Contents
Gabby
DEDICATION
Legal
Chapter 1 Gabriella
Chapter 2 Trey
Chapter 3 Gabriella
Chapter 4 Trey
Chapter 5 Gabriella
Chapter 6 Trey
Chapter 7 Gabriella
Chapter 8 Trey
Chapter 9 Gabriella
Chapter 10 Trey
Chapter 11 Gabriella
Chapter 12 Trey
Chapter 13 Gabriella
Chapter 14 Trey
Chapter 15 Gabriella
Chapter 16 Trey
Chapter 17 Gabriella
Chapter 18 Trey
Chapter 19 Gabriella
Chapter 20 Trey
Chapter 21 Gabriella
Chapter 22 Trey
Chapter 23 Gabriella
Chapter 24 Trey
Chapter 25 Gabriella
Chapter 26 Jules
Chapter 27 Gabriella
Chapter 28 Trey
Epilogue
Author notes
Gabby
By
Sherry Foster
DEDICATION
To the family I adore,
my friends who keep me sane,
and the readers who love to read.
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This book is a work of fiction.
All of the characters, organizations, events, and places
portrayed in this novel are products of the
author's over active imagination.
Copyright © 2018 Sherry Foster
DAS Publishing
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any form or by any means without
express written permission from the author.
Chapter One
Gabriella
I wasn’t sure where to go from here. I had money. They say money can’t buy you happiness. You know what else it can’t buy? Family. It has been years since I saw my sister. I can feel her, twins often can feel each other. I just can’t find her. I have been running for years. Never fast or far enough to escape the ones chasing me. I just wish I knew why they were chasing me.
I can’t ask my parents. They died in a car crash when Trina and I were small. We had Nanny and Uncle Josh growing up. They were a couple and they loved us as though we were their own children. We never got to go to school. We were never allowed to leave the property. My parents said it was too dangerous. Nanny and Josh told us we could not leave, it was what our parents wanted. The only real instructions my parents left. At least the estate was massive, but we were lonely. We were home schooled, graduated by the time we were sixteen. I enrolled in the local college after I graduated. I didn’t tell a soul except Trina. One day, one day, was all it took for me to find out what my parents meant by too dangerous.
I remember sneaking out of the house for my first day of school. I was so scared and yet so excited to finally be doing something I wanted to do. I had a map. Town was further than I realized though. But that was ok, I was always a good runner and I loved to run. I had left extra early so I could get to the small college in time for my first class. It was almost ten miles to the nearest town.
I never made it home that day. I hid that night. The next day, when I did sneak back home, my home had been ransacked, my sister, Nanny and Josh all gone. I never found a trace of where they went. Fortunately for me my parents left us a sizable trust fund. I don’t know if the people chasing me have a way of watching the accounts or if they are just that good. For all I know I could just be that bad.
I want to go home. I want to see my sister. I want to know why I am being chased. I haven’t seen my pursuers in a couple of months. But I remember the first day I saw them. I had just gotten to the junior college. Wide eyed with excitement I was trying to take in all the sights. And the people, they smelled so strange. I was use to the fresh outdoor smell of Nanny and my sister and Josh too. I did not know people could smell so terrible.
Walking to my first class I had suddenly been surrounded by a group of boys. They crowded me and pushed me taking turns smelling of me. I swear a couple of them were slobbering on me. But it was what they said that scared me the most. The started talking about me smelling too young but one of them said they could lock me up and keep me till I turned twenty-one. I took off running when they reached for me. I haven’t looked back.
I have tried to find out how they could tell I was young by the way I smelled. My sister smells the same as I do, and Nanny smelled almost the same. They had the same earthy smell we had, except, they smelled a little of decaying leaves, not unpleasant, just rather earthy. Nanny doesn’t have that same smell, she just smells of the outdoors, a little stronger than Trina and I but basically the same smell. Josh did not smell that way either, except a tiny bit. His smell was more of a fresh tree smell.
It was hard the first couple of years. I lived on the street some. Even when you are rich, if you are too young you can’t get a place to stay. I fell in with some good people over the years, and some bad ones. The good ones were as much help as the bad. The good people gave me places to stay, helped me learn how to live alone. The bad ones taught me to cheat the system. I have a fake id now. Even though I just turned twenty a few months ago my id claims I am twenty-five. I have have had it three years, I have changed over those three years. I figure I need to get a new id soon.
Using the money I had access to and my old ID, I managed to get enough money to start over with my new id. It was a slow process though. Take money out here and there and save it up till finally I could open accounts in my new name.
When I had gone back to my house that fateful day, and found Nanny, Josh and Trina gone I grabbed the bag Nanny kept packed for me. She told us she was in a house fire when she was young. She claimed she lost everything so she made us a go bag. Each of us had our own go bag. Every time Trina and I hit a growth spurt and needed new clothes we got to order extra clothes to go in the go bag.
We also use to practice a few times a year running away from the house with our go bags. I don’t think Nanny was in a house fire anymore. I remember asking one time why we had to grab the bag and run. Uncle Josh told us because sometimes houses exploded. We needed to be fast about grabbing our bag and getting out of the nearest window or door and just running until we could not see the house. We had a certain place we were to run to in case we got separated.
I never really paid attention to the go bag as far as what was in it. I knew each bag contained important papers for each of us. I found out my bag contained my birth certificate, a significant amount of cash, and bank cards along with some other paperwork concerning bank accounts and other identification. Having all that did me no good in the beginning. Like I said, if you are too young you can’t do anything. Lugging around a big duffel bag just draws attention. I don’t know why the duffel bag was not riffled through, maybe because it was under the bed. I am just glad it was there when I grabbed for it.
When I grabbed my go bag all I could think of was running to the spot Nanny and Josh taught us. It was almost instinct by that time. When your hand yanks the handle of the go bag from under the edge of the bed you run. So I did. I almost got caught though. Just before I reached the spot I heard voices and smelled the decaying leaves smell from the boys the day before. All I heard as I turned to run another way was someone yelling “they came this way, sprea
d out and find them.”
I think they were making too much noise to hear me. But they found me by the next night hiding near a motel. Or, at least, they almost found me. I couldn’t get a room so I was hiding near a dumpster, crying when I saw one of them come around the corner of the motel. He had his nose up in the air sniffing. Maybe he could smell me, but since I was hiding by a dumpster I think maybe he couldn’t. When a cab rolled up to the corner I jumped in and told the guy my daddy was gonna be so mad at him for being late.
The cab driver was surprised I think he wanted to make me get out of the cab. I don’t know why he didn’t. I had him take me to the bus station. He tried to protest, wanted to see some id. I talked my way out of having to show him id. Not that it did me any good. The bus station would not sell a ticket to a sixteen year old. Plenty of money and no place to stay and no way to go anywhere. I did not have a laptop or a tablet or even a cell phone. I did not realize how those things could have helped me. By the time I found out, I was old enough to be able to use my id to get things.
The next day I found stores, and explored the area of town I was in now. I changed out my duffel bag for a backpack and reduced my clothing down to a couple of changes of clothes. I slept in an alley near dumpsters for a few days. I started getting headaches from the smell though so I had to find new places to sleep. I bought a bicycle and used it to get out of town. When I reached the next town I just kept on going. I went to bigger and bigger towns for a year or so. Some of the larger towns were where I found the most help running. Some good people still exist in the world, they are just really hard to find.
I finally got old enough to get a car and my own place to stay. But they always found me. I was still going from town to town taking money out of my accounts and stock piling it. I put thousands of miles on that first car driving into one state to with draw money then into another state to deposit the money in my new name. Never very much, too much and people start asking questions. I figure I was still making mistakes though, cause they kept finding me.
After a while I had a sizable amount in my account. I also had sizable amounts on various disposable credit cards. And a bundle of cash, just in case. I do not know how my pursuers keep finding me so easily but crime shows talk about following the money. I am guessing my pursuers must be following the money. So I am trying to make the money hard to follow. A multi-millionaire and I can’t even use most of it. My life sucks most of the time.
I headed west looking for a quiet place to hide. One with few people so I would know if a stranger came to town. That is how I ended up here, in Piney Hills. The air around me smells just like I remember Trina and Nanny smelling. I blend in here, everything smells like me. I had no idea a place like this could exist.
Chapter Two
Trey
When David walked in my office I knew something was wrong. He was rubbing the back of his neck. The only time he rubs the back of his neck is when something is wrong. I was almost hoping whatever was wrong would answer the question of why my wolf had been clawing at my insides for the last two days.
“What’s up man? You look like you have a problem? Something wrong with the marketing?”
David was the marketing manager for the pack run Packwood Robotics. I did not think a marketing problem was the reason my wolf was going crazy though.
“Hmm, no, no marketing problem. More of a pack problem. I think.”
“What kind of pack problem?” As my beta most problems went first through David before I ever knew about them. Often the problem was as simply as kids bullying kids. After six years as the Alpha of the pack the mated couples were just starting to feel secure enough to bring their females home from the boarding school. We had brought two females back from the school. So far we only had a few females in the school with the boys. Boys who had no interaction with females other than mated, older females were finding girls difficult to understand. When they got older they would find females were impossible to understand.
I had built a secure community and newcomers were not welcome. Strangers in town were checked out thoroughly and invited to leave shortly afterward. The only exception were the few couples who had found out about our pack and asked to join. Even those had to go through a probation period unless they had a female child. Couples with male children were not welcome unless they had a female also. The council had found the only couples who had females were couples with a strong alpha, a strong pack and a secure community. Seems if the female wolf did not feel secure she could not produce a female. Things had not always been this way. Females were becoming scarce in the shifter community and had been for decades.
Families with males would go to some pretty disturbing distances to secure a female for their sons. The whole reason I became the alpha of the Piney Hills pack was because David had found out his father was holding a female captive till she turned twenty-one. She was only sixteen when we found her chained in the basement of a house on the edge of our territory. She had been there since she was twelve. His father had sound proofed the basement. David was horrified and devastated. He was even more crushed when he found his mother had known of the poor child and helped his father take care of her. He did not feel he could defeat his father for the alpha position, so he came to me. That was the first time I had seen my friend broken.
“I think we have an unmated, underage female living alone in our territory.”
When I looked at him in disbelief he shook his head, “I know what you are thinking. Same thing I thought when ole Sam told me. Unmated, underage females living on their own is a wolf shifter unicorn. Ole Sam thinks he smelled one though. Actually, he is certain he smelled one.”
“Where? Was he drinking? How could he smell her this time of year?”
Old Sam was older than most of the community and someone you could rely on in a pinch. He was the one who alerted David to the fact he faintly smelled a young female on one of his runs. The old alpha had made the area around the cabin off limits to the pack. Said it was too close to human territory and he had found traps hidden in the woods in the area. The only reason he had kept the girl hidden so long was because of the ban.
From spring to fall the females smell much like the woods around us, but in the winter, when the greenery is dormant, when the sap does not run as strong, a female can be smelled for a distance. The rest of the year one would have to be almost on top of the female to smell her. Ole Sam did not take kindly to being banned from part of his running area. Older than the alpha he had ignored the ban. After all, he reasoned it was just a short piece from his place and he had never seen human trappers around. It was winter when he got close enough to the cabin to smell the young captive girl. We reasoned later he must have run by the cabin just after the Alpha had left, otherwise the smells should have stayed trapped inside. She had been in there for four years and Sam had ignored the ban for the last three of those years. He felt so bad about not smelling her for four years. The guilt ate at him sometimes to where he would start drinking trying to out drink our metabolism.
But it was middle of spring right now. Ole Sam would have had to be almost on top of the girl to smell her. “Where did he say the girl was?”
David looked toward the ceiling, then lowered his gaze to the floor. “He said in the cabin near his house.”
I growled, I could not stop myself, “The same cabin we found that poor girl in?”
“The very cabin.”
“So some young unmated female moved into the cabin we gave Sam as a reward for his part in rescuing Trisah. The cabin he was saving to give to his niece as a home when she finds a mate? She just moved in?”
“Ah, well about that. According to Sam she came by a couple of days ago and found the cabin. She backtracked in the car and asked Sam if it was empty and if he knew who owned it. He said the wind was blowing toward him and she had her windows open. He couldn’t be sure then it was only later he became certain.”
“So how exactly did he become certain later?”
“According to Sam he told the girl he was the owner of the property and then she asked if she could rent it. He told her he would have to check and see if it was livable first, told her it had been some years since anyone had lived there. Then he told her about the cabins up the road she could rent for a week until he could check the place out. Said he only told her that so he could get a sniff in her car. She gave him her cell number and left. When he went by the cabins that night, sure enough her car was there. He said he went over that car and there was no doubt what she was. He called her the next morning and told her she could move in as soon as she liked.”
“Why didn’t he come to me first?”
“He said she spooked real easy. She would not let him get close to her, had him send her the rental contract on line and used a prepaid card to pay him somehow. He figured he needed to make sure she would move in first and not take off running.”
“Sam knows how to use the Internet? I didn’t know he even had a computer. He said he doesn’t trust those new fangled contraptions. How did he get the money?”
“Well, no, I asked him about that same thing. I mean, I have heard him talk about how computers are going to destroy the world too many times. Seems his niece bought him a computer and taught him how to use it last year when she was brought to visit. She told him something about if she had to remain locked inside his cabin with guards surrounding it she was going to have something to do or she would go crazy. He said they talk every week now and he just typed in a search of rental agreements. He said she worked it out with his bank to pay him. And his bank, when he called back to talk to them, said the girl used a prepaid card. Said he tried to visit her but she won’t open the door but a crack. He said she musta thanked him half a dozen times.”
Gabby (Safe Haven Wolves Book 1) Page 1