Page 118 of Cold Curses

Connor snorted, then smiled beatifically at the person who brought a plastic pitcher of water and a stack of red plastic cups.

“Water all around,” the waitress said. “Anything else?”

We all declined. The kitchen sink—a pizza with literally everything they had on it—would take all the internal capacity we could spare.

“You guys don’t party?” I asked Kieran after sticking the offered bendy straw into my drink. Because even a vampire needed to relax now and again.

“We have our moments,” Kieran said. And didn’t sound like he knew firsthand what a party actually involved.

“They’re hippies,” Alexei said, reading a drink menu to pass the time before the pizza arrived.

“We aren’t hippies,” Kieran said. There was no insult in his voice. Just a kind of polite logic. “We’re conservationists.”

“Burning Wolf creates tons of trash.” This from Alexei again.

“Burning Wolf?” I asked.

“Burning Man without man,” Connor said. He stretched out his legs beneath the table, one thigh against mine, my skin warming from the contact.

“Or celebrities,” Kieran said. “Or endorsements.”

“Or desert,” Alexei said, looking up. “It’s in Yosemite.”

“Fancy,” Lulu said.

“Very relaxed,” Kieran countered. “And clean.”

“We’re just giving you crap,” Lulu said. She had taken a kids’menu and was coloring over an outline of Chicago with enormous flowers.

I was getting the sense that either the Swift family were sticklers for the rules—something near my own heart—or his shifters were just different from those in the NAC.

Connor leaned over. “If you’re thinking about defecting, brat, unthink it.”

“Nothing to defect from,” I said. “I’m not Pack.”

Alexei snorted. Kieran cleared his throat. And I went on alert.

I looked at Connor. “What?” I asked. “I’m not.”

“You have alpha all over you,” Lulu said, then glanced up. “Ooh, that would be a great band name—alpha all over you.”

I had no idea how to respond to that, so I just kept looking at Connor. He was smiling at me, slow and easy and sexy.

“Explain,” I said.

“I have alpha-level power,” he said, and gave Swift a not-very-subtle look, a reminder of his aptitude for Apex of the NAC. And then he looked back at me. “You are mine and vice versa. My magic is stronger now. Strong enough to mark.”

“To mark me?” I didn’t like the canine sound of that.

“You’re in the bubble of his protection,” Lulu said. “You can’t feel it? It’s kind of obvious.”

I shook my head. I hadn’t felt it. But my magic had come from a mix of sources over the past few days. Was I so out of sync with my own body that I hadn’t recognized Pack magic mixed with mine?

“And the Pack?” I prompted.

“Everyone else knows you’re his, too,” Swift said. “They’ve seen and heard it, and now they’ve felt it, too.”

I shifted uneasily. Something about this scraped against my sense of independence, which had been feeling especially vulnerable this week. Before I could comment further, two of thewaitstaff carried over the biggest pizza I’d ever seen in real life. It nearly filled the table, and it had Swift and Lulu scrambling to move napkin dispensers and cheese shakers out of the way.