by Selena Scott
Copyright 2018 by Selena Scott - All rights reserved.
In no way is it legal to reproduce, duplicate, or transmit any part of this document in either electronic means or in printed format. Recording of this publication is strictly prohibited and any storage of this document is not allowed unless with written permission from the publisher. All rights reserved.
Respective authors own all copyrights not held by the publisher.
Table of Contents
The Shifter’s Shadow
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
Chosen by the Dragon
(The Dragon Realm Series - Book 1 Preview)
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
Danil’s Mate
(Secret Shifters of Spokane Series – Book 1 Preview)
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
Ansel’s Game
(Shifter Fever Series – Book 1 – Preview)
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
The Shifter’s Shadow
PROLOGUE
Time meant very little to the truly dark things in this world. It was the one resource that was always in infinite supply.
But that didn’t mean that it wasn’t still a primal, twanging thrill when the timer was up, the waiting was over, and everything was tumbling closer.
The demon closed his eyes and reclined backwards. There was nothing, really, to recline on, in this land of nowhere, of nothing. The demon could visit Earth, of course—how else would he eat? And he could also visit many other planes. But he preferred it best in the land of nowhere. Where there was just his horrific, gnarled body. His own ugliness observed by no one else, where he was the only observer.
There were a hundred things that this demon could choose to do with this small snippet of his life. But these last few centuries had centered around a game. He’d laid the pieces, then watched with fascination as they’d moved around the game board of generations of human lives. And now, the day was fast approaching. Only a few more sunrises and sunsets until the day would truly begin. And the demon would get what he’d been hungering for for centuries. There was a soul that awaited him. The most decadent, opulent meal known to demon-kind. He’d feast on that soul. Make it last. Lick it from his every fingertip.
He dreamed of that meal the way a weary traveler might dream of the stew and bread at the end of the road. He dreamed of it because, quite honestly, he was dreadfully bored, and it was the only thing he had to dream of anymore.
Infinite time, though an incredible gift, also had the strange side effect of dulling everything at the same moment. Like too much water in the soup. The demon knew that after all this was over, when everything was said and done, he’d be fed and satisfied and, once again, bored. But that was tomorrow’s problem. Today was so much more interesting.
Today, he could lean back and close his eyes to peer into the lives of his game pieces. The humans he’d set atop his game board. He could watch them dance like the puppets they were, falling into his trap like ants marching one after the other.
He closed his eyes and watched the first one. He’d liked watching her since the day she was born. So thorough and careful and skilled. And beautiful, of course. He watched her as she prepared for the game he’d destined her to play all those centuries ago. He watched her in her bedroom. And he dreamed of the meal that lay in store for him.
CHAPTER ONE
Thea Redgrave stood in her bedroom, in the half hour directly after sunset, and deftly folded the clothes she was bringing with her on this wild goose chase. Her flannel button-ups and worn jeans, though they were years old and desperately faded, were folded with an effortless, militaristic precision and placed just as neatly in her small pack.
“Thea? You home?”
Ray Goodman’s voice echoed through her rickety, drafty, utterly beloved farmhouse. She could hear him stomping the mud off his feet on the front porch before he came and stood in her living room.
She strode out of her bedroom on impossibly long legs inherited from her father’s side of the family. The effect was that she always moved fast while looking like she was moving slow. It was something she’d come to value in her life, and she particularly attributed that to her success with all the animals she kept on the farm. She cared for them, quickly and efficiently, but never spooked them in the process.
“Evening, Ray,” Thea said as she came through the kitchen to the living room, her hands tucked in the front pockets of her jeans and her hair, shower-damp, tied up in an economical knot to keep it out of her face. It was unusual for her to have a visitor at this hour, and seeing as how Ray was the person she’d charged with taking care of her farm while she was gone, Thea got an almighty sinking in her gut at the sight of him. Was he here to cancel on her? Tell her she was asking him too big of a favor?
“Sorry to drop in like this,” Ray said, holding his baseball hat in his gnarled, pre-arthritic fingers. “But I didn’t want you to leave without somebody saying goodbye.”
Thea Redgrave had a big secret. Somewhere deep in her chest was a pulsing, beating soft spot, filled with maple syrup. Sticky sweet. And right now, hearing Ray Goodman’s words, it warmed right up. “Ah, Ray.”
“Yeah, Loretta thought, since you don’t have nobody here to see you off…” he trailed off and twisted his hat.
The maple syrup hardened back into sap in her chest. She restrained her sigh. Ray was sweet enough to want to come here to give her company before she left town. His wife, on the other hand, would never miss an opportunity to point out that Thea didn’t have a man, or even a family, here on this homestead. Thea supposed that she should just continue to ignore all the passive aggressive quasi-kindnesses from Loretta Goodman. The recipes she sent over ‘in case Thea wanted to start trying her hand at cooking’. Loretta’s version of the work a woman was supposed to be doing in a hardened, unforgiving landscape like Flintrock, Montana. Or the special dirt-removing laundry detergent Loretta had dropped off ‘to try and get some of those mud stains off all your clothes’. On the surface, it was a neighborly thing to do, kind even. But Thea knew it was just Loretta’s way of reminding her that she had no business having muddy clothes on from working in the barn or the field out back all day long.
And this was just one more thing to add to that list. If Ray himself hadn’t been the kindest man west of the Mississippi, twisting his hat and looking for all the world like he was truly gonna miss her, Thea might have just booted him right out of there with the message for Loretta to go suck a lemon. But as it was, he took another tentative step toward her.
“You’ve had a good dinner, then? Something to set your stomach before you travel?”
His question was so thoughtful, and so like something her grandfather would have asked her, that Thea felt that sweet spot warm up again and she went ahead and pushed Loretta completely from her mind.
“I had a big old omelette and potatoes not half an hour ago.�
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“Breakfast for dinner,” Ray shook his head, and looked at the ground, a little smile on his face. “Loretta says that’ll confuse your stomach and throw off your sleep, but it was always my favorite.”
“Well, you can have breakfast for dinner as much as you want while you’re staying here.”
Ray’s eyes lit up, and it occurred to Thea for the very first time that perhaps asking Ray to look after her land and her animals while she was gone was as much a favor to him as it was a burden. His and Loretta’s land didn’t need much tending this time of year and she’d even offered Ray her guest bedroom, seeing as how their homesteads were a few miles apart and it would be less of a pain for him to tend the animals come dawn if all he had to do was roll out of bed.
Ray cleared his throat and dropped his hands to his sides, his hat still clenched tightly in one fist. Thea immediately recognized the signs of a man about to say something he was scared to say, something he felt he truly had to.
“Are you sure you need to go do this, child?”
She wished she hadn’t been quite so forthcoming with Ray about the details of her trip, even though she hadn’t told him nearly all of it. As far as he knew, she was taking a solo camping trip in Northern Michigan, one last way for her to say goodbye to her grandfather.
“It was the last thing he asked me to do, Ray.” That much, at least, was true. “And it won’t be the first time a woman takes a camping trip on her own. I won’t go looking for trouble, and I can handle myself besides.”
“Well, I’ve seen proof of that.” He sure had. Ray smiled faintly to himself. He’d known Thea Redgrave since she was a two-year-old girl. She and her two older brothers had been unceremoniously dumped at Chet Redgrave’s homestead by their good-for-nothing parents and from that day on, they’d been Chet’s kids. He’d seen Thea grow up on this hard land, surrounded by hard people. Chet knew that she wasn’t a woman scared of much. And certainly not of hard work or hard conditions. She’d grown more and more beautiful as time went on, with her long, black hair, wildly pale skin covered head to toe in freckles. And those eyes. Witch’s eyes, Loretta always said. They were the palest aquamarine blue. Like sunlight through the Caribbean Sea. Not that Ray had ever seen the Caribbean Sea, but come on, he had an internet connection. He thought, privately, that her undeniable beauty had made her more closed off and a bit prickly over the years. As she had no intention of ever seeking a companion, and companions sure attempted to seek her.
The point was, Ray had witnessed Thea Redgrave handle herself in all sorts of situations, with all sorts of obstacles, and he’d yet to see her fail. He supposed that this ticking, nagging worry he felt at the thought of her leaving Montana was understandable and a bit extraneous. He shouldn’t burden her with it.
“Besides,” she told him, “I think it’s important that I do this. Leave for a bit. In a way, this place still feels like his. It might always. But maybe if I leave, when I come back, it’ll feel like mine.”
Ray nodded his head. Made sense to him. But then, Ray had always believed that women tended to make quite a bit of sense. Everything that Loretta said made sense in the moment. It wasn’t usually until much later, in the quiet of some bit of labor around his farm, that Ray would piece through her words again, try and figure out if they actually held water. He figured he’d have to do the same for Thea’s words. And whether they held water or not, by the time he’d figured it out, she’d be long gone on her trip.
Oh well. That was the way of the world. Time was a funny thing. There never seemed to be enough of it. But like all the people in their rural, hard-working community, Ray just did the best he could and called it a day when the bedside lamp turned out.
“I left instructions about Sarah’s medicine,” Thea said, moving toward a long, handwritten note in neat, precise handwriting. “She doesn’t like it much but the trick is—”
“I’ve administered udder cream to a cow before, Thea.”
“Right. Of course. And just so that you remember, I heard coyotes on the back acreage about ten days ago, so I’ve been double-checking the—”
“I heard them too, and I’m not gonna let coyotes find their way into your barn.”
“I know. One more—”
“Thea.” Now he just shoved that baseball cap onto his head and closed the distance between them. “I’ve been working this land around here for damn near forty years. I’m not gonna let it all go to hell because you’ve decided to go see the world.” He wrapped his arms around her in a good firm hug.
She laughed into the shoulder of his jean jacket and closed her eyes against the smell. Tobacco and dust. Just like her grandfather. “The world? I’d hardly call Northern Michigan ‘the world’.”
“It’s part of the world now, ain’t it?”
She squeezed him once and stepped back. “Guess you’re right about that.”
Ray stepped back and knocked one hand on the doorframe of her living room. “Guess I’ll see you in a few weeks, then.”
“That’s right. I’ll call and check in.”
“You be safe, darlin’.”
She nodded at him, unable to completely verbally commit to that, given the fact that she had absolutely no idea what the hell she was about to get herself into.
She saw Ray to the door and quickly turned back to her bedroom, getting the last of her things packed. Her few toiletries, no makeup. She was bringing a lightweight, single-man tent and a down sleeping bag that she strapped tightly to the outside of her pack—this was going to qualify as a carry-on if it was her last earthly accomplishment. The rest of her camping equipment she’d acquire when she got there. She couldn’t very well fly with a jackknife and a lighter.
The last thing she packed would have looked like a simple scrap of yellowed paper to the casual observer. It was on thick paper that, strangely enough, never seemed to crease or wrinkle. On one side was a map with a small star in the Northwest quadrant of it. On the flip side, which Thea didn’t bother turning over to see, considering she’d already read it a hundred times and didn’t see the point in a hundred and first, were words in hand-scripted, flowing cursive:
On the seventh day
Of the seventh month
when the seventh moon
falls dark,
You, the seventh soul,
will find what you seek.
She carefully packed the parchment, clipped her pack closed, and tossed it on her back. She flipped off the lights to her house, knowing that Ray would be there later tonight for his first evening on duty. Thea grabbed her truck keys from the hook on the wall of the front entryway. She touched, for just a second, the peeling rosebud wallpaper that the grandmother she’d never met had so painstakingly put up. And then, pressing her fingers to her lips first, she pressed the pads of her fingertips to the glass of a photograph of the man who’d raised her. Chet Redgrave, in stark, shadowed black and white, stared back at her. A candid shot of a hardened man. He’d never have posed for a photo. But she was infinitely grateful that her brother, Will, had had the audacity to take this photo without warning their grandfather first. Because there he was, staring at Thea with those blue eyes that matched her own.
She knew what he would say to her, were he there to say it. “Go on, then. Do what you have to do.”
So, she did just that. Thea locked up the farmhouse and jogged, pack and all, to her old, red pickup truck. She took one last look at the faded white house in her rearview mirror as her truck kicked up whirlwinds of dust in the fading light of the evening. There it was, she thought, her whole life in that square of reflective glass.
***
Caroline Clifton flung the covers off of herself and sprang from the hotel bed where she’d barely slept a wink that entire night. She whipped back the track curtains and stared out at the cars parked in the gray parking lot. What a gorgeous morning! Well, almost morning.
The sun was still just a hint of periwinkle at the edge of the earth. The parking lot lights are
still on, for God’s sake, Caroline.
Caroline could hear her husband’s voice in her head as clearly as if he were lying in the bed behind her. Which he definitely was not. He was always exasperated with her habit of rising bright and early. And by ‘rising’, she meant springing head-first into the day. Which was what she did on any normal day.
But this was not a normal day. She turned from the window and practically danced to the windowless bathroom of the hotel room to brush her teeth. Today was July fifth.
Which meant it was just two days from being the seventh day of the seventh month. Just two little teeny weeny days before the total lunar eclipse on July seventh. The first total lunar eclipse on July seventh in centuries.
Which meant that Caroline—the seventh soul!—was just two measly, puny days away from finding what she sought!
It occurred to her, as she spat out her toothpaste in the sink and turned on the shower, that if there were another person in possession of the map that was in her purse, they might be excited about finding the actual thing they sought. Caroline, on the other hand, was sublimely excited to find out what it was that she sought.
She couldn’t think of a more perfect gift than following her map to the marked star, witnessing a total lunar eclipse, and finding out what the hell she’d been searching for all these years.
Because if there was one thing that Caroline knew about herself, it was that she’d been searching for something. She just… had no idea what that was. She’d thought she’d found it eight years ago, at the ripe old age of twenty, when she’d first met Peter Clifton. But over the last few years, the feeling of looking for something she’d never find had slowly started creeping back into her life.
She’d find herself marching into a room, a specific purpose in mind, only to get there and realize that she had no idea why she’d walked in there in the first place. Now, she knew she was absent-minded in the extreme. She’d lose her car keys for days, only to have Peter find them in the fridge, next to the orange juice. Once, she even drove all the way across town to bring Peter’s cat to the vet, only to arrive realizing she’d brought an empty cat carrier. The cat was still lounging in a patch of sun on the chaise in their bedroom.