Hunting Season: Werewolf Bodyguard Romance (Guarded by the Shifter Book 1) Kate Rudolph (best romantic novels to read TXT) 📖

"Are you all werewolves?" Owen's heat was enough to burn, and maybe she should have pulled away from him if he was secretly a monster, but nothing about him made her think he was monstrous, even if he was a werewolf.

"We are," Gibson confirmed.

"Were you born that way?" Em asked.

Good question. She was so glad that Em had jumped in the car with them. She was going to need moral support soon, or at least Em's memory. Trauma had a way of messing with a person's head.

"No," said Gibson.

"Then shouldn't you know about the bite?" It hurt, and Stasia didn't want bullshit answers. She'd done a good deed, she'd saved a fucking life. She deserved to know the truth. Her boyfriend/bodyguard was apparently a werewolf, and he hadn't bothered to say a word about that. She'd been bitten by a freaking werewolf. And now they were playing word games. "Tell me what's going on."

There was a heavy silence in the room after Stasia's demand. She was worried no one would speak, but finally Owen broke the silence.

"It started two years ago in Germany."

Chapter Twenty

Two years ago

The last thing Owen remembered, he was going off the base. He wasn't sure why. But that was normal enough. He sure as hell hadn't meant to end up in the middle of a forest somewhere, his hands tied and in the middle of some strange ritual put on by devil worshipers.

Were they devil worshipers? Did devil worshipers actually exist?

He remembered hearing about them when he was a kid and he had thought it was all fake. But now he was in the middle of some magic looking circle and there was a guy wearing a black robe with animal pelts over his shoulders and they were surrounded by guards carrying wicked looking guns.

Would devil worshipers need guns?

His mind felt kind of spacey and his head ached. Had he been hit? That was very possible. He wanted to feel around for a wound, but with his hands tied he could barely move. And the tactical part in the back of his mind told him it would be a bad idea for the warlock in the middle of the circle to figure out that he was awake.

Warlock? Witch? Sorcerer? It was way too Lord of the Rings for him.

But whoever the magic man was, he wasn't paying attention to Owen right then, so Owen did his best to look around without squirming too much. And he wasn't the only person tied up.

He wasn't sure of the others’ names, though he was pretty sure the older guy was a freaking major. In fact, he thought he recognized everyone from the base. Abducting a handful of US soldiers off of an army base couldn't be easy, and it was pretty fucking suicidal. Did they think the Army was going to play? They would come in guns blazing to get their people back.

And this was Germany. It was supposed be safe. He had been psyched to get this assignment. Ending up tied up in the woods like he was playing a part in an old-fashioned fairytale was not how Owen expected things to go.

There were seven torches blazing all around them and the warlock was doing something on an altar in the middle of them. Was this human sacrifice? Owen's mom was going to freak out if she found out he was killed by human sacrifice. She was a good Catholic woman and no priest would be able to explain this.

The warlock turned to him, carrying a scary, shiny knife.

"You don't have to do this." This was the time to reason with him, if it was possible to reason with some kind of demon summoner out of one of Grimm's fairy tales.

The man didn't speak, his lips pulled into a terrifying smile with two sharp teeth. They didn't look human. Was he human? Maybe he was a demon.

"No, no, no!" Owen tried to struggle, but the man didn't pause. And he brought the knife down, but he didn't stab him. Instead he sliced a healthy stripe of skin on his chest, enough to sting and draw blood, but not enough to do much damage.

What the fuck? Then he caught some of the dripping blood in a metal cup of some kind. No, a chalice. That was the right name for a fancy magic cup.

The warlock or demon continued the ritual with each of the tied up soldiers. One of the guards stepped into the light and Owen got a good look at his face. He did his best to memorize it. If he got out of this thing, he wanted to come for these people. He wanted them to pay for whatever weird shit they were doing.

But the warlock was done with whatever strange task he was performing and he went back to the center of the circle.

He started to chant. Owen didn't have any special skill in languages, but he could recognize a few from being stationed around the world. This wasn't one he recognized. It didn't sound like anything that came from Earth. It was deep and guttural and it made his ears hurt.

The skin where he had been cut started to burn as the man kept chanting, and Owen had to be going crazy because it was like a light show started in front of his eyes. First it was blue light swirling around in circles, and he wondered if it was some kind of LED set up. But there was nothing technological out here. And then a red light joined it and the two lights danced in the air and circled like a cyclone.

The warlock's voice got louder and louder, and Owen was sure that his ears were starting to bleed. He lost sight of the guards, and it was as if they had drifted away into the dark of the forest to give the