Falling for Shifters: A Limited Edition Autumn Shifters Collection

by Lacey Carter Andersen

  As it was, the silence was enough to terrify me.

  I had two younger brothers in that house. A step-mother. If my father had killed every single intruder, then I should hear him howling in victory.

  But all I got was silence. And silence or no, howl or not, I had to get in there.

  I was about to make my move when I felt the cold muzzle of a gun pressed against my ear. If I had any doubts about whether or not the holder of the pistol meant business, the click of the safety being disengaged removed them.

  Chapter Four

  I might have known the smell of human because it was what I was scenting for. But my nostrils told me the man beside me was wolf. Not strange wolf, either. He had the smell of pack.

  "Take it easy," I said, lifting my hands in the air and dropping my own pistol. "I won't hurt you."

  "Damn straight," came the voice. Masculine. Familiar. I knew that voice.

  I cursed out loud at the sound of it as rough hands gripped me by the elbow and pulled me to my feet.

  I stood to face three men. Two of them wore combat fatigues.

  "Nice suit," I said to the third, the man from the alley.

  He shrugged. "Occupational hazard."

  "So thugs are wearing Armani now?" I said, twisting in the steely grip that held me so that I could escape the feel of cold metal against the back of my ear.

  I nodded at the bodies littering the yard as I moved and my gut felt as though it had been punched.

  "What's this about?" I asked him, sizing him up even as I tried to engage him in conversation. One on one, I could take him, I was sure of it. Three of them? I might have to play nice for at least 50 more seconds before I could get the upper hand. Put them off guard. Then attack. The mantra was making its way through my brain.

  I had to strike before the adrenaline robbed me of my reason and put me into fight or flight.

  He must have sensed my ruse for the good old banter; he gave a curt nod to the third fellow, the one who didn't have me by the arm, and in seconds that intruder clamped silver cuffs around my wrists.

  I winced at the burn of silver on my skin.

  "Hurt?" Armani suit asked.

  "Like a bitch," I said. "But then you know that."

  "Sorry," he said and had the nerve to actually look as though he meant it. "I can't take any chances."

  I narrowed my gaze at him, trying to figure out why he smelled human in the alley but as a wolf. I inhaled again to be sure. Yes. Pack. My pack. My gaze scanned the suit and I thought I recognized it.

  "What kind of businessman kills innocent people?" I asked.

  One black brow quirked good-naturedly over a crystalline eye.

  "Who said I was a businessman?" He looked back over his shoulder to where the bodies littered the ground. "And who said they were innocent?"

  I wrenched my shoulder away from the grasp that held me but it was a solid one. I growled without meaning to.

  "You're the one who set those hunters on me," I said as I realized the truth.

  I leveled my gaze at him, steeling my spine against its instinctual desire to curl under the pain. "You collected our scent."

  He shrugged as though I was half right. "Your scent," he said. "You left it all over each man you killed."

  I inhaled and sensed honesty in the words. But there was more. He hadn't just sought out my kills to grab clothes and pheromones from skin. He and his comrades smelled of others in the pack.

  "You used them to keep me busy so you could get access to these grounds." I couldn't quite figure out how he'd managed to creep into the compound without Galen noticing.

  He shrugged. "You're awfully good at your job. We had to recruit a lot of poor souls."

  I lobbed a glob of spit at his feet to indicate what I felt about that. All those poor boys dead for some wannabe hunter-mastermind.

  "Enjoy your fifteen minutes of fame," I told him. "Lucien won't be quite so easy a target as an old man and a few lazy guards."

  I imagined he might feel proud that he'd gotten this far onto the property, baited me away long enough that he could murder his way up to my Alpha's door, but Lucien was old for a reason. He was ruthless. He was clever.

  I almost wanted to laugh at the poor human's bravado. All that work for nothing. I might actually enjoy killing him. The temptation to look across the lawn at Galen was so great I had to bite my tongue to keep from doing it. Instead, I soothed my grief with the promise of vengeance.

  "So what are you waiting for?" I said. "Let's ring the damned doorbell and get this party started."

  I kicked my foot out in the direction of the front door, showing him where the wolf shaped doorbell waited.

  He said nothing to that, merely stuck two fingers into his mouth and whistled. Then he turned to me, capturing my gaze and forcing me to meet his.

  "Not my party," he murmured.

  "Coward," I said and tore my eyes from his face to watch as men lifted from prone positions all over the yard, from behind shrubberies and molded statues.

  There was an eerie sort of calm to the way they moved, as though they'd finished something very difficult and had yet to process the fact that it was over. Even the early morning dew had begun to evaporate, leaving a sort of mist around their ankles.

  My mouth went dry. The adrenaline had kicked in finally. I'd lost my chance to do much but suffer the effects of it without the benefits.

  "Am I in an episode of the X-Files?" I asked. "You boys have finally realized we exist and are sworn to annihilate such disgusting vermin from the face of the Earth." I coughed out a patronizing laugh. "Good luck with that."

  My bravado was misplaced and he knew it. There were too many of them. My knees went weak when I saw how peppered all over the property they had been. I'd missed them. Every single one because of my impatience and exhaustion and the stink of blood and death on my body.

  I sank to my haunches in the man's grip and he let me go. The sick and sudden realization that whatever had happened up to this point was nothing but the dénouement to a carefully planned climax. I heaved awkwardly, bringing up nothing but empty air that burned my nose.

  The leader took me in head to heel with a pursed lip as I crouched there, doing my best to keep the skin of my wrists from contacting too much of the silver. It burned like a son of a bitch and it was getting harder not to whimper in pain.

  I had the feeling that the metal had already burned through the first layer of my skin, and that if they stayed on for much longer the cuffs would become as easy to wear as it was to hold onto an fire-forged blade.

  I knew he was watching me struggle against the pain and for a moment I thought he might take the cuffs off me. His right hand seem to move of its own accord toward my wrists, but he caught himself and shoved it in his pocket. I watched the ball it made of itself with some satisfaction if not longing.

  But the awful truth that was just dawning on me in light of the dozen men rising from the grounds was worse than the pain of silver. I knew right then I'd gladly wear the silver cuffs for a decade if it meant that what I feared most wasn't true.

  "What have you done to them?" I said softly.

  He looked down at me with something akin to compassion for a man with such hard features.

  "I haven't done anything."

  He reached his hand out and something inside me prompted me to hook my elbow over his palm. He hoisted me to my feet.

  "Come with me," he said.

  "Go to hell."

  He glanced down at my cuffs and then stepped close enough that when he extracted his hand from his pocket, he slipped it onto the small of my back. One gentle but firm shove urged me toward the steps.

  "Not long now," he said. "And then you can have those things off."

  My stomach clenched as I approached the door. Foreboding draped itself about me in a heavy blanket.

  I shook my head as the door loomed.

  "No," I said, and bucked backward. A jolt of pain shot into my wrist and I jerked my hands
backward toward my waist, sending a searing pain into my belly where my shirt rode up.

  I couldn't go in.

  "I don't want to see," I said.

  "I know," he murmured. "But you have to."

  With his free hand, he raked back a handful of his black hair, giving me clear sight of two crystalline eyes that looked like genuine agate. I felt trapped there beneath his gaze, wriggling like a bug on a pin. The beast within me roared with indignation.

  "I don't have to do anything," I said. "Not for you."

  "Then do it for your alpha," he said.

  My alpha. With Galen murdered on the lawn, and all of these men present, I hadn't imagined anything but the worst. Mention of Lucien had to mean not all was lost.

  Some part of my brain kept insisting this was all some clever plan of Lucien's. He'd devised a test for me, one that Galen had been in on. It didn't make sense otherwise that this man could acquire our pack's scent so easily. He needed help. I left scent on my kills, sure, but there would also be blood and sweat and urine. Feces. Those things would mask the smell of me. It would take a man with a strong stomach and masterful intent to take those remnants of body and clothes that would hold my smell and rub them over his own clothes. Smear that smell all over his comrades uniforms.

  The dedication alone to do that would mean such planning that it would have taken weeks or months to assemble all the pieces.

  So it had to be Lucien. Maybe Galen had plans to take over the pack and that was why he was dead. Maybe my father suspected me as part of a coup.

  Maybe...

  In those seconds before I crossed the threshold, I let anything run through my mind so long as it didn't end with my family's blood on the tiles.

  My imagination paled in comparison to the reality that faced me as the door yawned open.

  Chapter Five

  The truth was that I never truly expected to see my family members alive. I knew they were dead the moment those soldiers rose from the grounds. I knew someone had killed them. I just expected that someone to be the Armani suit or a band of his merry hunters much like the ones I'd been neutralizing over the last week. Certainly older men, more seasoned for battle than those I'd been taking out.

  I didn't expect a wolf from my own clan to be standing there holding the head of his alpha--my father-- in his disgusting grasp, the tangles of my father's hair knotted against his knuckles.

  Lucien's prostrate form bled pools onto the floor that puddled toward the sitting room.

  "Caleb," I growled.

  Despite the expenditure of adrenaline I'd used earlier, I found the energy to be enraged. Somehow, my body delivered all the hormone it needed to hate him with all the gravity of a black hole.

  I threw myself at his broad shoulders. How dare he. How dare he after all my father had done for him.

  I didn't get but six feet away when Armani suit grabbed me by the elbows and yanked me backwards so hard I fell on my ass and lay there staring up at the ceiling.

  My eyes burned with tears. I laughed at the hopelessness of it, my grief, my rage. The adrenaline shot was a traitor, clawing back all that numbness and making me feel the pain of loss.

  My beast whimpered within as it tried to come out but was held at bay by the silver around my wrists.

  I squeezed my eyes closed, and water bled from the corners.

  "Why Caleb?"

  "Because it's time, Shana," he said.

  I felt him crouch next to me, laying our alpha's head carefully behind him next to its shoulders.

  I rolled over onto my side, trying to decide how I would kill him as I regarded him.

  At one time, I might have thought him handsome with his rugged features and short cropped hair. He had a small scar beneath his eye from a wound that I had delivered during a sparring match when we were both in our wolf form.

  That was a dozen years earlier, and it only enhanced his looks. I always told him that he enjoyed extra attention from the human women he courted so much because of it. Now I wished I had taken his eye, and I swore I would deepen the gash before the moon waxed.

  "Time for what?" I demanded of him. "Time for me to tear out your heart and eat it beneath the full moon?"

  I heard Armani suit chuckle beneath his breath and I scrabbled across the floor on my elbows and knees until my fingers clawed into the material of his pant leg. I craned my neck to look up at him.

  "I wouldn't laugh if I were you," I said. "I won't wait for the full moon to eat your heart."

  I licked my lips and grimaced at him but he didn't move even an eyebrow at the threat.

  "I wouldn't threaten Jeb, Shana," Caleb said. "He's a lot more dangerous than he looks."

  Jeb. So this foul human being masquerading as a shifter had a name after all. He'd need it for his tombstone.

  I used Jeb's trousers to pull myself to my feet and pushed him off me when he tried to help me gain solid footing. I could barely feel the silver now, the rage within me was so feral. All I wanted to do was transform and tear Caleb limb from limb, and drag his lifeless body through the woods until it was nothing but ragged flesh. Then I would turn my beast on Jeb and every other man down to the last until the floor was a lake of blood.

  "It was you who hired them," I said to Caleb as I faced him. "It wasn't this paltry human," I jerked my chin toward Jeb almost absently. "You wanted the pack. You murdered your own foster father to get it."

  He reached for the table next to him, and I noticed for the first time that it held a syringe.

  "His time was over, Shana," he said.

  "What are you doing?"

  I took a step backwards and ended up colliding with Jeb. He caught me when I would have staggered and I turned around just enough to deliver a grinding bite to his bicep. To his credit, he made no cry of pain.

  "You need to understand," Caleb said advancing on me. "It's not just about Lucien, Shana. It's about us. He stood in our way."

  "Us?" I didn't bother to hide my confusion.

  Caleb nodded. "Mates, Shana. Surely you know we were meant for each other. We were meant to be the Alphas of this pack. Together."

  I swallowed, unable to think of any response. My mind reeled in confusion. It took several moments for me to find an answer, and when I did it was enough to make me choke on the laughter that rumbled up my throat.

  "But I'm not bonded to you, Caleb," I said.

  He smiled a peculiar smile and brushed his thumb against my lips, prodding the tip of it in to run along my teeth. I waited until he thought I was fully compliant before I sank my teeth into his knuckle.

  His sharp intake of breath was the only indication that I'd hurt him. He pulled his thumb free and sent his hand beneath the back of my hair, gripping my nape in a painful clutch as I backed even closer into Jeb's chest.

  I felt the torso behind me stiffen and the arms snaked around me almost convulsively. Something in me cried out, wanting to turn into it and bury my face there; something else flew into a rage when it felt the desire.

  I struggled against Jeb's grasp, and whether I managed to free myself or he let go, I ended up standing a good foot away from both of them, within arm's length of the fallen sword obviously used to decapitate our father.

  "I thought you preferred fully human women, Caleb?"

  "You know how it is," he said, offering an infuriating shrug. "I couldn't risk bonding myself to one of our kind, not when you were waiting for me. A man has needs, and there were plenty of women happy to satisfy them. If it helps, the human women enjoyed it."

  "You're disgusting." I edged closer to the sword.

  "You can't bully me into submission," I said. "I'm not that kind of girl."

  "That's exactly why you're the right girl," he said.

  He nodded to one of the men who immediately turned heel toward the sitting room.

  While I wanted to know where the man was going, I refused to take my eyes off of Caleb.

  "You know I'll kill you in your sleep," I said. "You know it, right?
You'll have to kill me so I don't kill you."

  He chuckled. "I know you believe that now."

  He stepped between me and the sword with an impassive expression. He'd known what I was planning, and now he was far too close to me for comfort.

  I heard Jeb clear his throat, and I was certain he had taken a step toward me. I was being herded like a stupid sheep and for each minute movement I made, Caleb made an equally subtle one.

  Even being fully aware of it, I was still surprised when I heard Jeb breathing behind me. Instinct sent my elbow snapping backwards, and with satisfaction I felt it connect and elicit a surprised grunt.

  I should have known Caleb would take the opportunity to slip in even closer.

  "What are you going to do, Caleb," I taunted. "Assault me right here in front of all these men?"

  I almost hoped he would try. Silver or no, I didn't think anything could hold back my beast under those conditions.

  I watched as those luminescent hazel eyes ran the length of my mouth and I knew he was considering something more intimate than mere conversation.

  I couldn't stop the heaving of my chest as my beast tried to pull in enough oxygen to initiate a most ferocious struggle. Those eyes dipped to the swell of my bloodied and ripped T-shirt and back up to my face.

  "I won't have to assault you, Shana," he said before issuing a short, sharp whistle.

  The soldier returned, leading in my two brothers, both of them chained together with a long length of silver, their young necks encircled with a silver collar. I tasted bile in the back of my throat.

  "I'm quite certain you'll come willingly." A sandy eyebrow waggled suggestively. "If you'll pardon the pun."

  I sagged on my legs. "They're just boys, Caleb."

  "They're werewolves. They understand what's expected of them."

  Things were spinning out of control. Too fast. Far too fast. I shook my head, my body already understanding what my brain refused to.

  "I won't do it. You can't make me. Surely there's another were who would love to be your mate. Just let them go. Leave me to do my job. I'll work for you. I'll kill for you. Just let them go."