”
The last assertion is where he’s wrong, and where he knows he is wrong. Callie just took his pack with the sheer force of her existence. Simply being who she is, is a powerful invocation. He might be able to try to do science to others, but I don’t think he’ll replicate the results, and he knows it too.
“I don’t think you will. I think you’ll try. I think you’ll kill some people. I think you’ll produce mutated, broken creatures.But I do not think you will create another Calista Hart. It’s not possible.”
“I have a man with me,” Orion says. “Get out here, Doctor.”
The man from the lab who was so helpful when Callie first went missing slides out of the car, looking very sheepish for a wolf scientist. I wonder why he was on hand. To sedate her? To perform further experiments in the field? I try to contain my rage as I imagine all the awful reasons he might be here—not one of them good.
“He’s right, sir.”
“What?”
“The processes involved are not designed to create… what we just observed. She must have had some pre-existing DNA components. Perhaps the prior bite, but I think it is more likely in her bloodline. Humans contain quite a bit of DNA of indeterminate function. When we were isolating her code in the lab, we noticed that she already had some sequences coding for…”
“She’s not special. We can replicate this,” Orion says, interrupting the scientist’s facts with his own baseless assertion.
