Chapter 240 – Mated to the Alpha and His Beta Novel PDF Online Free

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His voice tattered like a silken scarf shredded by sharp claws.

Stella stepped up. “I never knew you, grandfather. But you have no power over my fathers.”“Their power is mine!”

Xander and Mason dropped to their knees. Quickly, Zane and I knelt with them to put our hands on them. Stella had said our safety was incumbent on us touching each other. We were never going to let them go.

That’s when Orion breached the circle.

Xander–

My father grabbed the front of my shirt with fists as cold as ice. The moment he did, that same ice began to fill me. It centered around my heart. He was digging his fingers deep into my chest, tearing through muscle and bone. Blood spattered on the floor.

I fought him as hard as I’d ever fought anyone or anything in my life. I thought about the foggy hand crushing the captain. My father was trying to do the same to my heart.

“Fight him, Daddy!”

The more I tried, the harder he crushed. Memories flashed across my mind. My father had been there the first time I gave my wolf control. He’d taught me how to fight. He’d trusted me enough to take his place as Alpha in our pack, even though he could have kept the spot until he died.

“I love you, father!” I screamed.

A blast of bitter, stinking wind sucked the breath out of me. The fist squeezed. I could no longer stand. The only thing holding me up was my dead father’s claws digging into the meat of my heart.

That, and my brother’s hands.

***

Mason–

“I hate you!”I’d spent most of my life hating Orion. Faced with him now, though, my heart tried to leap out of my chest. His other hand slammed into me, his fingers seeking to gouge a canyon in my flesh the way he was doing to my brother.

With every wrench of his fingers inside us, Orion’s form grew more solid. The pain was excruciating and relentless. It seemed like I should already be dead, and still his hand kept squeezing. Twisting.

He wasn’t going to be satisfied with simply grinding our hearts to a pulp.

He was going to tear them out of our bodies.

I could hear Stella screaming at us both to fight him. Waves of love and hate flowed around us toward the specter sucking us dry. I grabbed my brother’s hand. Palm to palm, we fed each other the last dregs of our strength, and the forces of our determination mingled.

I felt a hand on the back of my neck. Zane stood behind me and Xander, his hands cupping each of us. He stood straight and tall. His Beta strength filled us. Sustained us.

Orion fell back a step.

His hands slipped out of our chests. I stared down, expecting to see my shirt in shreds, my chest even worse, but I was unmarked. So was Xander.

Orion staggered backward again.

Stella moved between us and the ghost of our father. She put her hands up. She pushed outward, not touching him, but still shoving him away.

“I love you, Dad,” Xander said. “But you can’t have her. Or us. Not anymore.”

***Zane I’d never been more proud to see my two Alphas joining together to share their strengths. They stood up to the man who’d given them life, and they refused to let him take it away from them.

Orion’s form shuddered, getting bigger and smaller. Beating like a heart.

The howls of the other dead rose around us. The same hands that had wrecked the yacht onto the beach grabbed Orion. He screamed as those hands tore him into a million tiny pieces that scattered like flower petals and then disappeared.

The hands remained. New figures appeared. I didn’t recognize any of them, but that didn’t matter.

Wolves, dragons, Fae. Even human figures became solid and faded in rapid succession. They flew toward us, striking at the invisible barrier Stella had shielded us with. One at a time, then many all at once, they attacked.

Snarling, screaming, crying out. But also laughing. They were gorging themselves on every emotion that could be experienced…and it wasn’t coming from me or my mates.

The dead were sucking everything out of Stella.

She swayed but kept to her feet. Me, Xander, and Mason leaped toward her at the same time, but we fell back from the inside of the barrier. Lanie stood on the edge of it, her hands toward our daughter. Sending her waves of brilliant Luna energy, pulsing strength that bypassed the shields and filled Stella.

“Together!” Xander cried. “Stand with her together!”

Two shields of Alpha energy pulsed toward her. I added my Beta strength to it. The four of us stood, loving our daughter with everything we had inside us, and the dead gobbled it up faster than she could absorb it.Stella no longer looked like the little girl she’d been or the young woman she’d grown into. I couldn’t say what she looked like. Something ethereal and otherworldly. To call her a goddess would have been a disservice. She was something beyond anything I’d ever imagined.

But she was faltering. Growing weak. She wasn’t going to be able to keep the dead outside the protective circle much longer, and there didn’t seem to be anything any of us could do to help her.

The doors flew open.

The High Council had found us.

Lanie–

The second the doors opened, the members of the High Council swarmed inside. They leaped and ran, at first in tight formation, like they were on a battlefield. Their cries rang out. Roars intended to intimidate us. Shrieks so fierce they sounded like they were tearing open their throats.

Once through the door, at the sight of the vast space that had been hidden inside what looked like a tiny hut, they spread out. Their expressions twisted in confusion. I saw a few at the rear of the attack start to backpedal, but the door had vanished and the wall was suddenly so close behind them they ran into it. I could see their plans falling to pieces right in front of us. They hadn’t expected anything like this.

And still, they would not stop.

They charged on, stumbling over each other. Shoving and pushing. The ones who fell were trampled by those who kept running. It was like they’d all gone mad, crazed with their hatred.

Nothing would keep them from us. I didn’t need any Goddess talents to smell their fury and desire to tear us limb to limb. They burned with it, and they wanted their inferno to consume everything in their path.

I saw Aldon at once, his face contorted with his screams of rage and triumph. Other Elders followed him. So did a dozen or more others I didn’t know. I should have been afraid, but a strange peace stole over me.

Whatever came next was what had always been meant to happen. Every choice we’d made had led us all to this place. We’d woven a tapestry of decisions. Taken our own paths, one step forward at a time. There had never been a different ending to this.The dead that had been pummeling us and devouring every scrap of emotion that Stella had ever felt became a single entity with a roar so loud it seemed like it shook the entire world.

Then it burst into a million pieces again. Hands. Faces. Tails, claws, horns, teeth. Arms and legs and fur and scales. Every creature who’d ever lived and every single one that had ever died all showed themselves in the same instant. And every single one was focused on the High Council.

Stella’s feet rose off the ground. Her toes pointed downward. Her hands were at her sides, palms up. Her hair flew around her the way it had done on the boat, snapping and crackling with electric life.

She spun slowly in the air, still rising. She was so far up now that I couldn’t have reached her even if I jumped as high as I could. I wanted to fight out of the protection she’d placed around us, but her quiet voice whispered to me through our family link.

“Stay inside the circle,” she breathed inside our minds. “All will be well inside of it.”

It took everything I had to obey. I could tell her fathers were fighting the desire to break free and attack the High Council. The council members themselves were pelting toward us at top speed.

There’d been the illusion that they were only feet away when they burst through the door, but now they seemed miles from us. Then inches. Then they might have been on the other side of the world.

Stella was causing that to happen. She was using everything she had to fight them off. The dead of Fallen Crest, on the other hand, were drawing them in. Desperate and hungry, greedy for their rage and fear and smug arrogance. The dead and the wolf-kind High Council were racing toward each other with our daughter in between them. The only thing keeping them apart.

And then… She stepped aside.She was back inside our circle with us. Still invisible, but I could feel the renewed strength of it. All of us grabbed hands, making our own circle within a circle.

Within seconds, the High Council began to change. Howls filled the cavernous space as their wolves tore free of their human bodies. Their beasts fought the restrictions of their clothes. Naked, they leaped, twisting and shifting in mid-air, only to land on human feet.

Over and over again, the High Council shifted from wolf to human and back. Some were stuck half changed, paws at the end of human arms. Wolf muzzles stretching from human faces. Wolf canines sprouting in human jaws. Human eyes with wolf pupils. Fur and skin and claws and soft flesh, all twisting together.

Their screams turned from arrogance to agony. Triumph to tragedy. The dead surrounded them, wrenching and tearing. Cracking them open like crab legs and sucking out the meat. One by one the High Council fell. One by one, they were consumed by the dead.

One by one, until the five of us were all that remained.

Xander–

Watching the High Council become nothing more than dried-up husks had been one of the most terrifying and satisfying sights of my entire life. Yet, already, the memory of it was fading. We’d fled the island on the boat the High Council had arrived on, and Stella had managed to keep us safe to just beyond the wall hiding the island. The farther away we got, the blurrier everything became.

“How much will we be able to remember?” I asked her. We were all in an SUV she’d commandeered for us as soon as we made it back to the mainland. I knew that’s what had happened, although the details of the journey were almost gone.

Stella was in the passenger seat and turned to me. Her gaze was solemn. “Probably nothing. The dead might not have been able to take our bodies, but they had to be satisfied with something. They will gnaw on the memories of that battle for eons.”

I looked into the rearview mirror at my three mates. Lanie’s gaze met mine. Shadows hollowed her cheeks and under her eyes, but she smiled at me. She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever known.

Mason leaned forward to look out the front windshield. “Are we ready to do this?”

We’d returned to Brightsky. This time, we’d stopped in Standard to go through the regular process of being admitted to the enclave. None of us wanted to face whatever security defenses Malachi might have put into place after we left. Stella had been unable to tell us if we’d been in danger or not.

“My visions have gone dark for now,” she had said without any strain or concern in her tone. “When I need them again, they’ll return. For now, we have to rely on our instincts.”It might have felt like a punishment, being denied the guidance from…well, whoever or whatever it was that had guided Stella as a Celestial. Instead, it felt more like a reward. We had come through the fire and been hardened, like diamonds.

We could trust ourselves to make the right choices.

“Let’s go in,” I said. “See what kind of welcome we get.”

***

Gabriela–

I stared into the mirror with a sigh at my reflection. The glasses didn’t feel right. I just couldn’t get used to them.

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