toward my beloved mates.
Chapter Five
The beautiful sun was a memory as dark clouds stirred above, and a light drizzle hit the window of the van we were in. The sound of thunder came from far in the distance, far enough away that I barely heard it even with my enhanced hearing. Hopefully the full out thunderstorm would hold off for a while. I’d trained enough in the rain to know it’d be a total pain in the ass to fight in, but there were ways to compensate. Nonetheless a wet muddy ground meant no wild changes in direction. Of course, it would mean the same thing for the enemy.
Chances are that wouldn’t be problem, since I was going to be protecting Tiffany and fighting the other witch with her, not mixing it up with the shifters. Unless of course, one of them broke away from the teams and went for our witch. It was a pretty obvious tactic, given the force multiplier a caster in a fight was.
The two of us were in the backseat riding with Carmen’s team, while Ginny was riding with Mark’s team. It was a bit annoying to my senses not to feel her and have her near while our adrenaline was surging, as our hearts picked up speed, and our bodies were preparing for battle. But she’d be away from me in the fight anyway, and realistically the vans could only fit so many people comfortably. In theory seven seats, which would’ve been enough if I’d put Tiffany on my lap, but shifter men were also bigger than the average bear, figuratively speaking. We were stuffed in pretty good, and she was half on my lap already.
Point was, I needed to trust my mate, and the men and women that were now technically under my command to watch our alpha’s back. It was just the mate thing, and it wasn’t easy to suppress those protective instincts. After all, she might’ve been alpha, but I was also twice as strong as she was, that made a psychological difference in a shifter. I felt that protective shifter thing for the weaker based on dominance, and of course on the human side I felt protective of my mate.
Fortunately, my cerebral witch side was a counterweight to that, but it still wasn’t easy to accept. Enough about that, just assume whenever my mates are in a fight, I wanted to kill anything that looked at them wrong and keep them safe, and that I hated when I wasn’t in range to do so.
Ginny was also a badass, and that helped too.
The vans pulled over, ours and John’s on the south side. John would set up a semi-circle around the house and stop, while the rest of us breached from the south and into the front door. Serina’s and Mark’s van should’ve been in the north by then as well, where Serina would set up the other half of the perimeter, and Mark’s team would breach with Ginny from the north side and through the back door.
Carmen fiddled with her phone, and then said, “Everyone’s in position, let’s go.”
About all we could realistically do is coordinate the start of a mission with our phones, because headsets weren’t going to work very well when we all turned into bears, wolves, or tigers. We piled out of the van and walked down the street. As soon as we hit the property Tiffany released a powerful privacy spell that covered the whole property, and the rest of us stripped and shifted in moments.
My human upbringing was a bit tweaked by the idea Mark was getting a load of Ginny naked, who was no doubt stripping on the other end, but I squashed that minor jealousy easily. Nudity for shifters wasn’t a big deal, no more than I was turned on by the sexy Carmen in that moment. Yes, they were very sexual creatures, but nudity before a shift or after one wasn’t a thing. So I reminded myself.
Besides, she’d tear his face off if he tried anything, mates didn’t cheat, at all. I noticed other women’s beauty of course, but it didn’t affect me as deeply as it did before I was mated, if that made sense. The only women who might hit me hard with chemical attraction was if we met another potential mate from the vamps and sirens.
Still, it’d only been three weeks. I still had a few human-centric hang-ups I needed to get over as I accepted my new life.
I