Page 14

13

On the Prowl

Harry shifted on the bench and sucked in a whimper as a searing, throbbing pain heated her left butt cheek. Letting Lenny give her her first tattoo a day before Paintball Pandemonium hadn’t been one of her brightest moments. Neither had lighting Elodie’s competitive fires by laying down that bet at Jax’s feet.

The angel was in full throttle, pacing back and forth as they listened to the crowd cheer in the stadium. You’d have thought paintball was an Olympic event with world-record-breaking potential for how many people sat in the stands at the Fates Haven High football stadium, watching the spectacle and rooting for their favorite team.

They’d run the game tournament-style, pitting team against team in a bracket system, the winner progressing to face off with the winner from an earlier matchup. So far, team Fearsome Four was undefeated and, believe it or not, advancing to the final round.

Against the Big Bads.

No one was more surprised than Harry.

Or sore.

They waited along the tunnel wall as a player from Jax’s previous opponent’s team was brought through on a stretcher, his ankle twisted at an odd angle. The young warlock had freaked out when caught in the crosshairs of both a vampire and a demon and during a runaway attempt, barreled over one of the low walls. The live-action replay on the jumbotron still had Harry wincing.

“Having second thoughts?” Jax’s warm breath brushed against her cheek as he leaned deliciously into her personal space. “It’s not too late to withdraw.”

She shot him a look, her lips nearly brushing his, he was so close. “That’s not happening.”

“No one would hold it against you. We are pretty intimidating. It seems like we’re eliminating our opponents faster and faster with each round. By my calculations, ours should be over in about ten seconds… and ten only because we’d drag it out a bit. To get the audience’s hearts pumping. I mean, they came out all this way to be entertained, right? Can’t have it all over in five seconds or less.”

She refused to look at the gorgeous tilt of his twisted smirk, and folded her arms over her chest. They didn’t quite make it all the way, her body covered in protective padding and a helmet that made her head feel like it weighed twenty pounds by itself.

“Is this you trying to psych out your competition?” Harry questioned knowingly. “Because that makes you seem a bit nervous about your odds. If you were that sure of yourself and your team’s quick ten-second win, why bother with intimidation tactics?”

“Not intimidation… just doing you a favor by letting you know what you’ll be up against. We’ll try not to make it too embarrassing for you.” He winked, and damn it if the sight of it didn’t dampen her panties. “It’s the least we can do.”

“Push him out of your head, Pierce.” Elodie’s sharp bark snapped her to attention and away from the sight of Jax’s black camo–clad ass as he joined his team on the other side of the tunnel.

“He’s not in my head,” Harry lied.

El’s look told her she hadn’t been very convincing. “Pants. Head. Wherever he is currently taking up space, evict him. Now. We have some egotists to crush into a fine, shimmery powder and we can’t get distracted by some hot ass. Speaking of… what the hell’s wrong with yours? You’ve been squirming around like you sat on an anthill since you got here.”

Harry’s gaze locked with Lenny’s before she turned it back to the anxious angel. “Nothing. Just… adrenaline.”

And the tattoo given to her by the Fortune-Telling Tattooist that she can’t look at until one more night at the earliest.

“She doesn’t mean that literally, right?” Grace asked from her right as Elodie checked Lenny’s protective gear one more time. “I’m pretty sure you’d be failing at this guardian thing if you dragged me into a competition that was to the death.”

“I’d like to think she’s kidding, but I’ve seen that look before and it never leads to anything good… but I think we’re okay.”

“You don’t sound too positive.”

“I’m positive this will be an interesting experience.” Harry pushed a smile on her face.

“And we’ve officially made it to our final two teams,” Nora’s voice echoed over the loudspeaker.

As the Paintball Pandemonium’s official MC, the witch stood on a small stage near the lower entrance to the high school football stadium, her sequined T-shirt loudly proclaiming her team Fearsome Four’s top fan.

“Let’s hear it for your Paintball Pandemonium finalists,” Nora announced to the roar of the crowd. “First up and out of the tunnel… they’re big… they’re bad… and they are not the least bit horrible to look at with all that muscle… it’s team Big Bads!”

The crowd’s roar grew, feet stomping in the stands as Jax and the others pushed off the wall.

“Ready to get your ass handed to you, angel eyes?” Silas taunted Elodie. “I’ll try to do it gently, but no promises.”

“And I’ll be feeding you your horns and tail… and I won’t be doing it gently,” the angel volleyed back, her voice deceptively sweet.

Jax shot Harry another coy wink and followed in a jog behind Maddox, Gavin, and Silas as they exited the tunnel and entered the field.

“We got this.” Elodie turned to their team. “They may have brawn, but they don’t have two brain cells between the lot of them.”

Grace fidgeted nervously. “I don’t know. Isn’t that one guy some kind of bookish research wonder or something. I’d think you’d have to be pretty smart to—”

Elodie shot her a glare that snapped her mouth shut.

“Never mind.”

“Thanks to the other rounds, we now know what works and what doesn’t,” Elodie pointed out. “Be quick. Be efficient. Be lethal. They won’t be pulling any punches and neither should we.”

“And now, for our last team, but certainly not least”—Nora’s voice echoed from the speakers—“they’re fearsome… they’re a foursome… and they are sugar and spice and both naughty and nice… they’re the Fearsome Four!”

The crowd roared again, and Harry and the others headed out to the field.

She sucked in a breath, and next to her, Grace groaned. “Did the population of Fates Haven triple overnight or something?”

“Pretty sure it’s more than triple.” Wincing, Harry sent an awkward wave into the stands.

There’d been a lot of people watching this morning’s first matches, but nothing compared to this. The Fates Haven citizens brought some friends, and the friends brought some friends and maybe a few dozen long-lost relatives.

Photographers standing on the sidelines took picture after picture, cameras flashing wildly as Harry and the girls took their spot next to the already waiting Big Bads.

Harry stopped next to Jax, the shifter sending her a small lip twitch. “That’s a lot of people to lose in front of, huh?”

“Yep. You’ll have to tell me how that feels later. I’m guessing not too good,” Harry shot back, pasting another smile and giving another wave to the crowd as Jax chuckled.

It took Nora a few attempts to get the crowd to settle, and then she picked up her microphone and turned to the teams. “I’m sure this is old hat by now, but let’s cross our i’s and dot our t’s, shall we?”

The teams both nodded.

“This is not a game out of that survivor book the kids love. Hence, no bloodshed.” Nora shot a look between Silas and Elodie that made Harry chuckle. “However, this is a Fates Festival event and any and all talents are welcome to be used. Got speed? Sprint away. A keen sense of smell? Get sniffing. Any special gifts get a thumbs-up. Your job is to protect the flag in your end zone while attempting to steal the other. Does anyone have any questions before you’re each magic-dropped to your respective parts of the field?”

Everyone shook their heads.

“Good.” Nora nodded. “Oh, and one more added caveat for this final competition…”

The older witch paused for dramatic effect, and it worked. Harry stood stiff, wondering what the hell caveat her aunt could have added.

“This time”—Nora smirked mischievously—“you won’t be magic-dropped with the rest of your team. Good luck, and play nice, kids.”

With a dramatic hand wave, a warm magical breeze made of pure gold and glitter washed over the eight of them, and before Harry had a chance to protest, the cloud disappeared and her vision slowly cleared.

She sneezed, the magic getting in her nose and making her eyes tear. When she finally blinked the moisture away and her vision cleared, she cursed. “Well, crapology.”

Nora hadn’t been bluffing.

Harry stood alone near a hollowed-out school bus. From what she remembered of the field’s layout, there’d been two, one near her team’s flag and one somewhere around the forty-five yard line. She didn’t see her team’s flag, which meant she was nowhere near the one she’d been charged to protect and about halfway to the one belonging to the Big Bads.

A rolling animalistic roar echoed from nearby.

Jax. He’d forgone his battle gear and paintball weapon to be either their team’s protector, or worse… their tracker. As another roar erupted from her left, this time a hell of a lot closer than before, she realized… tracker . Definitely tracker.

Harry took off in the direction she hoped was the right one.

She’d erroneously thought Elodie too meticulous when she’d gone over a possible scenario in which they got split up. Being at least halfway to Jax’s team flag meant she’d graduated from defense to offense. She had a flag to find and procure and evidently a cougar to outmaneuver.

Harry sprinted to the stacked-barrel wall, quick and as silent as possible, which turned out to be not much of either. She kicked a stone as she ducked behind the barrels, wincing as it bounced against something metallic in the distance. Probably the bus.

Shit. She hoped Jax wasn’t too close.

Harry crossed everything as she ducked from cover spot to cover spot. Keep moving. That had been Elodie’s advice if they found themselves on the offensive line. They couldn’t do anything about Gavin’s vampiric speed, Silas’s brute strength, or all Jax’s super shifter senses, which meant it was best to keep moving and hope one if not all of them became preoccupied with someone else.

Harry crouched behind a flock of pink flamingo yard decorations and scanned for her next cover spot, finding it nearly fifteen yards away in the form of a small brick retaining wall.

Another yowl—this one close enough to raise the hair on the back of her neck—pierced the air. Cougar Jax had gotten a whiff, and he was on the hunt. Movement on her left snapped her head in that direction, and then to the right. The time for carefulness was done and it was now time to hope and haul ass.

Securing her paint gun on her back, Harry took a deep breath and ran toward the retaining wall as if hell itself was hot on her sneakered feet. Cursing the entire way, she held her boobs in place and booked it. Something whizzed by her right shoulder and slammed into the ground at her feet.

A spray of blue paint.

“Found you, Harry!” Maddox taunted, releasing another barrage of paint pellets. “You can run, but you can’t hide… at least not from my very own hunting cougar.”

Another spray of paint came as she zigzagged and dove for the retaining wall. Everything jarred on impact, rattling every bone in her body.

“You know you can’t get very far”—Mads chuckled—“not without a miracle. You’re all by your lonesome out here. Silas already outed Elodie, and Lenny never saw Gavin coming he was so fast.”

“That still leaves me and Grace, so I wouldn’t count us out just yet,” Harry called. If what Maddox even said was true and not a very tired method of faking her out.

Closing her eyes, she let her descry magic flow through her veins. The air moved, shifting her hair away from her face as she called it to her… their flag… and a route to it.

“You think that’s going to help you, babe?” Mads asked, obviously sensing the magic rising in the air. “If you surrender now, maybe we’ll go a little easier on you in the next event. What do you say?”

She ignored him, her magic locating Maddox crouched behind the barrels from which she’d just run.

Harry shifted her paintball gun into her hands and checked the mechanism, making sure it was prepped to fire. “Keep dreaming, King.”

She leaned to the far left and fired off a series of shots. Maddox’s low curse had her grinning ear to ear until he retaliated, each fired shot making her temporary safe spot sway precariously.

She wouldn’t be covered for too much longer. She needed to fire and run.

She laid down a series of shots toward Lenny’s brother, making him duck or risk being ousted in the event, and spun right toward a large, snarling mountain lion.

Less than three feet away and obviously using her distraction to sneak up on her from behind, Jax growled, his fur standing on end as his gold eyes locked on her.

Sure, she could shoot him. It was Jax. In his cougar form, the paintball would likely feel like a tickle, but the animal lover in her still couldn’t do it.

His upper body lowered to the ground, hindquarters and tail twitching as if prepping to leap. Harry backed up a step. He wouldn’t hurt her, but she sure as hell wasn’t letting him pin her to the ground so Maddox could walk right up and smack a blue paintball on her chest protector either.

Hands raised as if trying to placate a regular animal and not the man who’d been taunting her with a smirk less than fifteen minutes ago, she took another step back. Cougar Jax took one forward. This wasn’t getting them anywhere.

His hind quarters wiggled and Cougar Jax pounced. A blurry streak whipped past Harry and rammed into Jax with a loud crash of grunts and limbs. Grace, with her arms and legs locked around the large cat’s middle, wrestled a dazed Cougar Jax off his feet.

“Go!” Grace threw at Harry, ripping through her shock. “Their flag is unprotected right now! Go, Harry!”

Maddox popped up out of nowhere and laid down blue fire. Harry booked it around the second bus and saw the swinging flag in the end zone. With victory within her sight, she didn’t process the sudden thunderous roar of the crowd or the game-ending buzzer until something hard slammed against her ass.

A bolt of pain zapped from her tattoo and through her tailbone, trickling down her legs as she dropped face-first into a muddy section of the football field. She didn’t need to look to know she’d been pegged with a Big Bad paintball.

Game over… and it wasn’t the Fearsome Four who’d won.

Elodie was going to be so fucking pissed.

V ICTORY SMELLED A lot like s’mores, or it could be the scent of toasted marshmallows hanging in the air, the roaring bonfire large enough for at least two dozen Fates Haven citizens to get their campfire fix at one time.

That was Fates Haven. Celebrate one activity with another, and with the first Fates Festival event entered in the logbook, excitement for the festival’s return had grown exponentially. People had shown up en masse to watch Paintball Pandemonium, signaling to a very thrilled Nora Pierce that she’d been right to bring the festival back.

The bonfire at Mystic Lake was not only to celebrate the festival’s return but the bang with which it did. Jax maneuvered through the crowd, accepting congratulations on a game well played, as he tried not to linger too long in one spot. He told himself it was because he didn’t people well.

And then he told himself he was a big ole liar.

He’d spent the better part of the last forty-five minutes looking for a particular brunette he couldn’t evict from his headspace. He found her sitting on a piece of driftwood a good distance from the fire, her bare toes stretched out as the lake’s water ebbed and flowed. She shot an occasional glare off to her left and when he followed it, he saw Grace talking to Devon, both teens’ faces practically lit up by their smiles.

Jax swallowed a chuckle. “Good thing you don’t have the ability to freeze shit with that glare or poor Dev would be an ice pop by now.”

Harry startled, glancing up at him with a guilty expression before focusing way too hard on what looked to be her iced Fruity Freeze. “I don’t know. My magic has been a little wonky lately. I could probably pull off a freeze glare if I were really lucky.”

“Is this seat taken?” He surprised not only himself but her by asking.

“It’s a public beach and a public piece of wood, so go for it.”

He sat, making sure to keep a foot between them. His willpower might be strong but not when it came to the woman next to him. “He’s a good kid, you know.”

Harry shot him a questioning look.

“Devon. Don’t get me wrong. He’s a teenager, through and through, but he’s a good kid. He’s respectful. He knows the importance of boundaries. Grace could do a hell of a lot worse than crushing on him.”

“Who said she has a crush?” Harry tossed him a glare before sneaking another look at them and cursing. “Fuck. Yeah, she has a crush. I just hope she doesn’t end up crushed.”

“You can protect her from a lot, but you can’t protect her from that.”

“Have a lot of experience raising teenagers, do you?” Harry teased lightly.

“I’ve been raising an entire pack for the last few months and, let me tell you, I wish they had mature heads on their shoulders like Devon. He sure as hell has a better one than I did at his age.”

And when he’d been Dev’s age, he and Harry had already been in deep. The good girl and the bad boy. The witch and the shifter. At least he thought they’d been in it together. Turns out, it had been a one-man diving expedition, and no one told him until he watched his heart walk away without so much as a single glance.

The past became a third person sitting between him and Harry on the log.

She stood and brushed off the seat of her jean shorts. “I should go find Nora.”

“That’s it?” Irritation bubbled to the surface and he slowly got to his feet, too, watching her retreating backside. “One brief mention about back then and you run away just like you did that day? You haven’t changed at all in thirteen years, huh?”

She spun around, hair flying around her shoulders. “You have no idea who I am right now.”

“Yeah? And whose fault is that, Harlow?” He used her full name on purpose, knowing it would piss her off even more. It worked.

Periwinkle eyes narrowing on him, she held her ground as he slowly approached, diminishing the distance between them.

“I’ll tell you whose fault it is,” Jax growled, years of agitation and anger bubbling to the surface. “It’s the fault of the person who left without so much as a ‘see you never.’ It’s the fault of the person who enabled that damn anti-tracking spell.”

At the widening of her eyes, a small sense of victory zipped through him.

“Yeah, that’s right, sweet pea. After the fourth attempt, I lost track of all the different places your spell landed me, places where you were definitely not living.”

“I… didn’t know.”

“And nor did you want to, or else you wouldn’t have cast the damn thing. Or sworn Nora to a Witch’s Oath.” He stopped less than an inch away, the soft glow of Harry’s eyes nearly drowning him right there on the rocky Mystic Lake beach. “So you’re right. I don’t know the woman you are right now, and it appears that I never really knew the girl I thought you were back then either, because my Harry, the one both me and my cougar practically claimed as our own, would’ve never shut us out and walked away. She would’ve never let us go without putting up a damn fucking fight.”

“I don’t know what to say, Jax,” Harry murmured, her shoulders deflating along with some of her anger.

“I don’t expect you to say anything. Just know that although I’m glad Lenny, Elodie, and the rest of Fates Haven seems to have adopted a selective memory when it comes to the details of your departure, I sure as hell haven’t. I can’t . I remember it all as if it were yesterday, and I sure as hell won’t be forgetting it anytime soon.”

The sound of a throat clearing signaled they weren’t alone, but Jax didn’t need it to know Grace had joined them, and not far behind stood Devon.

The teenager’s gaze shifted from him to her guardian, cautiously wary. “Is everything okay over here?”

“Everything’s fine.” Harry pushed a small smile to her lips and stepped back. “Just a long-overdue talk.”

Grace didn’t look as if she believed it, drilling her gaze on Jax.

“What she said.” Jax played along. He’d said his piece. Now the ball was in Harry’s court. “And speaking of a talk, I wanted to congratulate you on that takedown at the end of match. I have to admit, I didn’t sense you coming until my paws left the ground.”

A small smile twitched on Grace’s face. “Yeah, I was a little proud of myself for that one. I’m honestly not sure what happened. At first, I could hear Gavin tracking me through the course, and used it to keep my distance. And then I scented Harry and followed the trail.”

“You honed in on us using your shifter senses. That’s a good thing.”

“It’s good that it was that close to the surface that I could use my senses that easily?”

“And that you used them while maintaining control.” Jax nodded. “You could’ve very easily used that sparkage of yours to light my tail on fire, and yet you didn’t. You used your speed and strength to take me by surprise.”

Devon chuckled. “And there’s not many who can lay claim to that ability. Many shifters have tried, which makes you the ultimate badass.”

The kid looked at Grace with little hearts in his eyes.

“He’s not wrong.” Jax chuckled. “Which reminds me that Gavin texted me a bit ago. Those rare texts came in earlier today while everyone was at the event, and it turns out the collection is a bit more vast than what he’d thought. He asked if anyone wanted to help.”

“Absolutely!” Grace turned toward Harry. “I mean, if that’s okay?”

“A research party sounds fun. Count me in.” Harry nodded her support.

“I’ll touch base with Gavin and we’ll set up a time. Just fair warning, though, he’s extremely particular about book handling,” Jax added. “If he even catches wind of someone dog-earing a book, he may take a bite out of you.”

Grace chuckled, but at his serious face, the laughter slowly died away. “Wait. Are you serious?”

He shrugged. “I wouldn’t suggest trying it to find out, Sparks.”