Trouble with Wolves
Magic & Bone: Book One
Danielle Annett
Contents
Also by Danielle Annett
1. Red
2. Lindy
3. Red
4. Lindy
5. Red
6. Lindy
7. Red
8. Lindy
9. Red
10. Lindy
11. Red
12. Lindy
13. Red
14. Lindy
15. Red
16. Lindy
17. Red
18. Lindy
19. Cursed by Fire - one
20. Cursed by Fire - Two
HEYA!
21. Binge the Complete Series
Thank you
About the Author
Trouble with Wolves
Magic & Bone: One
Copyright © 2020, Danielle Annett
www.danielle-annett.com
All Rights Reserved, including the rights to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form by any means. For information regarding subsidiary rights, please contact the author.
This book is a work of fiction; all characters, names, places, incidents, and events are the product of the authors imagination and either fictitious or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Cover Design: Coffee and Characters
Editor: L.E. Wilson
Formatting: Coffee and Characters
Also by Danielle Annett
Blood & Magic
Cursed by Fire
Kissed by Fire
Burned by Fire
Branded by Fire
Consumed by Fire
Forged by Fire
For Thomas Shutt. You had a significant impact on my life and you will never be forgotten.
Red
The forest’s edge greeted us like the maw of a hungry beast, the silence deafening.
Despite Halbread’s declaration the previous night that, “Come morning, we ride!” No horses nickered or stamped the ground in anticipation. In fact, no horses stood beside us at all.
Why was that you might ask? Because despite sounding like an idiot, Halbread O’Herra wasn’t one. Not that that negated from the fact that entering these woods was a terrible idea—for them, not me. But no amount of talking could sway the eight men who stood beside me.
They were idiots. Idiots who drank too much and thought themselves indestructible.
Unfortunately for them, I didn’t care enough about their sorry asses to persuade them with any real force that this was not only a bad idea, but a suicidal one—again, for them.
Ask yourself, if you were a werewolf and saw a group of men who carried weapons entering Pack lands, how would you respond?
Exactly.
If I were a better man, I would have tried harder to dissuade them. But I wasn’t a better man. I had a job to do and keeping these idiots safe wasn’t on my to-do list.
If you don’t give a shit, Red, then why are you here?
I sighed and surveyed the surrounding men.
I wasn’t looking out for them by being here, I was looking out for me, I told myself. If any of them found the Pack Den before I did, I could kiss the bounty goodbye. I needed this job. Needed the money. And I wasn’t about to let a group of fools take it away from me.
A full third of the total number of Hounds living in Lethbridge had made the trek from the town center to the surrounding woods. Those missing from our group had either raged too hard the night before and were sleeping it off—thanks to some moonshine I’d conveniently brought along—or had woken with just enough coherency to stand guard around their small Canadian town and ensure the safety of their people.
There. I’d managed to keep some men from coming on this fool’s errand. That should earn me a few brownie points or something for my trouble. Not that it would be enough if the wolves decided to attack.
They hadn’t listened to that argument either. I was a soldier, yes. But I wasn’t a bodyguard. I couldn’t be their protector, nor did I want to be.
Everyone but me wore the customary red cloak that signified themselves as members of the Lethbridge Hounds. I wasn’t one of them, not officially, and I had no plans to become one, either. The cloaks were obnoxious. They might as well shout out an warning to the wolves saying, we’re here, come take a bite.
I mentioned the Hounds were idiots, right?
Because despite Lethbridge public opinion, werewolves weren’t stupid. And having that opinion made my job infinitely more difficult. Lethbridge was a sheltered community. Most had yet to travel outside its borders, and the Awakening had only further encouraged them to stay isolated within these woods.
I shook my head. My twin sister, Caroline, would have loved this. Would have relished the opportunity to teach the men beside me about the new world around them and all its possibilities. She loved a good challenge, and Lethbridge would certainly give her one.
Not for the first time I wondered how she and I had ended up so different.
She took her job as a Paranormal Liaison with the Human and Paranormal Enforcement Division—also known as the HPED—seriously. Caroline always tried to do good. If she were here, she’d try to bridge the rift between the humans and paranormals. She’d relish the opportunity to forge new connections. This was exactly the type of community she would have sought out.
And it was exactly the type of the community I tended to avoid. I was a bounty hunter. I didn’t care who the job came from so long as it paid. I didn’t ask questions, and I always delivered.
I’d promised her I’d stop. Promised I’d find honest work that didn’t keep me up at night. But then she went missing. And Caroline was the only moral compass I had.
Doubt wormed its way through me, making me second-guess my decision to be here in the first place. I could have kept moving. Found somewhere in the states—a bigger city filled with less ignorance—to settle down in. Caroline would show up eventually. She always did.
Only, she’d never been gone this long.
It’d been six months since we last spoke. Not an unreasonable amount of time given her line of work, but I was starting to worry. She’d said she was heading to Canada, but Canada was a big country and Caroline had a habit of finding trouble.
I should’ve gone with her when she’d first left, but I’d been wrapping up a gig—one that had made her proud of her hard-edged brother—and she wasn’t supposed to be away this long.
I rubbed my hand over my close-cropped black hair and exhaled an exasperated sigh. I needed to focus. I knew what hunted these woods and cursed my circumstances for it. Cursed my sister for trying to protect people like this. Ignorant, stupid people with too much bravado and too little sense. I’d done my time. I’d served my wars and fought my battles. I was done with that shit.
I was supposed to be done putting my neck on the line for other people.
I wanted a quiet life in the city. I wanted to put the wars behind me.
What I did not want, was to chase around a bunch of grown men who thought they looked cool in little red riding hood cloaks and called themselves Hounds as they tried to find fucking werewolves.
Wearing a red cloak was akin to wearing an orange vest when hunting for deer. The stark difference being that the deer were likely to ignore the message.
The wolves wouldn’t.
But telling the men beside me that tidbit of information did me no good.
Idiots.
&
nbsp; So here I was, doing my best to protect men who looked down on me for being an outsider—I was definitely not getting paid enough—and dealing with their ignorance all because their leader, Alton Devereaux, was the only person in this godforsaken town who realized humans could not in fact go toe to toe with a shapeshifter Pack.
That leads me to the job. Find the shapeshifter Den. That was it. I didn’t lie to myself that once the Den was located, the humans would do the smart thing and give the Pack a wide berth. No, I knew they’d use it to their advantage and plan a slaughter. But I’d be gone by then. Paid for my time and on my way, one step closer to finding my elusive twin.
Caroline—wherever you are— you’d better appreciate the shit I’m putting myself through for you.
She wouldn’t.
I swept my hand over my hair in disgust. She’d be disappointed, but what choice did I have? The Awakening made for brutal times. I was following in Caroline’s footsteps, hoping it would bring me closer to her, but doing the complete opposite of what she would do in my shoes.
She would argue with the town council. Plead her case for peace and integration with the shapeshifters. But I didn’t have her silver tongue.
Resolve settled in my bones. I was doing the right thing. Sometimes the ends justified the means. There was a nagging feeling in the pit of my stomach that urged me to find her. And I never doubted that feeling when it came to my twin. This job would get me the money I needed to keep looking for her. The rest was inconsequential.
I took a long draft of a warm beer from the night before and quieted the discomfort in my mind. Water would have been better, but no one had bothered to pack any for today’s morning adventure.
Idiots.
From beside me came a terrible retching, followed by a series of spits and coughs.
I shook my head and poured out the remainder of my beer before tucking the bottle in one of the loose pockets of my black cargo pants.
“Why didn’t you stop me last night?” Roland complained as he righted himself.
Because I didn’t want you to come. Because I’d hoped you’d be too hung over to join in on this farce of a mission to hunt fucking werewolves.
Roland stumbled before catching himself on a tree, his pallor gaining a sickly sheen. I almost felt bad for encouraging him to get drunk last night. Almost.
There would be no hunting. Not if I had anything to say about it.
The men were high on liquid courage and, as I’d found out, trying to get them to see reason was a wasted effort. It was easier to let them stumble through the woods for a few hours and tire themselves out.
Vomit caught in Roland’s beard, and I subtly flicked at my chin. He caught my meaning and swiped a hand across his face. “I think I mighta had a few too many.”
I fought the urge to roll my eyes. That had been the point.
“A few? You drank the place dry. Nox is probably still counting out his winnings. You should know better than to bet against the young ones. They’ll drink you under the table every time.” I grinned with wry amusement. If I were being honest with myself, last night had been fun. Boisterous laughter. Drinking games I hadn’t played since high school. For a few hours, I’d been able to forget the wars. The bodies. The deaths of my friends.
“Eh. Only because their livers still work,” he grumbled.
Roland wasn’t like the others. He didn’t want a sheltered life. Safety and security, sure. But he wasn’t one to hide behind a veil of ignorance. He’d at least listened when I’d spoken last night. Nodded when I’d explained the dangers, and even agreed when I’d suggested the men stay behind and let me track the shifters on my own—until it became evident that the others wouldn’t be staying behind, and Roland refused to miss out. He relished the opportunity to speak with a shapeshifter face to face. He wanted an adventure, and as he’d reminded me more than once, meeting a shapeshifter was on his bucket list. He was a few years younger than my thirty and I liked him well enough, but he was an idiot, too.
“Reddington, Roland, you two songbirds done chirping?” Maxus asked, though not unkindly. There was a wry smile beneath the greasy, wiry hair of his blond beard. “Don’t think every critter in the forest quite heard you yet.”
“The name’s Red,” I countered. I only ever let Caroline call me Reddington, and only because as she often reminded me, she was my big sister—by a whole four minutes, mind you—and could call me whatever the hell she wanted.
“Well then, shut yer trap, Red,” he offered. “And get moving. We’re heading east.”
This time, I did roll my eyes. The shifters didn’t need to hear us to know we were here. Even I could smell the men around me.
I kicked a clod of dirt. At this rate, I’d never find the Pack Den.
“We’re ready,” Roland called. He hitched up his pants another inch and strode forward with a hand on the hilt of the small axe at his side. A larger one lay strapped across his back.
Wolves were fast. Werewolves were even faster. And while there was an argument to be made that a swing from an axe couldn’t hit a wolf moving at speed, the way Roland saw it, a man going toe-to-toe with shapeshifters was likely to get only one shot, and he trusted the heft of an axe over the smooth, sliding precision of a sword to break bones and crush organs.
I wasn’t sure I agreed, but I hoped we didn’t get the chance to test his theory. I held my bow by my side, its length parallel to the ground. A silver-plated arrow lay nestled along the inside line of my palm, the shaft poking between my fingertips, but I didn’t pay it much attention.
I didn’t want trouble with the local Pack. All I had to do was find them, I reminded myself. There was no reason to engage. The shapeshifters weren’t my enemy.
I was a pacifist reformed, and an occasional asshole. But hey, we all had our strengths.
I’d served two tours and got out of the Army right before the Awakening struck and thank the fuck for that. Eight years in the Army was enough for me and if I thought the world was going to shit before, it really went to shit when all things paranormal came out of the woodwork.
When you’re young, you think everything is a fight and you fucking live for it. You embrace the moments that make your blood rush in your ears and your adrenaline spike. It’s like a drug you can’t get enough of. But after war, you pray you never have to fight again. You pray for peace and normalcy. I spent years retraining myself. Years dealing with flashbacks and adrenaline rushes and instincts that told you to kill first and ask questions later. Instincts that made me a fucking liability to the few people I cared about.
Caroline was a big contributing factor in my recovery. She was my anchor when the sea battered my resolve and threatened to sweep me away.
Where are you, Caroline? I shook thoughts of her away.
Most of the Hounds walked with weapons drawn, though none at the ready, believing there was safety in numbers. I decided not to correct their poor judgment. I carried a bow and quiver full of arrows because it was a long-range weapon. Close range fights with a shapeshifter would always be a losing battle.
A rifle would have been a safer choice but I was confident in my skills as a bowman. While it lent an extra layer of security, a rifle also sent the wrong kind of message in these woods and ammunition was fucking expensive.
The air was wet and thick from the previous night’s rainfall. Soft soil shifted beneath my boots, which I knew would need a thorough cleaning before the day was over.
Some military habits died hard.
Damp, flattened leaves littered the ground, a patchwork of colors that complemented the browns and greens of the forest floor. That was the other supposed reason for this little adventure—the seasons were shifting.
Halbread said the local shapeshifters were led by a white wolf, and soon he’d be all but invisible against a backdrop of snow. He thought he could somehow capture the wolf.
Idiot.
I had to keep reminding the men they weren’t common wolves. They were shapeshif
ters. Men and women that looked like the rest of us when in their human skins.
I was beginning to wonder if any of them had come face to face with a shapeshifter or if all of their knowledge was really just overzealous fantasy and speculation.
But still, if Halbread was right, if the elusive white wolf was the Pack Alpha, he’d have a hell of a time finding him unless he wanted to be found and fur color had nothing to do with it.
Alphas weren’t Alphas for no reason.
They were the best of the best. The strongest, fastest, most capable members of their Pack with razor sharp minds. If I was lucky, the Alpha would remain elusive. All I needed was a glimpse of their Den entrance. That was it. I’d prefer to wrap this up without coming across any of the shifters themselves.
We scouted through the forest in almost complete silence, each man lost in his own thoughts. The group moved in a clockwise rotation, scouring the nearby area for wolf tracks, to no avail.
Over an hour passed, and I breathed a sigh of relief. Sweat dampened my chest and my back between my shoulder blades. I wiped my forehead with the back of my hand. “This is stupid,” I told Roland, who stood five meters away from me. “We should head back. There are no wolves for the men to intimidate. Let’s go home and grab a beer.”
“Bring it up with Halbread,” he advised with a hiccup.
I exhaled a long breath, but turned my attention toward Halbread—the Hounds’ fearless leader. Alton warned me about him when he’d hired me. He wanted the glory accompanied with taking down the Pack and he didn’t care whose life he risked in the process. He was stubborn and a bigot and he wouldn’t think twice about stealing the bounty out from under me if the chance presented itself.
Trouble with Wolves: An urban fantasy romance novel (Magic and Bone Book 1) Page 1