Awaken a Wolf (Wiccan-Were-Bear Book 9) Read online

  Awaken a Wolf

  Bad Boy Alphas

  A Wiccan Were-Bear Novella

  By R. E. Butler

  Copyright 2015 R. E. Butler

  Awaken a Wolf (A Wiccan-Were-Bear Novella)

  By R. E. Butler

  License Notes

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the author.

  Cover by Croco Designs

  This ebook is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination and not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locations is coincidental.

  Disclaimer: The material in this book is for mature audiences only and contains graphic sexual content and is intended for those older than the age of 18 only.

  * * * * *

  I’d like to thank Jennifer Moorman for editing the book, her time, and expertise.

  * * * * *

  Where would I be without my amazing support team? Much love and thanks to my amazing beta-readers – Joyce & Shelley – the Wild Shifter Babes Street Team, and the readers and fans who have been an encouragement to me from day one. XOXO

  * * * * *

  To B. B. and B. L. with all my love.

  Awaken A Wolf

  Wiccan-Were-Bear #9

  Natural Wiccan Cinder Knight has a pretty good life. She’s part of the largest coven in North America and has a great job at the Whalen Family Clinic. She has zero complaints, until she finds herself the recipient of unwanted attention from a certain alpha wolf.

  Adam Beaumont hasn’t been the alpha of the Cleveland pack for long before he feels the pressure to take a mate. When he sees a beautiful Wiccan talking to one of his wolves, he knows exactly what to do to make her his. The only problem is that Cinder isn’t receptive to him at all. Everything he tries to do to make her his seems only to push her away, and neither he nor his wolf can accept the denial much longer.

  Cinder discovers that she’s not truly a Wiccan, but something much more, and Adam is the only one who can help her. The infuriating alpha male manages to put the brakes on his desire to rush her into mating him because she needs him as she navigates the waters of her new destiny. When someone from her past threatens all they’ve built, will Cinder survive the full moon or will Adam find himself alone once more?

  This book contains an alpha male used to getting what he wants, a Wiccan who doesn’t like her choices being taken from her, and enough magic to set the world on fire. Contains m/f interaction, new powers, old magic, shifting, a little wolfy voyeurism, and gratuitous uses of the word mine.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Bad Boy Alphas

  Other Works by R. E. Butler

  Contact R. E. Butler

  Chapter 1

  Cinder Knight leaned over the small mortar and pestle and gave the mixture another few turns, making sure the tiny seeds were finely ground. After tapping the pestle lightly on the edge of the stone bowl, she set it on the counter next to her and carefully tipped the contents onto a square of wax paper and then folded the paper into a small packet, sealing it with tape.

  She straightened and arched her back, stretching with a grimace. She’d been bent over the bowl for forty-five minutes grinding four different seeds into a fine powder for use in a curative spell. She carried the packet out of the room and down the hall, entering an office where Lorene, the owner of the Cleveland Mother Earth Store and powerful North Corner of the coven, sat.

  “Are you done already?” Lorene asked from behind her desk, looking up as Cinder strode in.

  “Those seeds didn’t stand a chance,” Cinder said, smiling.

  She handed the packet to Lorene, who brought it under her nose and inhaled with a smile. “You are so talented. I dare say I could make a fortune for the coven just on your potions alone.”

  Cinder beamed with pride. She’d been with the Northern Ohio Wiccan coven for four months, joining after her mom’s coven suggested that she find herself another coven to hook up with after the truth of her half-nature had surfaced. Cinder wasn’t a full Wiccan — her mom was a natural, full Wiccan, but her father was a werewolf, and that meant that although she was as powerful as any natural Wiccan, Cinder was an outsider. Not enough Wiccan to be a corner and not enough werewolf to shift. She had feet in two vastly different worlds.

  Lorene glanced at the old-fashioned grandfather clock in the corner of her office. “I suppose you have plans with your handsome roommate?” she asked with a glimmer of amusement in her eyes.

  “Cyrus has to work. The construction company is doing inventory this weekend, so he’s staying in Whisper Creek. I’m going out with Leo, though. He’s taking me to Lykos.”

  “Ah, I remember when that club opened. It was the first of its kind in the area — a place for supernatural creatures to hang out together in neutral territory.”

  Lykos was owed by Leo’s wolf pack, but every shifter group in the area was welcome there as long as they didn’t cause trouble. Cleveland, Ohio was a virtual melting pot of supernatural creatures. Aside from the Wiccan coven and wolf pack, there were dragons, vampires, bears, falcons, white lions, and tigers in the area. Somehow they all managed to get along.

  During the solstice and full moon ceremonies, when the Wiccans would gather on the bluffs near Lake Erie and cast spells, each supernatural group sent guards to watch over them. During her first full moon with the coven, she met Cyrus, a tiger shifter, and they hit it off right away. Later on, she met Leo when he guarded her. She lived with Cyrus and dated Leo, but they were both casual relationships. She wasn’t the mate to either male, but she cared for them both a great deal.

  “Well, I won’t keep you from your date.”

  “It’s not a date.”

  Lorene rolled her eyes. “You sound like my granddaughter.”

  “Elizabeth?”

  She nodded with a smile. “She used to play the field with a number of suitors, keeping them all at arm’s length, happy to be casual with them. Eventually, fate took her life in a different direction.”

  “Two bears, right? Twins?”

  “Yes. She’s never been happier, but for a while, I thought she’d never settle down.”

  “I guess you can’t play the field forever, but I’m having fun.”

  “You’re young.”

  Cinder was nineteen plus one, which according to her supernaturally gifted long-life meant that once she reached eighteen, her body began to age one year for every twelve that passed. She was technically thirty-one.

  Lorene put the packet down on her desk and said, “Have a nice weekend, honey.”

  “Thanks, you too.”

  Cinder gathered her belongings from her locker in the lunchroom and ducked out the back entrance to where her car was parked. She sat behind the wheel of her Eclipse and started the engine, poking around on the GPS screen until she found a satellite radio station she liked, an
d then she headed home.

  She shared a two-bedroom apartment with Cyrus. With him gone for the weekend, she had the place to herself and decided that after she and Leo had partied the night away, she’d invite him to spend the weekend.

  Once home, she kicked off her shoes and checked her phone, answering a text from Leo that said he’d arrive at seven. She had just enough time to grab a quick bite and clean up, since she could still smell the crushed seeds on her skin.

  Cyrus had a flair for cooking, although he liked to pretend he was too alpha male to spend time in the kitchen. She wasn’t surprised to see a note on the counter directing her to a covered plate in the microwave, half of whatever he’d made for himself for dinner before heading to Whisper Creek. Opening the microwave, she hummed in surprise to see a breaded pork chop and sweet potato fries. After pressing the reheat button, she walked to her bedroom, stripping off her clothes along the way. There was only one bathroom in the apartment, but their schedules were different and they rarely had to fight for the room.

  An hour later, there were two sharp knocks on the front door before it swung open and Leo’s voice rang out. “Hey, Cin.”

  “I’m back here,” she called, pulling the black corset up over her hips and adjusting it over her breasts.

  “Nice,” Leo said with a sexy drawl. “How about you push that back down and we stay in?”

  She grinned as she turned. “Tie me up?”

  “Oh, baby, I love your double entendres,” he said, chuckling as he strode to her and tightened the strings that pulled the corset tight to her body.

  “We can stay in after we go out.” She turned to face him after he finished tightening her top.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m off until Monday night.”

  His brow arched. “What about cranky cat?”

  She swatted his shoulder. “He’s in WC for the weekend.”

  He growled playfully, his brown eyes dancing. “Ready to go to Lykos?”

  Leo was a total sweetheart, handsome, and leanly muscled. “You bet,” she said, grabbing her clutch.

  She locked the front door and took Leo’s hand as they walked down the flight of stairs to the parking lot. He opened the passenger door for her and shut her in safely before jogging around the front and opening his own door. As he sat down and turned on the engine, they played the cursory Twenty Questions about their respective jobs. Leo worked for his alpha, Adam, at the pack-owned garage in Delta Park, outside of Cleveland, where the pack lived. Aside from working for the coven on Thursdays and Fridays, she was also a receptionist at the Whalen Family Clinic, which catered to supernatural creatures, Monday through Wednesday.

  She stroked her fingers through the hair on the back of Leo’s head, and he made a low growling sound. “If you start kicking your leg, I’m going to bust a gut laughing.”

  He grinned. “I can’t help if it you always find my happy place.”

  He pulled into a parking spot in front of Lykos. The name of the club was written in crimson lights, glowing brightly against the darkness. There was a line of people leading out the door, which she had expected because it was Friday night and there weren’t a whole lot of shifter-friendly clubs in Cleveland. Leo held her hand as they walked past the crowd waiting to get in. The bouncers were two males she recognized as being coven guards at one time or another. They smiled at her, and she smiled back before Leo tugged her through the open front door.

  He pulled open a second set of doors, and music blasted her, making her wince as she adjusted to the deafening sound.

  “How do you guys stand the loud music?”

  Full wolves like Leo had very sensitive hearing. Her hearing was slightly better than a human because she was part wolf but she knew her hearing wasn’t as good as Leo’s.

  “You get used to it,” he said loudly.

  They wove through the crowd that stood around the dance floor. Strobe lights and brightly colored lasers decorated the walls, floors, and writhing bodies. Leo stopped at the edge of the dance floor and said, “Drink or dance?”

  “Dance!” She whooped as she tugged him into the crowd and they began to dance. She lost herself in the music, in the sights and sounds and smells of the club, and let her mind drift away to that place where everything was amazing. In this place, she was just a girl dancing with her friend. She wasn’t a half-Wiccan, half-wolf trying to find out where she fit in. She wasn’t the girl whose father wanted nothing to do with her, or whose mom hadn’t been willing to leave the coven with Cinder or fight for her right to stay. No – here, in this club, she was just a girl, and that was more than okay with her.

  Chapter 2

  “An alpha can’t be an island, son. You have to take a mate,” Craig Beaumont, Adam’s father, said as they sat in Adam’s office.

  Adam exhaled sharply, trying not to growl. “I’m not just going to randomly pick a female from the pack and mate her.” In truth, he fucked one of the females every full moon. It was part of par for being a wolf — the need to fuck and shift and hunt, to give into the primal urges that they kept under wraps the other days of the month. There were only ten single females he wasn’t related to in the pack, and they serviced all of the unmated males as well, more than forty now. It wasn’t a pretty job, but the females knew what it meant to be a wolf, and in their culture, females were sex objects or they were mates. There was no in-between.

  “You don’t want a she-wolf, that’s fine. You should reach out to the coven. We are in need of a new witch for our full moon ceremonies. We haven’t communed with our spirit ancestors since Lit left.”

  He growled under his breath. The last time he tangled with a witch, she’d twisted his heart out and stomped on it, as if he had no value. He had pretended as if it hadn’t mattered at the time, but it had mattered a great deal. He hadn’t loved Elizabeth, but he could have, if she’d just opened up that part of herself. But she was content to keep him and a handful of others on the leash for full-moon sex. There was a part of him that understood it. She was young; she liked her freedom. But there was only so much that a man could take and still keep his dignity.

  “I don’t think I can take a witch, Dad,” he said finally.

  “You need to do something. The females are restless because they have no one to lead them. Your mother is doing what she can, but she’s not the alpha’s mate.”

  After their conversation, his father had left him alone to think and that was why he’d ended up at Lykos that night, thinking about females and mating. The circular booth that was reserved for Adam and whoever he wanted to join him was currently filled with his closest friends and packmates, Brick, Solan, and Joe. They knew he wasn’t in the mood to chat, so they kept the drinks coming and the conversation to a minimum.

  He looked across the crowded club with a lack of enthusiasm. Same old club, same old music, same old females looking for love, or a lay, or both. If the situation were different for him, if he weren’t alpha of the Delta Park pack, maybe he could grab one or two of the scantily clad females and take them in one of the back rooms for a little fun. But that didn’t appeal to him anymore, not really. Approaching his true age of twenty, which meant that at wolves’ slow aging of one body year for every twelve years that passed, he was now closer to middle age even though he still looked like a college kid. He didn’t feel like a college kid, though. Disillusionment colored his perception now.

  Being alpha was a brutal business. He’d been third in command before Lit, their former alpha, had started to slip in his duties to the pack. He had family troubles that included a wild teenage daughter and an unnatural witch wife who had friendships with some extremely unsavory males. To prevent the pack from disintegrating, Adam overstepped their beta, Brick, challenged Lit, and won. Lit and his family left town to join another pack somewhere away from their problems, and Adam hoped the problems hadn’t followed them there. Adam became alpha, keeping his cousin Brick as his second. Adam’s parents were elders of the pack, ones who had been around
for a long time and wanted to share their wisdom with the pups. They helped the pack without getting caught up in rank fights, with this lifestyle becoming a form of retirement for wolves.

  Adam’s only sister, Angie, was eighteen plus five, just old enough to think she knew everything when she’d hardly lived her life yet. Just as he was about to give up and head home for a date with his right hand and some serious shut-eye, he caught the sweet scent of pure sugar. His body tightened and froze. His wolf rose inside him until he felt his fangs pushing out of his gums. Closing his eyes, he scented further until he located its source. When his eyes opened, he saw the object of his desire — a petite blonde wearing a black corset and a very short skirt.

  He had only one thought as he prepared to rush to her side: to throw her over his shoulder, take her home, mark her, and make her his forever. There would be time for talk later, much later, after he fucked her soundly.

  As he stood, he saw an arm slide around her shoulders and tug her forward. A head lowered and dropped a kiss to her mouth. His hackles rose immediately. Someone was touching his woman.

  Then he grinned when he saw who was touching her: Leo, one of his lowest-ranked wolves. Sitting down, he nudged Brick and said, “Go tell Leo that I need to talk to him now.”

  Adam leaned back against the cushioned seat and smirked, making plans to learn all about his woman from Leo before asserting himself as alpha and forbidding Leo from seeing her again.

  It was good to be the king.

  Chapter 3

  Cinder checked her cell again, for the tenth time in as many minutes. She just didn’t understand what had happened to Leo Friday night. After they’d danced and rubbed obscenely against each other, teasing with low voices about what they were going to do to each other later, they’d headed to the bar to cool down. Someone from his pack had pulled him away, and when he returned, he had taken her home immediately. All teasing was gone; his face that normally always had a big smile just for her had gone very serious. For the first time since they’d met, he kissed her cheek and left her at her front door.