BOX SET: Shifter 4-Pack Vol 2 (Wolf Shifter, Dragon Shifter, Mafia, Billionaire, BBW, Alpha) (Werewolf Weredragon Paranormal Fantasy Romance Collection)

by Candace Ayers

  It was so green. The Rockies were lovely this time of year, early summer, when life came roaring back in rivers and new things flourished. Elie wondered if she was one of those new things as she joggled open the car door; it creaked so loudly, Grandma Earline in the city cemetery twelve blocks away probably grimaced.

  There was a minor vortex of motion in the thick bushes to the left of the neat little house, and Elie nearly had an MI when a big running form on four legs came shooting like a ski-ball toward her car.

  “Jasper!” she laughed. The big German shep was gyrating with delight; it turns out, dogs really don’t ever forget. He whuffed and whined, licking her hands and trying to get his tongue to her face. Elie crouched down and hugged him, burying her face in his fur. His muzzle had grown speckled and gray; guiltily, she wondered what he thought of her long absence.

  “Oh, Elie! I thought I heard a car.”

  She looked up, and her heart twisted.

  “Hi, Mom,” Elie stood up and met her mother halfway across the lawn. They hugged. Unlike Hemford’s stagnation, unlike Jasper’s gray whiskers… Elie felt no change, and it felt right.

  Alison Barner beamed at her daughter; Elie always hoped she’d look like her mother, when the time came. Strong and sprightly, and a little taller than Elie herself, Alison was in fine health. She was dressed in casual denim and a button-front shirt with the sleeves rolled up; she’d tried to brush them off, but bits of dirt still clung here and there where she’d clearly been digging in the garden. Nothing could have been lovelier. Even the lines of sliver picked out in her dark hair were glorious, under the hail of spring sunlight.

  “Well, let’s get you inside.” Alison—Alie—opened the back door of the Outback and helped her daughter truck in her big duffel bag. Elie let her, picking up her smaller bag and her school bag. If there was one thing Elie and Alison shared in eerie communion, it was a need to feel capable. A need to feel needed.

  “How’s school?”

  Elie gulped.

  “I passed my finals,” Elie replied. Of course she did. She knew how the school rituals went, how to pass the tests. Most of her classmates were nineteen-year-olds. She was pushing thirty.

  “When do you pick classes for next semester?” Alison was asking these questions cheerfully over her shoulder as she and Elie eased through the too-narrow entry hall. Her parents had bantered about widening the entry into a full foyer for as long as Elie could remember—so far, it was still just barely three feet across, a perpetual reminder to eat your greens and sometimes skip dessert.

  “I’d be a returning student, so I can pick them out in a couple weeks.”

  To this, Elie’s mother didn’t respond. It wasn’t accidental; a deaf man could have heard the falter in her suddenly-thin voice. But she didn’t push. That was something everyone around Elie, everyone who stayed around Elie, soon learned.

  “When’s Dad coming home?” Elie changed the subject without grace and without excuse, but her mother let it happen. As she walked the duffel bag up the stairs in the back of the kitchen, she called back down.

  “He’s taking Friday off so we can go out together, so he thought he’d stay a little later today. He’s loving the foreman work; it’s been getting tough, the last few years, working the trucks. This is much easier on his knee.”

  Elie glanced up at the wall over the kitchen table; there hung a pictured history of the Barner family, including a military portrait of her father. It was taken when he retired from the Air Force; his knee had been smashed—a stupid industrial accident in the carrier—and he’d been honorably discharged. The Force would send him a monthly check until the day he died, but Brent Barner wasn’t fond of early retirement and had leapt into the logging mill, which welcomed him as a fellow Hemford-ite and mountain son.

  Logging. That’s what everyone in Hemford did. Even Elie had considered it, before she ran away to France with her high school girlfriends.

  Her mother came back down the stairs. “I made up the bed in your old room. Well… it’s a guest room, now, but I hope you’ll still feel like home.”

  Elie smiled. It already felt like home.

  Jasper wagged his tail loudly against the doorframe and sat practically on her feet, gazing up at her admiringly.

  The silence spun outward like a wild spool of thread, and Elie twisted her lips.

  “How long were you thinking of staying?” Alison asked finally.

  The air became oppressive. Such an innocent, justified question, but it shot a jolt of adrenaline through Elie.

  “I don’t know,” she shrugged. Why did it sound so defensive?

  “You can stay as long as you like,” Alison replied putting her hands on her hips. “We aren’t going to make you sign a lease.”

  “I know that,” Elie snapped irritably. Why did it sound so defensive!

  Alison didn’t reply. She walked across the kitchen to the fridge and pulled out a pitcher of lemonade.

  “Out comes the lemonade,” Elie muttered.

  “Elinor Barner,” Alison’s voice was warning and command in one, even all these years later. “It was a simple question.”

  It was a simple question, one that Elie had no idea how to answer. Twenty-eight years old, and she didn’t know how to admit that she still didn’t know—anything. She’d run to France because she didn’t know. She’d tried New York because she didn’t know. She’d tried University of Denver because she didn’t know. And with thirty looming near, the feeling that she didn’t know was strangling.

  “I’m going to go out for a walk.” Elie turned on her heel and let herself out. Jasper didn’t follow; he just hung his head and looked at Alison as if to ask, ‘How long this time?’

  Chapter Two

  Ringer’s Bar was about the only kind of bar that you had any hope of finding in middle America in a town whose population couldn’t even fill Disney World. It was the town bar. As in, the only bar in the town. Elie walked into it knowing what she would find, and happy to find it: dark anonymity, muffled under the sound of a stereo bellowing Hank Jr. and Willy Nelson.

  The multitude of likely-looking single men was a little off-putting. She’d just as soon be alone, but one bar in town made for slim options.

  The narrow panel-top bar itself was probably the safest harbor; she took an isolated corner stool and slipped her dusty jacket over the back. Dusty? It was dusty, wasn’t it? She batted some of it off, but it hardly bothered her. Dusty felt… safe. Like home.

  “Just a Coors, thanks,” she waved to the bartender, an ashen old biker-babe who’d lost track of the years that had flown by- the years since she could wear a tank top without a bra. But she smiled and waved back and reached for the cooler.

  As she waited, Elie turned her mother’s question over in her mind. From a distance, it didn’t seem so threatening. She wasn’t any closer to an answer, but at least it wasn’t choking her.

  Truthfully, Elie was thinking about staying in Hemford for longer than a few weeks. Maybe longer than a few months. Maybe she wasn’t going back to Denver.

  She accepted her Coors with a sigh.

  “Haven’t seen you around here.”

  “Wish that had continued,” she answered, taking a swig.

  She turned to look at the intruder on her private brooding. Now, he wasn’t too bad; tall and handsome, with a molded jaw and striking eyes. She’d seen that look in the eyes of men time and time again, and she propped her chin on her elbow.

  Elie had chosen a seat that was awkwardly placed for someone to try and shimmy closer, but try he did. In the dim light, his hair might have been sandy brown—but then, it might also have been blonde. Nothing like a dimly lit smoky bar to alter perception. There was no mistaking his slim legs in those tight jeans, or the soft leather of his jacket.

  “Are you new in town?” he asked. He made himself comfortable in the seat next to hers. Elie laughed.

  “Are you? I’ve never seen you before.”

  He shrugged. “A little
. So you’ve been to Hemford before?” He waved at the bartender; she nodded and reached for a glass.

  “I was born here.” Elie sipped off her beer and admired his profile. He had nice shoulders, and certainly a face worth taking a second look at. Plus, he didn’t look like a mill-worker, so it was unlikely he’d inadvertently blab to her father at work tomorrow.

  He stuck out a hand. “I’m Bryan.”

  “Elie.” She took his hand and tried to shake it, but he pulled it to his lips and kissed it in a gallant gesture that seemed fully out of place and time. She laughed again; he was entertaining, at least. He probably lived in a mobile home, but that wasn’t a terrible thing in Hemford.

  They passed a half hour, then another hour. Elie wasn’t about to get sloshed hanging out with a total stranger. At least, she hadn’t planned to, but having this total stranger take off his jacket so he could show her the tattoo on his shoulder hadn’t been part of the plan, either. Elie made it through two and a half Coors bottles before she realized the turn of her stomach wasn’t the butterflies of infatuation. Bleh—she’d never been able to drink more than a couple.

  “Hey, I don’t live far from here.”

  Here it was. Elie grinned at him knowingly.

  “Did you need a ride?” she teased.

  “Of a sort.” He smiled half a smile and his hand found her thigh. “Not the kind that needs a car, though. Actually, I thought you might want a ride—my bike’s out front.”

  The hand on her thigh pressed upward an inch, then another. He was leaning quite close now, and he smelled like Axe and dust. Elie could already see her lips on his ear, his jaw, his neck…

  She leaned over and kissed his cheek. “You know, I think I could use one.”

  It was twilight outside; that was early mountain sunset for you. It wouldn’t get truly dark for another couple hours. Elie and Bryan, arm-in-arm, crossed the dirt parking lot to where his motorcycle sat waiting. Elie could count the things she knew about motorcycles on one hand, but she knew a Harley when she saw one. It sat low to the ground with a classy black and orange tank, and Bryan climbed on first.

  It had been years since Elie had ridden a motorcycle, but riding passenger was not difficult to figure out. She swung a leg over the seat and snugged comfortably against Bryan’s back. He was just as slim and hard as his jeans suggested, and she hoped he didn’t live too far away.

  “Hey! Mosley!”

  Bryan froze and turned, reluctantly, towards the shout.

  Elie looked, too. Approaching the bike were two men, and in the half-light it was a minute before she recognized the flat-brimmed hats and the shine of badges at their waists. Sheriff’s department.

  “Uh… how can I help you boys tonight?”

  “Don’t give us that ‘boys’ song and dance, Mosley.” One was quite old, and one was catching up, and the elder threw a droll and unimpressed glare over Bryan’s windshield. “We have some questions for you. Why don’t you come along with us, now.”

  It wasn’t a question; Elie sat there awkwardly, thinking about a good way to excuse herself. A second ago, she’d been gleefully planning an evening with a hot man on a bike. Things were starting to look like the opening minutes on an episode of Cops.

  “Is there a problem?”

  Uh-oh. Elie knew a dodging question when she heard it—it takes a thief to know one, and all that.

  “There ain’t no reason to get into details here in front of your lady, we just need you to come with us to the station, Mosley,” the younger deputy added in amiably. His thumbs were hooked casually in his belt; Elie tried to find their squad car, but then she remembered this wasn’t Denver. Their squad car was a pickup with a light rack rigged up on top and the Sheriff’s department seal decal on each door.

  Even getting shaken down by the cops was a quaint experience here.

  Quaint, but not the least bit attractive. Elie stepped off the bike. “I’ll catch you later,” she waved as she walked away. Bryan looked like he wanted to argue, but the deputies didn’t, so Elie was left in peace to stride off into the pre-darkness.

  She was shaking a little; maybe it was colder than she’d thought it would be. She hugged her jacket closer and walked on, away from the main street, away from the lights. There were a good many residential neighborhoods here, and her parents’ was perhaps a mile off. It wasn’t far at all to walk, even in the dark.

  Chapter Three

  A friendly ghost moon was turning overhead, growing fuller. Elie loved this time of year. It smelled fresh and new and clean, and if she knew Colorado weather there would be rain in the next few days, even though the purple sky was, at present, clear. She’d taken a turn through a dim section of road that wended through a break in the houses. Silhouetted forest surrounded her.

  Bryan Mosley, eh. She huffed, not sure if she was annoyed or relieved. She recognized that name, now. He was Amanda Mosley’s little brother, a few years younger than Elie herself. New in town? No, he wasn’t, not even a little. Unless he’d left, as she had, and recently returned.

  That was more likely. Elie didn’t remember him owning a motorcycle back then, but he had only been a freshman when she skipped town for an extended post-grad year. People made all sorts of crazy changes in a decade.

  “His lady,” Elie muttered.

  Something rustled to her left.

  Elie looked, but kept walking. It was probably a deer or a rabbit or something. Or a dog. Or a—

  Something big and shaggy stood up between the trees.

  “Oh holy Jesus,” Elie breathed.

  A bear?! This close to town? Goddamned kids throwing their trash out windows—bears raiding trash cans right in people’s yards had never been a problem when Elie was in high school. She backed further down the road; it was just sitting there, watching her.

  “Don’t mind me,” she murmured as she went. “Just a human out for a stroll. Don’t let me interrupt your evening. Thaaaat’s right, just sit right there, I’ll be out of your fur in a minute or two. Just gonna keeeeep walking this way…”

  She could see its rounded ears flopping about. If she wasn’t mistaken, its head actually tilted a little, as if curious.

  It was big, with big, hunched shoulders. Oh Jesus, Joseph and Mary, it was a grizzly, for sure. What did they say? Try to outrun a grizzly by running downhill? Hadn’t she read somewhere that they could run 50 miles an hour? Wouldn’t they just run faster downhill?

  “Nice bear,” Elie babbled. It hadn’t moved yet, and she was putting some respectable distance between them. “Nice bear… happy bear… calm bear… bear that doesn’t like to eat humans…”

  There was a sharp whuff sound and the bear’s silhouetted head twitched. It was so like one of Jasper’s snorts that Elie giggled a little, or perhaps that was merely hysteria.

  Following the whuff was a much less familiar sound, as the bear opened its maw and bellowed a short warning.

  “N-Nice bear.” Elie’s voice had diminished to a flickering squeak. They said don’t run from a bear. You can’t outrun a bear. But there was a house just down the road, the first in a line of cheery-lit homes that lined the street between here and the Barner’s. The bear hadn’t even gotten off its haunches, yet.

  She could make it.

  Elie broke into a sprint. She’d never been much of a runner, a girl her size and shape had too much bounce and jiggle to run. Still, something primal and all-encompassing came rushing to the surface when the need to not die arose, and it pushed strength, surely more than she possessed naturally, into her legs, into her heart, into her lungs that were hissing air in and out. The house ran up the meet her in what seemed like no time.

  “Help!” she threw herself at the door frantically. “Bear! There’s a bear! Please!”

  The house’s occupants opened their doors, baffled but helpful, an older couple whose evening TV time had been interrupted. The man cradled a shotgun as he peered out beyond the safe halo of his front porch. He was dressed like a country grandp
a, his flannel shirt tucked into jeans that nearly reached his breastbone. His blustering wife in her frilly nightdress (she’d obviously expected an early evening) pulled Elie inside.

  The bear hadn’t tried to give chase, but her geriatric saviors offered to drive Elie the rest of the way home. She accepted happily.

  Chapter Four

  Sunlight poured into Elie’s eyes. She pulled the quilt up, grumbling.

  This wasn’t her bed back in her Denver apartment. Where was she? She groped around for whoever she’d followed home.

  Wait.

  Elie sat up; she was in her old room in her parent’s house, although it didn’t look the way it had when she lived here. She’d sort of wondered, over the years, what her parents’ life might have looked like if she hadn’t existed, if her younger brother Jim had been their only one. Jim had followed his father into the Air Force; he was somewhere in South Asia, now.

  This room that had been hers was sunny and open. The thick curtains she’d liked were replaced with lacy white ones, which were pretty and feminine but did little to block out the sun from the eyes of late-sleepers. The wood bed frame was the same, and the desk and bookshelves. But everything was pleasant white and blue, now.

  Elie got out of bed and stretched for the ceiling. Her ripped Avenged Sevenfold concert t-shirt looked out of place.

  Scratching her scalp (the air was so dry up here!) and ruffling her already-dismal brown hair, Elie shuffled towards the window. There was the yard. There was the series of flower beds, just like always. And the birch trees—

  Elie opened the window. Frowning, she reached out and plucked an envelope from the branches that reached towards her sill. It had her name on it.