by Selena Scott
The neat little two-storey with its matching furniture and photos on the walls was perfectly Danil. Even all the plates matched, Emin thought as he pulled out two and started setting the table. He did the one other thing that he was equipped to do in a kitchen and put the coffee on.
A few minutes later Danil stomped into the kitchen, his hair damp from the shower and his undershirt tucked into his suit pants. He sniffed the air appreciatively as the first drips of coffee wafted through the kitchen.
“You need art in here,” Emin said as he surveyed the kitchen.
Danil dug in the fridge for eggs and bacon, an American breakfast the brothers had all taken to quite fast when they’d first moved from Belarus. “I’ve been telling you this for years. But all your paintings go to Maciaryszki. Or straight to your clients.”
“I’ve got one that I’ll bring over here. None of my clients like it very much. It’s very… tame.”
Danil raised a sardonic eyebrow at his brother’s tone as he cracked eggs into a hot pan. He wasn’t going to dignify that with a response.
“Don’t give me that look,” Emin said, biting back his smile. “You’ll like it very much. The side of you that jogs as a man instead of as bear. Your domesticated side.” He smiled even more when Danil bristled at his choice of words, flipping the eggs. “The painting is of our mountain, behind Papa’s house. All in blues. It’s just your style. Everything is in its right place.”
Danil’s eyebrow raised even further as he flipped the bacon in a second pan. Emin crossed the kitchen, poured them both a cup of coffee before the machine was done and got a small satisfaction out of watching the drips burn as they fell onto the hot tray. He ignored Danil’s annoyed noise and put the coffee pot back into its place, slid Danil’s coffee cup across the counter.
“You might as well just get to your point, Emin,” Danil said, taking an irritated swig of coffee and cursing when it burned his tongue. He could tell that his brother was circling around something here and he just did not have the patience to wait while he landed the plane.
“My point is that I think you sweat up a hill at 5 am because your woman is not in the right place. Not in her life or in yours.”
“Excuse me?” Danil tossed three eggs on a plate for his brother and then for himself. He mounded another plate with the still-sizzling bacon and tossed it all on his kitchen table. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
The men sat and Emin watched Danil with a discerning eye. “It means that she is somewhere sleeping across town in a shitty hotel rather than upstairs in your bed.”
Danil tried to say nothing but his brother was annoying the shit out of him this morning. “It’s not like that, Emin. I’m not trying to bed her.”
Emin nodded, saw something flash on Danil’s face that he’d never seen before. Interesting, he thought. Very interesting.
“Fine, well, that’s your own delusion. But as for her place in her own life, well, she’s not right there either.”
Danil took a huge bite of breakfast, as if to show that he had very little interest in this conversation, but Emin knew better.
“I caught her scent in the woods last night. Back behind Mama and Papa’s house,” Emin said.
Danil stopped chewing. He leaned back in the chair and eyed his brother more like a wolf than a bear. “Was the scent fresh?”
Emin nodded. “She’d been there not twenty minutes before Anton and I came back down the mountain.”
“God damn it,” Danil cursed, tracing a hand through his wet hair. “In the fucking wilderness in the dead of the night again.” He stood. “Finish your breakfast. We’ve got someplace to go before I have to go to work today.”
Half an hour later, the two brothers pulled up to the spot where Danil had tasted heaven a few mornings ago. He parked his car in the same place as before and got out, walked over to where Dora’s car had been parked. Sniffing the air, he growled in frustration and started stripping out of his clothes.
As bear shifters, they all had very attuned senses of smell when in their human forms. But her scent had waned so much over the last few days that he’d need to be in his bear form to be able to track her path now.
Emin followed suit, stripping down and shifting before they ambled into the woods side by side. In their bear forms, the two brothers picked up her scent easily. Their thoughts invaded one another’s in a way they’d become extremely accustomed to over their lives together.
“She came here in the night?” Emin asked Danil.
“Yes, a few nights ago. She was arrested for trespassing.”
“She is a writer, you know. An investigator.”
“Yes, of course I know that. How did you know that?” Danil snapped at his brother. He didn’t like how much of an interest his brother was taking in Dora. In fact, it irritated the crap out of him.
“I googled her,” Emin replied matter-of-factly as he sniffed an old mossy pine, picking up her scent again.
Danil stopped in his tracks and turned to stare at his brother in his sleek dark form. He pictured Emin’s rustic cabin up the mountain, covered in half-painted canvasses, electric lights he never bothered to turn on in lieu of candles. “Excuse me?”
“What?” Emin looked up, his dark furry face cocked to one side in mild insult. “I’m not a caveman. I google.”
Danil shrugged his massive shoulders and kept on his way through the woods. It was a few miles further before they came upon a ten-foot, chain-link fence. He could smell where her hands had touched each link. Rearing up on his back feet, he found a little patch of denim that must have ripped off her jeans. It smelled good. Like her skin.
Neither of the brothers was willing to shift back to human form to scale the fence, so they traveled on the outside, tracking her path along it. It was only a few minutes before they came upon the outbuilding. Her scent gathered here, as if she’d spent a while there.
Something skittered up Danil’s spine and his brother’s low curse confirmed he felt it too.
“Do you smell that?” Danil asked.
“Fear,” Emin confirmed. The place reeked of the sticky, metallic scent of fear. It had staled, by maybe a year, but it was there. Forever clinging to the building. To the entire area.
“Danil,” Emin called to his brother and the men came upon a tear in the fence. Danil used his mighty paws to hold back the chain link for his brother and Emin did the same on the other side.
They padded through and once around the building. A sick feeling washed over Danil. The scent intensified. There was animal fear and human fear clinging to the building. And pain. So much pain. They reared up on their back feet to look in the window and Danil caught Dora’s scent. He realized she must have looked in the same way.
Emin was cursing again when they saw what lay inside the building. A testing site. There was fur and surgical instruments and chemicals in syringes. Danil’s shoulders bunched with rage. He knew the smells of those chemicals. It was the same way that Anton had smelled when…
He bit off the thought, hating to be reminded of that time in their lives, but the look in Emin’s eyes confirmed that he’d made the connection too. This was bad. This was a dangerous place.
A white hot streak of rage lanced through Danil. What the hell had she been doing here? Alone? What had she been thinking? Did the woman have a death wish? How could she have been this reckless? Endangered herself this way?
“Where is she staying?” Danil bit the question out as if it were made of knives. He hated that he had to ask his brother that question. Hated that his brother knew the answer before he did.
“I tracked her back toward the other side of town the other night. That little motel off the highway with the broken sign.”
Now the rage was actually blurring Danil’s vision. He confirmed that the woman really did have a death wish. She’d die of tetanus in a place like that.
Danil turned. He was bounding back toward the fence when the wind shifted. Both brothers froze. They scented the
breeze. There was another animal in the woods with them. It wasn’t far but it was getting farther. Fast.
“Have you ever smelled anything like that?” Emin asked, the fur on his spine rising up.
“Not outside of a zoo,” Danil answered, his head cocked curiously. There was only one animal that smelled like that and there was no way that it was living in the woods of Spokane.
He shook his head, not his problem right now. He only had one problem. And she was sleeping in a crappy motel across town. The two of them slid through the fence and started in opposite directions. They paused, looked back at one another.
“I’m going to her,” Danil growled.
Emin nodded, wisely hiding the smug look on his face. “Fine. I’ll find my own way back.”
Danil took a step away and then looked back at his brother. “You’re following that scent?” The mysterious scent was still wafting on the air.
Emin nodded. “I have to find out what it is.”
“Be careful,” Danil said. “They scratch.”
The two brothers grinned at one another for a moment before bounding away in opposite directions. Both racing toward something they couldn’t help but chase.
Click here to check out the rest of the Secret Shifters of Spokane Series
Ansel’s Game
(Shifter Fever Series – Book 1 – Preview)
PROLOGUE
ONE YEAR AGO
Ruby Sayers skipped a rock off the shallow, almost still, waters of the lagoon where she sat. She wanted to shout something across the water to her brother, but instead she bit her lip and skipped another stone. She was trying to take a step back lately. He was seventeen years old, for God’s sake. And she was woman enough to admit that she was a tiny bit of a helicopter parent.
She didn’t particularly blame herself for it, considering that she’d had to learn how to be a parent all at once, at age nineteen, when she’d unexpectedly become the sole guardian of her then nine-year-old brother. But it was eight years later, their lives had really started to smooth out, and she knew Griff didn’t need a nagging, harping voice in his ear telling him to be careful jumping between the boulders that surrounded the lagoon.
But dang it, she really wished he’d be more careful jumping from boulder to boulder! Instead of calling out to him, she squeezed her eyes shut for just a minute, centering herself. It was better if she didn’t watch him. When she felt a little bit better, she grabbed up her camera from her satchel and set about taking some pictures of the lagoon. This would make a lovely place for some engagement photos, she reflected. Or some graduation photos.
It was a little bit too woodsy for typical wedding shots; no woman in a full wedding gown could make it out this far from the trail. But, in her last five years as a professional photographer, she’d definitely learned that it took all kinds. People came in all shapes and sizes and they wanted all matter of things documented. Hell, Ruby had photographed a cat wedding not three weeks ago. As in, a person had wanted his two cats to be wed.
She and Griff had been laughing through tears when she’d showed him the final proofs. She smiled now, just thinking about it. And without a second thought, she swung her camera toward Griff, and captured him in a photo in the exact second that he backflipped off a boulder and into the lagoon below.
Ruby squawked in dismay. Yes. Squawked. The noise tore out of her as she rose up instantly, tossing her camera aside and readying herself to dive into the water after him. Half a second later, he surfaced, grinning and waggling his eyebrows at her.
“Griff, you ass!” Ruby hollered as she set her hands on her hips. But she couldn’t stay mad. She’d never been able to stay mad when he was smiling like that. Ever since their parents had been declared dead, all of Ruby’s focus had been firmly placed on Griff’s happiness. Which was why she’d made the decision to yank him out of school in Brooklyn two years ago.
They’d had to leave some friends behind when they moved out here, but Griff was never gonna survive in high school. He often had debilitating migraines that his doctors never could get to the bottom of. And he found himself falling further and further behind in school. When the choice had been to repeat freshman year, or yank him out and help him get his GED, Ruby hadn’t hesitated.
And for his part, Griff hadn’t either. He was a shy kid, always had been. Even though he’d been born and raised there, the loud, raucous heat of Brooklyn had never quite felt like home. Both Ruby and Griff had breathed a tremendous sigh of relief when they’d finally rolled into the driveway of the summer home their grandparents had left to them a few years back.
It was small, quaint, and had needed plenty of upgrades to turn it into a year-round home, but two years later, it suited both of them perfectly. Small enough that it was fairly easy to keep clean and just big enough that they had places to stay out of one another’s way.
Which was becoming increasingly important, Ruby reflected as she watched Griff’s slender, sleek body dive under the water. He was growing up. He was starting to meet—shudder—girls.
God.
Ruby sat on the edge of the lagoon and turned her face up to the sun that filtered through the layers on layers of green leaves. What was she gonna do about Griff dating? Up to now, she’d been able to muddle her way through parenting him in each stage of his life because each stage of his life had been something she’d handled first-hand.
But dating? Yeah. She had zero experience in that arena. Like a big, old, whopping zilch. She hadn’t been, you know, very cute in high school, all that red hair and a little chubby. And she’d only been one year into college when her parents had disappeared. And then, when she’d blossomed (her hair had calmed and she’d made her peace with her curves), which she could admit that she finally had, she’d become a two-for-one deal. Most guys weren’t interested in getting super close to a girl who had a lanky, quiet, often scowling kid attached to her side.
She sighed. She figured that she’d probably handle it the exact same way she’d handled everything with Griff. With unfiltered, often cringe-worthy honesty. She never wanted him to feel as if she were keeping anything from him. So she’d just gone the safest route and told him the truth. About everything. It had made for hard moments.
-There was an avalanche, Griff. They can’t find Mom and Dad.
-They stopped looking for Mom and Dad, Griffie.
-There’s gonna be a funeral, Griff. We’ll say goodbye together.
-It’s just you and me. But we’ll make it, Griffie. We’ll make it.
Hard moments, but ones that she was grateful for in the end. She and Griff trusted one another without question, and he’d understood what had happened from the beginning. There were none of those gut-wrenching, when is Mommy coming home? moments that you so often saw in movies. She’d told him the truth. He’d cried his eyes out, accepted it, and moved on at her side.
She watched Griff float lazily in the water. He was getting bigger. And he’d started asking her about getting a job of his own. Because the house from their grandparents was bought and paid for, Ruby had been able to keep them in groceries and fairly stylish clothes with just her photography gig. But she had to admit, a little extra pocket money for a kid his age would go a long way. And a job would be good for him. Maybe something physical. Something that could put a little meat on his bones.
She wondered idly if the carpenter who’d done the upgrades on their home two years ago would ever hire an assistant on. Her brain quickly skittered away from thoughts of that man. He made her stomach jump. Not in a bad way, but just in a… jumpy way. Slow-talking, slow-eyed, and well over six feet tall, Ruby had always felt nervous in whatever room he was in. So for the most part, she’d kept out of his way while he finished up the project. Occasionally she’d see him around town and she’d give him a quick smile or a nod, but most of the time she found herself busying herself with something, crossing to the other side of the street.
She supposed some men were just like that. No one else she’d
ever met besides that particular one. But it soothed her nerves to think that he was of a particular type that she just wasn’t quite familiar with yet.
Ruby did a quick scan of the lagoon, saw that Griff was still floating on his own, and stood up to start getting lunch ready for the two of them. Nothing fancy, just some sandwiches she’d tossed into the bag and an orange and a pickle each. And a Nalgene of water to split. She was halfway through setting it out on the small picnic blanket she’d brought when something caught her eye. And sent her stomach right down through the floor.
Griff was gripping the side of the lagoon, his shoulders up around his ears and the heel of one hand digging into his eye.
She’d recognize that posture anywhere. It was exactly what he looked like when he was just minutes from experiencing an excruciating migraine.
Damn. Damndamndamn. Ruby dug through the bag until she found the pills that the last doctor had prescribed, but she knew they wouldn’t work. They never worked. Yet, it was better than just sitting back helplessly. Luckily they still had a few hours before the sun set, so Griff would probably be over the worst of it before they had to hike back out.
She grabbed the Nalgene, hopped a small shrub and skidded to her knees right next to where Griff gripped the side of the crystal clear pool.
“Here you go,” she whispered, knowing that extra noise would be excruciating to him now. She wasn’t surprised when he shoved the pill back toward her. He didn’t like taking them and Ruby couldn’t blame him. They didn’t do much besides knock him out for a day and a half.
“No, Rube,” he groaned. “If I gotta walk out of here in a few hours then you know I can’t take that crap.”