by Amy Green
Warrior Wolf
Shifter Falls, Book 3
Amy Green
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Copyright © 2017 by Amy Green
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Shifter Falls Series:
Book 1: Rebel Wolf
Book 2: Lover Wolf
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1
When Nadine Walker became sheriff of Grange County, she’d imagined herself spending her days doing good. Helping the people of Colorado while putting away drug dealers and thieves. She had never once imagined herself dealing with werewolves.
But Brody Donovan sat across the table from her, regarding her calmly. Brody was the alpha of the Donovan werewolf pack, which was based in the town of Shifter Falls, just over the county line. Shifter Falls—the town fathers had actually named it Schaffer Falls, though no one ever called it that—was where all the shifters lived. Wolves, bears, eagles, and the like. It was a tough town, full of men who were half animal, and any sane human stayed away. It didn’t help that the Falls was the territory of the Donovan pack, led by Brody—sitting right here, looking like he might quietly eat her for dinner—and his three equally scary half-brothers.
Normally, as sheriff of a county of humans, Nadine would have nothing to do with Brody, his werewolves, or his town. She’d had run-ins with werewolves from time to time in her law enforcement career, and nothing she’d seen had dispelled the image of brutal, sometimes deadly animals who lived by a primitive code. But recent events had dragged her, unwillingly, into shifter business. Business that, unfortunately, wasn’t done.
“So,” she said to Brody Donovan. “The Silverman. Who is he?”
Brody was wearing jeans, a t-shirt with a plaid flannel shirt over it, and a baseball cap pulled low over his brow. He was handsome, with dark hair and dark eyes that missed nothing. He also wasn’t much of a talker. “I have no fucking idea,” he said.
Six weeks ago, a rival wolf pack had tried to move in to the Falls and take over Donovan territory. The Donovan brothers and their pack had forced the rivals out. Nadine didn’t know how exactly, and she didn’t care—shifter business was shifter business. But as part of its battle plan, the rival pack had hired an assassin—known only as the Silverman—to kill people and frame the wolves for it, hoping to take the Donovans down. The Silverman, who got his nickname from the fact that he owned pure silver bullets, had also shot at the Donovans sniper-style, hitting two of the brothers before vanishing solo into the thick Colorado woods.
All of which, again, would not keep Nadine up at night. Shifters fighting, trying to kill each other—no one cared about that. Except that the Silverman had left two human dead bodies in the woods, and both of them were over the goddamned county line. In Grange County.
Which made those two dead bodies—live murder cases—her murder cases.
Which led Nadine here, sitting across the table from Brody goddamn Donovan. As forthcoming as the closest snowy Rocky mountain, and about as friendly.
“Look,” she said to him, trying another tactic. “I know you’re busy. I’m busy. I don’t want to be here any more than you do. But I have these two bodies in my morgue, and everyone says the Silverman did it. And no one knows where he is.”
“The Silverman did it,” Brody confirmed, unhelpfully. “It sure as hell wasn’t me.”
Nadine gritted her teeth. Shifters—including the chief of police in Shifter Falls, who was a bear shifter—said that the killer of the two men was definitely human, because when they’d cased the crime scenes they’d been able to smell it. To smell it. As if Nadine was supposed to build a court case out of that.
She looked Brody Donovan in the eye, or did the best she could with that baseball cap in the way. Brody was slouched back in his chair, his posture casual, but Nadine’s daddy hadn’t raised a fool. Brody was a wolf, packed with muscle, capable of moving—and killing—before she would have a chance to get out of her chair. Forget the fact that he was good-looking, a good leader, and had a reputation as basically decent. He might be all of those things, but her gut told her he was far, very far, from harmless.
“You never did supply an alibi for either murder,” she pointed out to him.
Brody just stared at her.
“Any recollection?” she prodded.
“I was probably at home.”
“Home,” she said. “Which is a big, isolated house in the woods.”
“Yeah.”
“Where you were. Alone.”
Brody scratched briefly at the back of his neck. “You have that correct,” he said.
Nadine tried not to stand up and throw her chair in frustration. “So why shouldn’t I suspect you of killing those two men?”
“Ask my brothers,” Brody said. “If I did it, they’d know. And they’d rat me out.”
Nadine stared at him. The rules and etiquette of werewolves always made her head hurt. “You’re their alpha, and their blood. Why would they rat you out? Wouldn’t they cover for you out of loyalty?”
Brody looked at her for a long moment, and something in his eyes was as cold as granite. “Our father was pack alpha for thirty years,” he said in that soft, kind voice of his. “He was a killer. He would have killed all of us, his sons, if he’d lived, because he saw us as rivals. So the pack has lived under a killer, Sheriff Walker. For too long.” He gave her half a smile. “We won’t live under one again. We’d die first. If I’d killed those men, Sheriff, my brothers would have killed me already.”
“Who’s the Silverman?” Ian Donovan said. “I have no fucking idea, but I’ll tell you something. I’d like to take his precious sniper rifle and shove it straight up his ass.”
Nadine poured another cup of coffee and watched Ian pace. This was Donovan number two, Brody’s half-brother. The resemblance was only passing—Ian was dark-haired, green-eyed, with none of Brody’s patience. He was kinetic, pacing the room like he wanted to climb the walls. He was wearing jeans and a black long-sleeved shirt that did little to hide his big, muscled body. He’d been a cage fighter once upon a time, before doing a year in prison for it.
Still, for all his pacing he seemed calmer than Brody. More level. This was probably because Ian had a mate, a woman named Anna. Nadine didn’t know much about werewolf mating, except that they chose one mate—only males could be born shifters, so the women they chose were human—and stayed devoted to them for life, dedicated to their mate to the exclusion of every other woman. Nadine thought shifters were a pain in the ass, but that part of shifter life seemed like something she could get on board with.
“Okay,” she said, sipping her coffee. At least Ian Donovan was willing to talk. “We know he’s human, right? Not a werewolf.”
“Definitely human,” Ian agreed. “I investigated
the first murder scene myself, in wolf form. I smelled him. A human man.”
The smell again. Nadine tamped down her irritation. She’d had that argument one too many times. “Anything else?”
“He can’t be young,” Ian said, pacing again. “He’s been the paid assassin of the Martell pack for several decades. And who knows how old he was even then.”
“And the Martells don’t know his name?”
Ian shrugged, barely flinching at the mention of the pack that had tried to forcibly take over Donovan territory. “We have Martell pack members who have decided to stay in the Falls. We’ve questioned them. They say no one has ever known him by any name except the Silverman.”
Well, that was no help. “No address? No idea where he was staying?”
“No.” Ian paced again. “Believe me, I want to catch him as badly as you do. That piece of shit shot two of my brothers.”
He was referring to Heath Donovan and Devon Donovan, the two brothers Nadine hadn’t interviewed yet. She was dreading both interviews, though for very different reasons. “Well, that’s my plan,” she said. “I need to close these murder cases. Speaking of which, I don’t see a record here of your alibi.”
Ian stopped pacing and looked at her. “You’re on the wrong track there, Sheriff. I’m not your killer.”
Once again, she had to ask, “And how the hell do I know that?”
“Because I can’t hide anything from my mate. So if I was ripping humans open in the woods, she’d know. And she’d leave me.”
Nadine rubbed her forehead tiredly. More complicated werewolf rules. “You’re saying that you can’t be a murderer because your wife would divorce you over it?”
Ian was still for the first time. He put his hands in his pockets and watched her, a smile slowly forming on his lips. He was enjoying her frustration. “A werewolf’s mate is important to him,” he said. “The most important thing there is.”
It didn’t compute. That wasn’t how humans worked. She was no rookie cop. If a man had the urge to kill bad enough—if he had the urge to commit the kind of violence that had happened to those men in the woods—then no woman would be able to stop him. In fact, he’d probably kill her first. Wolves were so goddamned strange. “That makes no sense,” she complained.
Ian said nothing and when she dropped her hand and looked at him, she saw the smile was still on his face as he watched her.
“Welcome to Shifter Falls,” he said.
2
“Sweetheart,” said Heath Donovan, “we’ve been over this.”
Nadine poured yet more coffee. This time, she wished she had a shot of tequila to put in it.
If Brody Donovan was the alpha and Ian Donovan was the rebel, Heath Donovan was the brother they called the Lover Wolf. He was handsome, with dark blond hair worn slightly long and a short, golden brown beard on his jaw. His handsomeness wasn’t blunt and intense, like his brothers’; it was sensual, utterly confident, and downright beautiful. And he had the body to match.
Today he wore a suede jacket of deep brown over a white button-down shirt, open at the throat, and worn jeans. There were leather bracelets on his wrists and silver rings on his fingers. A silver chain with a small wolf’s head hung around his neck, the wolf’s head resting on his perfect, tawny skin. He looked at her with his gray-green eyes and smiled.
Nadine leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms defensively. He was right; they’d been over this. She had interviewed him in the shifter bar he owned in the Falls, the Black Wolf, right after the murders had happened. She’d asked him these same questions. But that was just too bad. She was asking them again.
“I’m trying to close two murder cases here, Heath,” she said. “Stop calling me sweetheart.”
“Okay,” he replied. He put a hand on the table, palm down, and leaned in. He had beautiful hands. “I’ll tell you again. It isn’t possible that one of our wolves—any of them, including the pack leaders—could have done it. Wolves are hunters, strictly for food, not murderers. We don’t hunt humans and we don’t harm them. If a wolf in the pack had done this, we would know, and that would make him a rogue. The pack deals with rogues.”
“And I’m supposed to just believe this?”
He shrugged. “You’re asking, so I’ll answer. Yes, you are. You’re not a newcomer to this part of the state, Sheriff. You’re not a new cop, either. You know that we shifters deal justice among ourselves, in our own way, without bringing in the human police. You know that we handle problems like these, if they ever come up, by ourselves. And you know that if there was a rogue in our pack, we would have dealt with it after the first murder and before the second man had a chance to die.”
Shit. This was why she’d been dreading this interview. Even though it was shifter politics, it made so much sense when Heath explained it. In her opinion, the Donovans should always let Heath do the talking.
She shifted in her seat. The other two Donovans were scary, but Nadine wasn’t afraid of them. Heath was sex on a stick. She was afraid of that. And if she let on for even an eyelash twitch, he’d know it.
“How’s the injury?” she asked him.
He rotated his shoulder, as if she’d reminded him of it. The Silverman had shot him with a silver bullet. Werewolves healed instantly from most wounds, but a silver bullet was different. It could heal most of the way, but would never entirely be right. “It’s fine, I suppose. It pains me when the weather’s bad, and sometimes the muscles get tight.” He smiled again. “But I have someone to help with that problem now.”
He was referring to Tessa, his mate. They’d gotten together only six weeks ago, the Lover Wolf erasing the notches on his bedpost in fidelity to only one woman. Tessa was a beautiful blonde, sassy and smart, more than a match for her werewolf. Heath looked happy, devoted, and very well laid. The look only made him more attractive, damn him.
“I guess everyone was surprised when you took a wife,” Nadine said.
Heath cocked his head. “She’s my mate, Sheriff, not my wife.”
Nadine felt her eyebrows rise. “There’s a difference?”
He sighed. “Humans. Yes, of course there’s a difference.”
She couldn’t help her curiosity. “I fail to see what the difference is.”
“Of course you do,” he said. “A wife is a human construct. Made by laws and gods and rules and expectations. A mate is simply a wolf listening to his heart, to his blood and his bones, and choosing his other half for the rest of his existence.” He snapped his fingers. “As simple as that, and as complicated. No gods. No lawyers. The sun and the sky and the water. And you and her, if she lets you touch her, for as long as you breathe.”
Nadine stared at him. Heath and his silver tongue. He may be a handful, but Tessa was still a lucky woman. Nadine’s skin felt tight, hot. And a face flashed into her mind, dark and thunderous, bearded, with a big, muscled body. And a name. Devon Donovan.
She pushed the thought away, hard. Devon Donovan had nothing to do with mating. Besides, he probably hated her. And she hadn’t laid eyes on him in five years, since that night when—yeah, he probably hated her.
She was dreading Devon’s interview the most.
She made herself take a breath, get back on track. “What do you know about the Silverman?” she asked Heath.
He rolled his eyes. “You’ve already talked to Brody and Ian, so I suppose you know what they know. He’s human, likely old. He has no name and no home that anyone knows of. But I can tell you one thing. He hasn’t left the area.”
That made Nadine snap upright in her seat. “What are you talking about? Have you seen him?”
“Of course not. If I’d seen the Silverman, I would have ripped his throat out and tasted his blood.” Something dark and cold crossed behind his eyes, and Nadine was reminded that he was a werewolf. He meant that. He actually meant it. “No, I know what I know by other means.”
“What other means?”
“My injury, for one. It doesn’t just
throb with the weather. It throbs because the man who caused it hasn’t gone far.”
Nadine pressed her palms to her temples. “Please, Heath, for God’s sake. Can you say something that has logic?”
“That is logic,” he said, unperturbed. “I’m part animal, sweetheart. It’s called instinct. I’ve learned to listen to it. So should you.”
Argh. She dropped her hands. “Does your injury have a map, by any chance? Some kind of GPS? Radar?”
“No. But I’ll tell you something else.”
Nadine sighed. “What?”
He watched her carefully, and then he smiled again. “I know the Silverman is close, and I know he’s alive. Because Devon is tracking him. And Devon isn’t dead.”
3
His wolf smelled her first. He had come down from the mountains and was circling Shifter Falls, following a stream, in wolf form because he traveled faster that way. And he caught the scent of a woman in the wind.
Not just any woman. Her.
At first he put his nose down, thinking he could ignore it and continue on his way. He wasn’t as fast as he used to be—the remnants of the silver bullet in his back leg saw to that—but he could still make pretty good time. His human brain, the one that did the planning, had had the thought that the Silverman, wherever he was, would need a water source. So if his wolf followed the water, he would eventually find the man.
Never mind that these were the Rockies, dotted with streams and lakes probably in the thousands. He would find every single one. He’d been in these mountains for weeks already, alone, staying in wolf form most of the time, unable to stop tracking his enemy. What else did a wolf who was only half a wolf have to do?
But he found that despite himself, he’d stopped, his huge paws dug deep into the wet mud of the riverbank. There had been the sound of a motor, far off, some time ago. The motor had stopped. And now the scent. His wolf dipped its head. Deep in his mind, the human half of Devon Donovan pieced it together. Sheriff Nadine Walker had driven to the end of the farthest service road, parked, gotten out. And started walking.