Falling for Shifters: A Limited Edition Autumn Shifters Collection

by Lacey Carter Andersen

  I nodded. "Yes," I stammered the way I thought a woman in shock might. "Yes, that's probably best."

  I chewed the inside of my cheek. It was what a fully human woman would say. It would make the most sense to call an ambulance. The trouble was, I'd then be asked a ton of questions. Living on the outskirts of such a large city allowed us a fair amount of anonymity, but only because we'd been able to clean up any mishaps over the years.

  I knew what the proper thing for me to do was. If I was any kind of assassin, I'd kill this interloper too. I didn't want to. It would be such a shame to reward good deeds that way. Still. If he called 911, I'd be on the hook. It would put my pack in danger.

  My only question was whether I could carry the both of them to the river to dispose of them before dawn. He was pretty big, solid looking. I'd have to make full transformation just to take him down and then the petite human half of me would have trouble managing his weight for disposal.

  The last thing I wanted tonight was to make two trips. It would be messy. More chances of discovery.

  Unlike some of my peers, I would not eat human flesh. I had no taste for it.

  But as inconvenient as it was, there was nothing to be done for it.

  I crawled onto my hands and knees, thinking it would be a shame to ruin my new leather jacket, but I hadn't made it to this level of hierarchy within my pack by being sentimental. I had to change and I wouldn't be able to take the time to strip the jacket and confining clothes from my body as it did so. The fabric and jacket would have to be casualties to the task.

  An unexpected growl moved through my chest as I relinquished hold on my human half and let the wolf free. I leapt for him, fully expecting the beast to land on him and tear into that fragrantly soapy throat and halt the beating of his heart.

  He was either ready for me or his instincts were fantastic. As I met him, his arms went around me and turned into a snug embrace that made my wolf hesitate.

  Our bodies connected like they fit together. Still in my human form, the growl in my throat died to a whimper.

  I went limp in confusion. Parts of me tried desperately to sort out what had just happened and came up empty of any reason that would have put my wolf subservient to my human or this man. My wolf was not submissive. Not in the least. By all counts, I should have changed. My wolf should have taken flesh from his throat.

  I ended up clinging to him in bewilderment, trying to figure out how to make my wolf turn and obey me.

  "It's all right," he murmured into my hair.

  His fingers stole up to my occipital bone and stroked it lightly at first, then with pressure. "It's a terrible thing to witness death. You just let it all go."

  His tone was gentle, but the touch was less so. Insistent and possessive in its way, unused to offering comfort, I gathered. Or maybe unaccustomed to giving it to strangers.

  Befuddled rage wracked my body with uncontrollable shivers. Where had my beast deserted me to? Why had it abandoned me in that moment?

  Worse still, how dare he. How dare he assume that I was a weak woman, incapable of facing something unpleasant without collapsing into a mess of snot and tears.

  I wanted him to know in that moment that I had been the killer. I had taken that life. I wasn't a sniveling mess who couldn't face death. I had snapped the boy's spine, almost torn his own throat out as he sat there thinking he needed to coddle a pathetic woman.

  I wanted to know how lucky he was that he was still alive.

  And then I realized that I was being a pathetic woman because in that flash of rage, I also realized I didn't want him to know I was capable of such violence.

  Befuddled rage turned to indignation. I wrenched myself away, pushing against his chest with my palm. I looked at my fingers splayed across his shirt, feeling the beating of his heart beneath, sending a wave of heat up my arm.

  "I'm fine," I snapped. "You looked like you needed a hug."

  He made a thoughtful sound in his throat as I pushed myself to my feet and began pacing in the alley. I had to do something. In seconds he would call for help and it would be too late. I had only one alternative left if I couldn't change. He had to be neutralized and I had no choice but to take the last option available. It would be dirty and noisy but I could be fast. With luck, anyone coming upon the bodies might think the two of them had an altercation and leave me in the clear.

  I pulled the gun from behind my back and pointed it at him.

  "Don't move," I said.

  His hands went up again. I scanned his grip and noticed with relief that there was no cell phone clutched in his fingers.

  "I told you I wasn't going to hurt you," he said in a soothing tone. "I'm not that kind of guy."

  I blinked. He didn't look scared, and he obviously thought I was still afraid. It took a moment to realize he believed I thought he had something to do with the death of the boy and planned to hurt me.

  I could use that.

  "Turn around," I said to him with my best imitation of a shaking voice. "Turn around and walk out of the alley and keep going until I can't see your back anymore."

  He nodded slowly, his eyes never wavering from my face. He kept his hands in the air as he moved.

  "Do you understand me?" I said, driving the damsel card home a bit harder. "I will be watching you. And if you so much as flinch as you leave, I'll think you're coming back for me. I won't hesitate to shoot."

  He jerked his chin toward the prone form on the cobblestones.

  "What about the boy?"

  "I won't tell anybody what you did to him." I said. "You have my word on that. Just don't hurt me."

  "But –"

  "But nothing," I said. "Just do as I say. Do you understand me?"

  "I do." I could swear a smirk played across his lips and I struggled not to scream at him. I had the feeling he didn't believe me for an instant.

  "Now," I said with incredible restraint.

  He turned on his heel and I followed him as he exited the alley. I watched for long moments to make sure he crossed the deserted street and continued on down past several buildings. He didn't turn around. To his credit, he walked as calmly as though he had just left a restaurant after a nice meal.

  I wasted no time hoisting the youth over my shoulder and stealing away into the night so that I could throw his body into the frigid spring river in hopes that the cold water would retard his decay.

  There, I transformed just enough that the beast within could tear into his young flesh, leaving him bloody and gored so that anyone who found him later would believe he was the victim of a feral attack.

  It was nasty business, requiring a cold and callus nature that didn't suit me. I felt like a sociopath but I smothered my distaste and did what needed to be done. I didn't leave him recognizable and I doubted anyone would know him anyway. Hunters were a certain ilk. They abandoned families for the life or they entered it because of trauma.

  By the time the sun turned the horizon pink, I was already standing in front of my cottage, ready, willing, and able to fall fully clothed onto my bed and sleep for three days.

  The events of the night were peculiar enough that I didn't want to think about them let alone admit what they might mean. I had heard about females of our kind being unable to change at will. Sickness or subservience caused a reaction with the beast to protect either the were herself or her lover. I'd been changing and killing and changing again so often, I knew I was wearing myself down.

  I needed rest, but I knew I wouldn't get it today. Not yet.

  Chapter Three

  I sighed with exhaustion. My bungalow wasn't much but I felt at home in it. The seven hundred square foot thing that once served as a governess's cottage was tucked in between the old manse and the monstrosity of a McMansion that our alpha had built for himself and his family twenty years earlier when he'd moved us into Shady Oaks and turned the sprawling countryside around it into a gated community.

  Not much if you had a family, but I was alone. I had no mat
e and no whelps and it served pack purpose for the new pack assassin to be housed in the governess's cottage while the retired enforcer lived his days in the original manse.

  I had no regrets. It was home, and I was grateful for the serenity that greeted me when I passed through the gates and made my way home. It was unusual at this hour to see so little activity, but I was grateful for that too. It meant there'd be no questions until I faced Lucien.

  I'd been in the same pack since birth and I knew better than most shifters how things worked within our world. You did your part and kept your human half safely presented to the masses of full humans around you. For most, that meant leading a double life of work in the real world and pack politics at home.

  For me, as pack enforcer, it meant I didn't have to hide my primal self because my job and my life were all ensconced in the same arena.

  That meant I killed on a semi-regular basis. So that serenity and solitude suited me. It took a lot of energy to kill a man and it steals a bit of your soul each time you relieve a body of its spirit. I hadn't been at it long in comparison to my mentor, but I'd discovered that while I couldn't exactly pack the gaping hole that remained with healing balms and medicines, I could at least stuff it with gauze to hold it together.

  No one came into our territory without invitation. We kept a closely gated community of werewolves with connections to exactly two outside packs to keep the gene pool deep enough to avoid unwanted mutation. No one wanted a Ptolemaic generation of weak, inbred shifters.

  My job was to take out any threat to our existence. My alpha didn't care if that meant permanent removal or simple misdirection for the unwary curious human. I'd managed to choose misdirection and finesse eighty percent of the time since the late 70s, the other twenty percent--well, it was pretty much a repeat of what I'd done to the boy in the alley.

  Weird how the whole 80/20 rule rears its ugly head more than you think. I'd been taking care of the twenty percent, eighty percent of my time over the last two weeks. Something was amiss in the shifter world, and I knew I'd have to report this latest to my alpha. He'd want to know all the details.

  I'd killed too many would-be Van Helsings and rogue wolves over the last few weeks for things to be merely status quo. If a change was coming, we'd have to meet it head on. We'd need to be ready.

  I sighed with longing as I stood in front of my bungalow, pulling my braid straight and flicking it over my shoulder. My hand came away sticky. I didn't need to look to know it was blood that coated my palm and trapped a knot of silver strands.

  A quick shower would be as much a balm as I could manage but there wouldn't be time for that. My alpha was patient but anxious over this latest spate of intrusions. The boy in the alley had been the sixth one in as many days to attack me or someone from the pack. It was obvious they knew what I was, and it was possible they knew what we all were. And that was impossible. We were adept at secrecy.

  That meant someone had put it in their heads that killing wolf shifters was a noble profession. Maybe someone had fed them a line or to about glory and adventure.

  All they'd met were grisly ends. No glory anywhere in sight.

  There hadn't been this many tightly timed attacks since the 1500s when the world still believed in all things supernatural. Every enforcer was made to understand our heritage so we would know how fragile and tenuous our hold was on survival. It took our kind generations to lull humanity into believing in science first and supernatural as fiction to be enjoyed, not feared.

  When something as obvious as an orchestrated werehunt reared its head, an enforcer and his alpha listened to the cues and quelled the uproar before it could get out of hand. Six hunters in as many days meant I'd be out again with hardly time to wash the blood out of my hair, scouting the next threat, digging up secrets, neutralizing the target.

  Rinse and repeat. Something I very much wished to do with my own body at the moment.

  Used to be the post was more of a ceremonial thing than a necessity. Used to be the enforcer had to fulfill the harshest requirements of his post maybe once every 10 years, and simply advise his alpha on governance and the odd political alliance. Used to be the enforcer was a male. Not anymore. Now all of those historical privileges taken for granted by the shifters of the early 1900s were long gone out the window, privileges that changed the year I was born.

  That was 1904, and I was one of those sired during a time of tremendous upheaval. Imagine my mother's disappointment when she produced for her pack a pale-looking female pup instead of the hoped for male. Wolf shifters wanted male wolf shifters. They needed strong wolves to take out threats, to counteract the declining birth rates. A she-wolf was as welcome as a girl child in post-war China.

  She did not want me, my mother. She was ashamed of whelping a girl let alone a near albino girl.

  But it was my father Lucien, the alpha of our pack, the same alpha I reported to now, the wolf who brought us out of that dark time, who saw the potential of a weak looking girl-child.

  He and his enforcer, Galen, understood what type of power there might be in seeming weakness. They knew well the art of war and of fighting. They understood that even a male wolf will expect subservience from a female. That a human man would face a human looking woman and expect weakness. He might try to protect her or he might expect her to be easy prey.

  I was a dedicated study in flouting those expectations and using someone else's ingrained norms to my advantage. I struck quick and hard and repeated, keeping them surprised. Keeping them off guard.

  Until I won.

  Galen trained me to a warrior's role for decades, fostering my penchant for taking opponents by surprise and exploiting their own misguided beliefs. When he wanted to retire to the good life of a gardener, he petitioned my father to let me take his place.

  Later my father himself took over the political parts of my training, including in the lessons his new foster-ling Caleb, the brooding youth he'd found sniffing around the outskirts of our territory.

  It was the kind of thing that only an alpha like Lucien would do. While most pack leaders were mistrustful of rogues, Lucien thought they would be loyal because they would be grateful. A rouge shifter needs a pack. It's what he most desires but few will take him in.

  That kind of behavior was exactly the kind of thing that gained the sort of loyalty that an alpha like Lucien needed. I always wondered if it was a case of chicken or egg, and I imagined it was Lucien himself and not the deed that earned the loyalty.

  As I stood at the gate, lost in thought, I allowed myself one short moment to think about my father as something more than the alpha of the pack. His tenderness toward me, his only daughter, was well-known to everyone as his only vulnerability.

  He'd come to power in the mid-1700s, and while no werewolf was immortal, his was the longest tenure known to our kind. Some might say having a daughter like me was a weakness for him, but we both knew the truth was exactly the opposite.

  The real truth was that he was my weakness. I would do anything for him, and I had over the years. I'd lied, stolen, killed. Despite my repugnance for killing, I took lives without question when he bid me. He had my allegiance just like he had every other member of the pack.

  We were safe for the first time in a dozen decades under his leadership, and we trusted his word as law.

  I looked askance at his mansion half a mile up the compound, taking in the rolling grounds and the deceptive serenity of it. I knew several guards were placed in key areas, that the seemingly benevolent gardener with a half bald pate had been the deadliest enforcer before me in his day.

  I knew I wouldn't have to worry about my father's safety, but the laughter of the boy in the alley as he'd died unnerved me.

  Instead of going into the cottage and taking that much needed shower, I turned to the left, letting my legs find a long comfortable stride across the field that led to the lawn of the mansion.

  The scent of grass was high in the air, almost too notable. Galen hadn't cut
the lawn for weeks since the weather had cooled to its new season. A peculiar fragrance underpinned that of bright foliage. I thought I smelled gunpowder and sweat and for a moment, I froze as I tried to disentangle the smell of the blood that coated my skin and hair from the scents I was sure I had caught wind of.

  It was the sight of the three guards sprawled across the grass and the disengaged head of Galen's bald pate that turned my comfortable stride into a full out run.

  Something was dead wrong. I drew the pistol from the back of my jeans as I raced along the lawn, not caring to seek cover, only aiming for the front door. I could change in a heartbeat if I wanted to, but I wasn't sure that the threat might not require the speed of six bullets rather than the ferocity of one beast.

  Now that I knew things were off, I knew the stink of blood wasn't just coming from me. It was everywhere, mingling with that of early morning dew.

  I cursed myself and my languid recall of a life I'd already lived while I stood melancholy at my own gate. I should have known something was off the moment I'd stepped foot into the community.

  Everything had been too quiet. I put it down to the earliness of the hour, but I should have known better. I just should have known.

  I dropped to the foot of the step immediately when I reached it. Crouching beside the balustrade and straining to listen for sounds within, I worked to separate all the things my senses were trying to tell me.

  I let my nostrils flare as they scented the air, focusing hard to filter out the familiar smells of family and neighbors. The pungent tang of stranger pricked my nostrils. Beneath that, the stink of gun powder.

  Someone had shot rounds of silver. It might not have killed those within, but it would certainly slow them down if they attempted to fight back.

  I would have preferred someone scream so that I could at least have a reason for charging through the front door. I could believe there was someone in there still alive.