Chapter One

Savannah Orman muttered a steady stream of curses as she made her way through the smoky pool hall, heading towards the bar. She hated the Watering Hole. Hated it, hated it, hated it. The fact that she not only had to come here, but she had to talk to Austin Bronson, was the cherry on the crud sundae that was her day.

First she’d woken up to her scatterbrained sister Jessamine wailing about her missing shoes. As if Savannah would ever have stolen Jessamine’s garishly hand-painted combat boots. It turned out that their brother, Niall, had hidden them in the chicken coop because the day before, Jessamine had embarrassed him in front of some fox he had a crush on.

Then she’d gone out to get the mail and there had been a notice from Algernon, Lord of All Foxes, reminding them to be ready to vacate their home and restaurant in thirty days. Not the kind of thing she was likely to have forgotten.

She’d quietly tucked the letter in the top drawer of her dresser. No point in showing it to her mother and ruining her morning.

And then she’d gotten the news from one of her lookouts. Austin had gotten to Torrin first. She’d been planning on snatching Torrin up tonight, when he went to visit his on-again off-again girlfriend. But Austin had beaten her to it.

And now…she’d actually had to come here and confront the big, stupid wolf who had more muscles than anyone had a right to. The jerk who made her tongue twist into knots and her stomach turn fluttery, when what she really needed to do was hate him. And avoid him.

He’d seen her come through the door. She’d spotted him looking in the mirror behind the bar, almost as if he’d been waiting for her, and his lips had quirked in a smile of satisfaction. But why would he expect her to come here, to this dive? And why did he take so much pleasure in riling her up?

Well, it didn’t matter. She wasn’t letting him get away with stealing her mark. Not again.

The curvy, red-haired fox shifter dodged a flying billiard ball and stepped over a passed-out wolf-shifter who lay face down on the filthy wooden floor, without breaking her stride. She breathed through her mouth, but the fog of cigarette smoke and beer sweat was so thick that she could taste it. She ignored the catcalls and whistles from the various species of shifter clustered around the pool tables.

“Hey, foxy lady!” a wolf shifter yelled from across the room.

“Original,” she snorted.

A wolf shifter sidled up to her, and his hand snaked out in the general direction of her rear. She spun around, grabbed his wrist, and bent it back, forcing him to his knees. His friends howled with laughter.

“Try that again, pervert, and I’ll slap the taste out of your mouth,” she said pleasantly, before releasing him. He rubbed his wrist with a whimper and scurried off.

* * *

“Refill?” Barry, the bartender and owner of the watering hole, asked Austin. The surly, one-eyed wolf shifter had a graying beard that brushed the top of the bar, and a perpetual scowl stamped on his face.

Austin shoved his glass at him. “I’m sitting here, and my glass is empty. You have to ask?”

Barry gave him a sour look, but he stuck Austin’s glass under a tap and refilled it. He set it down just as Savannah stormed up to him and slapped her hands down on the scarred wooden bar.

“You’ve got some nerve!” she snapped.

Austin took a long sip of his beer, then set it down on the bar and swiveled to look at her. His lips quirked in amusement, and his dark mood receded. He’d been hoping Savannah would show up and find him here. It was one of the reasons he’d deliberately parked his truck outside the Watering Hole. He knew that she had lookouts everywhere, even if this town was more wolf than fox.

She and her family had lived in the area for generations. They knew just about everybody. It was a pretty good bet that someone would call and tell her that he was there.

He lived to annoy her. It was so fun and so easy.

“A lot of nerve,” he agreed with her. “In fact, one might say that I was born with extra nerve. Actually, I’m exceptionally gifted in a lot of areas. Want a drink? We could talk about it some more.”

Savannah glared. “No, and now I want to barf.”

Austin’s lips curled in a smile. Cute little fox. She shouldn’t lie to a wolf. What big ears you have. With his enhanced shifter hearing, he could pick up the increase of her breathing rate and the thudding of her heart. What a big nose you have. With his exquisite sense of smell, he could scent the spicy aroma of her arousal.

To say nothing of the delightful visual evidence of her nipples swelling against her blue scoop-necked shirt. Savannah always dressed like a tomboy, in T-shirts and jeans that failed to hide her generous curves, and he loved it.

Too bad he had a severely shortened lifespan to look forward to. She called to his animal like no other woman ever had – which was exactly why he wouldn’t saddle her with his crazy-ass wolf problems.

But he might as well enjoy whatever time he had left. He couldn’t pursue her the way he wanted to, but he could at least flirt with her and drive her insane.

He called out to the bartender. “Barry! My friend here wants a mojito, made with white rum, of course, and don’t skimp on the mint leaves.”

He glanced at her and saw her eyes widen in surprise and her nostrils flare.

Barry stared at him while slowly wiping the bar with a filthy rag. Austin couldn’t recall ever seeing Barry crack a smile. “This ain’t the Gilded Lily. We got beer and we got rotgut. We don’t have a whatever the hell you just said.”

Austin grinned fiercely. He knew that. He’d been staying in this remote shifter town in southeast Washington state for the past three months, and this was his bar of choice. The Gilded Lily was the fancy upscale bar at the other end of town, where the wealthier shifters went. He never set paw in there. They reminded him of his family, of his original pack.

He’d just ordered the mojito to let Savannah know that he knew exactly what she liked to drink. To get under her skin.

Savannah stared at him, narrow-eyed.

“The mark that you have out there in the car? He was mine, you asshole. I did all the work. I spent weeks tailing his dirtbag friends, squatting in the woods, getting eaten alive by mosquitos, not to mention a major case of poison ivy rash on my butt, and you followed me and snatched him away right before I got to his hideout.”

At the mention of her butt, he perked up. He loved her butt. It was so big and round and squeezable – so he imagined. “This is all true. Can I check out that rash? It sounds like something you really should get looked at.”

There was murder in her light brown eyes. “I shifted into fox form and it healed, you ass. And by the way, why are you in here drinking, when you’ve got a man trussed up in your back seat and a bounty to collect?”

“He mouthed off at me. Pissed me off. So he’s sitting out there sweating it out while I knock back a cold one.”

“It’s freaking eighty degrees out!”

He snorted. “Yeah, yeah. I parked in the shade and cracked a window. And he’s a shifter. He’ll survive. He’ll be very hot, sweaty and uncomfortable, but he’ll survive.”

Shouts from the corner of the room drowned out Savannah’s response. Half a dozen shifters were rolling around on the floor, all in human form, throwing punches and swearing. As Austin’s gaze swept through the dimly lit bar, he saw a few men watching him warily. He wasn’t surprised. A couple of weeks ago, the dark visions that had been visiting him for months had swooped down on him right as he was grocery shopping in downtown Greenville. He’d flipped his shit, shouted at the twisted creatures from his visions, and then he’d shifted and destroyed the bakery aisle.

When reality had swum back into focus, he’d been standing in a pile of smashed wood and bread crumbs, and everyone in the store had fled.

He already had a killer reputation, but this was making people question whether he was on the verge of going feral.

And since he had the Dominus gene, that would be bad news for everyone in the region. The Dominus gene meant that he had powers – even greater powers than most Alphas. He could force other shifters to change form, he healed at an accelerated rate, and he was physically stronger than a dozen men his size put together.

He reached for his beer again.

Savannah put her hand over the top of the glass.

Her voice turned saccharine-sweet, with an underlying bite to it. “So, the point I’m trying to make, Austin. Why are you even here in this part of the state? Your pack doesn’t live here. You’ve got plenty of work to keep you busy all over the Northwest without stealing my marks from me.”

“Ha. You’re lecturing me on stealing? You’ve stolen three of my marks in the past three months.”

Her lips twitched in what looked suspiciously like a smirk. “Harris put the calls out, they were open to anyone, and the fact that I got to them first doesn’t mean that I stole them. It means that I’m a better bounty hunter than you.”

Harris was the broker who handled all the calls for rogue shifters in the Northwest region. It had been done that way for the last century. If a pack didn’t want to go after one of their rogues, they were required to hire licensed, officially approved hunters. That way, there weren’t a bunch of reward-hungry, wannabe gun-jockeys running around shooting up everything in sight or shifting in public and risking exposure.

Austin pulled his beer out from under Savannah’s hand and took another swallow, enjoying the crisp, cold liquid as it slid down his throat. “No, it means that your family knows everybody in this part of the state, so everybody was helping you and trying to screw with me, and I still got three marks – no, make that four, counting Torrin out there – before you could. But who’s counting?”

Her brow wrinkled in frustration. The fans circling lazily overhead barely cut through the hot, stuffy air, and sweat beaded on her temples. He imagined licking her salty sweat, then nibbling her neck, and then…

“Quit screwing with me and move on, Austin. Stay off my turf. I mean it.” There was a snap to her tone now, and her scowl was meant to intimidate. It was the cutest thing he’d ever seen.

“But I like it here.” He grinned fiercely. “There’s such beautiful scenery.” He let his gaze slowly drift over her body, making his meaning very clear.

She quickly crossed her arms over her chest, but it was too late. He could see the glorious swelling buds of her nipples, and a jolt of arousal shot through him.

If she looked down, she’d see exactly how much he appreciated the scenery, because he was rock hard now, straining against his jeans.

“Stay away from my marks.” She punctuated her words with another slap on the bar.

“Or?” He quirked an eyebrow.

“Or…you’ll find out.”

He sighed and shook his head reprovingly at her. “Now, that was disappointing. I was really hoping for an actual threat. You go home and work on your insults, princess, and I’m going to finish off my nice cold beer. Run along, now.”

He swiveled around on his stool, turning his back on her.

“You son of a bitch!” she screamed, and dove at him, knocking him off the stool.

He was more shocked than anything else. What exactly did she think she was going to accomplish? There was no scenario where this ended well for her.

In human form, she was a cute, short, well-padded girl of maybe five foot two, weighing a buck sixty or so. He was six foot two, and two hundred twenty pounds of solid muscle.

In animal form, she was a cute little fox. Foxes, unlike some other species, were considerably bigger than their non-were cousins– she was double the size of a non-shifter red fox – but that was still only forty pounds. He was an enormous gray wolf, weighing about two hundred fifty pounds in wolf form. He could eat her for breakfast and be hungry for more by lunch.

She didn’t have a chance in frozen hell of besting him, either in human or animal form. Or even causing a dent.

And yet here she was, straddling him on the floor.

He’d certainly played this scenario in his head plenty of times, but it hadn’t been set in a bar full of whooping, hollering men who were eagerly rushing forward to get a better view of the action. They’d temporarily forgotten that he was a potentially feral rogue, and were pushing forward to get a better view of the show.

Savannah clenched her fists and rained blows down on him that barely even stung. Growing impatient, he grabbed her wrists and, with a heave of his hips, flipped to the side and flung her off him. She punched the side of his head; he swatted her arm aside. They writhed around on the sticky floor, which was littered with cigarette butts and smelled of beer and bodily fluids he didn’t want to think about.

Savannah’s breath came in panting gasps.

Austin was painfully hard now, his erection throbbing, his inner wolf howling with need. He would have to remember to come up with some particularly exquisite revenge. If he lived long enough.

She managed to get a few halfway decent blows in, and he was starting to get annoyed, because she had an unfair advantage; he wasn’t going to hit her. Well, he was extremely tempted to drag her over to the small stage at the back of the room, flip her over his knees, and spank her plump rear, but he had a feeling there would be bad consequences for doing that.

“Mangy scumbag thief!” she yelled at him. She wriggled free, leaped to her feet, brushed off the bottle caps and cigarette butts that were sticking to her arms, and stormed outside. A chorus of catcalls chased her out the door, stirring a sudden rage inside him. His fangs shot out, and claws curved from his fingertips.

With massive effort, he forced his wolf back down.

What the hell? There was no way he was jealous over Savannah.

He climbed to his feet and leaned against the bar, thinking hard. Something was off here. He had never managed to rile her up that much before.

So why the sudden blitz attack?

He could only think of one reason.

He patted his jacket and shook his head ruefully. Of course.

The sound of an engine starting outside confirmed what he suspected. It was his engine.

He hurried outside. The sun was high in the sky, and the warm air smelled fresh and clean after breathing in the fetid, smoky smog that brewed inside the Watering Hole.

Like most shifter buildings, the bar was set in the middle of a thickly wooded area, providing maximum privacy. The parking lot, hemmed in by tall, swaying pine trees, was full of Harleys and pickup trucks – minus his.

Savannah had snatched his car keys from his jacket pocket while they were rolling around on the barroom floor, and he’d been too distracted by his raging hard-on to notice.

Well, she was certainly upping her game these days.

He was seized by a sudden urge to push back against the darkness that was slowly creeping into his head, if only so he could stick around and annoy the living daylights out of her for that much longer.

He strolled outside, and a smile of amusement curled his lips as she drove off down the road in his pickup truck, spewing up dirt in her path.

She stuck her hand out the window and extended her middle finger.

His grin turned feral. Oh, that one was going to cost her.

He reached into the hidden inside pocket of his denim jacket, pulled out the extra set of keys that he always kept there, and pressed the kill switch on the key.

The pickup truck slowly glided to a stop. He would have given every single penny he had in his bank account to see the look on her face at that point.

He stuffed the spare keys back in his pocket and jogged down the road, not even bothering to shift, and rapped on the driver’s side door.

Her glare could have set a lesser man on fire. Slowly, she rolled the window down.

Austin leaned in, resting his arm on the window sill. “I believe you’ve got something that belongs to me. Its name is Torrin. Also my truck. Stealing a truck is considered a felony pretty much everywhere.”

“Please die, Austin.” She bit the words out as if they tasted foul. “Right here, right now, so I can watch.”

He winked at her. “On the plus side, if you ever get tired of pretending you’re a bounty hunter, the bar owner would pay you good money for a mud-wrestling gig.”

Her face was turning redder and redder.

Suddenly, she turned the keys in the ignition and started the truck up again. Austin let out a low growl of annoyance.

Again, he pulled the keys out of his pocket and hit the kill switch. The truck had only driven a few hundred feet down the road when he stopped it. He started jogging towards it.

The back door banged open, and Torrin flew out of the car and shot into the woods. Austin spat out a curse.

Savannah had slashed through Torrin’s ropes and let him go rather than let Austin have him.

He started to run, snarling, because although Torrin was a skinny little bitch of a shifter who would break if Austin smacked him too hard, he did have one skill. He was a very, very fast runner. He’d had to be, to survive this long with all his stupid vandalism and thieving.

As he ran, he shed his jacket and kicked off his boots. Then, in one fluid motion, he unleashed his wolf without breaking his stride. He felt the mild sting as his bones snapped and cracked and reset, his fangs shot out, his ears lengthened and sharpened to points. Fur flowed over his skin like a river, and his clothing shredded and fell away.

The colors of the world faded from technicolor to dull and muted, but the richness of a thousand scents flooded his nostrils, more than making up for it. Rich loamy earth, sweet sun-ripened berries, the tracks of raccoons and squirrels and rabbits criss-crossing through the dewy grass, the green smell of crushed leaves, rushed at him as his legs slashed through the air.

Savannah was in fox form now, chasing him, and she smelled musky and sweet. His wolf wanted her. It wanted her bad. Wild power flowed through his body, and he yearned to skid to a stop and let her catch up to him. His animal was clouding his thoughts. It wanted him to chase after Savannah and pin her to the ground and… No!

He banished those treacherous thoughts from his head. With a massive wrench of effort, he forced himself to ignore her, arrowing through the underbrush, heading deep into the woods after Torrin.

Then he felt a sharp sting as Savannah clamped her jaws on his flank, piercing his flesh with her needle-sharp teeth. He let out a howl of fury and spun in a circle until she flew off, landing with a thud on the soft, mossy forest floor. But she kept chasing after him, tripping him up, until he realized that it was too late. Torrin was long gone.

With a snarl, he spun around to face Savannah, who was already vanishing into a thick clump of underbrush. Genuinely pissed off now, he forced his way through the tangle of snarled branches – only to see her bushy, white-tipped tail vanishing into a hole in the ground.

Damn foxholes.

Cursing, he turned around and trotted back the way he came.

His mark was gone, and so was Savannah. He’d just had his ass handed to him by a shifter a third of his size.

I’m coming for you, foxy lady. I know where you sleep. And payback’s a bitch.

He was trotting along, panting, laughing ruefully to himself, when he felt it.

The darkness.

He froze where he stood, heart jack-hammering in his chest. Hellish visions swarmed in front of him, crowding out the trees and the scents and the sunlight.

He was inside the Watering Hole again, and someone was slumped over the bar, their head a bloody ruin.

Instantly, he did what Korbin the healer had told him to do – resisted with all his might. Tried to use his Dominus power to push the images from his brain.

Instead, it grew more warped and horrifying. Barry was the one lying slumped over the bar, his head half blown off, and demons were clawing at his face. Austin’s brother Grant crawled over the bar in human form and began gnawing on Barry’s arm. Savannah, her hair in flames, danced on a table, flapping bat-like wings. Horned monsters swarmed over Barry’s body, tearing at his flesh, their eyes wild, their faces twisting in hideous snarls.

It wasn’t a future vision. Some shifters had those, passed down through the father’s side of the family, but his father hadn’t been a Seer, and future visions showed things that were actually going to happen – not these hideous visions of hellscapes.

So he was just going crazy.

He pawed at his head, as if he could claw the visions from his flesh. As he backed away, snarling and snapping, he tripped over a chair leg and crashed to the floor. How? How could he feel anything in this hell-vision? How could he be physically affected by it when it wasn’t real?

Someone was shouting his name.

It sounded like Barry.

But Barry was dead. His brains were leaking all over the bar, his flesh stripped down to the bone.

No, no, no…the creatures were fading away as he swung around wildly, desperate to fight, and when he snapped at them, his jaws closed on thin air.

Slowly, the vision receded, and he realized he’d tripped over a tree branch, not a chair leg. He was alone in the woods. His heart pounded in his chest as he staggered to his feet, head low to the ground.

Off in the distance, he could hear Barry shouting. “Austin, you dumb motherfucker!”

Yeah, that sounded like Barry.

When he reached the edge of the woods, he saw Barry standing there, looking annoyed. “You left your truck parked in the middle of the road, dumbass. It’s blocking my customers. Move it.” That was Barry’s way of checking up on him without actually admitting that he was checking up on him.

Austin shook himself hard, sucking his fur back into his skin, drawing in his fangs. “Thanks, Barry, I love you too,” he growled, climbing to his feet.

“Say that again, asshole, and I’ll chew your face off, Dominus or no.” Barry turned around and walked away.

The world was back to normal. For now.