Read Online Perfect Mate (Book Two: A Werewolf BBW Shifter Romance) by Aubrey Rose - Free Book Online

dead anyway."
    The other shifters waited for them at the bottom. Julia's surprise hit Damien hard as she recognized her grandmother. His heart began to beat fast and he breathed deeply to calm himself. Tension led to mistakes. To acting too quickly, on impulse. The last time he'd done that—
    In his thoughts flashed the fight of two years ago, in the darkness as he was now. Lukas's legs had risen up and slashed down through the air, with powerful muscles behind them. Damien remembered falling onto his back, helpless to protect himself. The last thing he'd seen was the moon, and then he'd lost his sight forever.
    He felt a twinge of pain along the scars that ran over his eyes. The razor-sharp claws had sliced them through, and all of Jordan's work hadn't been able to restore his vision. The flesh had grown back, and a golden haze had come over the surface of his irises, but he'd never be able to see the moon again.
    The leader stepped forward, and Damien's fingers curled at his sides.
    "Dejara." He addressed Dee as though they were old friends, and perhaps they were.
    "Give me back my granddaughter, Trax," Dee said. "Then we'll go in peace."
    Trax laughed. Julia's fear rippled through Damien's body, and he willed her to be calm. If her fear struck him at the wrong moment during the fight, he would be done for. She seemed to realize this, for she was struggling to hold herself together.
    "Do you think I'm afraid to fight you?" Trax bellowed. "A weakling, a blind man, and an woman as old as the moon herself. You might as well cut each other's throats now and be done with it."
    Damien sensed the wolves next to Trax beginning to shift, their scent growing stronger. Immediately he followed suit, as did Jordan. Only Dee and Trax remained human.
    "May the fight be fair," Dee said, Damien knew she was raising her hands to the sky in prayer. "May the gods take those who fall."
    Damien howled first, and the rest of the wolves joined him, their calls spiraling upward to the sky in a terrible harmony that flooded the clearing and bounced back off of the trees. Damien could almost envision the stance of each wolf by the reflected sounds among them. Then the pack leader began to shift, and he knew the fight was about to begin.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
    Julia gasped as Granny Dee stepped forward. The world went silent in her ears as she watched the pack leader talk to her grandmother. She was sure that any moment he would reach out and smash Dee with one hand, crumple her into bits. But he did not move close enough for that. He wasn't even confused by Dee showing up. And she realized as they spoke that his shoulders were raised tensely. He wasn't confused at all.
    He was scared.
    Damien and Jordan shifted along with the other pack's wolves, and although Julia had seen it twice before it was still a shock to behold. The horrific cracking of bone and tendon as the skeletal structures of the men shifted into that of wolves. Damien's face, his beautiful face, changing into the snout of an animal. And then fur covered them and they were all wolves, all of them except for the two standing in the middle.
    Granny Dee raised her arms to the sky.
    "May the fight be fair. May the gods take those who fall."
    During all of this, Julia had not accepted what she knew in her heart must be true. Even as her grandmother prayed to strange gods, she wished that it would all go away, that she would wake up from the nightmare and go back to work at the library. She would shelve a hundred thousand books now if it meant the safety of her grandmother.
    But then Granny Dee lowered her arms and stared forward into the face of Trax, and Julia knew before she shifted that she was not entirely human.
    The leader changed first, his limbs bending and growing claws. Dark red hair sprouted and covered his torso. His body was nearly twice the size of Damien's, thick with knotted muscle. Julia did not pay attention to him, though, once she saw what her grandmother was