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

by Selena Scott

  He shifted back into his human form and grimaced at the window. It was just barely wide enough for him to slip through. Glancing around, he located another pair of scrubs on a shelf and slipped the pants on. They were tight, but anything was better than trying to squeeze himself through a tiny window butt ass naked.

  The driver, so unsympathetic to his compatriot’s plight, screamed like a little girl when Orion tumbled through the window and onto the front seat, going for the element of surprise and socking the driver in the side of the head as he fell. The two men wrestled with the steering wheel for a moment before Orion opened the side door and booted the guy out onto the side of what appeared to be a service road cutting through the mountains. They were the only vehicles in sight.

  The other two trucks were in front of him, driving in a neat little line. Orion growled low in his throat and stepped on the gas. He’d never driven a car before and right now he was going to have to figure out how to stop the other two cars without causing an accident that might injure his siblings. Piece of cake.

  He roared down the highway, gaining on the other two trucks and swerving into the opposite lane to pass them. They honked and swerved as he passed them, obviously aware that his truck had been hijacked, but he didn’t let that stop him. When he was far enough in front of them, he slammed on the brakes, swearing when the truck started fishtailing on the pavement. He had not planned on that.

  The truck skidded and executed a full one-eighty, somehow facing the oncoming trucks now. Orion swore, and grabbed at the stick shift. He knew that one of the letters meant R for reverse, but he couldn’t read any of them. The other trucks bore down on him as he tried one setting and it merely made the engine rev. He tried another and the car lurched forward. He tried the last and sure enough, the truck zoomed backward, ten feet, twenty feet, fifty. Just enough that the other two trucks, honking and skidding, didn’t reduce Orion to a smear on the pavement.

  All three trucks skidded to a stop nearly at once. The other two drivers swung out of the cabs of their trucks, shouting and gesticulating. The back door of one of the trucks banged open, hanging drunkenly on one hinge as Phoenix’s wolf exploded out, looking pissed as hell.

  “Phoenix!” Orion shouted, trying to get his brother’s attention. They needed to stick together and stick close to the one truck that had been neatly divested of its driver. It was their only ride home.

  Phoenix’s wolf swung his head to look in Orion’s direction but turned toward the other truck. He slammed his body against the truck doors, trying to get to Dawn.

  Yeah. That was a good point.

  The driver of that truck cocked what looked like a stun gun and rounded the side of the truck, trying to get to Phoenix.

  Nope.

  Orion hadn’t spent the last fifteen years of his life hunting and tracking for his brother and sister, providing for them, protecting them, only to fail now. He barreled into the driver, slamming him into the side of the truck and wrestling him to the ground. He wrested the stun gun from the driver’s hand and pointed it at him.

  “No! No!” The man shouted.

  How complicated could this contraption really be? Orion pulled the trigger and, yup, not so complicated at all. The man shouted and writhed beneath the jolt of electricity and scrambled away from Orion, no longer a threat.

  He bounded around to where Phoenix was still trying to break the lock on the back of the truck with his meaty paws.

  One more hit and the lock was broken, Orion reached up and flung the doors open, only to find Dawn’s wolf growling down at the orderly who’d been assigned to her. The man, splayed on the ground, cowered and inched back from her, his hands raised in surrender.

  Dawn looked up, murder in her eyes and bloody rags from the man’s shirt clutched in her jaws.

  “Good work,” Orion said, impressed with his usually shy sister’s killer instinct.

  She dropped the rag from her jaws and hopped out of the truck.

  “Can you shift back and drive us home?” Orion asked her. “I don’t know what the hell is going on, but—“

  He cut off abruptly as a distant and heart-droppingly familiar noise kicked up around them.

  “Oh, crap.” And then he was the one who was shifting instead of them. Because if he and his siblings had to outrun a helicopter, they weren’t going to do it as humans in a humongous target of a truck. Nope. They were going to do it as wolves who melted into the forest around them.

  The three wolves took off together, shoulder to shoulder, toward the nearest copse of trees.

  They were almost there, ten feet away from cover when the ground exploded in front of them.

  The helicopter was shooting at them! Not to kill, he was sure, but to keep them from going any further.

  The wolves skidded to a stop and Orion wheeled around to look up at the helicopter. A man leaned out of the open side door and cocked a gun. There were four more men just like him all lined up neatly in the helicopter. The visual was disheartening, as was the sudden appearance of the chopper. It made it seem like no matter how hard they fought to get away, there were going to be more and more of whoever these people were.

  The wolves tried to sprint to the other side, but the ground exploded again in that direction. They were being herded and Orion let out a gruesome howl, angry beyond belief. One of the soldiers in the chopper pulled out a different looking gun and this time he aimed it directly at Orion.

  Orion dodged at the last second and in the ground, right where he’d just been standing, sat a dart of some kind. Surely something that would have tranquilized him.

  Again, the wolves attempted to flee, this time in three different directions, but there were too many guns in the chopper and all escape routes were abruptly beheaded. They were completely hemmed in.

  Another round of darts came their way and they, all three, avoided being clipped, but Orion knew it was only a matter of time. They were not going to be able to avoid getting dosed at this rate. Panic filled his heart as he watched one of the guns be pointed directly at Dawn. He lunged forward, intending to take the hit, but didn’t quite make it. The dart lodged itself in her back leg.

  She howled in pain and curled in on herself, yanking the dart out with her teeth before it was able to fully unload into her blood stream. The helicopter lowered down, sensing weakness, and made to land.

  Orion rushed to her side but startled when an almighty roar shook the trees, momentarily drowning out the sound of the helicopter. A bear, irate and roaring, burst onto the road, charging the low-flying helicopter. The helicopter tried to regain altitude, but not quickly enough. The bear bashed into the skies on the bottom of the craft, clipping it just enough to send it flagging sideways into the trees. It crashed awkwardly, sending the men skittering out of it, trying to get clear before it exploded.

  Orion turned back to Dawn’s wolf. She was having trouble getting back to her four feet, the medicine obviously taking affect. The bear stood between the wolves and the soldiers from the helicopter when a wall of heat and sound knocked them all off their feet.

  The helicopter smoked and flamed and smoldered where it had crashed into the trees.

  “Orion!”

  Through the smoke came an image that Orion would never forget as long as he lived. Diana running alongside a gigantic polar bear, skirting one of the trucks and jogging around the scattered soldiers who were still trying to get back to their feet.

  She skidded to the ground beside Orion’s wolf, scraping her knees and coming to rest beside Dawn. “We followed you. The cops are coming,” she told him. “They’ll be here any second.”

  Her eyes arrowed in on Dawn’s wolf.

  “Oh, God,” Diana whispered. “Dawn, you need to shift while you still can. Shift back to human form if you can.”

  Phoenix and Orion followed Diana’s advice, but Dawn merely strained, it was almost as if she was too weak to shift.

  “She was hit with a dart in her back leg,” Orion informed Diana. He found
the dart in the dirt and handed it over.

  “A tranquilizer. We have these in the center, only for the direst of circumstances if someone loses control. She’ll be all right after a few hours.”

  Diana looked up at approaching sirens and her face was awash in red and blue. Moments later cops came streaming past the trucks, tossing the soldiers in handcuffs, casting wide circles around the polar bear shifter and the two naked men crouched around the unconscious wolf.

  It wasn’t until an ambulance arrived and he and Phoenix helped load their sister into the back that Orion realized the grizzly that had come to their aid had disappeared in all the hubbub.

  “Where did Quill go?” he turned and asked Diana.

  Her eyes narrowed. “Quill was here?”

  “He protected us from the soldiers. Kept us from getting shot.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.” She frowned. “He was the one who sold you out. He arranged this entire thing.”

  “If you want to go with her, it’s now or never,” one of the paramedics sitting alongside Dawn called down to Orion.

  Phoenix had already peeled off to go find Ida. Orion felt himself torn. The protector inside of him needed to go with his sister, unconscious and still in her wolf form. But that would mean leaving Diana in this smoking, hectic place, crawling with cops.

  She quirked a smile at him, as if she could read his mind. “I’ll be fine, Orion. You go with her. I’ll meet you there.”

  He stepped into the ambulance and blinked down at the woman he loved. And he knew, he just knew, that she would be all right. She knew how to take care of herself. She didn’t need him to take care of her. In fact, she did everything she could to take care of him.

  And what a feeling that was. It was something he hadn’t truly felt since before his parents had died. She’d figured out he was in danger. She’d come for him. She would always come for him.

  ***

  The doors to the ambulance closed before Diana could tell Orion everything that was echoing through her heart. But that was all right. He had to focus on his sister right then.

  But it wouldn’t keep forever.

  She turned back to wade through the sea of cops at the scene. She needed answers.

  Ideally, she’d be able to rush off to the hospital and be at Orion’s side right now. But she knew him. She knew that more than anything, he needed to know what the hell had just happened. He needed to know that his siblings were truly safe.

  So, instead of heading straight for the hospital to sit vigil at his side, she did what she did best. She kicked ass and took some names.

  “Ida!” she called. “Get Phoenix. We need to get to the precinct where they’re taking all these people for interviews. I want answers and I want them now. Where’d the polar bear go? Ah, there you are —hold on. What’s your name?”

  “Um. Uh. Jesse?” he said in a shockingly deep voice as he towered over everyone who scuttled around him.

  She put one hand on her hip. “Are you asking or telling me.”

  “Telling you?”

  She laughed and dragged a hand over her face. “All right, Jesse, we’re gonna have to avail you of your kindness one more time and get a ride back into town on your jeep. Also,” she paused, appraising him, “You’re a hell of a guy for jumping into action like that. You didn’t have to bring us out here and you definitely didn’t have to shift.”

  He seemed distinctly uncomfortable with the praise. “Yes,” he said, fairly awkwardly, turning pink and looking at the sky above Diana’s head. “I don’t mind giving you a ride.”

  “Great. Let’s roll.”

  ***

  It was almost ten hours later when Diana dragged her sorry, exhausted hide up the steps of Orion’s front porch. She’d long since sent Phoenix, Ida, and Jesse home. She’d been the last person from their group at the precinct where she’d belligerently badgered every cop in her sight for any information they could glean from the soldiers they’d arrested at the scene.

  Her adrenaline had given out about six hours ago, and for a while, the coffee had done its thing. But now, as weighted down as she was with the information she’d acquired, she felt like she could sleep for a week.

  But first, Orion.

  As had happened the other night, right as she was raising her hand to knock on his door, Orion swung it open. They both blinked in surprise before sort of folding toward one another, their embrace as comforting as it was passionate.

  “I was just coming to find you,” he said into her hair.

  “I know,” she whispered back. “You’ll always come find me. Just like I’ll always come find you.”

  Unlike the other night, this time, Diana was the one dragging Orion through the house by his hand. He didn’t object. As they passed the second landing on the stairs, Diana nodded toward the doors in the hallway, closed and dark.

  “Dawn?” she asked him.

  “All tucked up into bed,” he confirmed. “She woke up an hour or so after we got to the hospital and they monitored her for a while. They gave her the option to stay the night there but she wanted to come home. Phoenix and Ida are sleeping too.” He scratched at his hair. “I’m glad you’re here. It feels better having everyone under one roof.”

  Something leapt in her stomach and she tugged on his hand, pulling him up the stairs to the third floor, where his bedroom was.

  She closed the door behind them, flicked on his lamp and turned to him, a fire burning in her gut. “I’ve got good news and bad news. Which do you want first?”

  “Good news.”

  She took him by the shoulders and sat him on his bed. Taking a deep breath, Diana fell to her feet in front of him and took off one of his shoes and then the other, tossing them over her shoulders. She stood and surveyed him, deciding she wanted him even more comfortable.

  He laughed as she skinned off his clothes. He sat back on the bed and she was half a second away from tucking him in, she felt so tender.

  “Okay.” She took a deep breath. “The good news is that you’re part of my everyone, too.”

  “Huh?”

  She smiled and took a deep breath, trying to figure out how to explain it. “You said that you were glad I was here because it felt good to have everyone under one roof. Well, I’ve never really been included in anyone’s “everyone” before. And I just want you to know that you’re in my everyone too. It wouldn’t feel right not being with you. You and your family are my group. My people. I’ll fight for you guys. Protect you as best as I possibly can. Your world is my world. You’re my everyone.”

  Apparently speechless, Orion reached forward and looped an arm around her waist, dragging her between his legs. His arms banded around her so tightly that she could feel every emotion that was coursing through him. All the panic and fear and rage and determination from the day. The confusion and the anger and the bravery. And now, with his forehead pressing into her sternum, she felt just how grateful he was to have her there.

  “It’s so great,” he said, speaking into her stomach where his face was pressed, “that you’re so in love with me.” He tilted his head back and gave her a playful, self-satisfied grin. “What a relief.”

  She gave a monumental eye roll and pushed him back onto the bed, straddling his hips and pinning his hands down. “You joke…” She let it linger in the air, let him suffer a little. “But it’s true. I am. In love with you, that is. I love you. I figured that out right around the time I was bashing my way out of a locked closet to get to you.”

  “Wait. What? You were locked in a closet? Hold on. One thing at a time. You love me? Oh, thank god. Because I really love you. I love you so much, I can’t believe it. I’ve loved you for months. A year. From the moment I first saw you. You’re my person. My one person. Holy shit, I can’t believe you love me back.”

  Tears gathered in his eyes and they matched her own. She immediately added it to the list of reasons that she loved him so much. Because she knew, for certain, that she was the only
person on this earth that he would cry in front of. And vice versa. They were a little bit of a mess right now. Crying and kissing and supporting one another and being supported. But that was the way she liked it. That was the good stuff.

  She got to have his tender-sweet parts, just like he got to have hers.

  “Okay,” he said, after pulling back from a long, deep kiss. “Tell me why you had to break out of a closet. And tell me how you knew that the whole thing was a trap. And tell me—“

  She pressed two fingers over his lips to still his questions. She thought of everything she’d learned from the cops today. About the Director, his plan to recruit unwitting shifters and turn them into government weapons. She thought about Quill’s allegiance to the Director. How he’d betrayed them all. And then, most confusingly, how he’d shown up at the last second and protected them all. How he was gone now, disappeared into the forest. She thought of what might come next for them all. The vigilance. The bravery.

  She thought of everything that would come tomorrow. But for now, she was safe and warm in the arms of the man she loved. And amazingly, in spite of it all, her life seemed steady, constant. She didn’t know what would happen next, but for her, it almost didn’t matter. Because Orion would be at her side. And she would be at his.

  “Is there any chance,” she asked, snuggling closer to him. “That I could convince you to talk about it tomorrow?”

  He looked down at her.

  “Your family is safe,” she promised him. “And the rest is a mess. But maybe you and me, we just go to sleep.”

  He raised his eyebrows and eyed her for a long minute. Then, in a beautiful show of trust and love, he simply scooted them back and slid the blankets over top of them.

  “Sure,” he said simply, trusting her implicitly.