Page 4 of The Wolf's Bullied Pregnant Mate
“Stop it,” I growled.
“Admit you’re wrong,” she snapped. “There’s plenty more where that came from if you want to hold onto your little pride,wolf.”
“Adalyn,” Hector spoke up. “He’s an idiot. Please release him.”
But Adalyn did not look away from me, her face furious. “No.”
Through gritted teeth, I asked, “Why didn’t you do any of this to fight off demons, then?”
“Maybe I wasn’t given a chance,” she spat. “Maybe I was delegated to shields. Maybe I’m simply strong in certain situations. Maybe I have weaknesses. I have no problem admitting that.You, however.”
“Fine,” I snarled when the counter started to blister my hand. I choked on the pain, no longer able to ignore it. “Fine! I was wrong.”
The wood immediately cooled and smoothed back to its original position. I exhaled sharply and wrenched my hands away. “You’ll fucking pay for that.”
My threat hung between us. Adalyn narrowed her eyes at me. Hector gave me a cool, impatient look.
“Stay out of my store next time, Zephyr,” she warned. “I can make anything hurt you; don’t forget that.”
“Bitch,” I spat and stepped further back.
But as I did, I saw something flicker across her face, something replacing the anger for a moment:pain. Pain of her own that flashed through her features, tightening her mouth and eyes for a minute. But it wasn’t the jolt of physical pain. No, it was the sharp surprise of emotional pain; I knew it. That brief glance upwards at the sky. The quick composure. What had I said to trigger her?
I hated this damn place. I wanted out of it immediately. I hated how the walls seemed as though they had eyes watching me. I hated the witch who ruled the store like a dark queen. I hated feeling unsafe, but I couldn’t see the threat.
Adalyn is just a girl, I told myself.I can handle a girl. I’ve won enough of them over.Except I didn’t want to win her over. She terrified me. She irritated me. She triggered my hatred, my anger, and I wanted to destroy her—her and every last one of her coven. I wanted out of Azure Cove, but I had followed Alex in setting up a life here for a while. I was loyal to a fucking fault.
Hector moved forward. “If you don’t have any maps of the demon world,” he began again, reminding us all why we had visited the store in the first place. “Then, could you let me know the last place demons were active?”
“That I can do,” Adalyn answered. “Do you have anything of the demons? Blood?”
“Oh, great,” I muttered. “She can do something productive.”
Hector and Adalyn both ignored me. He handed her the vial of demon blood that he’d collected. She spread out a map of Azure Cove. Even I peered closer. She poured a drop of blood on the center of the map and held a crystal pendant over it. The blood seemed to connect to the crystal, as if they were magnets.Then, a force pulled both blood and crystal to a spot on the north coast of the cove.
“That’s where I’ve been putting up more shields,” Adalyn told him.
“So you already knew?” Hector asked.
She shrugged, smiling. “I had to do someparlor tricks, didn’t I?”
“So you did a location spell,” I muttered. “Wolves can do that in less time and on the go by using our sense of smell.”
“Cool,” she answered dismissively. “Can you track full groups of them at once?”
As she asked, the blood split into six different groups. It snaked out across the map, stopping at several pinpoints as the crystal swung in a circle, pulled by all of the different points.
I scowled at the witch.
“If you want to offend my abilities, then you can do it off my property,” Adalyn told me. “There’s alovelysidewalk outside. You can wait there.”
“I’d rather not leave Hector alone with a witch.”
“I thought I wasn’t a threat?” she challenged.
I ground my teeth. As the two of them talked more about locations and Adalyn’s process for shields, I tuned them out. I didn’t care about any of that. I would be called in to fight. I would always answer that call, but when there was nothing to answer, my life wasmine, not to prepare for a demon attack. I was proactive.
Adalyn levitated a grimoire in the air, and I rolled my eyes as she listed off a spell to Hector.
