by Kari Cole
Yup, the six on top concerned young shifters who’d seemingly fallen off the grid. Four males, two females. Three wolves, a fox, a cougar, and a jaguar. They were from New Mexico, New York, Florida, Colorado, and Michigan. No bodies had been found, no signs of foul play. Some hadn’t been heard from in more than a year, others a few weeks.
Vaughn leaned back in his chair. The corned beef suddenly sat in his stomach like lead. Teens and young adults dropped off the map all the time. The urge to sow their oats was universal, even more so in weres. But they usually didn’t disappear completely. They ventured to other territories to find mates or have fun. Where the hell were they?
Damn it. There was nothing he could do for these kids. They weren’t from his county or territory. Still, maybe he could make some calls later.
The next request was for an adult Latino male. Elk. He flipped the cover sheet to look at the picture, just in case, but he hadn’t come across any unfamiliar elk shifters in a while. Nope. Didn’t recognize him.
When Vaughn pulled out the last request, he sucked in a sharp breath. Werewolf female. Blonde, blue-eyed. Five-foot-six. Name: Sharon Beck. In his haste to turn the page, he tore the cover sheet right from the stapled bundle. A four-by-six-inch color picture was printed on the upper right corner. A beautiful, teal-eyed female with a square jaw and golden hair stared back at him. Not Cassandra. Now that he thought about it, not the right age or height either. Sharon was in her midforties and several inches shorter than Cassandra, who could almost look him in the eye.
Christ. He needed to get a grip.
He reached for the phone to call the mayor back. The mystery of Cassandra Shipton would have to wait a little longer.
Chapter Eleven
Thank the goddess. Finally.
Finally, Hannah was going to get some help with this—this curse. Some real help. Not just Raze telling her to “chill and breathe.” If there was any better proof that her would-be savior was a male, she couldn’t think of it. Jessie, on the other hand, could offer honest-to-goodness assistance from someone who knew what they were doing.
Sitting amid a stack of colorful pillows on Jessie’s comfy couch, Hannah smiled at Frost, who lounged on the slate hearth in front of the unlit fireplace. Thanks to Sarah’s healing abilities, his cut looked days old and his eyes were bright and clear.
Yes, sirree. For the first time in months, things were looking up.
Jessie ambled in and set two glasses of ice water on the coffee table before sitting in one of the club chairs across from Hannah. Hannah shifted to the edge of her seat, practically bouncing in anticipation. Finally!
“So,” Jessie said. “Now that we’re alone”—her gaze slid to Frost—“sort of. Tell me the truth. You didn’t really get involved with the wrong man, did you?”
Well, that took some of the wind out of Hannah’s sails. “What?”
“The ex? The bad-news boyfriend? You totally made him up, right?”
Hannah sputtered for a few seconds. “I did not.” Even she didn’t believe herself.
“Please.”
“You have no idea the losers I’ve brought home.”
There was the heir to the largest pecan farm in Georgia. Smart as a bag of hammers, with a penchant for stealing Hannah’s panties—to wear himself. She had no problem with a man who liked to express his feminine side now and then, but hands off her La Perla. Then there was the budding rock star who’d called her father “duuuude.” The things that man could do with his hands. Of course, he liked to do those things with other women. Lots of other women.
The boyfriend who’d driven her parents over the edge, though, was the biker. Six-foot-two-inches of denim-and-leather clad muscles and tattoos. Delish. And talented, too. Hannah had loved the artwork he put in studios even more than the designs inked onto his skin. True, working in a chop shop put a crimp in their relationship. Really, a female could tolerate being stood up only so many times due to incarceration. But in the end, it was Darrell, with his criminal connections, who’d saved her behind.
“Oh, I can imagine,” Jessie said with a knowing nod. “Picking up deadbeat dickheads is a particular talent in our family. Well, your father doesn’t really fit, but your mother worked her way through her fair share of morons before she met him. Still, I’m not buying. Fess up. What’s with the fake name?”
“Wait. Mama dated losers? I’ve got to—”
“The name, Hannah. Why the fake name?”
Damn it. This was the problem with lying. If your tall tales were coming back to bite you in the butt, they were total failures. Lose-lose.
What could she say, though? It wasn’t as if Hannah could tell her cousin why she was really on the run or who was after her. It would put Jessie in even more danger than she already was just by being near Hannah. Keeping people at more than arm’s length—hell, more than a football field’s length away—for their safety was a lesson she’d learned the hard way.
The horrible way.
“You didn’t tell anyone my real name, did you?”
“No. Why—”
“Because you screamed it out during the attack.” It hadn’t registered during the heat of the moment. Terror was like that, the ultimate distraction. But once Hannah had gone more than five minutes without her heart galloping in her chest, she’d realized the potentially fatal mistake.
“Oh,” Jessie said. “I don’t think Sarah noticed. Even if she had, what’s the big deal?”
Hannah groped around in the suddenly empty, cavernous depths of her mind for an excuse. A little help, she said to her wolf.
The beast had nothing to add. Wolves didn’t care about names or secret identities. She thought all of Hannah’s machinations were quite boring and beneath them.
Finally, something Jessie had said triggered a thought. Ooh, that could work.
Hannah twisted her gloved hands together. “Do you really think my parents want it known to the greater lycanthrope community that I have more than just a smidge of witch blood?” Not a total lie. Most lycanthropes weren’t too fond of witches. She couldn’t blame them. Witches could craft glamours that disguised their scents. The powerful ones could even cast spells that messed with a shifter’s connection to her beast.
Her mother had all but buried her heritage in order to be with Hannah’s father, whose family line was registered in the Associated Genealogy Charts. Blue-blooded shifters all the way.
Jessie’s immediate scowl and sound of disgust told Hannah she’d chosen the right pile of crap to shovel. “Are you kidding? They’re still playing those games? After all these years? The pack knows Catherine is witchborn. Does she think they’ll boot your father out for mating her? Or having you and Scott? He’s, what, fifth in the pack?”
“Fourth,” Hannah corrected.
“Right. And a Cochran, for God’s sake. How my scrawny cousin married into the Rockefellers of the lycanthrope world, I’ll never know.”
“We were hardly that wealthy.”
“Oh? What kind of convertible did you get for your sixteenth birthday?”
Ah, a Mars-red Mercedes-Benz E-Class with the cappuccino-and-black interior. She’d loved that car. Right up until the moment she’d traded it to Darrell for a grubby fistful of twenties, a fake ID, and a banged up Mitsubishi that stank like stale beer and enough Axe body spray to drown an elephant.
“Wait,” Hannah said. “How did you know I got a convertible for my birthday? You were long gone by then.”
Jessie sniffed and found a bit of lint to pick at on the arm of her chair. “Gran might have mentioned it.”
Hannah raised her brows at that, both touched that Jessie had cared enough to ask about her and annoyed because Jessie hadn’t asked her.
“Anyway, you see what I mean. Your father’s place in the pack and society is pretty darn safe.”
Hannah shrugged, pretendi
ng indifference, when what she really wanted to do was curl up in a corner somewhere and cry. Nothing about her family was safe anymore. She didn’t even know who she could trust. Until she did, she’d just continue pretending that everything was fine back home. Thank the goddess Jessie didn’t have a shifter’s ability to sniff out lies.
Besides, Jessie and Mama had been doing the same old song and dance of petty jealousy and familial rivalry since long before Hannah was born. It seemed to be instinctive for Jessie to lash out. When she was a kid, Hannah had learned to not bother trying to mediate. It never helped and she’d just become another toy for them to fight over.
“Wait...” Jessie said. “You have a fake ID. I saw the sheriff going through your bag. He’d have put up a fit if you’d given him a different name than what was on your driver’s license. Your parents went that far?”
Guilt swirled in Hannah’s stomach. “No. I did that. I had the ID from back in my pre-twenty-one party days.” Sort of true. She’d had a fake ID when she was underage, but the current one—and a few others—had come from Raze. She’d burned the one Darrell had given her months ago.
“I thought it’d come in useful, and goddess knows it has.” True. “Can you imagine how my father would have freaked out if he’d gotten a call that I’d been shot?” He’d have flipped his lid. So, also true. Yay! Go me.
Jessie pursed her lips. “I should have called them. I know there’s bad blood between me and your mama, but I can behave, you know.”
“I never said you couldn’t. But no need to worry anyone when we don’t have to. I’m fine.” It was her new mantra, after all.
“You shouldn’t have to do that, Hannah. Hide who you are.”
“Sometimes we have to do what’s best for others.” She held up a hand. “I’m okay with it. Please respect my wishes on the matter.”
“Fine,” Jessie huffed. “If that’s the way you want to play it.”
“It is.”
“Fine.”
“Fine.”
“Woof.”
Jessie narrowed her eyes at Frost. “Great. We’re all fine and dandy. Let’s get on with this, because you look ridiculous in those gloves, Hannah. Seriously. They’re a fashion crime.”
Hannah slumped on the couch. “I know. I tried a pair of ladies’ summer whites, but they weren’t thick enough.”
“All right. When you were young, I taught you to open your mind to the psychic energies imprinted on an object. Of course, that’s not the problem now. In fact, from what I felt this morning, it’s the opposite. You’re wide open to every tiny thing.”
Goddess, was she ever. Before whatever went wrong happened, she’d had to concentrate to read an object’s history. Sometimes it’d been an absolute strain to get even a hint. Thanks to Jessie’s and Gran’s advice, she’d been careful around items that held significant personal memories or feelings, like a baby blanket or wedding ring. But Hannah had never had any object break through her shields before. Of course, she’d avoided anything too gruesome like it had the plague. Why on Earth would anyone want to see someone die or to feel what the killer had felt in that moment? Thank you, no. She wished she could go back to those days of voluntary blindness.
“How do I close up shop again?” Hannah asked.
Jessie pursed her lips. “Hmm, what do you see when you look at your inner shields? Do you remember how I told you that I envision mine as a locked room and I open a window to let an impression through?” Hannah nodded. “Back then, if I’m remembering correctly, you saw a never-ending wall, right?”
“Yes.” An expanse of smooth, creamy stone higher and longer than the eye could see.
“Is that wall still there?”
Hannah closed her eyes and looked inside herself. Why she bothered, she didn’t know. As if things had changed from six months ago, or a week ago, or even an hour. The wall still stood—if something as diaphanous as a puff of smoke could be described as standing. It weighed nothing, held nothing back.
She opened her eyes. “Oh, it’s there,” she said. “It’s just about as useful as cheesecloth for carrying soup.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s beyond porous. It’s freaking mist.”
Jessie’s mouth dropped open. “That—that’s—what?” Hannah shrugged, and Jessie shook her head as if shooing a fly. “Okay, that’s nuts. Wait—are your other shields like that? The ones that hold back the wolf?” She leaned back in her chair, putting some distance between them. The whites showed around her eyes and her scent stank of fear.
Hannah rolled her eyes. “Please. If I didn’t have control of my wolf, things would have gotten bloody before now.”
They had, but not because of her wolf. Probably wouldn’t help to tell her cousin that.
Jessie blew out a breath and stood. She walked behind the chair and began pacing. As she did, she peered at Hannah. “You hadn’t had your first change yet the last time we saw each other. Do you have a separate shield for your beast?”
Hannah hadn’t considered that. Hadn’t thought about the state of the barrier between her human self and wolf half. For a second her heart raced, but then her wolf nudged her, calm and watchful. Completely comfortable in her place within Hannah’s psyche.
“I guess you could say that. I never really thought about keeping her behind a wall or fence. I know other weres do. They speak of their shields. But my wolf and I, we’ve never used such a thing. She was just always in my head and I in hers. We don’t fight. Okay, a few times we may have argued. A bit. But no one is stomping on anyone else’s parade.”
Her wolf sniffed in agreement and laid her head on her paws.
The look on Jessie’s face suggested she thought the insanity angle was a probable winner, but she sat back down. “It’s possible that your ability to shapeshift and your psychometry come from completely different places. I’d thought that because it’s all magic they’d be more intrinsically linked, but maybe not. Doesn’t matter. I think the first step is to try to repair your shields.”
Now it was Hannah’s turn to jump up from her seat and pace. Frost rose as if to follow her, and she waved him back down. After a minute of internal whining and feet stomping, she said, “How? I’ve tried to rebuild them. I even tried constructing completely new ones. Nothing stuck.”
“I don’t know, but we’ve got to start somewhere.”
Hannah clenched her fists and looked at the brown leather stretched taut over her knuckles. “Fine. I just want this over with.”
Chapter Twelve
Vaughn glanced at the clock on his dash and swore. It seemed like all he ever did now was rush around and curse at how late he was and how many other things he still needed to do. The pack run started in just over an hour. He shouldn’t go. A hundred things demanded his attention back at the station. Not to mention he had a county full of tourists. Patrol was destined to be lively tonight, but somehow he’d gotten roped into babysitting.
There are worse jobs, a selfish part of him said. Sure, Cassandra Shipton was easy on the eyes and her scent made his head spin a little. But Vaughn was the sheriff. He should be the one dealing with the hapless, the drunks, and the grifters who followed them, not sniffing around some female, no matter how pretty or how fantastic she smelled.
He flicked the directional and turned onto Jessie Mills’s property. A red Chevy Silverado waited for him to pass on the gravel drive, Jessie’s assistant, Maria Sanchez, waving from the driver’s seat. He nodded to the thirtysomething human and continued to the back of the property. He’d never been to Jessie’s house before. It was situated behind a row of flowering trees that offered some privacy from the road and the business.
As he got out of his SUV, the fresh fragrance of wildflowers and green, living things bolstered his mood. His mother may be right—he needed to appreciate the goddess’s gifts more. Maybe he’d start with a confoun
ding little wolf.
He shut the door and headed up the path to the house. Feminine voices carried through the open windows.
“Now picture it growing thicker, harder,” Jessie Mills said.
“I’m trying,” Cassandra replied. Her voice sounded strained as if she were lifting something heavy.
As he climbed the porch steps, Frost’s scent grew in strength and hung in the air like he’d not only lain on the shaded wood, but thoroughly inspected every inch of it. Vaughn shook his head. He had never heard of a natural wolf following a were around like a puppy. Occasionally, one might choose to play with a were in wolf form, but generally they kept to themselves, even here in the Cabinet Mountains, where there had been a pack for longer than there’d been a United States. The wolf was just one more thing he didn’t understand about Cassandra Shipton.
He raised his hand to knock on the door.
“Shit! Are you okay?” Jessie again, right before something crashed and glass shattered.
He twisted the knob and raced inside. The wolf stood on the threshold between the entryway and the living room. Vaughn pulled up short when the beast snapped his teeth and snarled at him. Beyond, crouched between the couch and a long white coffee table, Jessie knelt next to Cassandra, who was lying on the floor.
“Move, wolf,” he growled. He could make the damn thing get out of his way, but Frost had protected Vaughn’s packmates when he couldn’t. Obviously, he was protecting Cassandra now.
“Sheriff! What are you doing here?” Jessie asked.
He ignored her while he and Frost had a brief stare-down. His own wolf pressed closer to the surface, checking out the creature that dared challenge them. Frost considered them for a spare handful of seconds, then jerked his head toward his mistress. Natural wolf? Yeah, right.
In three strides, Vaughn covered the distance to the women.
“Careful, broken glass,” Jessie said, pointing to what remained of a clear drinking glass and a puddle of water soaking the area rug and splashed over the hardwood.