Falling for Shifters: A Limited Edition Autumn Shifters Collection

by Lacey Carter Andersen

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  Also by Lacey Carter Anderson

  Monsters and Gargoyles

  Medusa’s Destiny *audiobook*

  Keto’s Tale

  Celaeno’s Fate

  Cerberus Unleashed

  Lamia’s Blood

  Shade’s Secret

  Hecate’s Spell

  Shorts: Their Own Sanctuary

  Shorts: Their Miracle Pregnancy

  Dark Supernaturals

  Wraith Captive

  Marked Immortals

  Wicked Reform School

  Untamed: House of Berserkers

  Mates of the Realms

  Renegade Hunter *audiobook*

  Cursed Hunter

  Betrayed Hunter

  Rebel Lover

  Rebel Lies

  Rebel Loss

  Rogue Demon

  Box Set I: Demon Hunter

  Box Set II: Rebel Angel

  The Firehouse Feline

  Feline the Heat

  Feline the Flames

  Feline the Burn

  God Fire Reform School

  Magic for Dummies

  Myths for Half-Wits

  Alternative Futures

  Nightmare Hunter *audiobook*

  Deadly Dreams *audiobook*

  Mortal Flames

  Twisted Prophecies

  Box Set: Alien Mischief

  An Icelius Reverse Harem

  Her Alien Lovers

  Her Alien Abductors

  Her Alien Barbarians

  Her Alien Mates

  Collection: Her Alien Romance

  Steamy Tales of Warriors and Rebels

  Gladiators

  The Dragon Shifters’ Last Hope

  Stolen by Her Harem

  Claimed by Her Harem

  Treasured by Her Harem

  Collection: Magic in her Harem

  Harem of the Shifter Queen

  Sultry Fire

  Sinful Ice

  Saucy Mist

  Collection: Power in her Kiss

  Standalones

  Goddess of Love (Blood Moon Rising Shared World)

  Worthy (A Villainously Romantic Retelling)

  Beauty with a Bite

  Shifters and Alphas

  Collections

  Monsters, Gods, Witches, Oh My!

  Wings, Horns, and Shifters

  Half a Huntress

  Rogue Huntress Chronicles

  Thea Atkinson

  About Half a Huntress

  She let a mortal man live, will it be the death of her?

  When a human man catches Shana neutralizing yet another threat to her pack in a dark alley, she decides to let him go. It's an act of mercy that will cost her dearly.

  She finds her father murdered, and her brothers missing. She's failed. And now the property is swarmed by hired mercenaries, led by that same man from the back alley. She's ready to exact vengeance, but quickly discovers there's more to the stranger than merely hired muscle.

  The real threat is the person who hired him in the first place, and while it's too late to save her alpha, it's not too late to save her young brothers. If she wants to keep them safe, she'll need to submit to the new ruthless new, ruthless alpha.

  * * *

  The trouble is, she's not the submissive type…

  Chapter One

  There are a dozen grisly ways to kill a man, hundreds if the assassin is creative. I'd like to think of myself as a practical assassin. Creativity can get in the way of getting the job done.

  My mentor. Now, he was creative. I'd seen him track a hunter for a year, waiting for the moment to take him out so that no other one of his ilk would suspect it was the werewolf pack the man was hunting who had been the instrument of his demise. Slipped a few shards of glass into his beer at a bar that belonged to a sorcerer just as well known to the hunter's crew as the pack he wanted to annihilate. When the man died, and his family of no-good creature killers mourned him with a wake the likes of which no modern funeral had ever seen, they went off in search of said sorcerer for vengeance.

  I hear they made toast of the poor man and our pack continued on as though nothing had threatened us at all.

  That was creative. That was patient. It was also necessary. We lived because we kept a seasoned assassin for each generation to keep us safe from the likes of mortal men who hunted us for sport or out of fear.

  My mentor had long since retired, and he passed on that torch to serve and protect to me.--the alpha's daughter.

  I never measured up to that sort of patience or creativity. I didn't want to, really. Killing wasn't something I relished. I hated taking a life, mortal or otherwise. It was something I did because I had to. I reserved the full-on assassination route for times when I couldn't protect us in any other way. But make no mistake. I would kill if I had to. If it meant death for the pack or death for a mortal, the mortal didn't live to see another day.

  Or night like this one. A moment like this one.

  I heaved the blade of my haladie with a right thrust toward the neck of the man in front of me. All that ran through my mind was that I needed to take him down as quickly as possible.

  Creativity be damned.

  He avoided the blade as deftly as any trained hunter. His neat sidestep out of range made my thrust in the darkness nothing better than an awkward stab at shadows. He spun around so languidly he might have been a dancer avoiding his partner's outstretched arms as though it was a tease. Part of the show.

  There was a faint scuffle of shoe sole on cobblestone as he moved, an almost imperceptible brush of leather against denim. I knew he had reached beneath his jacket for a blade. Maybe even a pistol.

  Attack always; never give offer time for defense. Keep them moving. Keep them unsettled. Keep them afraid. It was a mantra I'd repeated to myself from the age of five. It was so ingrained in my muscle memory that I didn't need to encourage myself to attack. It came like breath or like a heartbeat.

  I always attacked.

  "You won't get away that easily," I said.

  I lunged for his legs before he could extract whatever weapon he had hidden beneath his coat. I needed to get him onto the ground. He wouldn't expect that. But if I could grapple with him while he still grappled with the surprise of being tackled, I might have a chance.

  My haladie clattered to the stones and skittered off into the shadows between buildings as I leapt. I knew the cobblestones tore at my chest as I slid along the sidewalk, ripping my T-shirt and stripping the bra underneath it away from my breast.

  The chafe of stone on nipple would hurt like a bitch tomorrow, but for now I didn't feel anything. Adrenaline had already started dumping into my tissues several moments earlier. I had a short time before the effects of it started to rob me of the benefits it also delivered. The shaking would start. The pain would come. My mouth would go dry, making it hard to swallow.

  He skated backwards from my momentum and fell on his elbows exactly as I expected. I had him then, I knew. He wouldn't recover from the surprise and I knew I had to use the chance to claw my way up his legs to his chest and straddle him.

  I leaned in close enough that I could smell his aftershave. Something cheap, I knew. Like a kid would wear. It covered him the way old women bathed in scent.

  I forced my palm down against his Adam's Apple, fingers and thumb digging in beneath the tender spots of his jaw line. He managed to find the energy to stick the pistol he'd extracted against my rib cage.

  "If that bullet isn't silver," I growled at him. "You'd better start praying."

  I felt his hesitation as the barrel trembled against my bottom rib. Trained in martial arts, maybe, but no killer. Of that I
was certain. A trained warrior would only kill if he had no chance. A killer wouldn't hesitate.

  "How new are you?" I demanded, staring down into the shadowed pits of his eyes.

  He stared up at me. I could make out the curve of his cheekbone in the lamplight. I elbowed his head sideways. Inspected him. Barely enough stubble to have been worth three years of shaving. I sucked the back of my teeth in disgust.

  "You're just a kid," I said.

  Not unlike my last attacker. I felt an uncharacteristic pain of pity when I thought of the last boy. He hadn't died well. Regret visited me in the dark hours over his death. I had to remind myself he had attacked a young pack member.

  "What in the hell do you think you're doing, kid?" I demanded.

  For one brief moment I chewed the inside of my cheek. I wanted to let him go and I couldn't let him go.

  "Do yourself a favor," I prodded. "Give me a reason to let you live."

  "Go to hell, monster," he said and gathered enough spit that when he launched it at me, it soaked half of my cheek.

  The monster within me rose in fury. It didn't think. It simply squeezed with a righteous abandon that made my fingers elongate and crackle and send feral claws into the back of his neck.

  I knew the change wanted me, that the beast within wanted to tear the flesh from his bones and fling the strips of skin into the air like sheets of fine linen.

  I had to work hard to control my beast. I'd always had to. It's what made me such a good huntress for my pack. I was ferocious, focused to a fault, but the fact that I won so often over my beast when it was so hard to control, gave me a skill many of my kind didn't have.

  Only one other possessed the quality and he'd been trained by the same enforcer as I had.

  The weight of the pistol in my ribs eased up and I heard the metal strike the cobblestones as his arm went slack, losing the power to control his muscles as the oxygen left his tissues.

  "Tell me why you're hunting us."

  I had to be dogged about this. If newly minted hunters were cropping up all over the county, I had to know what their intent was. I hadn't taken the time to interrogate the last attacker. I wouldn't make the same mistake again.

  I gave him enough breath to answer.

  He laughed beneath my hand. "Hunting you is like shooting fish in a barrel."

  "You mean someone is helping you," I guessed.

  Most humans weren't even aware of our existence. They thought us holdovers from fairytales, imagining that the wolf in Red Riding Hood was some sort of metaphor for a young girl's sexual awakening, and not actually one of my kind.

  I gripped beneath his jawline even tighter, lifting his head a fraction of an inch and slamming it back down on the cobblestones.

  "Someone hired you."

  He twisted beneath my grip, trying to find the gun he'd dropped in the shadows. I reached for it across his body with my free hand and brought it within his view. I pressed the barrel of it against his temple. A regular man would let go his bowels by now. This young man tensed but he didn't give in to his body's command to evacuate all available energy. He'd be formidable if he made it to adulthood.

  I leaned in again close enough that if I wanted to I'd be able to read fear in his eyes.

  "Someone trained you. Someone hired you. Someone wants you to get yourself killed."

  He gurgled beneath my grip and I loosened it again to let him talk. I didn't expect him to give up, but I wanted that information. His death was a foregone conclusion. It was too late to persuade him werewolves didn't exist. He'd already felt my claws against his skin.

  "Tell me who is making young hunters," I said without promising him he'd live.

  "Fuck you."

  He glared at me and I knew that if I looked, I wouldn't see fear in his eyes. I would see something else. His kind of zealot would never give up. His kind of zealot would have probably promised his gun to someone else in the hopes that if he ever died in the line of duty, someone else might pick up the mantle and continue hunting unholy things in dark shadows.

  I placed the pistol neatly next to his body so I have both hands free for what would have to be done next.

  "You're pretty stubborn for a kid," I said. "I'll give you that. But I can't have you running around behind my back trying to stick a blade between my ribs."

  And that was the way of it. I'd given him a chance I rarely offered. It wasn't a choice I made, but a choice he did. There was no turning back.

  Even as his spine snapped, echoing like a gun report against the stone buildings of the alley, he cackled out a laugh that made the hairs on the back of my neck quiver.

  I looked down at him with a sense of emptiness when he went still finally. One more foolish fully human dead, and for what?

  I reached for the gun he'd dropped and stuffed it into the waistband of my jeans. I had no idea where my haladie went and I wasn't sure I'd have time to search for it. With no balconies or terraces or even windows anywhere within the alley, no one would believe this young boy fell to his death and broke his spine. I'd have to do what werewolves like me had done for eons in the name of survival.

  I might change to disguise my human form if the situation met it. But there was no time to relish the exquisite pain of transformation, nor under the circumstances was it appropriate. Some werewolves allowed themselves to feel the duality of transformation no matter whether they had killed purposefully or accidentally, and so they mingled the acts into one great mess of mixed signals and ended up feeding their beast far too often. For them, killing became a sort of perverse foreplay.

  I wasn't one of those. I refused to blend violence with pleasure. This boy needed to be neutralized, but it didn't mean I had to take pleasure in his killing.

  I avoided looking at his face as the transformation prickled along my skin. I could already make out the flush of black fur as it mingled with the down of human hair that coated my body. I bit down the pain as my bones shifted to accommodate the emergence of my beast, a black thing despite my almost albino coloring.

  It was a rare condition for the beast and human halves to be so out of sync with each other, but I welcomed the anomaly. It reminded me that I was different from my pack mates, different from most wolves, and that uniqueness afforded me – a female hunter – the luxury of maintaining myself as a singular entity, not becoming a bonded pair and becoming subservient to a less worthy male.

  I was just about to let my beast have me when I heard a sound from the mouth of the alley. It could have been footsteps, laughter, or merely a rat scuttling along the litter, but I was so immersed in my change, so amped up on adrenaline that I hadn't processed exactly what had made it. I only knew any sort of sound was an intrusion, and an intrusion of any kind was most unwelcome.

  I strained to repress the shudders already taking hold of my muscles. If anyone saw me this way, half changed, crouching over the form of some innocent looking youth, there'd be no going back for the intruder either. My wolf would act out of defense and self preservation. She wouldn't think through the consequences.

  I froze, forcing back the beast as I strained to make out another sound. My nostrils flared at they strained to pull in any strange aromas. I heard nothing but the pounding of my own heart in my ears and I was beginning to think I'd imagined the noise. I swung my gaze sideways, praying as I did so that the alley would be empty excepting myself and what lay beneath my hands.

  Except my nose was far more acutely sensitive than my vision. It flooded with the truth even before my eyes revealed it, and I knew that the man standing a mere three feet away from me understood that the boy beneath my hands was dead.

  Worse than that, I knew the man was fully human.

  Chapter Two

  The man edged closer even as my wolf growled inside.

  "Is he dead?" he asked..

  I stole a glance at this newcomer, trying to assess the tone of his voice. Was it too flat, too aware? Did he sound overly concerned and afraid?

  He stood
at least six foot four, and though far from heavily muscled, he had the appearance of a man who had a kind of wiry strength. Someone whose every muscle was toned from hard work. Even in the dim light of the street lamps I could tell he wore a suit, but I had the feeling he wasn't a typical businessman.

  I had only one second to decide whether to add him to my tally for the night, and even as I began to allow the tremors of change to wave over my body, he crouched next to me, oblivious to the danger. He was innocent. A good Samaritan. I wrestled the wolf for control. She didn't like the smell of this man. She wasn't afraid of him, but she felt threatened. It was a strange sensation, one of equally verdant strength warring one against the other.

  He felt for the the boy's pulse. I knew he'd feel nothing and I tried not to brace myself for the moment he realized it and expected me to be shocked.

  In a move that surprised me enough to flinch, he put his hand between my shoulders as though to comfort me. The responsive shiver that ran through me as my beast backed down must have resonated against his palm. The gentle touch moved away as he tucked it into his jacket pocket.

  "It must be a terrible thing for you to find him like that," he murmured.

  I eyed him warily, formulating my answer.

  "It was awful." I pushed myself backwards onto my bottom, facing this newcomer. "Someone must have killed this poor boy and dropped him here."

  I examined him through the shadows. Rough looking for a businessman. A hard edge to his jaw that spoke of a past filled with sharp edges.

  "Why would anyone do such a thing?" I said with as much meekness and confusion as I could muster.

  "So much crime lately," he said. "Probably drugs. Terrible thing. Such a waste."

  I found myself instinctively reaching for his wrist when he felt beneath his suit jacket, whether it was because I wanted to touch him or to keep him from pulling a weapon, I wasn't sure. I swallowed convulsively.

  "No worries," he held his hands in front of him as though in surrender. I guessed he thought I believed I was in danger from him. "I'm not going to hurt you. Just going to call an ambulance."