In the midst of this hot adventure his strong arms held her and didn’t let her go.
Chapter Four
Every choice she’d made since the old world had fallen apart had been about embracing life and rejecting death. As she looked at the sexy shapeshifter reclining beside her, Julia wondered where this choice would lead. He was still a mystery. Was he her lover or her enemy or a dangerous tangle of both?
“I pulled you from the burning plane. I won’t allow them to harm you.” Ross spoke without opening his eyes. He sounded so calm. How had he known what she was thinking?
“I take it shapeshifters aren’t as democratic as their cousins from the other Cherokee clans?” Julia replied.
The doubtful tones in her voice caused him to stir and open his eyes. She’d never seen him this relaxed and yet there was an amber glitter deep in the brown of his eyes that said he never really relaxed, not completely.
“Shapeshifters don’t jockey for position or fight amongst ourselves. There’s a natural order of dominance or submission tied to the animal spirits that share our souls. We are an ancient clan living among the seven modern clans, but we have kept the ties to our own ways, our shifter ways. Those ties have been our salvation. We were able to help the modern clans survive.”
“But many died.” Julia couldn’t help the haunted quality in her voice. She tried to block out her own memories of loss as she spoke.
“We aren’t magicians or miracle workers,” Ross replied. She thought she heard regret beneath his usual calm.
“You’re subversives working against the government,” she said, needing to remind herself before she let her heart grow too soft toward him.
“We work to survive. To give our children a chance to live normal lives.” He showed a spark of temper now. It tightened his jaw and tensed his face.
“But you’re standing in the way of peace,” Julia argued. She wouldn’t be put off by his tension or lulled by their intimacy.
“It’s a lie. Your New World government doesn’t seek peace. They seek an army to enslave. An army of shapeshifters to use to regain the power they’ve lost.” He was no longer reclining. He sat up, straight and tall, and rested his hands on his knees.
“What are you saying?” Julia asked. The persuasive look in his eyes caused her body to tense as well. She was prepared to fight him with a tazer or with an undercover sting, but she wasn’t comfortable arguing politics.
“Your leaders want absolute power and authority and they want to use us to get it.” He looked at her as if he wasn’t lying, as if he spoke a truth so horrible he hated to say it. “Why do they always ‘bring us back alive’? Why are we taken to laboratories instead of prisons? And why has there never been a trial? Not one trial?”
Julia couldn’t breathe. It was as if she was transported back in time to the overcrowded hospital ward where hundreds lay dead and dying. Her chest had been crushed. Her lungs collapsed. Every inhale had been a battle fought, every exhale a battle won.
She stood, not even noticing that her knee supported her weight much better than it had before. She stumbled back the way they had come. Limping, but on her own.
Her mind whirled with scenarios for action as extreme as storming the agency to demand the truth or as lame as curling into the fetal position and wishing the truth away.
She hadn’t become an agent to save the world, but she had wanted to help put things right. She had wanted to thumb her nose at death and keep on keeping on. Monster hunting had seemed like the perfect calling. Unlike the human terrorists who had hurt her, an amorphous threat she couldn’t confront, the shapeshifters were an obvious target. Now she wondered if she’d been working for the true monsters all along.
She’d seen things change so much in the last few years. The new government that had risen from the ashes of Washington bore little resemblance to the one she had initially sworn to serve. Had she been so busy surviving that she’d ignored the obvious? Was it easier to believe the worst about Walker and his people just because they were different?
“To give our children a chance at a normal life,” he’d said.
It could all be a lie. She could refuse to believe it. But would that be hiding from truths too ugly to face? She didn’t cower. It wasn’t in her nature.
Julia pulled on a black T and jeans from Walker’s suitcase. Thank goodness she found a belt as well. It wasn’t until she was cinching it tight that she realized she was on her feet and her knee wasn’t throbbing.
She tried to put her entire weight on her injured leg and only then did she have to ease off with a gasp.
Not healed.
Not quite.
But drastically better.
Impossibly better.
“We aren’t magicians or miracle workers,” he’d said.
Was he a liar, after all?
Chapter Five
Before she could reach and pull the loose leg of her borrowed jeans up to look at her knee, shapeshifters began to materialize from out of the shadows of the surrounding trees. One minute she was alone, the next she was circled by a ring of men and women, some shifted, some not. Several coyotes and one fox came snuffling forward, their noses to the ground. A hawk landed with a cry and a ruffle of feathers on a sky-scraping pine tree overlooking their makeshift camp.
A puma padded into view, smaller than Walker’s lion, but just as golden and sleek.
The puma shifted right before her eyes. This time she didn’t blink. The puma’s body shimmered as if it had been hit by the glow of a thousand suns or a nuclear spotlight. From the blur of dazzling light, a woman stepped.
Gwen Starr.
Walker’s second-in-command.
Unlike the man she followed, Starr’s coloring matched her mountain lion’s. She had golden sun-kissed skin and long tawny hair. Her eyes were a startling green that sparkled with flecks of mica.
“Where is he? What have you done with him?” Gwen demanded. She spoke almost before her body was capable of forming words so the growling purr of her puma could be heard in each syllable.
A fellow shifter threw Gwen a small bundle and she undid it with a jerk, shrugging into a simple black wrap dress and tying its belt, but not before Julia saw she matched her cat in muscle as well.
She had straightened when the shapeshifters appeared, forgetting her knee. Now, in the face of Gwen’s approach, she braced her feet and prepared to fight.
She was no slouch. When she wasn’t on a mission she worked out obsessively to prepare for the next. Still, she would be fighting for her life when Gwen attacked…and she would lose. A human was no match for a shifter. Not without weapons and backup.
“I’m here, Gwen,” Ross said as he came out of the trees. “Stand down.”
“She was supposed to die in the crash,” Gwen protested.
“So, that was your handiwork,” Julia concluded. “I thought it was too convenient.” She didn’t stand down. In fact, she fisted her hands, furious that someone had tried to kill her with cowardly sabotage. A secret attack she couldn’t fight. She couldn’t waste time regretting her intimacy with Walker. She wouldn’t look at him. She wouldn’t think of him. She could only face Gwen and be thankful that she would go down swinging.
Gwen sprang toward her, and for a split second the shapeshifter’s leaping human body grew hazy as if its inner lion shared the leap. Julia saw claws where there were only fingers. She saw fangs where there was only a determined grimace.
Without a thought for her knee, Julia took the smaller woman’s weight with her arms outstretched. Like a spring, she allowed herself to be pushed back into a crouch, and then used every bit of strength she possessed to throw the shifter back and away from her vulnerable throat. Gwen landed several feet away on the balls of her feet, blinking in surprise as she slid backward before coming to a stop.
They both paused when every bit of strength Julia possessed ended up being more than either of them expected.
The pause didn’t last.
The shapeshifter attacked again, and this time her leap took Julia to the ground.
All of her training, all of her workouts, didn’t account for how she was able to meet and match her attacker, blow for blow, block for block.
It might have lasted seconds. It might have been minutes. But they finally paused again. They both dripped with sweat. They both greedily sucked in gulps of oxygen as their exertions caused their bodies to thirst for air.
Julia wasn’t dead.
Not even close.
Her muscles were burning, but it was a healthy burn, as if she’d only finished a regular workout. Her body had absorbed the powerful shapeshifter’s blows as if each hadn’t been backed by the full force of Gwen’s strength.
“If she dies, I die, tlvdatsi.”
Ross spoke and the Cherokee word for mountain lion didn’t sound like an endearment. His voice rang out in the tiny clearing as if in ceremony, as if he’d made a proclamation.
“No,” Gwen choked out beneath the hands Julia had gripped around her throat to hold her off. She jerked away from Julia’s grasp, standing up and backpedaling with awkward stumbling steps that in no way resembled her normal confident stride.
“We have chosen. The Imprint has begun. If you continue this fight, you will lose,” Ross continued. His tone brooked no argument, but it was also soft as if he was trying to be considerate of a woman whose loyalty he valued.
Murmurs broke out among the surrounding shifters and the hawk who had been preening shot up into the sky with a mighty leap and a screeching cry. It flapped its wings and curved back into a circling arc to travel back the way it had come.
Julia was the center of attention. All the shapeshifters looked at her. Some with curiosity. Some with antagonism. One with fury.
“She is not fit to be your mate. She’s our enemy,” Gwen said through clenched teeth.
Her fury seemed to soften some of the others’ anger. They disapproved of Gwen’s disapproval.
“You cannot know another shifter’s dreams. The choice cannot be questioned once it is made. The Imprint cannot be rescinded,” Ross replied. “One day you will follow your own dream,” he finished, persuasive and soft in the manner of an older brother trying to ease his sister’s heartache.
Julia had questions. Tons of questions. And no one was going to tell her they couldn’t be asked.
She took the hand he offered when he came to her side. She allowed him to pull her to her feet, but only so that she could face him as quickly as possible.
“What’s happening to me?” she demanded.
Gwen’s shoulders had slumped and her arms were crossed over her chest. She looked less like a powerful second-in-command and more like a young woman who hadn’t left teenage angst far behind.
“I knew you before I met you. I’ve dreamt of you. Every night. Every day. Many of us have these dreams. It’s the way our animal spirits guide us. The Imprint begins when we make our choice…and when that choice is reciprocated.”
“Imprint,” Julia repeated, feeling the familiar word take on a deeper meaning against her tongue.
She had been drawn to Walker from the start, but it was only white-hot chemistry paired with wanting what she couldn’t have. They couldn’t be mates. She couldn’t have been in his dreams.
“My knee…?” Julia began, still trying to understand what he was saying.
“Will heal. You will be stronger because we share my strength. You will be faster because we share my speed.”
He sounded pleased, but Julia’s head throbbed even though her knee didn’t anymore.
She did feel strong. Her knee held her easily. But if she couldn’t accept that she was his mate she had to see this “Imprint” he spoke of as unwelcome. It was a wildness spreading beneath her skin, connecting her to Ross when she hadn’t given it or him permission to penetrate her defenses.
How could he be such a part of her and her enemy at the same time?
Chapter Six
Julia was drawn to the wreckage of the plane because that’s where she’d first been confused about Walker. He hadn’t hurt her. He had helped her. But if his people had caused the crash he was responsible for the pilot’s death.
“He pulled me from the flames,” she said as Gwen Starr approached. The shapeshifter came to sit beside her on a charred rock. Surprisingly, Julia didn’t feel threatened…much.
“I colored my hair once. When I was sixteen. It turned out orange. Bright orange. I should have known then.”
Julia glanced at her unlikely companion. Gwen’s eyes were red, but there weren’t any tears. Did shapeshifters cry?
“How long have you loved him?” Julia asked, not sure how they’d gone from nearly killing each other to this truce, but needing to talk, needing to know.
“I was fifteen when he came to Cherokee from the Oklahoma Res. Wars were raging, but he was so calm. The Ani’Kutani knew what to do, he said. He transformed Cherokee from a tourist destination into the thriving refuge you see today. People began to arrive from all over the world. Ross welcomed the Tsalagi, the Cherokee survivors from the seven modern tribes, and he even welcomed outsiders who were afraid of how intrusive the government was threatening to become. People who were interested in a new beginning.”
“That’s how I was able to slip inside his defenses,” Julia whispered. She’d posed as a rogue journalist for an underground newspaper preparing a feature on Walker.
“His dreams caused him to welcome you, Rierdon. Even though you meant him harm,” Gwen growled.
So their truce was an uneasy truce at best.
“He brought us all together, but he always stood alone…until now,” the shifter finished with a sigh.
Julia looked at the blackened earth and the crumpled metal nearby. She had been unconscious when he’d pulled her from the wreckage. And it had been the first time she’d been so helpless since she’d been in the hospital.
“I like to stand on my own,” she said to Gwen, her own growl threatening to erupt between words.
The shapeshifter looked at her in surprise with one brow arched over a vivid green eye.
“Do you? Or do you fear slowing down long enough for someone to stand by your side? The Imprint has to be mutually desired. Your spirit is calling to Walker’s whether you hear it or not.”
“I didn’t ask for this ‘Imprint’,” Julia said, changing the subject from a question that hit too close to her heart.
Gwen rose suddenly, standing tall on the rock so that she towered over Julia, and her face disappeared in the glare of the setting sun. She couldn’t make out the expression on the shifter’s face, but she could feel the tension in the body so close to hers.
“Others have begged for what you discard far too easily.”
A sudden burst of light and heat sent Julia falling back off the rock and onto the ash-scarred earth below. Gwen had shifted. Her golden cat padded to the edge of the rock and looked down at where Julia crouched, ready for attack.
Julia’s heart had stopped as if she’d been caught in an explosion, but it began to beat double time to make up for its pause.
Was the uneasy truce at an end?
Gwen was hurting and her pain was shared by the great cat she had become. Julia heard it in the cry that echoed up and out of its throat. It caused her heart to stop once more. But that didn’t stop her from clenching her fists and bracing her body for the fight to come.
Instead of having to fight for her life again, she only had to catch her breath and watch in grudging appreciation as the sleek body of Gwen’s puma leapt off the rock and bounded into the trees.
Julia was left with the wreckage.
Her eyes were drawn toward the burnt-out remnants of the cockpit. The shapeshifters had killed the pilot. Even if she could come to terms with the unasked-for connection she now apparently shared with Walker, even if she was prepared to accept that the government wanted to prolong and intensify the chaos instead of end it, how could she forgive him and his people for out-a
nd-out murder?
She had two choices. She could accept happily ever after with a killer or she could continue with her mission as planned. She was supposed to neutralize Walker before the raid.
There was still time.
Julia only had to look at the ruined cockpit a few moments longer before her muscles grew taunt and her jaw clenched. She wouldn’t let her emotions or shapeshifter beliefs interfere any longer.
She would return to Cherokee. She would recapture Walker.
And then the army could do the rest.
Chapter Seven
When they returned to Cherokee, Julia tried not to see it through new eyes.
She failed.
This time she couldn’t help noticing the schools, the bustling market, the smiles. Before she’d lived undercover at the casino hotel and her focus had been entirely on capturing Walker when he’d least expected it. Now she looked around at the thriving, diverse community and it was hard to jive the hope and optimism she witnessed with the ruthless killers she’d faced on the mountain.
She had to remind herself about the dead pilot again and again.
“Thank you for making my people happy,” Ross whispered into her ear as he escorted her to a party being thrown in their honor. It was a city-wide celebration and she’d been primped beyond recognition in white lace and ivory satin hand-beaded with traditional clan designs. She hadn’t protested the flouncy full skirts…because they were perfect for hiding the gun she had strapped to her thigh.
“And you?” Julia couldn’t help asking. “Are you happy?”
He’d been slightly distant ever since she had told him she would return with him. His dark eyes had been shuttered, enigmatic, filled with more golden mysteries than she could fathom. But his touch was still warm. His fingers grasped her arm as she walked by his side and even that innocent gesture sent heat to places she tried to ignore.
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