One True Mate 4: Shifter's Innocent

by Lisa Ladew

  Beckett left the DVDs and cased the room, checking every corner, discovering where the two females had entered. When done, he returned to his clothes. His wolf’s eyes gazed up the stairs to where he knew the exit from the house was, but Beckett easily moved forward and caged him. He’d had so much experience over the last decades that it was easy.

  Human once more, ignoring the loss he felt at the transition, Beckett pulled his clothes on, his mind turning over everything his wolf had discerned. She’d been in his house twice, yet somehow he’d never known, not even scenting her the first time, or maybe scenting it and dismissing it for some reason? His wolf had discovered something else, too. She’d touched him. On his mouth. With her own lips. Meaning she’d kissed him, only a few hours ago. His tongue snaked out, trying to taste her on his lips.

  Beckett didn’t try to puzzle that out. She must have had her reasons. It didn’t bother him one bit, in fact, he would give anything to experience it again with this mysterious female. Awake, asleep; he’d take whatever he could get.

  None of what happened before mattered. Only what he did now was important. His eyes fell on the retina scanner on the wall, and that feeling that something momentous was happening to him deepened. His heart picked up speed in his chest. Maybe Crew had been right after all. Time to follow the female and find out exactly what was going on here.

  He wondered for a moment how she’d gotten the door open, then dismissed the thought. He wasn’t good at puzzles, didn’t enjoy them. He craved action, and that was available for the taking. He moved in front of the scanner, triggering it, then slipped into the corridor beyond. He rarely used the tunnels, hating being closed in, and preferring to drive everywhere. His preferences immediately ceased to matter because he knew immediately she had been there. The sweet licorice smell assailed him, stronger in this enclosed space, soothing him like a lover’s caress.

  His mind empty and serene for the first time in weeks, he turned right and followed the scent.

  ***

  Beckett stopped at the edge of the forest, his mind spinning in a way he wasn’t used to. He was by nature a grunt, a foot soldier, a worker-bee doing what he was told to do by someone smarter and higher up the feeding chain than him. But now, a seemingly unsolvable puzzle lay before him, and he was loath to give it up to anyone else. The unknown female had entered the tunnels through a patrol officer’s house, one she’d broken into first, then returned that same way, and ridden a horse through here.

  Why?

  He took one step into the cool evergreens, not feeling the frigid air against his skin, even though he had no jacket, no hat or gloves. His mind burned with a craving to solve this mystery, warming him from the inside out.

  He turned his face to the sky, taking the scent of pine resin, wood smoke, and frozen earth into his lungs deeply. His wolf loved it, wanting out and Beckett almost gave in. He’d lived as a wolf for three weeks once before, using the transition to blunt his immense grief. The idea beckoned and maybe would have won if the licorice smell of the female didn’t beckon stronger. He picked up speed, jogging to follow it.

  His phone rang in his back pocket and he ignored it, briefly considering pitching it into the woods, but killing the idea when a new scent reached him.

  Death.

  Not hers.

  He shook himself, still not knowing who she was. His jog quickened to a run as he followed the well-worn path through the forest, ending at a small clearing that marched directly to a trailer, one that was old and ramshackle, with the roof sagging on one side, extension cords snaking through the yard, and blue tarps covering two windows. He stared at the metal home, realizing the scents of blood and gunpowder were coming from inside. He hadn’t brought his gun, but it might not matter. He had better weapons.

  Beckett unleashed the animal inside him for the second time that morning, and dropped to the snowy ground, watching the trailer carefully as his body completed the shift. Blues muted to grays and grays faded to tan, while the orange extension cords on the ground became yellow. Colors and the urgency of his thoughts and emotions were the only things that faded as he shifted. Scents, sounds, primal needs, and the slightest shift in the atmosphere exploded in vibrancy.

  The fact that he was able to shift at all meant no humans could possibly be staring out the window.

  No live ones.

  Chapter 9

  Beckett circled the perimeter of the trailer once, ensuring to himself that nothing moved or breathed inside, then he returned to the rear yard, ignoring a scent that screamed at him. Later. Inside first. Back at the building, he stood on his hind legs, and tore away one of the tarps. He leapt inside, neatly clearing the window and landing in a tiny living room with attached kitchen.

  She had been here. Lived here. Her scent was everywhere, but so was stale beer, strong moonshine, and hand-rolled cigarettes. He turned right, toward the smell of blood, ignoring everything else.

  The door of a small room stood open. Beckett lumbered toward it, his wolf so large he took up most of the hallway, his back much higher than the knob of the door. In his peripheral vision, the black socks his wolf wore swung into view every time he took a step. The hated black socks that branded him as the subject of the Saving the Savior prophecy, that had both ensured him a spot on the KSRT, and killed his father and brother. Beckett often wondered if he would have been able to do something to stop their deaths, that question one he could only drink into blackness for a short while.

  He crossed the threshold, his nose interpreting the story even before his eyes saw the dead human. The girl, the prepubescent one from his basement, had stood right here in the doorway and fired the gun. He nosed closer to the dead body, marking every blood spurt and splatter, then catching the scent of the woman, then her blood. He picked his way carefully over the scene until he could do what he intended, something very unusual for a wolf, especially one his size. He raised up onto his hind legs to get his nose closer to a spot on the wall, to be certain of what he suspected.

  Yes. No. The scent of her blood from a small spot on the wall provided him confirmation of his theory, and more mystery. Everything in the room told a clear story, except for the mysterious, slight scent in her blood, one he almost recognized by name, but his wolf told him was poison, name or not.

  Beckett dropped back to four legs and backed away, placing his paws carefully, sparing the dead human not so much as a glance. This was a justified shooting if he’d ever seen one. Imagining what the human, who reeked of binges and sour rage, had done induced an urge in Beckett to lift his leg and piss on the body. He restrained himself.

  He crossed the room, back into the rest of the trailer, following the scent that most interested him now, the light, sweet scent of the woman that made his mouth water.

  On the other side of the living area, he found one more room and pushed his way inside. Again, the room told a story. The bitter scents of years-old fear, despair, and despondency that made Beckett shake his head in as much muted empathy as his prowling wolf could manage. But the redolent, wholesome scents of love, togetherness, and dreams soothed him.

  Again, he nosed along the floor of the room, until he smelled something that caught his attention: himself.

  He pushed his way into the closet and, using his teeth, pulled a sweatshirt off a TV no bigger than a toaster. Behind it was a stack of DVDs, and at the very top of the stack, one of his DVDs, taken from his house.

  Beckett sneezed at the riddle, backing out of the closet. He would be heading in to work today after all. He dropped his nose to the ground again and followed the most recent scents of the girl and the woman who had spent many unhappy years in that room, puzzling out their last steps. They had left by the front door, hours ago. He would follow, but first, he had one more scent to check, and a phone call to make.

  He leapt back out the window, dismayed to find a breeze had picked up, which could make tracking the twosome impossible. He would still try.

  The scent he had ignored e
arlier called to him, and he dropped his nose to the ground to follow, skirting a sad-looking shed built from metal roofing, to the farthest western corner of the yard, just before the forest started.

  He rubbed his muzzle against the snow, then against the dirt below, trying to catch the scant scent that was left.

  A decaying body lay below him. A woman, buried in a shallow grave for no more than a year. The dead man inside had been the one who buried her.

  Beckett headed back to his clothes, then swung left as another scent called to him. He entered the forest swiftly, his paws making no noise as he trod on the groundcover of needles there. When he found what his nose told him was there, he sat back on his haunches and stared for a full minute, canting his head first to one side, then the other, then he crept forward and took an identifying sniff of one of the orange mushrooms flecked with white. Poison! Just one of these mushrooms could put a full-grown man into liver failure. But there were at least twenty growing between the roots of the tree.

  Beckett sat back again, taking in the plot of mushrooms as a whole. It extended around the base of the tree, its edges an obvious square, making it look as if they had not grown haphazardly there, as mushrooms did in the wild, but rather as if they had been cultivated, like in a garden.

  The mystery surpassed anything he could puzzle out in animal or human form, so Beckett headed for his clothes. He would call in the detectives, and let them do their job.

  When he reached his clothes, his phone was ringing already. He shifted as quickly as nature let him, then knelt naked in the snow and fished his phone out of his pants pocket, his senses on high alert.

  If it would have been anyone else, he would have ignored it, but it was Crew.

  “Crew,” he said warmly into the phone.

  Crew’s harried voice put Beck on alert immediately. “They need you, Beck, at Clear Sky Lake. Me, Trevor, and Graeme are locked down here at the house, in case this is a trap to lure us away from our mates, but it’s not. It’s for real.”

  “What’s for real?” Beckett said, but the urgency in Crew’s tone told him more than he wanted to know.

  “The Vahiy. The signs leading up to it. Khain just tripped one of them somehow. He’s trying to force it to happen.”

  Beckett swallowed hard. The Vahiy. The end times. Also known as the DOR: The Day of Reckoning, or the Death of Rhen. No one knew what it meant, but all shiften universally feared that day. Would they cease to exist? Drop in their tracks as their connection to Rhen was cut off? Or maybe they would lose their ability to shift. Or, somehow worse, would Khain become so strong they could not hope to fight him?

  Fear mobilized him, making him forget for only a moment what he had just discovered. “Where do they need me?”

  “At Clear Sky Lake. It’s on fire. We’ve set up a command post here, but Wade and everyone else are at the lake.”

  Beckett frowned. “Everybody?”

  Crew grunted, then moved away from the phone and said something to someone else in the room. It sounded like another one?

  Beckett waited until he had Crew’s attention again. “Crew, what if this is a trap. What if he’s going to hit somewhere else while we’re all out at the lake?”

  “Doesn’t matter, Beck, you gotta go. Remember the 777 signs? The one about a lake fire says this: Shiften hesitate, shiften fail. The demon gets the upper hand, his fire raging into a firenado that marches his plot forward. Meaning if he has his way and this sign gets out of control, it leads right to the next sign. We’ve got to stop it.”

  Beckett’s hand tightened on the phone. Firenado? Never heard of it, but it didn’t sound good. “What’s the next sign?”

  “It’s in flowery language, almost like propaganda, but Sebastian thinks it means Serenity burns to the ground, but it might go farther. We’re getting reports of more lakes on fire, one in Mississippi, one in Oregon, a few further south.” He stopped and spoke again to someone else in the house, then when he returned to Beckett, his voice was tighter than ever. “Beck, we aren’t sure how he’s doing it, and if we can’t figure out how to stop it, he could burn every major city in the entire country down, at least every one that’s built on a waterway.”

  Beckett knew that was almost all of them. Fuck.

  “I’ll be out there in twenty, Crew.”

  He would call in what he’d found here, but he wouldn’t be able to search for (his mate?) the two girls who were probably scared out of their minds. He’d have to tell patrol to take it easy on them if they were found.

  Chapter 10

  Grey Deatherage trod down the last three steps that led into his sanctuary, chanting meaningless words with each step like offerings to the gods.

  “Horrors. Hostages. Hounds.”

  He reached the bottom, the cold concrete floor so much like the tunnels at every police station he’d ever worked at. But none of his fellow officers knew about this tunnel, and if he continued to receive Rhen’s favor, they never would.

  He strode along the cramped, dank corridor, ignoring the spirits that pushed at him from all sides.

  “Triple H. Mudge. Mudged. Mudger.”

  His voice was soft, echoing almost not at all, as his footsteps were louder and covered it.

  At the end of the tunnel, he pushed open the door to his inner sanctum, the only place he felt safe. It was not locked, had no cause to be. The door at street level was hidden and locked to his satisfaction.

  Grey swung the door shut behind him and stood still for a moment in the complete and utter darkness, taking stock of the large room with his acute senses. Behind and above him, the faint call of an ambulance siren swelled and waned, and a single horn honked once, sharply.

  In front of him, the room opened like a cavern and the spirits pressed in on him more, welcoming him home, wanting to talk with him. He could handle them, and he knew they would keep out anyone bent on finding his secrets.

  He crouched and felt to the right of him for the electric lantern he knew was there. He picked it up and lit it with a lighter from his pocket, then strode to the very center of the large open room that held only one chair and an end table next to it. He only came here for his most important work and he didn’t need more.

  Above him, footsteps sounded dully, as the humans went about their business. None of them knew of the room below their feet. This room that was supposed to have been filled in completely, bulldozed to hell, like it had never existed.

  Grey sat in the La-Z-Boy and flipped his feet up with the lever on his right side. Relaxation always helped when trying to communicate with angels.

  Just one angel, actually. Azerbaizan, that son of a bitch who had not answered him in years. Grey could feel the bodiless dickstand was still alive, so he kept trying. Could an angel even die? Maybe.

  Grey relaxed, starting with his scalp muscles and working down to his toes. He took deep even breaths and let the spirits pull at him, their fingers ruffling his hair and moving his clothing slightly, but doing no more than that. He could not help them and they could not harm him.

  Grey imagined Azer’s presence, his being made of light and fight and fire, and fixed it firmly in his mind, seeking him out, asking for him, commanding him to answer.

  Azerbaizan, you shimmery bastard, answer my call. Light damn you, talk to me!

  Nothing.

  Grey took another deep breath and sent out his feelers. He had nowhere to direct his thoughts, nothing to focus his request on. But Azer was not dead, he knew it. He could feel Azer’s presence, like a light flickering in the darkness, he just could not feel where the light was, how it was, if it was hurt or contained in some manner. Could he be asleep or unconscious like the actual Light? Maybe. Perhaps fathering the one true mates had weakened him to the point where he could no longer communicate.

  The last time they had conversed, Azer’s plan was to harvest materials from The Haven, to be combined with materials from Khain’s home, the Pravus, to form into objects of power which he would leave with the w
omen he bedded. Pendants that would remind them of who their children really were, and would also help the children communicate with their father as they grew, so he could shape them, guide them, help them develop their powers, and prepare them for their lives as half-angels fated to mate with shiften. Any who did not have that preparation would enter adulthood weaker than they should be, possibly unaware of their powers, more prone to losing their minds to what humans would call insanity, what shiften would call being moonstruck, but in reality it would be a desperate incongruity between what their souls knew to be true about themselves and how society shaped them to behave.

  The pendants had been Grey’s idea. Which Azer swiftly forgot. Flighty cocksucker only remembered what he wanted to.

  Frustration bubbled within Grey, ruining his concentration. He gritted his teeth and willed it back. Did he dare try to contact Rhen?

  A deep swell of longing filled his chest, longing to feel her presence, to hear her voice, to know how she was. But if he did that, she might tell someone where he was. Someone meaning Wade, that asshole, and Wade would come looking for him, bringing his troop of thankfully incompetent circus puppies with him.

  Grey shot out of the chair, almost knocking it over in his anger. He was stuck, with no possible plan of action.

  As much as he liked to take potshots at the KSRT, the truth was, they had pulled off a coup, entering and exiting the Pravus like it was a coffee shop, with no loss of life and a victory that would go down in shiften history as the beginning of the end for Khain, unless Grey was able to stop it.

  Three one true mates had been found and now they had a dragen on their side. Last he’d heard, Troy and Trent, the two non-shifting wolven, had been inducted into the KSRT, and they worried him more than any of the other members. They had no prophecy, either of them, but because they were non-shifting, they saw and intuited things the others did not. If either of them scented him, he was almost certain they would know instantly of his betrayal. Which is why he had disappeared. One of the reasons he had disappeared.