The Mistress and the Hellhound Read Online Free

low, dangerous sounding growl rumbled throughout the room, freezing the wolves of the court in place. It wasn’t lycan. It struck fear into the hearts of even a wolf, something that reached inside them all and triggered their survival instincts like their own growls did to the human population.
    The sound they all knew, but none had actually heard.
    Hellhound.
    Legends said they once walked amongst wolf-kind. Creatures of the night and the pit, who bred with humans to create the first werewolves. Lycan ancestors, but also the bogeymen who haunted their dreams. Behave or the hellhounds will get you was a refrain used by lycan parents.
    No one actually thought they existed.
    They shouldn’t exist.
    They were just a story…
    “Human? What makes you think I was ever human?”
    The court and the alphas scattered from the deep voice. Reena caught her breath, hand over her mouth as a figure emerged from the shadows at the end of the room. Archer, but as she’d never seen him.
    He was dressed for the evening, but his jacket and tie were gone. The fine silk of his shirt pulled over his muscled chest and broad shoulders, and as he walked, shadows trailed him like a cloak. His eyes had changed. Not to the amber of a wolf. Instead, fire burned in their depths. As she watched, his claws lengthened one by one, each announced by a scraping slide that reminded her of a sword pulled from its sheath.
    “You…you’re not human.” Kellan took a step back, fear leeching from his pores as Archer approached.
    He’d always been tall and broad-shouldered, but now he was taller, and getting bigger the longer Reena looked at him. She swallowed, fighting her natural instincts to run. He was shifting, slowly, in front of them. No fur flowed over his skin. It looked harder, like armor plates. His face began to change, a muzzle pushing forward.
    “No,” he growled, each step ringing out as he approached Kellan. “Never have been. Looked it. Acted it. Took a dose of lycan virus to wake me…but now, I’m here.”
    He shoved his face down into Kellan’s until the men were nose to nose. “You have a problem with me in the female’s bed…so let’s have it out. Change, wolf…and let’s see who is worthy of her.”
    She made to leap forward, to get between Archer and Kellan, but a hard hand on her arm stopped her. Turning, she looked up into Travis’s face. His expression was hard. “No. This has to play out.”
    Shit. He was right. It did.
    Biting her lip, she looked at the two men. Kellan held his ground, matching Archer glare for glare. The sound of tearing fabric filled the room as Archer’s shirt gave at the back, two bony spines rising and fanning out.
    “Shit. No one said they had bloody wings!”
    A whisper of awe and fear rolled around the room, even Reena’s eyes widened as the full magnificence of Archer’s half form, somewhere between man and beast, was revealed. Large fangs jutted from his muzzle and he pulled back his lips to snarl.
    “Fuck. He’s going for it,” Travis whispered, as a wash of power flooded the room. Kellan pulling power from his wolf a second before he launched himself into a shift.
    Alphas could shift fast and have teeth in their prey’s throat within half a heartbeat. It was what made them so feared, and the more powerful an alpha, the faster the shift. Apart from Reena herself, she’d never seen anymore change faster than Kellan.
    He leapt forward, his wolf form exploding out of his body as he flew toward Archer. But it wasn’t fast enough, wasn’t ever going to be fast enough, and all those who watched knew.
    Almost lazily, Archer reached out and caught Kellan midleap. One massive hand grabbed the big wolf around the throat, stopping him without even a stagger back. Desperately, Kellan whined and struggling, snapping his jaws and trying to claw Archer’s arm. All to no avail. Easily, Archer held the fully-shifted wolf, raising his arm to look Kellan in the eye as though the lycan were nothing