She smiled sweetly and took a swig of her coffee. “What makes you think that I did that?”
He let out a snort of derision. “Nobody has a better sense of smell than I do, Isadora. I know where you’ve been.”
“I didn’t say I’d never been in that snobby store or looked at their jewelry. Since I have been in there, I would expect that my scent would be on the jewelry. So?” Her tone was challenging.
A slender blonde wolf shifter from the Pine Hills pack sauntered by. Her pack was a small pack with a fairly weak Alpha. They were under the protection of Steele’s uncle, Vince Battle, who was the Alpha of Timber Valley, and they paid dues for the privilege. Her name was Tiffany; she tried to catch Steele’s eye as she walked by, like she always did, and he ignored her, like he always did.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her stride off.
He turned back to Isadora as she finished her last gulp of coffee. “I can also get a pretty good idea of how fresh a scent is,” he said. “I can tell a scent that was left there last night versus a scent that was left there a couple of days ago.”
She tossed her coffee cup in to the trash. “Then arrest me,” she suggested. “Karen hasn’t had to bail me out in a while. I think she’s getting bored.”
Karen, a lynx shifter, was Isadora’s close friend and also a lawyer. She’d moved out of the state when she’d married one of Steele’s cousins, but from what Steele had heard, they still talked almost daily.
Steele felt a stab of envy thinking of Max and Karen, the way he frequently did when he saw a happily married couple. They had what he could never have, although it was entirely his own choice, he knew.
He forced himself back to the present. “You sure you want me to arrest you? Dash isn’t working at the station today,” he said. The spark of anger in her eyes gave him a flash of satisfaction. Her indifferent, above-it-all façade could be wearing at times.
“So? What would I care where he is?” she snapped, and turned and walked away. Sergeant Dashiel Battle was Steele’s cousin and one of his patrol officers. He and Isadora had some kind of weird thing going where Isadora could not stop herself from provoking him on purpose. Dash had arrested her for speeding, and chased her through the woods in wolf form on suspicion of vandalism, but she’d turned into lynx form and escaped by climbing high up in the trees.
He couldn’t tell if they had a thing for each other or if they hated each other. They were as different from each other as could be. Dash was the ultimate rules-following straight arrow. He lived and died by pack law and by the Covenant, the ancient book of rules that governed the lives of wolf shifters.
“Isadora!” Steele called after her.
She turned back with a look of annoyance on her pretty, pouty face.
“I know you have fun trying to prove that you’re smarter than everyone else, but I seriously don’t have time for this kind of garbage right now. You know what we’re up against. When you pull these pranks, it takes me away from our investigation into the disappearances.”
She paused, and her expression turned serious. “I’m sorry. You’re right,” she said, to his surprise. “Has there been any progress? Or any more disappearances?”
He shook his head. “Not that we know of. Just watch yourself, all right? I know you like to be Ms. Lone Wolf, or rather Ms. Lone Cat, but these days, I think there’s more safety in numbers.”
She gave him a wry smile. “I’m pretty sure they’re only looking for shifters with special talents. My sole talent is for creating mayhem, or sometimes just minor chaos. But thanks for the warning.” She walked away. Steele shook his head and headed for his office. He had a meeting to attend.
Over the last couple of years, around the country, a number of shifters had disappeared, and there had been several foiled kidnapping attempts as well.
At first, because shifters didn’t have a national centralized crime reporting agency like humans did, nobody had made the connections. The kidnappings had also taken place across different species – bears, lions, lynxes, wolves, and bobcats.
Then whoever was doing the kidnapping had stepped up their efforts, and tried to kidnap a group of shifter children from a summer camp on the Timber Valley Property. The attempt had been thwarted, and the men who’d attempted the kidnapping had been interrogated. The shifters hadn’t been able to find out much, because the men were just hired mercenaries, but before they died they did reveal that they had been hired by a paramilitary group that called themselves STAB – for Shifter Tracking and Apprehension Bureau.
Now the Council of Elders, and the Council Pride, who oversaw feline shifters, and the Bear Nation, were all coordinating intelligence and reporting everything that they knew on a daily basis.
What they knew so far was that there were at least a dozen shifters missing, and most of them had one thing in common: they were mutations. Most of them were healers, although there were a few shamans as well. Every pack had at least one healer, and one shaman. Timber Valley had a particularly high number of them.
Now shifters all across the country were on high alert.
Loren Redthorne was waiting for him in his conference room, drinking coffee and talking on his cell phone. He was the Chief of the Wardens, the law enforcement group that dealt with matters that affected all shifters, rather than individual packs. Loren was solidly built, in his fifties, with thick crewcut black hair that was shot through with gray. He was a match for Dash in traditionalism; a good man, but a man who took the rules of the Covenant as gospel.
He was also an adult male Alpha, as was Steele, which meant they couldn’t hang out together for more than a few hours at most before they’d start to get on each other’s nerves. Their natural need to be the dominant male and leader would grow stronger and stronger until eventually, they’d be at each other’s throats.
Fortunately, the meeting would be over long before that.
Loren hung up his cell phone when Steele walked in.
“Afternoon, Chief, I hope I didn’t keep you waiting,” Steele said.
“Not at all,” Loren said. “We’ve found some new information about STAB.”
Steele settled down in a chair across from Loren. “Hit me,” he said. “I’m all ears.”
“We’ve discovered that the army was carrying out a secret training exercise in the area where the first shifter disappeared, in Montana,” he said. “It was a military training exercise in a remote area of national forest, about two years ago. That was right around when we had the first incidence of a shifter disappearing, and the shifter had last been seen in the same area that the military was training. When he’d been missing for a couple of days, his pack went out looking for him, and they spotted the soldiers carrying out the exercise. The pack assumed that either the military had accidentally shot their pack member thinking he was an actual wolf, or their pack member had some kind of fatal accident out there. It happens. Bear attack, something like that.”
“Have we confirmed that this particular group was involved?” Steele asked.
Loren nodded. “We’re pretty sure. Our shamans have been investigating. We’ve kidnapped a couple of soldiers from the closest base, interrogated them, and then compelled them to forget. What we know is that a colonel and a group of his men who were carrying out this training exercise suddenly and inexplicably moved off the base two years ago. Nobody has heard from the men since.”
“Did these soldiers that you kidnapped know anything about the existence of shifters?”
“Nothing, thank God,” Loren said. “We don’t believe that this information has been communicated to other branches of the human military. We do monitor their communications, as you know, and there’s just been no chatter, no communication about that. I think if they’d known about our existence for the past two years, the military would have already made a move. It’s possible that the group who were carrying out those exercises are keeping that information to themselves, for whatever reason. We’ll keep you posted, of course.�
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Loren stood up to go. He hesitated, then said “By the way, one of my nieces was asking about you. Her name’s Sherry. She wanted to know whether you were single.”
Steele managed a smile. “I’m not really looking, thanks. It’s complicated. Let’s just say I’m better off alone.”
Loren raised an eyebrow. “Most Alphas around your age, they’ve already sowed their wild oats for a while, and they want to settle down and have cubs. You’re not sowing your wild oats, and you’re not looking to settle down. I’m not trying to push Sherry on you, in particular, I’m just saying.”
“I guess I’m not most Alphas.” Steele stood up.
That was Loren all over, Mr. Tradition. Steele was all for tradition. He’d love to be able to get married and settle down, but it wouldn’t be fair to marry any other woman when his heart had already been claimed.
It wasn’t rational, he knew that. It had just been one night and one day, but ever since that day, he hadn’t been able to get her out of his head. Sometimes he was tempted to ask their local shaman to make him forget Roxanne the way she’d forgotten him, but he didn’t want to do that. He wanted to hold that memory of her tight forever.
As Loren walked out, Dash passed him coming in.
“Isn’t it your day off?” Steele asked him.
“Just came to finish filing some reports.”
“I saw your friend a little earlier.”
“Oh yeah? Which friend is that?”
“The lynx. There were accusations that she’d stolen some jewelry from Elegant Apparel a couple days ago, and then snuck in last night and put it back.”
Dash scowled. “Sounds like the kind of dumb stunt she’d pull, just to thumb her paw at us. So to speak. You want me to go talk to her?”
“No, you two are not a good combination. You seem to ride on each other’s nerves something fierce. I already dealt with it.”
“Good.” Dash nodded and headed over to his desk.
Was that a tiny ripple of disappointment on his sergeant’s face? Whatever, Steele thought, exasperated. Dash was a big boy. He’d figure it out.
Steele had only been back at his desk for ten minutes when the door banged open, and Dash stuck his head in.
“Sir, you’re going to need to head downtown immediately.” As Steele leaped to his feet, Dash added “A woman just walked in to a bar there and asked for you.”
Steele paused in his mad rush to the door. “Uh, okay. And this is an emergency why, exactly?” he asked, annoyed. The way Dash had sounded, he’d have thought there had been a mass murder.
Dash’s next words mad Steele’s heart freeze in his chest.
“Sir, she’s human. A human is in our town, and she’s asking for you.”
Chapter Six
The minute she walked in to the Full Moon Saloon, Roxanne knew something was wrong. Literally every single person in the place stopped what they were doing and stared at her. The customers froze with drinks halfway to their lips, the barmaids stood balancing trays laden with beer mugs and pitchers, the bartender was riveted in place with a drink shaker in her hand, and her mouth hanging open.
Roxanne walked up to the bar, glancing around her. Yep, they were all still staring. The bartender hadn’t moved an inch.
Was it something about her? She glanced down at herself. She was dressed normally. It was September. She was wearing jeans and a denim jacket over a t-shirt, and low-cut tan boots.
She looked at the mirror behind the bar. The bar was designed like an old style saloon, with brass rails and spittoons, and a mirror on the wall that ran the length of the bar.
She didn’t have anything on her face. She had not sprouted a pair of horns.
Anxiety clutched at her throat. There was so much she didn’t understand these days. She almost wished that when she’d gotten that MRI, they’d found something physically wrong with her. A simple explanation, even if it were a terrible finding like a brain tumor, would have been such a relief. Instead, she was pretty sure that she was losing her mind, and the strange reaction of all these people at the bar just helped solidify that belief. Was she doing something weird and not even noticing it?
She settled down on a stool at the bar, putting her purse on the bar counter. The bartender, a blond woman with hair pulled back in a French braid, finished mixing her drink, poured it into a glass, and handed it to the man who’d been waiting for it at the bar.
Then she walked over and cleared her throat. “Can I get you something to drink?” she asked.
Roxanne glanced up at the names of the beers written on the chalkboard. What a weird bunch of names they had for their beverages. “I’ll have, uh…a Stag’s Blood,” she said.
The bartender nodded, and poured it for her. It was a reddish beer with a sweet taste to it. Not bad at all.
“Don’t get many strangers around here, I take it?” Roxanne asked, with a nervous laugh.
“Well, we’re pretty far out of the way,” the bartender said. “How did you hear about us?”
How, indeed. That was the question of the day.
Instead of answering directly, Roxanne said “Do you by any chance know someone named Steele Battle?”
“You know Steele?” The bartender looked at her oddly.
“I met him once.” Yep, once. That had been plenty. The bastard. Bitterness rippled inside her, and she took a big swig of beer to wash away the suddenly sour taste in her mouth.
Well, that’s what she got for believing that a man like him would love a woman like her, instead of realizing the more obvious truth – that men will say anything to a woman when they want some nookie. Then they’ll vanish without a word of explanation.
“I do know him. Would you like me to give him a call and ask him to come down here?”
“If it’s not too much trouble, that would be lovely, thanks.”
Roxanne wondered what she would say to him when he walked in the door. Would he have answers to the questions that she desperately needed? Would he be annoyed to see her again? Embarrassed?
She heard the chirping of her cell phone in her purse. She glanced at it. It was Katherine.
She wasn’t ready to talk to Katherine right now, because Katherine couldn’t possibly understand. How could Katherine understand, when Roxanne herself didn’t know what the hell was going on?
She let the call go to voicemail, and took a long, hard swallow of her beer.
The little voice that had been nagging at her for God knows how long was a bit quieter, but not completely.
Go to Timber Valley. Find Steele. Get help, the voice said again and again. She heard it in her sleep. It pulsed urgently through her body all day long.
Why did she need help? She didn’t know, so what would she even ask him? She knew that something was wrong, that she needed help more than she needed oxygen, but she didn’t know anything more than that. She wasn’t in any danger that she knew of. Nobody had followed her there.
She thought about it. She wasn’t the one who needed help. Someone else was in danger, but she didn’t know who. She needed to get help for someone, immediately. Who was it? Why couldn’t she remember? She had a horrible feeling that she was letting someone down, that she should be rallying the troops, screaming at them to…do what? She didn’t know.
She clenched her fists, feeling her heart speed up. Get help.
“You feeling all right?”
She glanced up at the bartender, startled.
“Me? I’m fine, I think. Why do you ask?”
“You’re very pale,” the bartender said. “You look a little peaked, as my mother would say. Here, have some fries, we just made them.”
She set a bowl of salty, greasy fries in front of Roxanne, who thanked her and dove into them. They tasted heavenly.
The bartender was still watching her as if she might suddenly grow wings and flap out of there or something, and the conversation in the bar, which had died out when Roxanne walked in, was only at a dull murmur now. People were st
aring but pretending not to.
Roxanne rubbed her face wearily and ate more fries. It had been a fifteen hour drive. She’d stopped at a motel after eight hours and spent the night, and then resumed driving this morning.
Something about the thought of driving there made her anxious. Why exactly had she decided to come today, in particular? What had set her off? She couldn’t say.
Maybe it had been a mistake to come here. When Steele walked in, she wouldn’t know what to say to him, and she’d end up looking like a fool. Then she’d have to drive another fifteen hours back home.
Home. There was a big blank spot in her mind when she thought about that, a clutching in her chest, and she didn’t know why. She forced herself to picture the little house she lived in. Her parents house had been taken by the bank, because of all their hospital bills. She lived in a little mobile home on the edge of town, owned by Katherine’s father.
The house was decorated in thrift store chic. She’d made floral print sheets into curtains, using curtain clips. Katherine had helped her paint her little round kitchen table and four chairs different bright fruity colors.
Why did the thought of her house fill her with a sense of dread? Had she left from her house yesterday? She must have.
She drained the rest of her beer. Just as she was about to ask for another one, the door swung open, and Steele walked in.
He was every bit as handsome as she remembered him. He was so big he almost filled the doorway, blocking out the sun behind him.
He was wearing a sheriff’s uniform. Had he told her that he worked for the sheriff’s department? She couldn’t remember.
With resentment, she noticed several of the female patrons checking him out. Back off, bitches, she thought to her. Then she shook herself. Who was she to be jealous? He’d made his feelings for her quite clear – by vanishing.
Steele scanned the room for her and walked up to the bar quickly.
“Roxanne!” His tone was astonished. She couldn’t tell if he was happy or angry or what he was feeling, but she knew what she was feeling. All the hurt and humiliation she’d been feeling swelled up inside her and overflowed, and before she could stop herself, she reached up and slapped his face so hard her hand stung.
Hard As Steele (A BBW Paranormal Romance) (Timber Valley Pack) Page 4