Page 49 of Bound to the Wolf
Chapter
Twenty-Three
It looked like a party in the backyard as sunrise crested over the fence and drenched the grass around them, making it shine even brighter, like they were laying on a field of emeralds.
Or maybe Delainey was focusing on the grass so she didn’t have to look at the werewolf next to her, or think about what they had almost done the night before.
The backyard was modest, hemmed in by a wooden privacy fence that had been painted blue to match the old Victorian’s siding. A birdbath stood in one corner, dry and crusted with old leaves, and a patch of bare earth near the back door marked the spot where the coven grew herbs.
She and Reece were sitting in the middle of a circle with the coven and Emerson looped around them, hands joined and expressions intense.
There were dark circles under Aya’s brown eyes, and Delainey doubted she had slept. Her hair was pulled back in a bun resting on the top of her head, and she was wearing the same clothes as the night before. Her reading glasses were perched on top of her head by the bun, forgotten there, and the sleeves of her cardigan were pushed up past her elbows, inkstains marking her fingertips from a night spent writing. In front of Aya were several pages of loose leaf paper and a grimoire she must have pulled out of their library. Hopefully, it held the answers they needed to break the manacles on Delainey and Reece’s wrists.
Those manacles needed to get broken today. Otherwise, Delainey might do something crazy like chop off her own hand and see if that worked because she had woken up in Reece’s arms like she belonged there, and she had slept better than she had in weeks, even if you took the kidnapping out of the equation, which she wasn’t going to think about at all. It was relief, she was sure. That had to be it.
It wasn’t that there was something special about the werewolf next to her. It wasn’t that he made something inside her glow. No, it was a crazy situation they had no business getting caught up in.
Cole and Mark were standing behind Briana and Aya, while Javi and Hugh were on the other side of the circle. Javi looked almost relaxed, and Hugh had his arms crossed like he was waiting for some sort of threat he could fight. Nico was behind Elise, and he looked the most comfortable of all the men, but that wasn’t saying much because none of the werewolves actually looked comfortable.
Delainey had an idea that some of the tension among her coven and Emerson came from the spectators. She had performed magic in front of werewolves before, when they successfully rescued Elise and Nico from Austin LaSalle’s clutches, but this felt different.
“You two need to clasp hands,” Aya told them.
Reece met Delainey’s eyes and held his hands out, palms facing down. His hands were large and square-knuckled, with more than a few freckles on the backs of them, and the manacles glinted dully around his thick wrists.
Delainey didn’t want to touch him, but that would raise more questions than she could afford to answer, so she reached her hands out, palms up, and they linked their fingers together. She did her best to ignore the heat of his skin against hers.
Soon this would be over and she would never have to touch him again. She felt a pain deep in her chest at the thought and tried to push it aside. Not touching him was what she wassupposedto be doing. It was a good thing. If she felt a little weird about it, too freaking bad.
“No matter what you do,” Aya warned, “don’t let go of each other until I tell you it’s okay. We’re going to get started now.”
“Do you really need him there?” Reece asked. It was clear who he was talking about. There was only onehimin the circle.
“Doing this with five people is already stretching us thin,” Aya said, her fingers tightening around Briana’s hand on one side and Serena’s on the other. “But I figure you don’t want us calling in any more friends, right?” Her look at Reece was challenging, and Delainey saw Cole take one step forward before he stopped himself. “Emerson has graciously offered to help. Can you accept that?”
If Reece said no, this entire thing would be called off, and she and the grumpy werewolf would be bound together even longer. Delainey squeezed his fingers and gave him a look, hoping he could interpret it.
Reece’s jaw was set, but he nodded. “Just get this over with.”
Delainey felt the first wave of magic rising up from the ground, and Reece must have sensed it from the way he stiffened even further. The sensation started as a low vibration in the earth beneath them, traveling up through the grass and into the bones of her legs where they were folded beneath her.
Reece’s fingers tightened on hers until his knuckles turned white, and sweat beaded on his forehead. The ritual had barely started. The magic hadn’t been aimed toward them yet, andthere was nothing physically hurting them. She felt a hum in the air. Her body was warm with the nearness of magic, but that was it.
Reece looked like he had just run a mile.
She wanted to check whether the other werewolves were as strongly affected, but Reece met her eyes and didn’t look away, and she suddenly felt like his lifeline. If she turned her gaze to take stock of the others, she feared he might think she was abandoning him to the clutches of evil magic. So Delainey kept her eyes on his and waited for the first lick of magic to find them.
It took several minutes. Whatever Aya was doing required a lot of power, and that power had to be called from somewhere. The five witches were necessary to aim it, to shape it, to make it an arrow that flew true, and it would have been easier with seven or nine or even twelve. The coven was used to working with five, even if one of those was a substitute, and Delainey could do nothing but be a subject of the magic at the moment.
There was something normal and homey to the beginning of the ritual, the summoning of power she heard in her sisters’ voices, even though there was a baritone keeping cadence with them that didn’t belong. Emerson sat cross-legged directly across from Aya, his pressed button-down absurdly clean against the dewy grass, and his lips moved in time with the chant, though his voice was pitched lower than everyone else’s.
The magic was the same warm glow as always, except there was something slick underneath it, almost oily. She wasn’t used to Emerson’s magic, and that was probably all it was. Every witch had their own signature, and not all of them felt nice. It was no mark against them. Like someone with really bad body odor, it didn’t make them a bad person, even if they were smelly.
Reece coughed in the back of his throat, and Delainey narrowed her eyes at him.
What the hell was wrong? Magic circled her wrists, warm, almost uncomfortably so, but not quite a burn. He gurgled again and tried to jerk back. The tendons in his forearms stood out rigid as cables, and his fingers spasmed in her grip; the strength behind the jerk was nearly enough to wrench her arms from their sockets. She held on tightly, refusing to let him break their connection, mindful of Aya’s warning. She wouldn’t have said that if it wasn’t important.
His skin had gone even paler than normal, and dark circles that hadn’t been there when they sat down were now prominent under his eyes, as if he hadn’t slept for a week, when she knew for a fact he had gotten several hours the night before. She was his witness.
