MATED TO THE ALPHA AND HIS BETA - Season 5 Episode 79

Stella

Every hair on my body rose as a crackle of tense energy swept over me. I honed in on the sound of the scream, which I realized hadn’t been loud enough for anyone else to notice out here on the street, even those tuning in with wolf hearing. A ripple of anxiety ran along my spine as I stopped myself mid-run.

Someone had screamed from inside The Silver Crescent, but it didn’t seem to be causing a panic. I didn’t have to respond to it. I could keep on running my sad little self right on home and leave all those people to their own tragedies.

But I didn’t. I turned around and went back through the doors. I scanned the crowd. My senses were on high alert, tingling. For a moment, I was almost overwhelmed. I could draw on so many different talents, it was hard right this second to figure out which to use and how…without giving myself away.

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No more screams had come, but there was a different kind of tension swirling through the air. Heat, but also cold. A smell like rich earth, but also like metal. Like the electric zap of lightning. I’d forced the hair on my head to stop floating around me in a cloud, but the hairs on the back of my neck were still twitching.

Aunt Selena was back in the center of the dance floor. The song had gone back to something uptempo, and she moved to the beat with such easy precision that I couldn’t stop the wave of jealousy poking at me with tiny kitten claws. She moved like she didn’t care who was watching her…but everyone was.

Every male was, anyway. Even the ones with other women. Their eyes followed every move she made, tracking her like she was prey. Almost in unison, they lifted bottles or glasses to their lips and

drank, but on nearly every male mind was not the flavor of the alcohol but what it would be like to taste Selena’s lips…and other places.

A different sort of heat rushed into me, deep in my gut. I knew what sex was, not that my parents had ever talked to me about it. I’d carried the knowledge of how people joined their bodies for pleasure and procreation inside me, the same way I’d come into this world knowing so much else. But knowing how body parts could join wasn’t the same as having experience.

Watching my aunt dance, watching all these men stare at her, I began to get a better sense of how it all worked, only it wasn’t as fun as I’d expected it to be. In fact, the growing sense of friction emanating off the men in the room was twisting my stomach into knots.

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Selena kept on dancing even as a man came up to her and tried to take her hand. She shook him off with a toss of her hair and spun back around, showing him her back. A cluster of women I assumed were her friends circled her, but there was a strange feeling coming off most of them, too. Not the same as from the men, which was all need-focused. These women were feeling more like they were pushing away. Kind of angry.

Oh, it was jealousy. Not overt. Most of them didn’t even know they were feeling it, or at least they were pretending they didn’t. They all smiled and danced and tossed their hair the same way she was, but it was so clear that Selena, in the center, was still getting all the attention. Positive or negative, pretty much everyone in this room was thinking about her in some way or another.

The more she refused them, the more fervent they got. Angrier. Denial wasn’t sitting well with any of these men, even the ones I could tell thought of themselves as “nice guys.” Maybe particularly the ones who believed that of themselves.

I knew it was a risk, but I couldn’t stand here and watch her fend off that unwanted attention. It was going to get ugly in a few more minutes. I could see fists clenching. Eyes were narrowing.

What the heck was going on in here?

I shrank back against the wall, hopefully out of the way, so I could give myself a minute to close my eyes. I had to picture my mind like a vast library full of books, each of them an instruction manual of a different set of skills or talents. Because, like a library, I could only “check out” a few of them at a time. That was something I was only slowly learning, that being a Celestial didn’t mean constant access. Since I was already using shapeshifting energies, I’d have to be careful about what I pulled next.

The information filled my head in seconds. My aunt was in her first heat, and because she was a hybrid, she was drawing every male within miles. She didn’t even know it, and neither did they.

Which meant that it would be simple to ease them all off her without calling attention to myself. I pulsed out some distraction energy to get everyone to ignore Selena’s hybrid heat energies. Within half a minute, the tension eased. The men still paid attention since she was gorgeous and confident…but they were all leaving her alone.

And I’d seen enough to know I needed to get out of here.