Page 20 of The Fanged One

Fenris hadn't been kissed in a very long time. Forty seconds later, his body was still wrestling itself under control, and the conjured black jeans weren't generous enough to hide the bulge that was pressed uncomfortably against the fly. All he could feel was heat. Linnea's scent was in his nose, her taste on his tongue, and his dick was only interested in continuing what his mouth had started.

The wolf inside him was making a low rolling sound of approval that Fenris could feel vibrating under his ribs like a purring cat.

He was a god, for fuck's sake, and he was struggling to get his shit together. He blamed the dress. He hadn't been able to think one clear thought since she had walked out wearing it.

Yes, Fenris thought grimly. This humiliation was worse than being bound.

Linnea stepped out of his arms to greet a man wearing leather pants and a crown made of antler bones.

"Von!" Linnea threw herself into the stranger's arms, and his hands closed around her waist. Fenris's wolf made a sound that was no longer a purring cat.

The man lifted Linnea three inches off the dance floor, set her back down, and made a fond noise into her hair. Fenris's hands clenched at his sides, his mouth still wet from her tongue, and he reminded himself that this was the friend they had come to find. He wasn't an enemy.

Brother-hug, his wolf said grudgingly.

Yes.

The blond one is family. Do not kill him.

I wasn't going to.

Thinking about killing him.

I'm allowed to think about whatever I want.

Thinking about mating. I can smell that she is too.

Fenris bit his tongue because now he could smell her arousal as well. Fucking wolf.

The antler-crowned man set Linnea on her feet, and Linnea turned and gestured at Fenris.

"This is my friend, Von. The one we came to see," she said, beaming.

Von was tall and lanky, built of long bones and lean muscle. He had long golden hair to the waist, and one leather-wrapped braid threaded through it. His eyes were lined in black so heavy it should have looked stupid, but somehow it didn't. His bare chest was decorated in runic and serpentine patterns, and across the bare hollow of his throat, war-paint had been brushed in three thick black lines like a raven's wing.

Fenris's half-gray eye twitched and caught the faint shimmer that moved over the man's skin in a slow concentric ripple. Not god-magic. Not völva-magic. Something older and stranger, that came up through him and went out into the room and came back, like a tide. Fenris focused and saw how he was connected to the magic in the world around him, and he magnified it and sent it back out again.

"Ah, I see now. He's a shaman," Fenris said. He nodded once with respect. "Now I know why you think he can help me."

The shaman's mouth fell open before it curved up at the corners in the most delighted smile Fenris had been on the receiving end of in his very long life. The shaman put his hand on his chest.

"Oh, my darling. I could help you with a great many things, Mister..."

Linnea made a small, choked sound.

"Fenris," he said.

"How deliciously fascinating." The shaman's eyes did a top-to-bottom appraisal of him that started at Fenris's hair, lingered on his mouth, traveled down the front of his shirt, stopped, for a fractional half-second, at the unhelpful state of his jeans, before returning to his face with the kind of slow lifted eyebrow that was a sentence all on its own.

Fenris's ears went hot, but he refused to try to hide the state he was in. It would just make him look guilty of something.

Mate is enjoying this, his wolf observed.

Be quiet.

Linnea, mercifully, took the shaman by his long blond hair and gave it a small, affectionate tug.

"No, honey, you don't get it," she said. "He is actually Fenris."