Chapter 9

Gunner rose to his feet so abruptly I would have lost my balance if his hands hadn’t been tearing at the neckline of my sweatshirt, attempting to rip fabric away from my skin. Out of the corner of one eye, I caught sight of the remaining gang members fleeing the scene of their defeat. But I wasn’t concerned about teenage hoodlums any longer. Instead, I was fighting off a male who outweighed me by approximately a ton of muscle and who possessed supernatural speed and agility to boot.

“Stop!” I demanded, bringing one knee up to hit the male equivalent of an eject button. Because, yes, I’ll admit it—I had previously found the alpha werewolf as enticing and dangerous as a shiny new rapier. But I didn’t intend to assuage my curiosity on an open city street.

Unfortunately, Gunner’s instincts proved far too well-honed to fall prey to the typical female self-defense moves. Instead, the alpha’s easy twist out of my reach suggested that he was as adept at street fighting as he was at protecting his brother. And this time around, my throat tightened as I realized I was trapped within the vise-grip of werewolf arms.

Well, not quite trapped. The icy dagger slid down into my left fingers with facility despite the mandates of gravity begging it to move in the opposite direction. And my lips twitched into a smirk as I recalled how easily a lefty strike typically worked its way through an opponents’ unwitting guard.

But before I could decide between the long-lasting damage of a stab and the shock value of a swipe, the fabric of my shirt tore at last with a resounding riiiiiip. Then cold air rushed across my chest at the same moment Gunner flipped the dagger out of my hand with an almost-gentle bend of his wrist.

I was both disarmed and in dishabille. And while either state might have been enough to leave me shaken, it was the separation from my star ball that struck like a punch to my gut. The fragment of my soul soared away before I could beg it to change trajectory, and I bent inward as my strength fled right along with my blade.

“I need to see where you’re wounded,” Gunner growled, his words laden with more emotion than seemed justified by the ugly gray of my sports bra. Oh, right, the bullet hole. I shook my head woozily, trying to recall why showing the handsy alpha my holeless skin wasn’t the obvious route out of this untenable situation.

And as I pondered, Gunner took matters into his own hands. “Easy does it,” he murmured, voice hoarse with emotion. One huge hand slid down to press almost gently against my lower back while the other leveraged my shoulders up. Then chilly air gaped down the dramatically enlarged neckline of my sweatshirt, bringing my barely covered chest closer to the werewolf’s searching eyes.

***

It was hard to think with a third of my soul glinting against the pavement two body lengths away. So despite the sure knowledge that retrieving the star ball via magic was a bad idea, I nudged at the pseudo-metal with my mind’s eye, dragging it inch by inch across the road as stealthily as an alley cat stalked a mouse.

And the mere change in direction of my soul fragment snapped the rest of my brain back into focus. He can’t know what I am, I realized, hoping it wasn’t already too late.

Luckily, I could work quickly when haste was necessary. Calling upon the rest of my magic with far less ceremony than usual, I molded the icy star-ball fragment into a medallion. Sent out a tendril of magic to solidify into a gold chain looped around my neck. Then mental fingers slipped the bulky disc into my left bra cup a split second before Gunner’s hand-on-shoulders momentum bared my unclothed chest to view.

It turned out I needn’t have hurried though. Because the werewolf who had been so aggressive one moment earlier paused before digging into my underwear. His fingers hovered atop the second layer of fabric while his scent grew subtly more human as he overcame the instincts of his beast.

“I need to look at....” He paused, averted his eyes, and didn’t quite manage to complete the thought as the faintest tinge of red infused his cheeks.

The abrupt shyness from a formerly brash alpha was endearing. So rather than snapping back in retaliation for earlier abuses, I merely pulled the medallion out of its hiding place with a jerk to the chain that hadn’t existed seconds before. “The bullet never hit me,” I informed him, speaking as slowly as I did with the most annoying of my sixth graders. “It’s the old Bible-in-the-breast-pocket routine. No wound. No blood. No reason for you to be pawing at my breasts.”

Seconds after I spoke, though, I realized the error in my logic. Kira would have rolled her eyes at such an obvious continuity flaw in someone else’s magic trick. Because if the medallion had been inside my bra cup from the get-go...why was there no hole in that second layer of fabric? Why wasn’t there the bulge of a bullet breaking up the gentle curve of my breast?

Moving as swiftly as I could, I pulled a safety pin out of nowhere...or, rather, out of the back of the medallion, which shrank by half a centimeter as it lost a twentieth of its mass. Then I covered up the evidence quite literally, pinning my sweatshirt back together with hands that trembled only slightly.

Meanwhile, the boomeranged dagger nudged at my boot, its peregrinations complete. Just what I needed—to draw further attention to inconsistencies in my spur-of-the-moment solution. Still, I couldn’t just leave it there.

So, neck prickling with danger, I bent down to collect the errant weapon, feeling absurd as I went through the motions of stashing a trickle of magic away in an imaginary sheath up one sleeve.

Up my right sleeve. Shit. Could I be more disingenuous?

Before me, the werewolf’s brows furrowed in consideration. He knew something was cockeyed...which meant it was past time to make my escape.

“Thanks for nothing,” I said grimly, turning away from a predator who possessed the means, motive, and opportunity to snap my neck between his long fingers. Then, forcing my feet not to break into a run, I headed blindly toward the far end of the block.