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

by Candace Ayers

  “Don’t know. Haven’t seen him,” Amber said.

  “Did you tell Dunstan about this? Did he go in after her, too?”

  Amber bit her lip. She was horrible at this kind of thing. She looked around to make sure it was just the two of them, and whispered, “Yes! But you can’t tell anyone!”

  Jessica asked, “Why would I, and why shouldn’t I? What’s with you?”

  Amber looked at her close friend and whispered, “I don’t know. He just asked that we keep it a secret. I think he doesn’t want anyone to know he… he goes into Bowland Mountains. I think rather frequently.”

  Jessica’s mouth opened.

  “Please don’t say anything!” Amber exclaimed.

  “Calm down! I won’t. Not if you don’t want me to,” Jessica said. “But you’re keeping secrets for him? I thought he just sort of hung out behind Starlight Tavern and you two talked now and then.”

  Amber ignored this and said, “It was very important to him. You must not tell anyone.”

  Jessica exhaled and straightened up. “No, I get it. He’s cute. Well, he would be if he ever bathed and changed his clothes.”

  Amber blushed. “I’m working on that with him,” she said.

  “Do you think it’s possible he’ll find her?” Jessica asked.

  “Yes,” Amber said. “I don’t know why, but I do.”

  “I pray you’re right. Not for my sake, but for Mrs. Wallis. I can’t imagine having a family and then losing everyone.”

  “He knows what that’s like,” Amber said. “Dunstan I mean. Maybe he’s doing it for her so she doesn’t have to experience that. Even though he doesn’t go to school anymore, I think he likes Mrs. Wallis.”

  “So he doesn’t hate this town completely?” Jessica said.

  “No,” Amber said. “Not completely.”

  *

  Early morning. Amber and her folks were still at home recuperating from the night before at the pub. It had been a somber evening, but everyone drank and ate heavily.

  Amber was sitting by the front window reading an adventure story loaned to the town library from the town of Arundel. The morning was her favorite time to read. Trying to do so by candlelight always gave her a headache.

  A crowd of men ran across West High Street towards Avondale Road. Some with pitchforks, some with shovels. Her mother gasped and Amber put her book down ran out before her father could stop her.

  Down the road she saw Clint Wallis walking with Ed Gass’s arm draped over his shoulder. Clint was bleeding profusely from his right temple, but seemed to not be terribly wounded. Ed was clutching his side.

  “Get Mrs. Sadler!” someone screamed. “Now! Get Mrs. Sadler!”

  “Where’s Eli?” someone else asked. “Is Eli dead?”

  Clint Wallis collapsed to the ground, and Ed fell down after him.

  The town men picked them up and hurried with them up High Street. Mrs. Sadler’s practice was on Otley Street. Not the farthest it could be from them, but still not close.

  Amber ran back home and waited for some men to pass.

  “Is Eli back already?” she asked one of them. “Is he OK?”

  No one answered her, but one man made eye contact with her and shook his head.

  Amber’s heart sank. She only ever took him food on occasion when he came to eat at the pub. She wasn’t close to him, but it still hurt.

  “Get inside, Amber!” her father yelled from the door.

  She ran to him and said, “Dad, Eli’s dead! And Ed and Clint are hurt!”

  He grasped her shoulder and brought her in.

  Yannie was as good as dead.

  *

  The official story of what happened never really came out. All that either Clint or Ed would say is that Iris, Eli’s dog, ran off and he went after her. That’s when ‘they’ attacked.

  “How many did you see?”

  “What did they look like?”

  Neither man would answer these questions, at least not to anyone’s liking. The most they got from Ed was, “Wolves? Those weren’t any wolves I’ve ever seen.” After that he begged to be left alone and Mrs. Sadler sternly told them all to leave.

  “They were just simple questions! Why couldn’t they answer them?” Clark Atwell asked while waiting for Amber’s father to pour him a pint. “We need to know! We need to know what’s out there!”

  “Maybe we don’t want to know,” Jasper Dennel said. Jasper was the town’s main sheep-man whose face was perpetually tanned and set with deep wrinkles. He had a son who was Amber’s age. “Maybe they still want us to sleep at night.”

  “I’m not getting any sleep tonight. Don’t expect to anytime soon, neither,” Clark Atwell said as her father handed him his beer.

  “You’re not the only one!” someone answered.

  Amber walked back to the kitchen. Her mother was busy baking muffins. “Amber, dear,” her mother said when she noticed her. “Do me a favor and go to the storage shed and grab some more flour. They’re flying through these things tonight. Making ‘em as fast as I can.”

  Delighted to get outside for a moment, Amber agreed and walked out into the cool night air.

  She looked up to see the stars and was disappointed to see that a long band of grey clouds were covering up the sky. She could barely see five feet in front of her, but it didn’t matter. She could get to the shed with her eyes closed.

  “Amber!” someone whispered.

  She looked around.

  “Dunstan?” she whispered back.

  “Over here.”

  Amber found him standing behind a tree with Yannie crumpled at his feet. Amber couldn’t help herself and fell into him for a hug.

  “You’re OK!” she said.

  “Of course I am,” he said.

  “Yannie?” she asked.

  “Just asleep.”

  “Why haven’t you taken her back home?” Amber asked.

  “I can’t do that. People can’t know I’m the one who found her.”

  “Why? This is amazing! How did you do it? Eli’s dead. Ed and her father just barely made it back alive. They’re practically saying they saw monsters.”

  “Don’t worry about that right now,” Dunstan said. “I’m going to wake her up. I need you to say you just saw her walking in the woods.”

  “What? No, that’s a horrible idea.”

  “Amber, they can’t know about this. I’m already an outcast as it is. If they know, it will only get worse.” Amber began to protest again, but Dunstan said, “Please, this is important to me. All you have to say is that you heard her walking in the woods, and that she was alone. They’ll have to believe you.”

  “Will they? I don’t know,” Amber said. “I really don’t like this, Dunstan.”

  “It has to be done. There’s no other way. She can’t be left alone. I can’t just leave her somewhere and trust she’ll go back home in the morning. It has to be right now.”

  Amber stopped protesting, and so Dunstan knelt down and woke Yannie up. She jerked awake and curled further into a ball, whimpering, “No, no, no, no!”

  “Yannie,” Dunstan said delicately. “This is Amber. Do you remember her? She’s your friend. She’s going to take you back home to your mom.”

  Yannie looked up and relaxed when she saw Amber.

  “Where are you going to go?” Amber asked, pulling Yannie up.

  “I’ll be at Lovers’ Tree,” Dunstan said. “I need to sleep for two or three days. Haven’t slept since I left you the other night.”

  “Why don’t you go home to a bed?” Amber asked, worried.

  “Because I need good sleep,” he said as if it were a stupid question.

  He left while Amber scanned Yannie over. She appeared to be fine. Filthy, but fine.

  She led Yannie through the tavern’s back door holding her hand.

  “Thank you, Amber,” her mother said without looking up. She continued to kneed some dough and looked up. “Amber who is—” and screamed.

&nb
sp; Her father rushed in ready to kill whatever needed to be killed, and screamed, too. Soon everyone in the pub was trying to fit into the kitchen.

  Her father carried Yannie back home, and the entire pub followed him. Soon the whole town was awake.

  It took a few minutes of loud banging, but Amber’s father got Mrs. Wallis to the door. Her reaction was the same as her mother’s. Disbelief with the realization of the unfathomable turned manifest.

  Miracles, much like tragedies, can break a person.

  Kimberly Wallis didn’t break, but her scream suggested she saw a ghost in front of her. A ghost she would hug and feed until the remainder of her days.

  Amber only wished the true hero of the evening could be known, but Dunstan was out on the ridge, probably smoking a bit of pipe before he retired to his tree.

  *

  As years went by, Dunstan remained a bit of an outsider and seemed to be content with being one indefinitely. Amber did make a major stride in convincing him to become Dylan Hobbs’ protege. Dylan Hobbs was the town blacksmith, and had been good friends with Dunstan’s father before he died. Reluctantly, he agreed to take Dunstan in if he would come and talk to him himself.

  It took some wrangling, but Amber managed to get him to talk to Dylan, but she sensed he only did it because he would never refused her anything.

  Afterwards she thought she would get a town parade for her success, but the only fanfare she received was from her friend Jessica.

  “Holy mother, Amber! He likes you. Why aren’t you two courting yet?”

  Amber didn’t know. She often asked herself that.

  The strength she had predicted from him when she was younger did rise to the surface. At only eighteen, he was easily the tallest, most muscular person in Bruton. Amber would also say he was the most handsome, too— if he would get a haircut and bathe, of course. But one step at a time.

  The rest of the boys in town both feared and respected him. Many of them had gotten popped by him a few times in their pre-pubescent years, or, at the very least, had seen him ‘teach’ someone else a lesson, such as Russell Wilson.

  It was unspoken, but he had all of the girls’ rapt attention whenever he walked down the streets. None of them would ever admit it, but he was many of their first crushes. Just like Amber, they all daydreamed about cleaning him up and putting him in stylish clothes, helping him lead a better, more respectable life. Just like the boys, though, they were too afraid to speak to him.

  Amber strove to keep it that way. If anyone was going to be his girl, it was going to be her. Gods be damned.

  Like Dunstan, she, too, had blossomed during puberty. She wasn’t the town’s ugly girl any longer. With a beautiful face and a curvy, voluptuous body, the boys could hardly contain themselves around her.

  It was a gradual process, going from a big girl to a full figured woman, but one day it clicked into place and she knew she was on the other side of the fence. It wasn’t that the girls who used to pick on her and call her Fatty Amby weren’t having any luck with boys, but it was abundantly clear that boys actually did like Amber just the way she was. It would have been sweet if it were just the boys her age, but no. Working at her father’s pub was the worst job for her to have because all men in Bruton thought she was quite easy on the eyes. With a little drink in them, many of them told her so, and would ‘accidentally’ brush into her as she walked by.

  CHAPTER 6

  Snow crunching beneath her feet, the clear orange light of morning shined through leafless trees. The air was cold, but felt good going through her lungs. It woke her and calmed her nerves. Winter was alive and well, but Spring was on the way.

  It had been days since Dunstan had pinned her hairpin on the board outside of Town Hall, and true to form, it had been days since she’d seen Dunstan. It had been days since anyone had seen Dunstan. Not unusual, but all the same she wanted to see him.

  She reached the stone bridge and grabbed the railing as she walked across. It was icy and slippery. The stream below was frozen, but trickling movement still rattled through the ice here and there. Just two weeks ago, the Dennel boy, Colin, braved his fears and walked across it. Amber was sure it would land him another beating, but Mr. Dennel just gave him a stern talking to. There was always some child every few years who fell through. The last one, Olin Perry, was lucky. They were able to pull him and get him warm. But the one before him, Trent Hudson, was not. He got trapped underneath the ice and drowned before one of the older boys was able to pull him out.

  That was a horrible funeral it was. Amber could still remember how his mother and father wailed. Their son had been their world

  It was always boys who died doing stuff like that. Did God need them all back home, or was something wrong with them in the head? They were just so stupid a lot of the time.

  Even Dunstan was stupid. At least for her he was. How many times had he gotten her attention while doing something that could hurt him? He lived to impress her. But he was sweet, charming, and protective. She was never afraid of anything when he was around.

  Which was why when he hurt himself, it scared her to her core.

  Who had attacked him? Had Dunstan seen him again since? Why did he attack?

  Those wounds on his shoulder seemed like teeth marks. She wasn’t learned like Mrs. Sadler and old Abbie, but she felt certain now that’s what they were.

  But why would Dunstan lie to her? He had no reason to lie about what happened. So an animal attacked him. So what? The only thing that mattered was that he was alive.

  She had tried to ask Mrs. Sadler about the wounds, but she rarely saw her. The one time she did catch her at the bakery, she seemed reticent to talk about that night. The only thing she got out of her was, “A lot of bad things hide in the woods, Amber. Never go in there alone.”

  What did that mean?

  She had sewn most of her dress in late autumn, anticipating she would go with someone even if it wasn’t Dunstan. Well, that was the lie she told herself. As Spring Festival inched closer, she dug her heels in more and more, waiting. Admittedly, she felt foolish until just last week for doing so. There were plenty of other boys in town, but any boy wouldn’t do for her. It was either Dunstan or no one. And so having a half finished dress hanging beside her bed had been a constant reminder of how absent Dunstan was in her life.

  But things were about to change.

  She finished her dress the day before the festival. A pale pink, cap sleeved dress with a fitted top, and a flowing bottom that would twirl as she danced. Amber loved the way it displayed her ample bosom. Dunstan liked her for who she was, but he was also a hot blooded young man. And she liked being able to draw his eyes with her body— remind him she was a fully blossomed woman who only had eyes for him.

  The other boys in town would be watching her. Taking their eyes off of their dates and putting them onto her. Wandering eyes is what her mom called that, but she couldn’t worry about the other girls. The festival was about reminding Dunstan that they were both of age, and that it was time he officially started courting her.

  Dunstan, it’s time to come out of the woods, she thought.

  *

  Saturday. Still no sign or appearance. It wasn’t unusual for the girl not to see the boy before the dance, but she thought she might have at least seen him getting ready. Winter had bled into the ‘official’ start of spring, so there weren’t any floral corsages available. But Maggie Miller, who operated a floral shop in the spring and summer months, had some truly beautiful winter concoctions she made with holly berries, azalea leaves, and various nuts and pine cones. How she got them to stay together, Amber had no idea, but they were truly beautiful.

  The boys lined up all week to buy them.

  Everyone except, of course, Dunstan.

  Though it was cold, they were still having the dance in the Town Square. All of the parents with young sons and daughters got together on Thursday night and cleaned the area of lingering snow. Friday night they decorated it with ba
nners, bright ribbons, and hung tissue paper flowers from lamp posts and trees that lined the perimeter along the sidewalk. A lot of work, but they made it a merry affair with a barrel of wine from Bebington Fields. Thankfully the pub was closed until Sunday, so Amber and her parents got a few nights off.

  As the sun shrank, hanging torches were lit to light the way to festival. Slowly everyone walked out of their houses, all dressed up and looking spectacular, and began walking to the Town Square. Each boy meeting his girl along the way. Every married couple went and congregated in the center of the square, whereas the young couples waited in the alley between Mayor Haven’s house and the widow Elizabeth Tanner’s cottage. Drinks and snacks were set up and waiting for them before they arrived.

  Amber stood by herself. Dunstan hadn’t met her on the way. Jessica and William Haven were laughing and drinking with Rachel Afton and Caden Helliwell, the town’s other new couple who had recently started courting one another.

  Jessica and Rachel were comparing their corsages made by Maggie Miller. They were stunning, and Amber seemed to be the only one not wearing one. She put a brave face on. Damned if she was going to cry about it.

  They didn’t cost a lot of money, but Dunstan didn’t understand the importance of such things. She knew that. And he wasn’t around to remind.

  A flow of wind from above and then hands around her eyes. Amber shrieked happily and said, “Dunstan, stop you silly thing!”

  She turned around and saw that he was holding a corsage. One made from real flowers. Her jaw dropped and her eyes watered.

  “Where… how? Where did you get this? There are no flowers around here. None I imagine for many miles.”

  “Down south they’re blooming everywhere. Spring has bested winter everywhere but here. Why are you crying?” he asked.

  “I’m not, I’m just happy! Happy you’re here! I haven’t seen you since we went to Town Hall.”

  “Of course I am here. I asked you, remember? Listen, Amber, there’s something I want to tell—”

  “IT’S NOW TIME FOR THE GRAND PRESENTATION!” the mayor hollered over everyone.