The Price They Paid: Imprinted Mates Series

out which way to go. I couldn’t make the spinning in my head cease, but I couldn’t sit here and wait it out either. There was a break in the lights, and I gunned it, hoping for the best. I drove down the road swerving in and out of traffic until I hit the interstate. It had to be safer. The familiar green blurs of the signs indicated that I needed to drive faster.
Car horns blared but I ignored them, trying to get farther away from the sounds. My ears were ringing, and I could barely see as the traffic zipped about. I couldn’t figure out why the bright lights of the vehicles were coming toward me instead of away. I continued to drive, hoping they would convert and go in the right direction soon. The lights parted this way and that as I continued moving down the highway. They seemed to sense my need for a clear path to safety. A black blur raced at me with no intention of slowing down. Car. The headlights meant that it was a car.
As it grew closer, I blinked to clear my vision only to see that it was the guy from the bar gunning towards me! Why wouldn’t he leave me alone already? I turned the wheel to prevent from hitting him, but the oversized eighteen-wheeler was in my way. He tapped the side of my car sending me in a whirling spin. I screamed loudly and gritted my teeth. Make it stop, already! The entire time, all I could think was that I wasn’t ready to die.
I grabbed my head to stop the pain, but it was no help. My body felt like it was splitting in two. A loud crash roared in my ears just before darkness drowned me. Agony exploded all through my veins, and then I felt nothing.

Seuss
The worst kind of mirgrane assaulted every inch of my brain. I’d retired to bed early because nothing helped. Not even Alice, my fantastic healer. Sleep served me well initially, but then images of nothing flitted through my mind like a rapidly changing television. The snowy screens with the sizzling sounds of popping acid fried my already on edge nerves until the slideshow blended into one blurry echo.
The feeling of my soul dividing into four pieces while my heart was divided in half was like someone’s bones being broken all over their body in slow motion. I wanted to be back in my original form, one man, one heart, one soul, half sorcerer and half wolf. Was this a dream? The day … What day was it?
The days blended together because, so much was happening in my region. It seemed as if my own pack was being neglected. My Beta, Maddox, was holding strong, but how long could we handle this on our own? My wolfdom should be full of order and allied, but it wasn’t. The elders and the previous Alpha, my father, were against my decision to fill the ranks as they had. I’d managed to get rid of every person guilty of treason for the malicious attack against the royal family that brought about the death of the queen, the Alpha female, my mother.
The walls of my home were empty except for Alice, Maddox, and myself. No one else was permitted to enter. My father was exiled after he sided with the elders when they asked me to forgive the witch who made the potion that was slipped into my mother’s drink. Though she’d been an ally for decades, her hand was the one that concocted that potion. There had been arguments that she didn’t know it was for the queen, and somehow, she escaped with the help of a traitor. The others guilty of the treason committed met the same demise as my mother. She shouldn’t have been the exception.
The people feared me initially, but after realizing that I only wanted justice, things changed. My father neglected the community surrounding our home and the people living in it. He was too busy fighting wars that weren’t ours to fight, and trying to impress the people that hid behind the big desks and shouted orders. I was nothing like him, and I worked hard to prove it. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t remember what day it was.
Suddenly, the pain stopped. My mind was clearer than a sunny day. Blank. Calm. Something was wrong. The field I was standing in reminded me of the one I played in as a child before my father was king of this region. Running through the tall blades of grass was like moving in slow motion. You put forward the force of running at a normal pace, but they slowed you down by pushing toward you, preventing quicker strides.
Pushing forward wasn’t something that I wanted to do, but more like something I had to do. It challenged me, and I accepted it because the Alpha didn’t know any other way to respond. Backing away would mean that it was greater than me, and it wasn’t. I saw the last stretch, and my paws could already feel the triumph. I held my nose up higher, but the blades of grass surpassed it by at least a foot.
Whoosh! I broke through, and a smell besides green earth assaulted my senses. The smell of the sun, water, sunflowers, and … I stopped short when I noticed the wolf staring back at me. She was stunning. The red from her coat was almost supernatural. Think siren. Not the police car, though the color was right. Sultry. Sexy. Hell, I’m sure that the world did revolve around her. Mine. And just like that I could tell you exactly what damn day it was. August twenty-first. Solar fucking eclipse. And that red-haired vixen was my mate. Why was this a clusterfuck you might ask? Because for the past twenty-eight years of my life I’ve taken booster shots to prevent from seeing her. The only