A Halloween Paranormal Romance
Excerpt:
My Only Love Sprung From My Only Hate...
“We match,” Julia teased the handsome young man across the table from her. He was staring at her as if he had never seen a girl before. Julia knew she wasn’t especially beautiful, so there could be only one reason he was staring at her with a flabbergasted expression. This must be Shawn Strongclaw, the boy her mother wanted her to meet. He had probably seen a photograph of her and was now too shocked to say anything to her face.
She had guessed as soon as she had seen him come in, that he must be Shawn, because of his costume. Her mother must have told his mother what Julia was wearing, and the two wolf wives conspired.
He blinked at her. She felt a strange flutter in her heart. His expression right now was adorably goofy, but she had seen him when he entered, cocky, and sure of himself.
At first, Julia hadn’t been impressed. He was lanky, with a plain face. But when their eyes met, something struck her with the force of an electric pulse. His eyes were gorgeous. The rest of him didn’t matter. She felt a connection she couldn’t explain. It was as if her whole body had caught fire. Then she noticed his costume, and it hit her that it must be Shawn. She couldn’t believe it… Her mother had been right.
Shawn Strongclaw was her Fated Mate.
Her inner Wolf yipped excitedly. The recognition that this was the boy destined to be the man she loved forever was instantaneous, far stronger than she had imagined possible, even hearing tales from older relatives. Everyone talked about how magical the mating bond felt. But it wasn’t the same as feeling it for yourself for the first time. Her whole body tingled as if she were being pumped full of helium and could float away like a balloon.
He grinned sheepishly at her.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Could you repeat what you just said? I didn’t catch it.”
He hadn’t caught her words, she knew, because he was so busy staring at her. She liked the way he gaped at her as if she were the most important thing in the world. She grinned.
He answered her smile with a grin of his own, some of his earlier cockiness, returning. Suddenly shy, her cheeks heated, and she glanced down. To hide her sudden fluster, she gestured to her costume, the princess gown in mulberry and sapphire, and then to his doublet and hose in the exact matching shades.
“We match,” she repeated. “Our costumes, I mean. You are Romeo; I am Juliet.”
“Oh,” he said, with a twist of his lips. “Is that what this costume is? I was afraid I was supposed to dance ballet.”
“What’s wrong with ballet?” she challenged, pretending to be offended.
“Nothing, when pretty girls do it. Are you a ballerina?”
“No.” Julia laughed. “I have two left feet.”
He glanced over her shoulder, just as the song on the speakers changed again. “How about the Monster Mash?”
“I told you.” She lifted her skirt and pointed her slipper at him. “Two left feet.”
“Same as Frankenstein. So you’ll be perfect. Especially since I can’t dance either. “
He slipped around the table so quickly that she would have known he was a shifter, even if she hadn’t already sensed it magically. She still couldn’t detect what kind of shifter he was, but she could tell from the assured way he moved, that he had complete control over his animal. There was a certain confidence a shifter had after mastering their animal form. Besides, it was a Full Moon. If he hadn’t mastered his other form, he wouldn’t even be human right now, he’d be with the young Wolves under the supervision of their elders, running through the trees and howling at the Blue Moon.
He slipped his arm around her, equally confident that she would follow him, and she did. He pulled her into the solarium, which had been turned into a dance room. At the moment, mostly Boomers were dancing, but that didn’t deter him. He swung her around as if they were square dancing. Somehow her body seem to know what to do. He brought his face very close to hers; her breath hitched; she wondered if he would kiss her, even though they had just met. She wasn’t certain she would stop him.
He flashed another grin at her and pulled away. Then he deliberately made some comically bad dance moves to the cheesy Halloween music, pretending to be a zombie, a vampire, and some kind of ghoul through his exaggerated motions. Julia collapsed from giggling. More younger people joined them on the dance floor. The tempo and energy level rose. Julia and her Romeo danced at the center of the frenzy. After the Monster Mash ended, they danced to several more songs, including Ghostbusters, and Time Warp.
Finally, the DJ, who was actually Toby’s father, Morris, who normally drove a taxi, put on Spooky Movie Soundtracks and took a break to get some food.
“You never got to eat your food!” Julia cried. “I distracted you.”
“You certainly did. Let’s see if there’s anything left.”
Everything he said to her felt like an inside joke. They both laughed over it, though there was nothing explicitly funny she could pin point. They shared a secret that couldn’t be explained to outsiders.
They returned to the table. Fortunately, the Wolves had no intention of letting the food run short at any party of theirs, so, although Roman’s original plate had been cleared out, new platters of food replaced the earlier dishes, and they both were able to snag plenty of num-nums.
“Let’s go sit outside, where we can talk without all this noise,” Julia said. She was dying of curiosity. She already knew that she would agree to her engagement to Shawn, but he was still a stranger to her. She wanted to get to know him. She had a thousand questions she was bursting to ask.
Above all, the question that haunted her was whether he felt “it” too. She was certain that he was the one for her, but what if her zeal was one-sided?
Just like that, she crumbled into a nervous wreck again. She knew she was blushing, and she stared at her skirts, swishing along as they walked outside to a quieter part of the yard. From a bench under the trees, they could see Toby and other young Wolves playing their own version of bobbing for apples. Two male Wolf Shifters had their hands tied behind their backs as they circled each other. Each clenched an apple in his teeth. They were trying to force the other one to drop his apple, using only body and head slams. It was violent and rowdy, and they were surrounded by a circle of men and women, howling them on. The edgy music from the soundtrack of the horror film Halloween poured out of the house, adding tension to the game.
“Tell me everything about yourself,” Julia said. “Not stupid things that you would tell anybody, but the things that are really important to you.”
“All the things that were important to me up until now don’t matter anymore,” he said. “Now, all that matters to me is you.”
He said it so seriously that her inner wolf believed him. And nothing matters to me but him, her wolf whispered.
But it also sounded like a line, and the skeptical part of her rebelled wasn’t as swayed as her inner animal. She crossed her arms and tilted her head up at him.
“Come on,” she said. “Don’t flatter me.”
“I’m not!”
“Then don’t flatter yourself.” She touched his chest with a single finger, right over his heart. “Tell me what is going on in here. Do you like being a shifter?”
“Up till this moment, I would have said I love being a shifter,” he said. “Now I’m not certain. I might hate it.”
“Why not?”
“Because my animal is telling me that you are meant to be my soulmate for life. And if your animal isn’t telling you the same, I’m going to feel like dying. If you say that you feel the same, then I’ll be happy to be the shifter again. By the light, I’ll be the happiest shifter in the Seven Mortal Spheres. But if you tell me that you don’t feel the same, then I would have rather never been a shifter in the first place. I would’ve rather been born human, never knowing what it feels like to meet my mate. I would’ve rather not been born at all.”
She softened. “I do feel it,” she said. “I can’t believe this is happening to me. I hoped it would, but I never imagined…”
“Can I kiss you?” he whispered.
Their eyes locked. Slowly, Julia nodded her head. He lowered his face toward hers, slowly, his hands steadying her, one around her back, and one on her hip, as their bodies moved closer together, his lips close enough to hers that they shared one delicious breath…
Before he could kiss her, a noise startled them both. They jerked apart. The roar of animalistic rage, quite unlike the earlier, cheerful, howling, erupted from the circle of young men in the yard.
“He’s a fake!” shouted Toby. “He’s not one of us! He’s a sheep! It’s one of the enemy!”
A cacophony of other angry voices took up the cry. “An attack! An attack. The enemy has invaded our home!”
Julia and the young man both leaped to their feet. She knew that his instinct would be to protect her, even though he was there as a guest. Her instinct, of course was also to fight for her pack.
But she didn’t understand what was going on. Toby had wrestled a boy’s hands behind his back. She could hear her cousins and relatives and friends, crying out that the Sheep Shifters were attacking them, but she didn’t see any attackers. More importantly, she didn’t smell any Sheep Shifters.
An old man with a grizzled beard, a witch named Ollie, who often accepted invitations to the Wolf parties, raised his hands. His fingers were gnarled with arthritis, his voice rattled, scratchy and dry, but his spell and his magic rang true. He chanted a counterspell to any glamours.
The young man that Toby had grabbed into a wrestling hold transformed. The stranger was still a young man, but his face, and notably his scent, were dramatically different. Now, Julia recognized him as Mason Bellwether.
But that was not the only shock. Worse, much worse, was that the boy she had taken for Shawn Strongclaw also transformed. But his princely Romeo costume dissolved into a dark shirt and black jeans. His plain face altered subtly, the line of his jaw, the slant of his nose and brows... Only his eyes remained the same. He didn’t turn into a hideous Goblin... If anything, the transformation did his looks good. Whereas before he had been somewhat odd and gangly looking, now he looked ruggedly handsome.
The problem was that she recognized that handsome face because he was a student at her school. Of course, she never spoken to him before, because she was forbidden to talk to him, as he was forbidden to talk to her. They certainly had never stared deeply into each other’s eyes, only seen each other from afar.
She knew his name, though, as she had memorized the names and faces of all her family’s avowed enemies.
He wasn’t Shawn Strongclaw, her mom’s friend’s son, but the son of the hated enemy clan, Roman Bellwether.
Fury filled her. Before she could sputter any of the accusations that flooded her mind, Roman Bellwether flashed her one of his twisted smiles, which looked so familiar, even now, on his hatefully handsome face, that her heart squeezed.
“I’m so sorry,” he whispered. “I never meant for this to happen.”
Then he ran and transformed into his Ram form, knocking Toby so hard with his horns that her cousin toppled over, releasing the other boy, Mason. A third young man joined them as well, and all three bounded away in their Ram forms.
Half of the Grayhide Pack transformed into Wolves to follow them. The Alpha, Ronald, who had raced out of the house when he heard the ruckus, barked orders for the others not to be fools, not to run away, leaving the house undefended, in case those three Bellwethers were there to lure the pack from their home for a larger attack later in the night.
Julia felt like a hub in a wheel of whirling chaos, her throat dry, her eyes wet. No one noticed her shock or if they did, assumed it came from the same source as their own outrage. She had seen the real face of the one she knew was her mate, a face more handsome than she had dared to dream, yet more hateful than she could bear. She had not loved him at first sight for his dashing good looks, nor had she rejected him before he could meet her because of his family’s name. Now her attraction and her agony were doubled by the truth. She would never see him again unless her family hunted him down and dragged him back to the house to be interrogated—which meant he would be beaten and abused, perhaps worse...
She prayed to the Light he would escape, but in some ways, it would be worse for her, knowing that her one true love lived, walked the same streets as she did, and even attended the same school, but would remain always out of reach.
She dared not tell anyone that her Wolf had recognized Roman Bellwether as her mate, for there was only one way to be free of a Fated Mate once the bond was sealed.
Death.
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