“Not that bad, is it, Stanzie?” Ronan winked at me before he finished his own bottle. One of the grandmothers passed by with a bag and he tossed the bottle into it. Murphy discarded his as well. I’d have to wait for the next time around. Maybe by the time she’d worked her way back up from the end of the line. I’d have the bottle emptied.
Another minty swig. I wished the bits had been chopped finer, but maybe they needed to be this size. The recipes were very exact for a reason.
“Why does the pack bond work?” I asked Murphy. “Is it metaphysics? Magic? What?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know, honey. It just works. Like shifting.”
“Others don’t have bullshit things like pack bonds,” I muttered beneath my breath, but he heard me and gave me a hug.
“The Native Americans had some interesting rituals,” he told me. “Vision quests and all that. The Egyptians too. Modern man has lost a lot of his connection to the earth and the otherworld.”
“The pack bond belongs to the otherworld?” This was a concept I hadn’t considered before.
“I don’t know,” he said again. Did he know anything? How could people blindly take something like a pack bond and not know its origins?
I took another swallow. Either the bits weren’t as big as I’d thought or I was getting used to them. The taste was growing on me too. Something tugged inside me, like a fish nibbling at a baited hook. Was it my wolf? Did she like the taste too?
I bit my lip and gulped more. Definite warmth was spreading throughout my body. Did everyone feel it?
I touched my fingers to Murphy’s cheek. His skin was hot, but he was not particularly flushed. Couldn’t be the heat of the fireplaces, we were nowhere near either of them.
Those who had been in the front of the line were now spreading out. The mattresses by the fireplaces were being chosen first.
I watched Andrew strip off his sweater. Siobhan and Maureen were sprawled across a mattress. Siobhan had let her blond hair down from its customary twist and Maureen was running her fingers through it, her eyes half lidded. Andrew sank to his knees before his bond mates and they moved into his arms together.
Siobhan bit one of his earlobes playfully while Maureen kissed his throat.
I turned to face forward again. My jeans chafed the inside of my thighs, which had suddenly gone tender.
Ryan and Cass were making out and when the line moved up and they didn’t, Ronan gave Ryan a good-natured shove.
“Drink it all, dearie.” The grandmother’s voice was kindly, but she still scared me. Where’d she come from? I jerked in shock and nearly dropped the bottle. Two or three mouthfuls were left and since the grandmother didn’t appear inclined to move without my empty bottle in her bag, I hastily swallowed the rest of the elixir in one gulp.
Fire lit in my stomach and branched out in glowing tendrils throughout my body.
“It is magic, isn’t it?” I whispered to her when I tucked my bottle into the bag. She gave me a mysterious grin.
“The magic part is you,” she told me before she moved on.
* * * *
We didn’t drink the blood. We mixed ours with the Alphas’. Three chairs had been placed on a small riser so the Alpha triad could sit while the pack advanced by them. Colm was first. He had a small silver knife and used the sharp point of it to prick the meat of his thumb until blood ran. Then he handed the knife to the person in front of him, who also pricked their thumb. Skin to skin, thumb to thumb, the blood mingled. Contact might last fifteen seconds or forty-five. It seemed to depend on the relationship between the Alpha and the pack member.
Murphy went ahead of me. He and Colm exchanged a long, silent look before Colm nicked his already bleeding thumb with the knife before passing it, handle side out, to Murphy.
A flash of silver, and Murphy’s thumb bled. He and Colm pressed their thumbs together. One heartbeat, two. I held my breath and let it out with a whoosh when Murphy moved to stand before Deirdre.
My turn. I squared my shoulders. Part of me wanted to run away. But the heat inside me was a fire that needed more. Almost against my will, I dragged myself in front of Colm.
He was solemn, no smile for me. Paddy would’ve smiled, I just knew it.
Colm handed me the knife. When had Murphy given it back? The blade was hot to the touch, warmed by the blood and body heat of countless others.
The metallic tang of blood coated my sinuses. The crackling flames in the fireplace nearly deafened me. So did Colm’s steady heartbeat. Mine was as fast as a humming bird’s gossamer wings. Hot. So damn hot.
Right hand? Left hand? Fuck, I’d known only a moment before. Left. It was the left.
The sting of the blade made me gasp, and I bit my lip. Blood welled on the sides of the slice and ran down to my knuckle.
Colm took the knife back and held up his bleeding left thumb. The slightest twitch of his mouth. Was that a smile?
I pressed my thumb to his as the world stopped spinning. My vision blurred as if someone had thrown a silver veil over my head. I couldn’t breathe. I was drowning in invisible water. My lungs burned then, shock, the world spun on its axis again. A rush of cold air smacked me in the face as I sucked in a deep breath. The veil lifted.
What the fuck? Colm did smile then and I stumbled as I moved over three steps to Deirdre.
I didn’t need her silver knife., My thumb still bled. Her smile lit her pretty face, but she was exhausted. When we pressed our thumbs together, I sent her some of my strength. A small push of energy from me to her. Electric tingling as she absorbed what I sent. Her eyes widened gratefully. Then the world stopped again and everything went silver for several heartbeats.
Fee’s eyes were still red-rimmed from crying and, when I pressed my bleeding thumb to hers, she gave me her grief. I don’t think she meant to, but maybe she couldn’t help it. She missed Paddy so much. For a dizzying second, my perspective shifted and I was the one sitting on the riser, Paddy beside me. I smelled his cologne and his blood. We were thinking about Murphy, who’d just lost his bond mate and wouldn’t take the pack bond, wouldn’t stay in Dublin with us. All this happened four years ago, not tonight, but it made perfect sense to me in the moment. Time was fluid and it skipped like a stone across the flat surface of a dusky lake.
The world ground to a halt as everything turned silver. I was myself again. Fee and I stared at each other. Had she been me? Had she experienced my sense of terror at the prospect of tying myself to her and the rest of the pack? Maybe seen with my eyes as I’d drunk the unbinding elixir in Scott and Faith’s basement? She’d seen something, of that I was sure.
Murphy waited for me a few steps away, near the wall. His dark eyes gleamed amber. His wolf was awake inside him somehow. The pack bond woke him, just as sex did?
All around us, bodies writhed on mattresses. I stepped over a pair of red shoes and a crumpled sweater, arms inside out. I hissed aloud when Murphy closed his fingers around my wrist. He was burning up.
He slammed me against the stone wall and moved so every inch of him pressed against me. His cock was hard as a stone in his jeans and he groaned when I slid my hands down to cup his ass. He kiss burned my mouth. Our teeth clicked together as we dueled for dominance with our tongues. He fisted my hair with both hands and pulled possessively. The heady scent of his blood tangled in my hair. I left bloody thumbprints on the back pockets of his jeans. One of us growled. I think it was me.
“I want to be inside you.” Murphy lifted me up and I hooked my legs around his waist. His cock pressed tauntingly against my pussy, but there was too much fabric between us still.
I undid his belt buckle—why the hell did he wear a belt and button-fly