Page 31 of Mortal Blood
She shook her head, looking puzzled. “I…don’t know. I just felt like I needed to come here.”
Jax and Cole shared an uneasy look.
“Do you think Astor might have planted a seed?” Cole asked.
“I don’t think so,” Ling said, her voice uncertain. “It didn’tfeellike that, but…”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said, and as all three turned to look at me, added, “We have to get to the pack, and whether Astor knows about it or not doesn’t change that.”
Jax shrugged one shoulder. “She’s not wrong.”
“Gee, thanks. I mean it, we don’t have time to waste. We need to get going.”
“Going where?” Ling asked, and before I could answer, added, “I’m coming with you.”
“Bad idea,” Jax said. “Taking her into the pack, when we don’t know what’s going on there…”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Wolves and uncertainty. We get it. And you need to getoverit. Did you miss the part where we don’t have time to stand around talking? She’s coming.”
Jax turned to Cole for support, but Cole was too busy looking awed by me taking charge. I preened for a moment before remembering we were in a hurry.
“Er, right, let’s go. Give me a leg up?” I smiled sweetly at Cole who interlocked his hands and gave me a boost over the high wall. I could have jumped it myself with a run up, but I couldn’t resist any opportunity to be close with Cole. I blamed the mate bond. And my raging libido.
I landed neatly on the far side of the wall and a moment later, Ling landed beside me, and then the guys came over, landing smoothly in crouches that seemed far more elegant than was fair for guys their size, though I couldn’t help admiring the powerful grace underscoring Cole’s easy movements.
Ling cleared her throat and I shrugged unrepentantly. “What? I said we were in a hurry, not that I couldn’t enjoy the view along the way.”
“Feel free to do the same,” Jax said to her with a grin, flexing one bicep. Ling rolled her eyes, but not before a flush of pink stole across her cheeks. Huh. So much for my friend having better taste than that.
She twisted away a little too quickly as Jax stripped off his shirt.
“No need to be shy,” he said with a wink that was wasted on her back. “You’re going to be getting up close and personal with all this soon.”
Her eyes widened in panic as she twisted round to me.
“Yup, sorry,” I said. “Unless you’ve got a better way of getting through miles of woodland at high speed, we’re going to have to ride them in their shifted forms—and Cole’s already taken. Do you, um, have a better way?”
I worded it as tactfully as I could, knowing that Ling was super sensitive about whatever it was she actually was, but she just shook her head, the red in her cheeks deepening.
“Don’t worry.” I sent a dark look Jax’s way. “He’ll be on his best behavior.”
Jax feigned a hurt look. “Am I ever not?”
I rolled my eyes and turned back to Ling. “And if he’s not, you can always give him a kick.”
Jokes aside, Jax would take good care of her, and if I’d thought for one moment she wouldn’t be safe with him, I’d have insisted she stayed behind.
The guys stripped off and shifted, and I quickly gathered up their clothes and scrambled onto Cole’s back. He rose carefully from his crouch and I settled into place, their clothes pinned carefully under one leg. Cole wouldnotthank me if we got to where we were going and discovered we’d lost his pants somewhere on the run. I’d already learned that lesson…
Ling exhaled in a sharp huff and then carefully climbedonto Jax’s broad back. I gave him one last death glare for good measure, but he rose steadily to his feet, taking care to keep his passenger from losing her balance. And then we were off and running, and everything except me, Cole, and the wind and trees whipping around us was banished from my mind. Running with him like this was so freeing, so incredibly liberating that I couldn’tnotbe absorbed in it wholly. The only thing I could imagine being better would be running on four legs beside him, like some part of me yearned to be able to do. But wishes didn’t come true, not in my world, and I wasn’t going to let that steal the joy of my closeness to Cole in this moment.
We ran for minutes that felt like seconds to me, and probably hours to Ling, and then the two wolves slowed to a halt. I leapt nimbly from Cole’s back, and then steadied Ling as she slid down from Jax. She gave me a grateful smile and I squeezed her hand in solidarity and quickly brought her up to speed on everything we knew—which admittedly wasn’t much—while the guys shifted back and got dressed.
The four of us emerged from the woods and a few minutes later a small town came into sight. My eyes immediately caught on the welcoming lights of a quaint inn on its outskirts, with a pretty sign swaying gently beneath a thatched roof declaring it as the Wandering Willow Inn.
I blew out an irritated sigh, twisted my head away, and looked at it through the corners of my eyes.
The grimy inn with peeling paint squatted beside the road with an air of menace was about as far from the idyllic image of the quaint inn as it was possible to be. But then, why bother maintaining the place when you could just use an enchantment to turn it into a Venus flytrap for unsuspecting travelers?
