He just raised an eyebrow, and she glared as she moved toward them. They both stepped away and began to walk down her hallway to the door, talking in low tones, but her ears perked up, and she heard them discussing that the pack of mystery Lycans had been spotted again, and Mack wanted to know what Roland wanted to do.
“It’s time. Once I get Shea to my home, I will go and see what it is that they want, but it is no coincidence they are back now.” His voice sounded grim.
“And I think they want our women for their own. Place some of the older males with partners around the perimeter of Moonshadow and get Warren to gather the women into a safer space.”
Mack strode out the door and then shifted into his wolf to hurry and do his boss’s bidding. Roland waited for her to reach him and then ushered her out the door and took her keys to lock the door before he escorted her to his place.
Shea felt a sense of foreboding, again, and had a feeling that today was about to change everyone’s life.
Chapter 4
Adanya
Adanya panted as she hurried through the forest in search of her prey. That goddamned Mack was about to get a chunk bitten out of his ass for what he’d just said and how he had treated her twin sister, Emiyah. She had a silly crush on that man, and with time, it would have gone away when she was bonded to someone else, but for now, it was just a bit of annoyance, and all he had to do was continue to avoid her.
She paused and sniffed the air and picked back up his scent.
It looked like he was heading to Shea’s home in the forest, and she was now curious as to why he was going there. “No matter, you don’t get to hurt my sister and get away with it.”
The image of her sister bursting through the door with tears running down her cheeks and her breathing hitched as she almost hyperventilated. She had been tinkering with another closing door mechanism for old man Harry, who constantly forgot to close his animal stock doors as he left from attending them. Harry then would have to get help to chase them back into the enclosure. This new gadget she created was going to recognize him and close the gate once he had exited. She was calibrating it when the door opened, and she saw her sister in the state she was in.
She couldn’t get the whole story of what happened from Emiyah, but what she could piece together was that she’d goneon a walk on the trails and had run into Mack and once again tried to engage him in a conversation.
Emiyah had turned to her with hurt dripping from her voice, “I thought about approaching him for some lessons with a weapon because I thought I could help protect the village from the traveling Lycans.”
Emiyah stared at her teary-eyed. “Adanya, for a split second, I was so happy because he finally paid attention to me and wasn’t just ignoring me.”
“But I wish he’d continued ignoring me. The first time I wished I’d never spoken to the man.” Emiyah looked at her with dark brown eyes filled with liquid that kept running down just as fast as she tried wiping them away. Her nose was running in sync with her tears. Her sister looked a mess, and her anger rose till she saw red.
Her sister bawled, and Adanya pulled her sister into her arms, waiting for her to finish crying and continue with the conversation.
Emiyah pulled away, looking suddenly defeated and exhausted, her heart clenched. “I’m tired, and I lost my favorite hair tie.” Her lips quivered.
“It’s okay, go get some rest. I will find it.” Adanya patted her on her back.
Emiyah nodded and began to climb the stairs, and then paused for a second, turning around, and Adanya sucked in a breath. She’d never seen her chatty, vibrant, absentminded, I love everyone and the world, sister look this way. Anger, pain, and hate made her face look dark and cold. Her eyes are dead now.
“Adanya, tell Shea I don’t need the serum anymore.” Her sister straightened and walked like a zombie up the stairs.
Adanya growled low, her canines beginning to drop, and she took several deep breaths to control it as she watched her sister continue up the stairs.
“Fucking bastard, who does he think he is?!” She cursed under her breath again before getting up and then heading out the door. She searched around and asked for him when she didn’t spot him immediately around the lodge and the King’s place, as was his usual station. She finally caught his scent as she went in search of her sister’s favorite hair tie. When her sister liked something, it was hard for her to move onto anything else, and she wore that red and white patterned butterfly hair scrunchie until it was worn and the vibrant colors faded.
She shifted and began to run in the direction he went, sniffing the ground to make sure he’d not gone anywhere else but was heading to Shea’s place. Adanya could tell he was in human form and not as a wolf. They smelled different when they were in their human or wolf form, and it was never explained properly where their clothes would go once they transitioned. They have evolved so much from their past, where at one point in time their clothes would get shredded, and their bones would snap and break to accommodate their transformation. The newer Lycans could shift in a blink without their bones breaking or their clothes being destroyed, and when they returned to form, they were able to transform back into the same clothes they had on before. No one knew how but speculated there was some form of magic involved.
As she continued to run, Adanya could also smell her sister and thought this was where she must have been before heading toward the village and getting into the confrontationwith Mack, because even though the scent was light, it was still here, along where she was running.
She stopped suddenly when she saw a flash of bright light for a second, and then it disappeared. She panted as she scanned the area. Then saw the flash of light again.
She moved to her left quickly, curiosity piqued as to what that was, and got closer through the bush. She stopped abruptly, holding still as her ears picked up the sound of males talking in low tones, harshly to each other.
“I want to talk to him. I think we can solve this amicably without having to resort to violence and thievery.”
She then heard the other male snort. “Do you really think they will just hand over some of their women to us because we lost some of our women to a disease that we can’t explain or solve?”
“Brother, come on, we have been studying them and the other clans for weeks now, and we need to just take and disappear and start over somewhere else.”
“I think that idea is stupid. The women of Moonshadow Clan are about to go into heat. We will be stuck rutting the females with our backs exposed.”