“Ready!”

The shifters of Frost Security racked their rifles on my command, bringing shells into the chambers. The noon Colorado sun bore down on us all from its spot in the sky, baking us as we kept at our drills. The day was hot even for fall, up here on the mountain, and beads of sweat were rolling down the sides of my face and down the back of my shirt, causing it to stick to my skin.

“Take aim!”

Richard and the others brought their cheeks down to the top of their rifle stocks.

“Fire!”

All four of my men opened up on the targets ahead of them, crack-crack-crack, firing in perfect succession as I paced behind them on the firing line. They were all leaning against their sandbags, using them as rifle perches as they fired downrange at the paper targets we’d set up. Perfect, neat holes punched through the human-shaped images at center-mass and in the head as they all unloaded.

“Reload!” I yelled.

The fusillade of 5.56mm rounds broke for a moment, just the barest of moments, and resumed so quickly a passerby would have thought they’d just stopped pulling the trigger, instead of physically removing a near-spent clip and popping it back into the magazine receiver.

My heart swelled with pride, and I nodded slowly as I walked up and down behind the line. All my men were well trained by the United States Armed Forces. Some were Marine Force Recons, another a Pararescuer for the United States Air Force. It didn’t matter where they’d come from, though. They’d all kept on top of their training, had stayed in peak physical shape, and had maintained their standards of force maintenance in the years since they’d left the service.

I’d be damned if it didn’t make me prouder than a drill sergeant on graduation day.

“Sidearms!” I barked.

They dropped their rifles on the sandbag emplacement, drew their sidearms, and continued shooting. There was almost no break in the sound, no relief for my ears.

The report of the small arms fire resounded off the surrounding mountains, the clack of their gunfire almost deafening as it echoed over the pines and spruce trees surround us. The smell of propellant filled the air, stronger to my shifter senses than a normal human’s. But even if a normal human were here, that smell would have stuffed itself right up their nose and begun crawling right down their throat.

I stopped and looked out over my four men, now on one knee as they fired at the targets we’d posted about a hundred yards up. We’d been at this for weeks, ever since Richard Murdoch and Frank O’Dwyer had returned from honeymoons with their respective wives after their joint wedding. Day in, day out, we’d been here at the firing line running with the sandbags and sparring each other. It was like the final days on the run up to deployment. The days where you could feel an energy in the air, an uncertain kind of electricity that seemed to shoot through you and connect you to every man in your unit. Where you could feel the worry about the future, but also the heavy knowledge of duty and the resignation to the fact that you’d have to fight soon. Fight for your life, for your country, for the man next to you. For the ability to go home and see the shining faces of the people who loved you and made life worth living.

Things hadn’t been right in months. Not with me, and not with the little world we’d managed to build in the small mountain town of Enchanted Rock. Not since Vanessa Springer, my mate, the shifter woman I’d loved unceasingly since my teenage years—the woman who I’d thought was dead for nearly two decades—had wandered right back into my life.

Now, as I looked back at the little window that peered into the kitchen of the safe house cabin, I could see her watching me and the rest of my men. Her piercing blue eyes stared out at us, her gaze so sharp she could draw blood from a stone. At this distance, not even I could tell what she was thinking as she watched us go through our firearms drills. But still, I could practically smell her distaste for it.

Damn, I’d missed her like a body misses its arm. Or its heart.

And now she was back in my life, alive, just as suddenly as she’d first disappeared. For whatever reason, though, my soul was torn. One part of me wanted to rejoice, to pull her into my arms and disappear into one of the back rooms so I could feel her in arms, her body pressed against mine once more as we tried to make up for all the lost time.

But another didn’t. Couldn’t. That part of me had questions, concerns. Where had she been all these years? Where had she come from? Why was she back now, of all times, with this storm looming over us all, this mass of thunderheads that was threatening to come crashing down with the full force of nature? And why did she seem so subtly different? Or was I the one that changed? My own life had taken me through so many twists and turns. Was I so different, too?

I shook my head to clear my thoughts. Enough of that self-wallowing. I could worry about Vanessa when my pack was safe. When they and their mates could get back to normal lives and be able to start thinking of starting families.

“Cease fire!” I ordered as I turned from the cabin, my voice cracking a little, my throat dry from the heat. I cleared my throat and shouted again. “Cease fire!”

My orders took the second time, and all my men lowered their sidearms into a resting position. They were still ready to open fire again if I ordered it. But, for the moment, their guns were quiet.

“Holster your sidearms!”

Fluid as water, each man moved with a grace and speed that belied their massive sizes as they holstered their sidearms in one smooth motion. They kept their eyes straight ahead, facing their targets. I hadn’t called for them to be at ease yet, and they were perfectly attuned to my orders while we were training.

Now, when the training was over, we’d move into different territory. These men weren’t my soldiers, and I wasn’t their commanding officer. No, they were my pack. And I was their alpha. Most importantly, though, I was their brother and friend.

“Alright,” I called, “let’s go check those targets.”

As one, we moved up the firing range. The discipline of the men, just as strong as the day they left the military, broke for once as they began laughing and giving each other hell on our hundred yard jogging march up the incline to the targets.

“How many you think you got through the head, pardner?” Frank O’Dwyer asked in his thick, west Texas drawl as he checked soldiers with Richard Murdoch. “Or you shooting blanks like Jessica’s been worried about?”

“Haha,” Richard replied, not budging or giving one bit of ground to the bigger Texan. Richard was my partner and second in command, the first shifter I’d recruited for the security agency before I’d even moved up here. He’d helped me recruit the other three guys, shifters we’d found all over the world as they’d performed different bits of justice and heroism in their wolf forms. “Figure you should be the one checking your own target. Jessica’s been telling me Ashley’s concerned you ain’t even been able to get your rifle up into a firing position.”

Jacob Wayne and Matthew Jones both laughed at the two other shifters as the four of them made their way up, me still straggling behind. We’d all been pushing ourselves hard for the last few months, and I knew we needed to blow off some steam, to make fun of ourselves and of each other. Besides, a little bit of gentle ribbing was just the way guys communicated. We had to give each other shit, or else we’d start to think something was actually wrong.

Each man grabbed his target from the stand and inspected it. Near perfect grouping at the torso’s center of mass and, of course, in the head, on each target. Not a single stray bullet on any of them.

“Well,” I said as they looked over their paper enemies, “guess both your women are wrong. Neither of you are shooting blanks or having problems getting into a firing position. Now, we just need to be worried about the real things coming for us. Targets don’t shoot back, after all.”

The men remained quiet after my statement. Richard just set his jaw and looked harder at his target. “Peter,” he said, “you really think these guys are coming after us? I mean, you said so yourself, you ain’t seen hide nor hair of them.”

“Maybe not yet,” Jake said from the edge of the group, his black beard obscuring the serious look on his face. “But soon.” His words were like pouring water on a fire, dousing all the good feelings of having shot well.

I’d brought Jake into the investigation back during the winter, almost nine months ago. He was a former LA homicide detective and the best investigator I had on staff. With him teasing at the various strings of the case, he’d begun to unravel who our mysterious hunters were by tracking tail numbers of planes at local municipal airports.

Before that, there’d only been a string of murders pointing to a deeper conspiracy of some group going after shifter packs. Between him and my adopted daughter Mary’s description of the murder of her family, we’d finally nailed down a suspect on who might be going after shifters: Jaeger-Tech.

And, take it from me, they were bad dudes.

They came after my own family while I was in the Navy and murdered the pack my father had been alpha of. They’d cut the hearts from my father and mother’s chests, as well as from my brother’s and sister’s. They painted sigils and symbols all over the inside of the burnt homestead where they’d lived. Where I grew up. I’d even thought they murdered Vanessa Springer, my mate. Instead, she’d just disappeared and went into hiding, doing God only knew what for the last fifteen years.

Jaeger-Tech was a shady multinational funded with only private investors through a web of shell companies and double-blinds, and was incorporated through Delaware and based out of the Pacific Northwest. All we knew was what we could find online through flight plans on their private aircraft and financial filings with different state and local governments. Whoever these guys were, they kept their cards close to their chest and didn’t make a move unless they were one-hundred-percent sure of the outcome. More importantly, though, we didn’t know the most important piece of information you needed to know about any enemy on the battlefield: just what the hell they wanted.

Vanessa claimed to have had a run-in with them recently while sneaking into a facility. But what she’d described couldn’t have been real. Even I didn’t think it could be real, and I could turn into a wolf. Hell, Jake and I had even searched and searched for any kind of evidence of a man like she’d described, but we hadn’t been able to find anything.

And, besides, whether she was telling the truth about her encounter with the eight-foot-tall giant with a German accent, there was one thing for sure: not even she knew what they wanted with us.

I did know one thing, though. The only way for us to make it out of the inevitable fight in one piece was to be at the top of our game. We had to be twice as ready as they were, and ten times as hungry to win. Because when they came, they were going to be fighting for the gold, and we’d be outnumbered ten-to-one. I wasn’t going to listen to any of this stuff Vanessa was spouting, about my using my special gifts that only alphas could do. Even my father had thought that was all a bunch of mumbo-jumbo.

“Alright, guys,” I said after letting Jake’s words hang in the air for a long moment, “let’s get those sandbags.”

Matthew Jones, our fire inspector, gave me a look like he was about to say something, but remained quiet. I could tell from his eyes that he was only partly there with us. He was the one newest to his relationship, and I sensed that his mind was still back with his mate in town, Rebecca Stokes, my adopted daughter’s English teacher at Enchanted Rock High School.

The guys were off in a flash, with only Matt hanging back for a moment.

“Jones,” I called as the guys jogged off to grab their sandbags, “hold up for a moment.”

He screeched to a halt, his heavy boots kicking up grass and dirt and rocks as the others continued on down to the sandbags we’d been using as rifle perches. “What’s up, boss?” he asked as I jogged up to him.

“You hanging in there?” I asked, clapping him on the shoulder.

He shook his head. “Nah, I’m doing fine. Why?”

“Just seem off your game is all.”

He shrugged. “Just, you know, thinking about things.”

“Thinking?” I asked. “Like what? This isn’t the military, Jones. You can speak freely.”

He made a face, looked away back down our shooting position, back down to the cabin with all our vehicles parked out in front. He glanced back at me. “You sure?”

“It’s just me, Jones. You can say what you want. You know that.”

He kicked the rocks at his feet like a nervous ten-year-old boy. “I’ve been wondering, boss, over the last few weeks. We’ve got these guys coming after us, right? They’ve got more guns than us, more men, more money. I mean, the US military might as well just be bearing down on us, right?”

I nodded gravely. “Not quite. But close.”

“And the thought struck me…why don’t we just fucking leave, you know? Put the Rock in our rear view mirrors, head out for someplace else. Canada, even. Wide open spaces, forests. No one for miles around. We’d be safe there, boss.”

I grunted a little as I looked away, my eyes panning out over the horizon. From up here on the mountain, the whole of the state seemed to be laid out around us. The peaks of the range over the valley, the highway below us. If I looked south, I imagined I could even see my little plot of land and the cabin I’d bought years ago when I moved up to Enchanted Rock. The thought of living somewhere other than America just kind of raised my hackles. Hell, after about twelve years in the service, bouncing from base to base and country to country, the Rock was the first time I’d settled down anywhere.

“Canada, huh?” I asked, the words sour in my mouth.

“Or somewhere else, boss,” Matthew said, a small frown settling into his mouth and brows. When he’d found his mate just a few months prior, things had gotten a little dicey. Fires had started and there’d even been an explosion meant for him that had instead almost killed all the men in the Enchanted Rock Volunteer Fire Department. “I’m worried, that’s all. If a fight comes here to the Rock, it won’t just be us suffering. It’ll be the people of the town stuck in the crossfire.”

I nodded as I sucked in a sharp breath through my nose, my nostrils flaring a little, the smell of propellant from the discharged rounds still thick and heavy in the air. “I understand where you’re coming from,” I said. “But I have a question for you.”

He just looked at me quietly as, down at the base of the small incline, the guys picked up their sandbags and grasped them tightly to their chest. The drill was simple. Sprint as hard and fast as you can to where we were. Throw the sandbag down. Beat the living hell out of it. Then grab it back up, sprint back down to where you started, and start it all over again.

Rinse, repeat, ad nauseam. Literally. We didn’t stop until we puked.

“How many people do you think we’ve protected by being in Enchanted Rock?” I asked. “How many lives and businesses have we saved by being here and taking the jobs we do at such a low price?”

Matthew frowned more deeply, looking down to the guys as they came racing up the hill, their grunting and gasping getting louder and louder as their heavy, booted feet pounded into the mountainside as they came charging up the incline towards us.

“All those people,” I continued, “whether it’s your mate, or her Uncle Zeke that you kept out of prison, or Richard’s wife’s art gallery we kept open, or Ashley Maxwell’s life we saved, or Jake’s girl’s sister. All those people and places are still around because we’re here. Because Frost Security was here to fight for them when no one else could. You saved lives when you helped Rebecca. Hell, you practically stopped the mafia in their tracks when they were trying to strong-arm people into paying protection money, just like Richard practically stopped those bikers in their tracks from pushing their pills and needles in this town. You know how important that is?”

Matthew sighed and shook his head. “I dunno, boss. I just don’t know.”

I clapped a hand on his shoulder as the guys continued their mad dash up the hill. “Look, Jones. We do good work up here. It’s a small town, and it’s a small county. The sheriff can’t do much for these people. He can’t stand up against the bullies of this world, at least not without our help. When you first joined the Air Force, you knew that you were a soldier, right? You knew that you were a warrior. And what do warriors do?”

“We fight,” he replied without a moment’s hesitation. “And we protect those that can’t protect themselves.”

My three men on sandbag drills hit the top of the shallow ridge and threw down their bags. They piled on top of them, fists flying, knees driving into weights. They slammed them hard, screaming and fighting them. Training like this was the best for endurance. It combined resistance training, interval sprints, and, most importantly, real life form and function. Lifting weights in a gym or even doing push ups was all fine and dandy, but you didn’t work out every muscle like you did in a fight.

Real fights ended up on the ground, especially when they were with an evenly classed opponent. Fights were about struggle, about desperation. If you weren’t putting every ounce of your determination and willpower into them, you were going to end up dead—whether you were a shifter or not.

And this fight with Jaeger-Tech was just the same. If our resolve wavered for even a moment, they were going to get the upper hand. And that was a fact.

I turned my eyes back to Matt’s and looked him straight on. “Now, I don’t know about you, but I signed up to fight because I love this country. And I still love it just as much now as I did the day I joined the Navy. There’s no way in hell I’m going to Canada, no matter how wide open the spaces are or how few of people live there.”

He nodded, pressing his lips tightly together.

“And,” I continued, “there’s no way in hell I’m turning down a fight that’s coming right for me. Especially not when the alternative is to be driven off my land or be forced to go into hiding. Hell no. What we built is ours, bought and paid for with sweat and toil. Running from this kind of thing isn’t what I’m about. And it’s not what being an American is about, either.”

Matthew sighed and nodded. “I know, boss. I know. But this is more than just our lives on the line, or the life of our buddy next to us. It’s about Rebecca. It’s about our mates, boss.”

I gritted my teeth unexpectedly, my eyes narrowed. I fixed him with a long, hard stare.

He flinched back a little when he caught the look in my eyes.

“Don’t even dare bring that shit up with me,” I growled, surprising even myself. “Believe me, Jones, I know what loss is like.”

These guys had all just found their mates. And I understood that feeling, of the completeness it brought you. But down there, right now, in our safe house cabin was the woman I’d been meant to spend my life with. The woman I’d thought had been put in the ground all those years ago.

“Don’t even think I don’t. You’re worried about losing your mate. I’m worried about losing mine again. Believe me, running from your problems isn’t going to fix them. I tried that all those years ago when I joined the service, and do you know what it got me? Fifteen fucking years of heart ache.”

He swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing a little, and nodded as he took a step back. “Yeah, boss, I get it. I understand, okay?”

With one look at the fear and apprehension in his eyes, though, the moment of anger seemed to ebb away, receding into the distance like some kind of strange red tide. I shook my head.

Where the hell had that come from?

“Shit,” I said, my fists unclenching at my sides. I hadn’t even realized I’d balled them that tightly. I ran a hand back through my sweat-soaked hair and flicked droplets off to the side. “Sorry, Jones.”

“No,” he said as the guys picked up their sandbags and took off down the hill again to the cabin, grunting and yelling the whole way, “I get it. I don’t even know how I’d feel if what happened to you happened to me. Believe me, I understand.”

I just nodded a little absently, that sense of sudden rage still lingering at the back of my mind like a crimson fog. Work, that’s what I needed. I needed some way to burn this energy off, to get my focus back on the goal.

“Come on,” I said, clapping him on the back, “let’s go.”

Together, we sprinted off down the incline, our arms and legs working as we made for the sandbags.

As I felt the muscles working in my legs and my heart beating faster, I knew this was what I needed to get my priorities reoriented, to get my emotions back under control. This is what was important. The work, the drill, the discipline, the practice.

But, as I hit my sandbag and scooped it up into my arms, pressing its strangely comforting hundred and twenty pounds of dirt and sand tight against my chest, my eyes drifted to the kitchen window of the safe house cabin, to the pale blue eyes of Vanessa Springer.

My mate. My soul’s twin. The one woman that truly mattered in my life.

What I saw in her gaze wasn’t my mistrust mirrored back, nor was it the love I knew that existed deep down in both of our hearts. Instead, it was derision.

I’d seen that look years ago when I’d told my father I was going to join the military, that I was going to do my duty to my country in the wake of 9/11.

And now, just like then, that look cut to my core.

It was the look that said, “You’re being too human. Again.”