Nora smiled when Errol and Onyx stepped up next to Ian and raised their hands. Victor was on Nora’s side and his hand was raised. Nora was too afraid to look around and see what the outcome was and based on the expressions of the alpha pair it was going to be close.
“Cora and I will discuss this tie and return with our answer.” They started toward the doors in the courtyard behind them but after a few hand signals exchanged between them they turned back.
Errol put his hand on Ian’s shoulder. “That was fast so it’s probably good news.”
“Or really bad news,” Ian said exactly what Nora was thinking.
“What if you stay and I live in Freebasin? You can come visit me.”
Ian laughed like she was joking when he knew very well she wasn’t. “I can’t be without you, Nora. You’re stuck with me.”
Nora closed her eyes holding onto him tighter. “I don’t deserve you, Ian.”
“We’ve made our decision,” Darian said before Ian could respond to what Nora said. “After Victor reminded us that we have exercised patience and forgiveness in the past and had it pay off so well we have reconsidered. Casting out Rafi was one of the worst days of my life. This day would be even worse, were we to lose you and your mate, Ian. Please stay with us.”
Everyone who voted in favor of them staying began to cheer and race forward to hug onto Ian and to her surprise, they were hugging her too.
Angeline wrapped her arms around Nora and hugged her tightly. “I am so happy you are staying, Nora,” She said with sincerity that humbled Nora even further.
“Thank you,” Nora said happy tears spilling over.
Ian gathered her from Angeline and held her close. “This is our family, Nora. Well, until we add to it and have kids of our own.”
Family, love, and happily ever after? This has to be my family up in heaven making deals with guardian angels because this is all just too good to be true. Closing her eyes she sent up a prayer she hoped found their ears. I love you, too.
EPILOUGE
Angeline jerked upright from the bed.
“What is it?” Killian asked.
She tried to catch her breath. “I saw a war coming, Killian. The Rizer pack is the target.”
“The damn HRAF again? I’ll kill every last one of them,” Killian growled so hard the bed shook.
“Stop it,” Angeline scowled at her husband and gave his ear a tug. “It wasn’t a human and shifter war. It’s a shifter on shifter war.”
Killian laughed. “No, that’s impossible, Angeline. We are one of the biggest shifter packs left and the other large packs are allies.”
“All of them?”
“All of the big ones now that the Herod’s are gone. It must have been a nightmare.”
Angeline shook her head, her blue eyes bouncing around the bedroom in the dark. “It was real, Killian. There’s a woman we have to find she has a gift different than mine. The other pack has her, if we don’t get her from them we’ll lose, Killian. The Rizer pack will be executed.”
Killian’s hand ran over her stomach, still round with the baby. “How can we find a woman of a pack we don’t know of? Angeline, you have to consider that maybe-”
“I know you don’t want it to be real but it is, Killian. We need to get the woman away from Rafi’s pack and the only one who will be able to get her is Victor.”
“Rafi?” Killian’s color drained from his face. “He wouldn’t come after us. He used to be one of my brothers.”
“He was outcast. He means to kill all of us.”
Killian started toward the door. “I’ll go get Victor, what should I tell him?”
Angeline bit her lower lip. “Tell him it’s time to find Nicole again, his predestined mate.”
THE END
If you’d like to find out more about the upcoming shifter war and Victor’s hot romance with Nicole Monet pick up the next book in the series, Love for you Alone.
Please remember to review if you enjoyed this book. Thank you!
A Rizer Wolfpack Series Other Books
NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
Hello Reader
Hope you enjoyed this book.
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Amelia Wilson
BONUS: DARK PARANORMAL ROMANCE
AWAKENING
Awakening
Phoenix Rising
By:
Amelia Wilson
J. A. Cummings
Table of Contents:
Invitation From The Author
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Epilogue
Copyright © 2017 by Amelia Wilson/J.A. Cummings
All rights reserved.
In no way is it legal to reproduce, duplicate, or transmit any part of this document in either electronic means or in printed format. Recording of this publication is strictly prohibited, and any storage of this document is not allowed unless with written permission from the publisher. All rights reserved.
Respective authors own all copyrights not held by the publisher.
Prologue
The jungle was hot and oppressively humid, but Theyn could not stop to rest. He had encouraged the local native population of this green planet to help him construct his isolation chamber, allowing them to also build a tomb they felt was appropriate for a god. He did not have the heart to tell them that he was not in need of a tomb and was not a god, but he doubted that they would be very impressed to know that their mysterious guest from the stars was only a botanist.
He hesitated at the mouth of the stone construct they had built for him, taking one last look up at the sky. The stars were brilliant and beautiful, but the constellations were not the ones he had come to know. He was filled with the ache of homesickness and stabbing grief. Somewhere out there, far beyond this solar system, his world was in flames, and he would never see his home again.
He and his Companion had escaped the destruction of their world in a borrowed research probe that was never meant to carry lifeforms this far from home. It had been a desperate act, but both Theyn and Beno had a strong will to live. They were the last survivors of Ylia, and they meant to carry her legacy into the future somehow.
Near the fourth planet in this system, an inhospitable red-colored rock, their probe had encountered an asteroid field. There was no propulsion capability on the probe and no way to avoid a collision, so they were knocked off course and forced to jettison in separate escape pods when they reached the outer atmosphe
re of this world.
Theyn counted his blessings. Neither of them were navigators, and they had done a blind launch. If it hadn’t been for the asteroids, they most likely would have ended up flying straight into Sol, the yellow sun at the center of this system. They were fortunate to have landed on a world with life, a compatible atmosphere, and gravity slightly lighter than their own. If they had to find a new world, this one was acceptable.
Theyn’s escape pod had landed here on an isthmus covered in jungle and populated by bipedal intelligent life. They had taken him to be a god, which is how he found himself here today, about to be sealed into a hibernation cell in the bottom of a stone pyramid.
He hoped that Beno, wherever he had landed, was having better luck. He hoped that Beno’s escape pod had also included the specifications for the construction of the hibernation cell. Otherwise, he would be very, very lonely when the cell finally released him, nine hundred standard orbital time units from now.
He took a deep breath, possibly his last breath of fresh air for a very long time. He would have been lying if he’d said he wasn’t a little afraid.
The natives were watching him, the young woman that they insisted on bringing with them leaning on the shoulder of one of the warriors. She was inebriated and unable to stand on her own. The warrior shook her gently, and her eyes rolled back into her head, a thin line of greenish drool escaping from her lax mouth. Theyn shuddered. He did not understand these primitive ways.
The escape pod had been designed to be converted into a hibernation cell so that anyone in need could afford to wait for help to arrive in safety. There was never any way to know what sort of infectious diseases or parasitic life forms might exist in a new biosphere, so it was better to be safe than sorry. Once he was sealed into his cell, he would be put into decontamination and a deep sleep. His cell would be linked to Beno’s, assuming that Beno’s cell survived his landing. When one of them awoke, so would the other, and then they would find each other again. Ylians were social creatures; they could not exist in isolation.
The natives helped him climb into his hibernation cell, obeying his direction on how to encase it once he had sealed it from the inside. Once it was activated, his cell would require very little power, but what it needed it could obtain through the soil beneath the stone floor of the chamber. He had placed the array himself. He would be all right, he was certain of it. He hoped that somewhere out there, Beno could say the same.
He closed his eyes and took one last breath as he lay down. The native chieftain spoke to him, but Theyn could not understand the words he said. He only smiled as gently as he could as he closed the lid.
Chapter One
Dr. Sera Cooper adjusted the lamp on her helmet and crouched next to a stone panel in a subterranean passageway. The corridor she was in had been hacked out of bedrock by hand tools over five hundred years ago, and the chisel marks still stood out in places on the low ceiling above her head. Above her, a stone pyramid reached a thousand meters into the sky, only recently rescued from its green jungle cocoon by weeks of back-breaking work.
In the dim light from her headlamp, Mayan glyphs danced across the stone, eroded by the slow trickle of water that flowed through the cavern. Several of the stone glyphs were covered with thick, clinging moss that obscured the characters. She gently scraped some of the moss away with the edge of her trowel and peered closer.
She squinted her blue eyes and blew a stray blonde curl out of the way as she read the ancient writing. As an archaeologist specializing in the Mayan culture, she was able to read glyphs as well as she could read an e-mail from her best friend, but this inscription was defying all of her efforts.
“This makes no sense,” she muttered. “‘The god came from the jaguar star and...green jade...mushrooms?’ What the hell?” She scraped the stone again, trying to clean it more thoroughly.
One of the glyphs moved. It pressed in like a button on a machine, and a low grinding noise filled the corridor. The stone panel she had been examining shuddered and slid backward into the cave wall, moving with a soft hum. It receded, moving to the right until it was completely swallowed by the stone around it, almost like a pocket door in a modern house. An opening gaped in front of her now, and the darkness beyond it was absolute. Air rushed back at her, stale and smelling of earth and dank, wet stone.
Sera swallowed hard and adjusted her head lamp again. Her heart thudded in her chest in wild excitement. A hidden chamber! She wanted to run inside, but her sense of self-preservation overrode her eagerness to explore. She picked up her walkie talkie and contacted her assistant, who was on the surface in the artifact tent.
“Joely,” she said. “I need you. Bring your brightest flashlight.”
Her voice came back immediately, responding to the quivering excitement in Sera’s tone. “Are you all right?”
“Perfect. Just… bring some light and get down here.”
She put the radio away and shone her light into the darkness. From what she could see, the chamber she had just opened was fairly large. She could see more glyphs carved into the walls. There was a large object in the center of the room, and from where she crouched, it looked like a sarcophagus. Beside it, a human-shaped bundle of textiles, wrapped with rope vines and lying on its side, rested on a low stone platform. A thrill shot through her, and she shivered. She had just made the greatest discovery of her career.
Joely clambered into the chamber, crawling forward through the claustrophobic tunnel where Sera had been working. She had two battery-powered lamps in her hands, and when she reached Sera, her mouth dropped open.
“Oh my God,” she said. “What is that?”
Sera took one of the lamps. “We’re about to find out.”
She turned on the lamp on its highest setting and pointed it into the chamber. The room sprang into view, illuminated at last, and she crept inside. Once she made it through the doorway, she was able to stand again. Joely followed behind her, her dark eyes wide.
“Oh my God,” Joely said again.
Sera went to the object in the center of the room. It was a sarcophagus, and it was covered with the same garbled glyphs that had graced the door to this chamber. She leaned closer to examine the carvings, and she could hear a low hum emanating from inside the stone coffin.
“Get the team,” she said. “This is now priority one.”
***
It took them weeks to properly record the glyphs from the doorway and the sliding panel. After a good deal of inspection, they realized that the door was attached to an ingenious hydraulic system utilizing rainwater and an intricate system of stone counterbalances to shift the panel. The chamber contained a sarcophagus, firmly sealed, and lying beside it was the wrapped body of an adolescent female, likely some sort of sacrifice. The poor girl had probably been entombed alive to accompany the tomb’s occupant, who was obviously a very important person. There were no grave goods to speak of, but the sarcophagus was extremely long. Sera was willing to bet that there was a cache of burial objects inside.
The interior walls of the chamber were covered in an elaborate creation myth she had never encountered before, something about gods from the sky. She had read it twice to make sure she understood what it was saying, and she still couldn’t quite believe her eyes.
Joely was setting up the laser scanner to record a 3-D image of the chamber for closer examination back in the lab. “I don’t know, Sera,” she said, shaking her head. “If those Ancient Aliens people get hold of this, we’ll never hear the end of it.”
“Tell me about it,” she groaned. “Do you think we can publish without including a translation?”
Her assistant laughed. “Not on your life.”
They started the scanner and let a laser light grid pass over the entire interior space of the tomb, careful to stay out of the way of the beams as the machine slowly rotated, taking readings and downloading the details of the space. Sera stood with her hands on her hips, watching the readout as the data was record
ed.
“This is so much better than having to draw all of this by hand,” she said. “Can you imagine what the first archaeologists went through? They must have all had art classes.”
“I took art classes,” Joely said.
Sera was surprised. “Really? You didn’t tell me that.”
“Yep. Art was actually my minor. I specialized in charcoal illustration.” She grinned. “It was great when the frat boys came in to do nude figure modeling to earn beer money.”
She snorted a laugh. “That was probably the only reason you took the class - a little free peek.”
“Nothing wrong with being young and alive,” Joely quipped.
Asa Brunner, one of her graduate students, ambled into the chamber, ducking to avoid the laser. He was a former rodeo cowboy who had turned to archaeology after a career-ending injury. The damage to his leg gave him a strange, looping stride. In his thick Texas accent, he said, “Dr. Cooper, there’s a man from the Mexican government here to talk to you.”
Sera and Joely exchanged a knowing look, and she sighed. “Okay. Thanks, Asa.”
The young Texan tipped his hat to them and left, and Joely said, “That didn’t take long.”
“Predictable. Government agents at important digs are like flies to shit.”
She left the chamber and clambered out into the open air. The pyramid they were excavating was a tiny one, and it had been utterly swallowed by the jungle before Sera and her team had started their work. Now they had cleared one entire face of the structure and a good part of the paved courtyard in front of it, revealing the precise joinery of the stones and the excellent masonry for which the Maya were rightly known. Tents had been pitched in the square, and the artifacts were examined and conserved there before being shipped back to the University of Austin, which was where Sera had tenure. Predictably, now that they had found something more interesting and potentially more valuable than a bunch of inscriptions and broken pots, the Mexican government was trying to get in on the action.
In Love with the Enemy (A Rizer Wolfpack Series Book 4) Page 10