Forbidden Shifters Complete Series (Books 1-6): A Wolf Shifter Paranormal Romance

by Selena Scott

  “Great!” Dawn said brightly. “Quill texted me the address and everything this morning so I’ll pick you up from work and we’ll go?”

  “Sure.”

  For now though, Orion had to get to work. Especially if he was going to have to take an unexpected half day off, he really didn’t want to be late. Which was a bummer because normally, if Diana’s phone had been off and he had an important thing like this to run past her, he would have wanted to run by the center, talk to her in person, but he just didn’t think he could squeeze it in. He didn’t want to lose his job.

  Orion worked the morning through, convinced his boss to let him take a half day and jumped in the car with Phoenix and Dawn. He frowned at his phone. Diana hadn’t called him all morning and her phone was still going to voicemail. Her office phone just rang and rang. When they’d woken up this morning in his bed, she hadn’t mentioned that anything would be out of the ordinary about her day.

  Something about this really didn’t feel right.

  “Where the hell are we?” Orion asked a few minutes later as Dawn drove through the outskirts of town. He’d never seen this part of Portland before. They pulled into a strip mall where a large white tent had been erected on one end of the parking lot.

  “I don’t know exactly,” Dawn said. “But this is the address that Quill sent us.”

  “Is Quill meeting us?” Orion asked.

  Dawn shook her head. “No.”

  He glanced at her. There was something about her tone of voice that sounded off. “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. He’s busy. We haven’t been spending much time together lately.” She slammed the car door and started striding off toward the white tent.

  Orion and Phoenix strode after her, exchanging meaningful eye contact. Up ahead, in the tent, Orion could see people scuttling around in matching uniforms, clipboard and tablets in their hands. Three different trucks were backed up into the tent and they were the kind of vehicle that he’d seen parked around town before. They looked like a truck on the outside but the inside was kitted out as a mobile clinic. A big sign was plastered on the side of all three trucks. He recognized it as the government’s medical symbol.

  “Are you three our 11 o’ clock?” a smiling man asked as he approached them with his clipboard out. He glanced down at it. “The Wolf siblings?”

  “That’s us,” Phoenix said, eyeing the strangers, the three trucks.

  “Great! Let’s get started then.”

  They followed him toward a folding table where he presented them with three sets of matching paperwork. Dawn filled it out for all three of them while the man smiled innocuously at them.

  “Busy day, then?” Orion asked.

  “Hmm?” the man said.

  Orion nodded toward the trucks. “Lotta trucks for just three shifters.”

  Dawn looked up from her paperwork and squinted at the trucks, then at the man sitting across from them. “Oh, yeah. You must be seeing a lot of potential participants if you need three trucks just to accommodate them all.”

  Orion could tell, just from using his nose that he and his siblings were the only shifters for about half a mile. The three different mobile clinics seemed like overkill to him.

  “Oh. Right,” the man said, his smile faltering just a bit. “We’re expecting to get busier later. Lots of people want to be involved in our program you know!”

  He stood and cleared his throat. Orion could smell his nerves.

  “Should we get started?”

  He led the three of them over to the trucks. “Phoenix you’ll be in this one. Orion, you’re there. And Dawn, you’ll be in the middle.”

  “You’re splitting us up?” Phoenix asked, though his voice was so low and sinister, it barely registered as a question.

  “If we do your exams simultaneously, we can get it all done faster,” the man explained. “Besides, if you’re in the same room, your hormones will interact with one another and screw up the test results and we don’t want that.”

  “We’re not splitting up,” Orion asserted. This was absurd. Why did they need to make things go faster? There was no one here but them. They had all the time in the world.

  “Guys,” Dawn said, pinching the bridge of her nose. “Can we not make this difficult? The faster we get this done, the faster we can go home.” She leaned in to her brothers. “Quill worked really hard to organize this for us and, honestly, we can’t afford to screw it up. We’re talking a hundred grand in debt just disappearing. Let’s just do what they say.”

  Orion didn’t like it, but he could already see Phoenix caving, the weight of the money nearly breaking him.

  “Fine.” Without another word, he strode up to his designated truck and got in.

  Dawn turned on her heel and did the same.

  Orion was left, pausing. But he really didn’t want to be the reason that this whole thing fell apart. Not when it was so obviously important to his brother. He climbed the stairs to his trailer and opened the door. There was a man in scrubs and a medical mask waiting inside. Next to him was a metal table lined with medical instruments and a row of tanks and screens. Some machine was beeping quietly in the background.

  “Hello,” the man said, rising to his full height. Almost as tall as Orion. “If you’ll just step over here we can begin.”

  The door to the truck slammed closed behind Orion and he could have sworn he heard a lock click into place.

  The man in the scrubs bent over a table, straightening some of the tools and Orion caught a flash of something silver at his waist.

  “Are you a nurse?” he asked the man.

  The man paused, apparently weighing his words. “Physician’s assistant,” he said after a moment.

  Orion wasn’t sure why, but he was almost completely positive that the man was lying.

  “Why,” Orion said carefully, standing up to his full height, “would a physician’s assistant need to be wearing a gun?”

  The man glanced at him, both blanching and pulling his shoulders back, like he was readying himself for a fight he wasn’t quite sure he wanted to start. “No offense, pal, but you never can be too careful with shifters. All of the medical staff are armed today.”

  A familiar sound caught Orion’s ear. The sound of an engine turning over. A telltale rumble slightly shook the ground. The truck next to them had just started. There was a slam and another slam. Someone shouted something from outside. The sound of gravel spitting from under tires.

  He made eye contact with the man across the truck before he decided he didn’t give a shit about a gun and lunged for the door. A loud bang and a searing pain in his thigh barely stopped him.

  Because he didn’t know what the hell was going on but he knew a trap when he smelled one and he was almost positive someone was driving away with his siblings.

  The man behind him shouted something, their truck kicked on, and as Orion scrabbled at the door, the truck lurched and sped out of the parking lot.

  ***

  “Really, I’m so, so sorry, Diana,” Quill said for the nineteenth time that morning.

  She pinched back her annoyance at him. It hadn’t been his fault that in their staff meeting that morning he’d spilled an entire bottle of water on her phone and destroyed it. But it was kind of odd. He wasn’t usually a clumsy sort of person.

  In fact, he’d been acting oddly the entire staff meeting. He was usually quiet and stoic. But today he was quiet and… nervous.

  That was it. She’d had it. She was tired of dancing around the issue and waiting for him to confide in her. After the meeting, Diana resolved that she would drag him by the ear to one of the private conference rooms and have it out with Quill cage-match style.

  There was something going on with him and she wanted to know what the hell it was. She wanted to help for god sakes!

  But unfortunately, she did not get to do that because Quill ducked out of the room to use the bathroom toward the end of the meeting and about three minutes later, there wa
s a huge scuffle breaking out in the main room.

  Diana burst out of the meeting to see not one, but three different clients had shifted and were posturing and dancing around one another, looking like some bonkers episode of a National Geographic special where a mountain goat, a cougar, and lynx all went at it. Quill, across the room, shifted into his grizzly form to play the referee and make sure things didn’t get out of hand. By the time Diana got everyone to shift back to their human forms and separated into other rooms, she was sweating, flustered, and internally scowling at the number of incident reports she was about to have to fill out. The center was abuzz with strange, tense energy. Following protocol, she did what she normally did in situations like these and sent all the clients home. With this much adrenaline zipping around they were bound to have another incident like that one unless they all got some space from one another. She ordered her staff to stick around for the debrief and turned on her heel, desperate for half a second alone to gather her thoughts.

  She slammed into her office and flopped onto her chair. What a freaking day! And it wasn’t even 11 AM yet. She reflexively reached into her pocket for her phone and frowned. Right. Her phone was dead. She frowned. She really needed to talk to Orion, just to hear his voice would be enough. The man was addictively calming. Her own personal glass of red wine.

  She picked up her office phone to call him and frowned when she didn’t hear a dial tone. That was weird. She hung it up and tried again. Still nothing.

  “Diana?”

  Ida was peeking her head around the door.

  “Sorry to interrupt.”

  Diana waved her in and Ida closed the door neatly behind her.

  “Look,” she started. “I know we’re all supposed to stick around for the debrief of the fight this morning, but they’re about to get called in for the lab testing any minute and I’d really like to be there with Phoenix if that’s all right. He doesn’t have the best relationship with doctors and I really think it’ll calm him down if I’m—“

  Diana held up one hand to stop Ida and squinted at her. “Hold on, what are you talking about?”

  “The preliminary testing for the medical program they’re enrolled in?” Ida said slowly, like she couldn’t believe Diana would have forgotten something so monumental.

  Diana rose from behind the desk. “Who is “they”?”

  Ida’s brow smashed down. “The Wolfs.”

  Something skied off a cliff in Diana’s stomach. She didn’t understand, not yet, but she knew something was terribly, grossly off-base about this. Her phones were all dead, her center was a wreck and the Wolfs were apparently headlong into something she had been harboring misgivings for. This wasn’t a coincidence. None of it was.

  “Ida,” Diana said, skidding around the desk and toward the door, but the rest of the sentence was cut off when the door of her office was nearly broken off its hinges by a very familiar grizzly bear.

  “Quill!” Diana shouted, hopping back on a reflex. Even though she knew this particular bear by name, it wasn’t every day that a woman found herself face to face with a thousand pounds of menacing growl. Both she and Ida stumbled backward as the bear advanced on them.

  “Quill,” Ida said in an admirably clear voice. “What the hell is going on?”

  The bear crowded them back into Diana’s office. A moment later Diana felt the doorjamb of her open closet door at her back. She stopped retreating. The bear growled and advanced again. Soon, Diana and Ida were both completely standing in Diana’s dark closet. A blur of light and sound and the stretch of muscle and then there in front of them was Quill in his human form, standing in a shaft of light, staring at them with that handsome face, an inscrutable expression there.

  Diana knew what was going to happen before it did.

  “Quill—“ she started, wanting to tell him that he didn’t have to do this. That whatever he’d gotten himself into she’d help him get out of it. That he hadn’t done anything irrevocable yet.

  But the door slammed in their faces, the lock clicked and half a second later, the scrape of her desk being laid in front accosted their ears.

  “Hey!” Ida shouted, slamming her hand against the wood. “What the hell! Quill, what the hell are you doing! Let us out of here!”

  The office door slammed and then there was silence.

  “Help!” Diana shouted as loud as she could, realizing already that their only hope was for someone else to hear their voices. Because Quill wasn’t coming back. She’d seen the look in his eye right before he’d slammed the door. It was resignation.

  The two women shouted and slammed against the door for a solid five minutes before Ida turned her back to the wood and slid down to the ground.

  “Diana,” she rasped, “Do you have any clue what the hell is going on here?”

  “Unfortunately, I have a pretty good idea.” She sank down to the ground next to Ida. “I think Quill sold out the Wolfs.”

  “What?” Ida was up on her feet again, her eyes frantic, her hands clawing at her hair. “What do you mean?”

  “There’s pretty good odds that that government program that sounded too good to be true is complete bullshit. I don’t know what it is a cover for. Maybe it really is medical research of some kind? Some shady non-FDA-approved mess? I don’t know. But I’m willing to bet someone paid Quill a lot of money to get the Wolfs somewhere at some time and all he had to do to make it happen was convince them to go there and make sure that we didn’t follow.”

  “No,” Ida whispered. “He wouldn’t do that. He’s my friend. He’s Phoenix’s friend. Shit, the man’s half in love with Dawn.”

  “You think?” Diana asked tonelessly, her hands going numb with panic, her skin alternating between hot and cold. “I couldn’t quite tell what was going on there.”

  Ida didn’t bother answering. “What are we going to do?”

  “Tell me you have your phone on you.”

  Ida shook her head. “Quill stepped on it this morning.” She hissed air through her teeth. “At the time I thought it was an accident. But that was before I knew he was a two-timing piece of shit!” She shouted the last part into the dim air of the closet.

  “Okay,” Diana said logically, willing herself to remain calm and pinching her eyes closed. “We can’t call anyone to help. Which means we have to get the hell out of this closet. Somehow.”

  There was only a thin strip of light penetrating the closet from the crack at the bottom of the door so Diana had to use her memory as she groped along the shelves for the toolbox she kept there.

  “Score!” She found its cold metal corners with her fingers and slid it open, groping around for the hammer. “Okay. Hope this works.”

  Raising the hammer, Diana smashed against the door right above the handle. It was made of stronger material than she’d anticipated and the blow reverberated up her arm. But she didn’t stop. Somewhere Orion was in danger and Diana was not going to let one lousy closet door stop her from getting to him. She hammered and hammered at the door until light broke through, and she didn’t stop then. She managed to make a three inch hole in the wood. It was just big enough to squeeze her hand through so that she could reach down and flip the lock on the door.

  She stepped back and swung it open.

  “Diana, you’re such a badass!” Ida called over her shoulder as she scrambled over the top of the desk and into Diana’s office. Diana was fast on her heels.

  It was clear as they skidded out into the center that somehow Quill had closed up shop, gotten everyone to go home. The center was dark and locked up.

  “Phone! We need a freaking working phone!” Ida shouted in frustration as she galloped from desk to desk, picking up the office phones one by one and finding them all dead.

  “Screw the phones, we just need to get to wherever they are. Any chance you knew the address?”

  “Yes, they were out by the Goodwill, by the river.”

  “Let’s go.” The two women sprinted out of the center but cam
e up short when they saw their cars.

  Identical slashed tires greeted them on both vehicles.

  “Motherfucker,” Diana shouted at the sky, finally losing her cool.

  “Car trouble?” a deep voice asked them from behind.

  Diana and Ida whirled and Diana squinted at a face she dimly recognized. Ah, it was the bouncer from the club the other night. The polar bear.

  “Hi,” he said, scratching at the back of his neck and looking uncomfortable and bashful. “I -uh- thought I might come check out your center that you told me about. The one with services for -uh- shifters? But it looks like I came at a bad time?”

  Diana could have kissed him. “You’re a lifesaver! Is that your jeep? Tell me you have a cell phone. Let’s go!”

  If there was anything that could be said for polar bear man, he certainly knew how to roll with the punches, because about twenty seconds later, the three of them were tearing down the road, while Diana called the cops on his phone.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Orion batted away the handgun from the man’s shaking hand as if it were a flyswatter. He advanced on him, a growl low in his throat, his teeth bared.

  Apparently this dude was super scared of wolves. Which boded well for Orion, considering he’d just shifted. He didn’t have a ton of a plan except for disarming the complete douche who’d just shot him in the back leg -the bullet had just skimmed his skin, lodging in the side of the truck. The man backed up and shouted into a radio, begging for help. Orion continued to back him up until the guy’s back was flat against the front of the truck. He scrabbled at the small window above that separated the cab of the truck from the body of it.

  “Pull over!” the man shouted to the driver. “He shifted! He shifted! Pull over!”

  “Pull over?” the driver shouted back. “Are you nuts? Sorry, buddy, but you heard the Director’s orders.”

  The window slammed closed and Orion lunged. The man screamed and lost his footing as Orion’s paws slammed into his chest, shoving him to the ground. His head bounced against the floor of the truck and he went still. Orion bent over him and watched the man’s chest rise and fall. Good. He wasn’t dead. But Orion hoped he’d have a hell of a headache when he woke up.