by Zoe Chant
Anchor, by Jorrie Spencer. The arrival of a young fugitive wolf is nothing new for Angus, the alpha of Wolf Town. But Mala, the dreamwalker following the boy, is extraordinary. He’s not only drawn to the dark-eyed beauty, he’s driven to protect her.
The Strength of the Pack, by Jorrie Spencer. Seth Kolski, a werewolf, hides his heritage and passes for normal. Until he meets Jamie. A full-length novel.
Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing, by Lauren Esker. Curvy farm girl Julie Capshaw was warned away from the wolf shifters next door, but Damon Wolfe is the motorcycle-riding, smoking hot alpha of her dreams. Can the big bad wolf and his sheep shifter find their own happy ending? A full-length novel.
Handcuffed to the Bear (Shifter Agents # 1) by Lauren Esker. A bear-shifter ex-mercenary and a curvy lynx shifter searching for her best friend's killer are handcuffed together and hunted in the wilderness. A full-length novel.
Guard Wolf (Shifter Agents # 2) by Lauren Esker. Avery is a lone werewolf without a pack; Nicole is a social worker trying to put her life back together. When he shows up with a box of orphaned werewolf puppies, and danger in pursuit, can two lonely people find the family they've been missing in each other? A full-length novel.
Dragon’s Luck (Shifter Agents # 3) by Lauren Esker. Gecko shifter and infiltration expert Jen Cho teams up with sexy dragon-shifter gambler "Lucky" Lucado to win a high-stakes poker game. Now they're trapped on a cruise ship full of mobsters, mysterious enemy agents, and evil dragons! A full-length novel.
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Keep reading for a special sneak preview!
If you love Zoe Chant...
You’ll also love Lia Silver!
Keep reading for a preview of Lia’s full-length paranormal romance, Prisoner (Werewolf Marines.) Werewolf Marine DJ Torres is a born rebel. Genetically engineered assassin Echo was created to be a weapon. When DJ is captured by the agency that made Echo, the two misfits find that they fit together perfectly.
Prisoner
(Werewolf Marines)
Chapter One
DJ
We’re Like Brothers
DJ Torres had broken a lot of rules in his life. But he’d never expected to break the most important rule of all, the rule he’d had drummed into his head since he was a little kid (and little pup), particularly since it was one of the few rules that he actually agreed with: “Never turn anyone into a werewolf.”
It went on, at least the way DJ’s pack elders had taught it to him, “Not even if they’re your best friend. Especially not if they’re your best friend. Not even if they’re dying and it’s the only way to save their life. Especially not if they’re dying and it’s the only way to save their life. They’ll end up wishing you’d let them die. And so will you.”
DJ looked down at Roy Farrell, his best friend, whose life he’d saved by turning him into a werewolf, and hoped to hell they weren’t both going to end up wishing DJ had let him die.
The blazing Afghanistan sunlight glared off the white sand, making DJ’s eyes water. Though they were shaded by a pair of boulders, the radiant heat made sweat trickle down his bare back.
The helicopter had mostly stopped burning, but it still sent up a plume of oily black smoke. On the bright side, it was a signal for medevac and rescue. On the dark side, it was also a signal for anyone in the vicinity who might want to kill or capture some Marines. DJ briefly released Roy’s hand to pat his M-16 and Roy’s SAW, just to reassure himself that he could snatch up either weapon in an instant.
The air was so bone-dry and still that DJ couldn’t even smell the smoke. If he’d been a wolf, he could have. If he’d been a wolf, he could have detected not only the smoke, but also the twisted metal of the wrecked helo, the crushed weeds beneath them, and Roy’s natural scent, a blend of charcoal, leather, damp earth, and dark chocolate.
As a man, all DJ could smell was Roy’s blood. It had gotten all over him when he’d hoisted Roy over his shoulders and carried him from the helo. He could feel it drying in the sun, sticking his hair together in clumps and pulling at his skin.
Despite the heat and the shirt DJ had wrapped around him, Roy was shivering. DJ wondered if he should move Roy out of the shade, or if that would just give him a sunburn on top of the worst shrapnel wounds DJ had ever seen anyone take and not immediately drop dead.
Roy closed his eyes. His breath went out in a sticky-sounding exhale, leaving more blood on his lips. He didn’t breathe in again.
DJ’s heart lurched at the thought that after everything he’d done, Roy would die anyway, right now in his arms.
“Hey!” When that didn’t get a response or an inhale, DJ slapped his cheek. “Wake up!”
Roy dragged in a labored breath, his eyes fluttering half-open. “I’m listening.”
Which was another bad fucking sign, because DJ hadn’t been talking. He’d talked so much in the last hour or however long it had been since their helicopter had been shot down, trying to keep Roy awake and tell him everything he needed to know about being a werewolf, that he’d had to stop for fear of losing his voice.
“What are you listening to?” DJ cleared his throat, but he still sounded like a rusty door when he spoke again. “What did I just tell you?”
“Uh...” Roy’s gaze drifted into the distance. “Can’t remember. Sorry. I’m a little... A little spacy.”
Sorry, I’m a little spacy.
Meaning, I’m in shock and bleeding inside and the only thing keeping me alive is my werewolf healing and I’ve probably got another half-hour or so before even that won’t cut it any more.
And that was classic Roy. After all the time they’d spent together on their fire team, with Roy carrying the SAW and DJ carrying the SAW’s extra ammunition, they’d gotten to be each other’s universal translators.
I’m fine, DJ, stop bothering me.
Meaning, I haven’t slept in three days and I’m about to pass out, but don’t worry, I can hold out till we get back to the base.
I’ve got dust in my eyes, Roy, can you read this for me?
Meaning, I’ll lose my mind if I have to spend five minutes trying to read three words, and there’s guys around who don’t already know about me, and if they call me stupid I just might snap and punch them out and get another demerit.
“It’s okay, Roy.” DJ squeezed his hands. “Just hang on, all right? You can’t go to sleep till medevac gets here. Don’t close your eyes.”
Roy nodded, his face tightening like even that tiny movement required a huge effort. “I felt better as a wolf. Should I change again?”
DJ thought about it, remembering Roy’s gigantic wolf sprawled panting on the sand, his thick white fur sodden with blood. “No. I don’t think it would help enough to be worth it. You can only shift while you’re conscious. If you turn into a wolf and then pass out, you won’t be able to change back.”
Roy actually managed to smile, which was more than DJ could do. “You could pester medevac into taking a wolf.”
“Where the fuck is medevac?” DJ muttered, scanning the sky for the millionth time. It was a perfect, cloudless, brilliant blue, and absolutely empty.
Roy followed his gaze. Softly, he said, “It’s a beautiful day.”
DJ bit his lip and concentrated on the sharp pain until the prickling in his eyes subsided. “Do you remember any of what I told you about being a werewolf?”
Roy seemed to try hard to recall. Finally, he said, “My scent name is Guinness.”
DJ surprised himself by laughing. Of all the useless, random things to stick in his mind! “Do you remember anything other than scent names?”
“They’re an important cultural tradition.”
DJ felt his eyebrows go up. “Now you’re just fucking with me.”
Roy didn’t smile again— he probably didn’t have the energy— but he admitted, “Yeah. That really is all I remember, though. Your scent name is Lechon. It means...” His voice trailed off, and he gave the smallest of shrugs.
DJ tried not to let his d
ismay show. Roy was drifting off again; he knew what lechon was.
“It’s Filipino roast pork,” DJ reminded him. “You had it last Christmas. Remember?”
Roy and nine other Marines who didn’t have relatives nearby had come over to spend Christmas with DJ’s family. While the guys sat around drinking beer and DJ’s parents oversaw the roasting of the hog, the little kids formed a posse and moved in on Roy.
Their appointed leader said in awestruck tones, “You’re so tall. Like a giant!”
“Only compared to DJ,” Roy had remarked.
But agreeing at all was his downfall; next thing Roy knew, he was running around and around the backyard while the kids took turns riding on his shoulders, yelling stuff like, “Giddy-up, Midnight!” and “Activate the mecha-laser, Death Falcon!” and “Run, Hagrid! We’re late for the Quidditch match!”
“Remember?” DJ repeated, when Roy didn’t reply. “Christmas in San Diego? Pig on a spit? Getting commandeered to play horsie by a gang of sugar-crazed five-year-olds?”
Roy made a non-committal noise that DJ interpreted as, “Not really, but I’ll say anything if it’ll make you shut up and let me sleep.”
“Okay!” DJ spoke loudly, before Roy could slip into unconsciousness. “I’ll tell you everything again. Pay attention now.”
“I am,” Roy said, not very convincingly.
For the fourth time, DJ began, “I’m a born wolf. My pack is my family. You’re a made wolf, and you need a pack. If you don’t remember anything else, you have to remember that. I’ll call my family and tell them I bit you and they need to adopt you into their pack, but you have to let them do it. If you don’t bond with a pack, you’ll lose your mind or commit suicide. You need a pack.”
“Can’t you be my pack?” As Roy spoke, DJ felt him instinctively reaching out with his latent pack sense, trying to create a bond.
Startled, DJ didn’t immediately raise his mental shields. There was no true bond yet, so the feelings he got from Roy were distant, something he understood rather than felt himself. He sensed Roy’s determination to hold on, the steely willpower that had kept him going this long, his trust in DJ, his fear of dying, and his relief that at least he wouldn’t die alone.
But most of what DJ perceived was physical sensation: an unbearable sense of drowning and a desperate hunger for air, tearing agony in his chest, overwhelming exhaustion and the near-irresistible desire to close his eyes and sleep, the coppery taste of the blood welling up into his mouth, and a bone-deep chill. And the one feeling that Roy clung to, the only one that wasn’t terrible and frightening, which was the warmth of DJ’s arms holding him.
DJ again bit down on his lip as he raised his shields, cutting Roy off. Roy flinched as if it had physically hurt him, though it couldn’t have. But Roy had to have sensed DJ, as DJ had sensed Roy, and it must have felt as if he was pushed away and locked out.
DJ was probably doing the right thing, but he felt incredibly guilty. Not to mention scared that it was actually the wrong thing, and frustrated and angry at himself that he couldn’t figure it out for sure. And that summed up this entire fucking nightmare of a deployment.
“I can’t now,” DJ said. “We’ll be in a pack together later.”
“My brother,” Roy mumbled.
“Yeah, we’ll be like brothers.”
Roy shook his head, then spoke more clearly. “You’re already my brother. We’re brother Marines. So why not now?”
DJ tried to explain it in simple terms, hoping Roy was with it enough to understand. “Because we can’t stay together after this. You’ll be sent to a hospital, and I’ve got to stay with our unit. If we bonded as a pack and then we were cut off from each other, it would hurt you. It might even kill you. Born wolves can be separated from their pack for a long time, obviously, but made wolves can’t.”
DJ hesitated, eyeing Roy to see if he’d put two and two together: if he couldn’t leave his pack and his pack was DJ’s family, ten thousand miles away in San Diego, that would be the end of his career as a Marine.
They’ll end up wishing you’d let them die. The remembered voice came to DJ so vividly that it was almost as if his grandmother had whispered in his ear.
He might have to leave anyway, because of his wounds, DJ argued with the memory of Grandma Steel. And none of the other stuff you warned me about happened. He has the pack sense, so he won’t be a lone wolf who can’t bond and lose his mind from loneliness. If he doesn’t have a power, that’s no big deal. And if he has one that he can’t control, it’s obviously no big deal either or I’d have noticed by now.
With an inner shudder, DJ recalled Grandma Steel’s most horrifying story: the made wolf who couldn’t control his power to create fire, and burned himself to death.
“You’re going to be okay, Roy,” DJ said, trying to convince himself as much as Roy. “Just stay with—”
“I’m sorry, DJ,” Roy said abruptly. “I’m blacking out.”
A second passed, and nothing happened. Then his eyes rolled back, his head tipped to the side, and his entire body went limp.
“Shit!” DJ tried to wake him up again, yelling at and even slapping him, but nothing worked. Roy lay across his lap, over two hundred pounds of dead weight, his face ashen. Red bubbles formed and broke at the corners of his lips. DJ told himself that at least that meant he was still breathing.
Then the most welcome sound DJ had ever heard filled the air, the steady whump-whump-whump of helicopter blades. As the medevac helo landed, while the Blackhawks that escorted it hovered above, such an intense wave of relief washed over him that he felt like he might black out too.
The Navy hospital corpsmen ran up. Half of them started examining Roy, while the others, to DJ’s confusion, started prodding at him.
“Where are you hit?” one of them demanded.
“I scraped my leg. And I cut my arm. But it’s not serious, don’t bother with me.”
A corpsman wiped a pad over DJ’s bare chest. When the gauze immediately turned red, DJ realized what the problem was.
“It’s his blood,” DJ explained. “I carried him out of the helo.”
The corpsman glanced at DJ, then at Roy, who looked bigger than ever sprawled out on the ground. “You’re strong.”
“I’m a fucking Marine,” DJ said, exasperated at himself for distracting the man when Roy was bleeding to death. “Just get him out of here, will you?”
To his relief, they were already loading Roy on to a stretcher.
DJ went with them, answering questions while leaving out the critical “I’m secretly a super-strong werewolf and I bit my buddy to give him werewolf healing powers” part: “Maybe a surface-to-air missile, but I’m really not sure;” “Yes, we were the only survivors;” “No, no one’s fired on us here;” “No, we landed okay, he was wounded when the helo was hit;” “Oh, right, I forgot about his shoulder— yeah, that was from the crash, a piece of jagged metal wrapped around it;” “No, actually, he was conscious up until about fifteen minutes ago.”
That last one got him some surprised stares, which, to his relief, seemed to distract them from the bite wounds on Roy’s shoulder.
As he approached the helo, DJ let himself believe that everything would be all right. Roy would never do another tour of duty, but probably that was just as well. DJ would finish out his, and then he’d have to decide whether or not he wanted to re-enlist.
He was leaning toward not. More and more, he’d gotten tempted by the idea of spending time with his pack, of performing in clubs, of hunting in the mountains and the desert, of riding his Harley, and of doing it all without ever having to worry about getting blown up or shot or stress-injured, or having his friends get blown up or shot or stress-injured.
Maybe then he could meet a girl for more than a one-night stand. Being a Marine was a double-edged sword: he never had trouble finding a woman for a weekend fling, but he never found anyone he could take home and introduce to his family, either. Werewolf women sure as he
ll didn’t want a man who was never around, civilian women mostly didn’t either, and military women were never around themselves.
DJ thought about the kind of woman he’d want. After this fucking horrible deployment, what he wanted most was someone relaxing. Someone sweet and gentle and accepting and calm. Maybe a nurse or a doctor or a physical therapist: a caretaking type, but one who’d seen enough herself that his war stories wouldn’t shock her and revealing that he was a werewolf, if she wasn’t one herself, wouldn’t send her running for the hills. His family would approve of a medical professional, and considering how much DJ had done to make them tear their fur out, it would be nice if he could do something they wouldn’t hate.
She should be playful, too. Social. Energetic, or he’d drive her nuts. Uninhibited. They’d get off work and meet at a club, and he’d DJ and she’d dance, and then they’d go home together and have wild sex all night.
As he scrambled into the helo, an image solidified in his mind of the life he could have when he got back home. He’d find a job in private security or law enforcement, he’d get to see his pack all the time, he and Roy could hang out all the time too since Roy would be in his pack, Roy would get better, DJ’s pack would finally like what he was doing with his life, and DJ would find that gentle, sweet, playful, sexy, pack-approved woman of his dreams.
That pleasant daydream lasted exactly as long as it took for the helo to take off and for Roy to start gasping like he was choking to death.
The hospital corpsmen shoved DJ aside so they could cluster even closer around Roy.
“Tension pneumothorax,” one of the corpsmen said. “Give me the fourteen-gauge needle.”
As the corpsman drove the huge needle into his chest, Roy’s eyes opened.
“It’s all right,” DJ called out, but he could see that Roy was in no condition to hear or understand. He started struggling wildly, but was pinned by the straps around the stretcher.
Roy abruptly stopped fighting, his blood-smeared face taut with rage and fear. All his muscles tensed at once.
Oh, shit, DJ thought.