Sophie’s
Shifters
Wolf Clan Shifters, #3
by Ann Gimpel
Release
Date: May 2nd 2016
Dream
Shadow Press
Genre:
Shifter Ménage Romance
One spirited woman + three coyote shifters =
e-reader ecstasy.
Jed slipped and slid
down the glacier, grateful his mate Alice wasn’t there to read him the riot
act. An accomplished mountaineer, she’d have laughed herself sick after the
second time he fell on his ass and slid twenty feet.
“Goddammit!” Terin screeched
from behind him and went flying past on his stomach. He shifted mid-slide and
dug his claws into the icy surface to stop his suicidal descent. Once he’d
stopped on the uphill side of a boulder, he shifted back.
Jed drew to a halt
next to him. “Good thing you didn’t bother getting dressed. Your clothes would
be strewn over the last fifty feet of ice in shreds.”
“Yes and no,” Terin
muttered, glancing pointedly at Jed’s shoes. “My boot soles would have helped—a
lot. Jesus but I’m glad Alice isn’t here to see this.”
“Keir’s doing okay in
bare feet,” Bron noted, catching them up. “And I’m not doing that bad, but the
soles of my feet hurt like hell—and I miss my claws.”
Jed eyed the edge of
the glacier. Patches of rocks and dirt, interspersed with ice, began a couple
hundred feet below them. Walking would get much easier then. He grabbed one of
Terin’s arms. Bron seized the other one, and together they lurched over the
remaining rock-studded ice.
“We have a problem,”
he said without preamble.
“Tell me something I
don’t know,” Bron muttered.
“We have to get home
and make sure Alice is okay,” Terin added.
Jed winced. He’d
wanted to leave someone home with the women, but neither Alice, nor Megan—Les
and Karl’s mate—would have any part of that. He reached for Alice through the
mate bond, but she was too far away for him to sense anything.
“Which particular
problem were you alluding to?” Bron asked. “Somehow it seems like more than
getting out of these mountains with our hides intact.”
“It is,” Jed said
tersely. “Les and Karl found a woman. They’re holding her back in the cave.”
Terin stopped dead.
“What? Is she a climber like Alice, who got stranded up here?”
“Somehow, I don’t
think that’s it,” Jed muttered.
“We’ll find out soon
enough,” Bron broke in. “Shit! If she came with the Hunters, we’ll have to kill
her.”
“That already
occurred to me.” Jed shot a pointed look at his lieutenant. “Keir said the
same. He was standing close enough to hear when Les gave me the bad news.”
“Damned shame.” Terin
shook loose from them. “I’m good. I don’t need you two to nursemaid me
anymore.”
They covered the
remaining half mile to the cave in silence. Terin and Bron went to collect
their clothes, and Jed strode briskly to a back corner where he sensed Les and
Karl. Crouched behind them in a quivering mass was a woman with her head buried
in her crossed arms. Long black hair shot with thick silver streaks spilled
around her onto the dirt floor. She was swathed in dark colored wool and
flinched away when Jed hunkered next to her.
He probed her mind
and found terror so gripping, it obliterated everything else. He started to
tell her not to be afraid, but the words died on his tongue. He couldn’t give
her any guarantees, and he wouldn’t lie to her.
“Who are you?” he
asked, keeping his voice gentle.
“We tried that,
boss,” Les said.
“At first, all she
did was moan,” Karl added. “She got quieter after a while, but she hasn’t
answered any of our questions.”
“Where’d you find
her?” Jed asked.
“After we lifted the
last of the bodies in our sector out of the moraine, so others could move them
up the mountain, Les and I sensed something living. It wasn’t a Hunter, but it
was human, so we dug a little.”
“Didn’t have to go
far,” Les cut in, “before we found her hiding between a huge piece of deadfall
and a big rock.” He shrugged. “Without our wolf senses, we’d never have
discovered her.”
A low whimper escaped
from the woman, and Jed laid a hand on her arm. “What’s your name?” he
repeated.
“Just get it over
with.” Her low, musical voice was strained. Hysteria trod near the surface.
“Get what over with?”
Jed probed. Maybe if he could get her talking, he could learn something.
The woman lifted her
head from her crossed arms and Jed’s eyes widened. She was absolutely stunning
with huge midnight blue eyes. Pronounced bone structure and copper skin
suggested Native American blood flowed through her veins. Sharp cheekbones, a
hawk-bridged nose, and a squared-off chin lent her an exotic cast.
She tilted her chin
at a defiant angle. “You have to kill me. I know too much. Get it over with.
The others—” she cast a spurious glance Les and Karl’s way “—they were waiting
for you to make the decision.” Her mouth worked as if she’d tasted something
bitter. “Anyway, get it over with. I took my chances when I tracked my brother
today. If he’d known, he’d have forbidden me to come.”
Jed frowned. “One of
the Hunters was your brother?”
The woman nodded
mutely. “Yeah, that’s what I just said, isn’t it? Get it over with, white man.
If you’re going to kill me, do it. If not, let me go.”
Bron and Terin had
joined them once they’d dressed. Bron passed a hand over the woman’s head, and
Jed felt him probing with shifter magic. “You have white man’s blood too,” Bron
murmured.
The woman shot him a
scathing look. “Not much. What of it?”
“Where we come from
in Canada,” Les said, “Indians are friends to those like us.”
She curled her upper
lip in withering scorn. “We have enough problems without associating with
shifters. You’re nothing but trouble. Bad enough we got stuffed onto reservations,
land no one else wanted.”
Jed tried a different
tack. “Why’d you track your brother today?”
She buried her head
in her arms again, refusing to look at him.
“Please.” He gentled
his voice. “Give us something to work with. Les and Karl, my brothers who found
you, didn’t harm you.”
“Only because they
were waiting for you, their chief.” Her voice was muffled.
“Goddammit!” Les
squatted in front of her and yanked her head upward. “Karl and I could’ve
killed you. We didn’t. We were not waiting for Jed to make that call. Tell us
why you were tracking your brother.”
Jed heard compulsion
flow beneath the other shifter’s words.
The woman drew back.
She tried to combat Les’ spell, but the contest was laughable. “To stop him,”
she said. The words were clearly dredged from her, but they held the ring of
truth.
“Good. He needed to
be stopped,” Les said. “Why’d you think he’d listen to you?”
The woman’s face
crumpled and she started to cry, big noisy gulping sobs that ripped through
her. “It’s not what you think. I didn’t try to make him listen to me,” she
managed between ragged breaths. “I have the gift of prophecy—farseeing—and I
knew things would go to hell for all of them today.”
“Do your visions
always come true?” Jed probed. Despite the problems the woman presented, her
story fascinated him.
She nodded, but
didn’t say anything further.
“Did your brother
know you followed the Hunter group?” Jed asked.
She shook her head.
“No. He doesn’t share my gift. His magic came mostly from the goddamned white
man’s Church.”
“Odd none of the rest
of them sensed you behind them,” Karl muttered.
“Not odd at all,” she
shot back, choking a little on snot running down her face. “I can blend my
energy into the rocks, the dirt.”
“We found you,” Karl
pointed out.
“Because you were in
your natural form, and wolves sense such things far more acutely than men.”
Jed waved Karl to
silence. This was going nowhere fast. Returning his attention to the woman, he
said, “So you came along, but didn’t talk with him. Didn’t try to warn him.
Help me understand why.” Jed hoped things might get clearer, but so far they
were just becoming more confusing.
“Let me get this
straight.” Bron hunkered next to Les and caught the woman’s gaze with his dark
one. “You saw in a vision that your brother would die, and you came along
anyway but didn’t try to warn him. Did you want to make certain he was dead?”
Jed silently offered
his lieutenant credit for shrewdness. If the woman knew today would end in a
bloodbath because she’d seen it—and she made no attempt to warn her
brother—what other reason would she have had for trailing after him.
The woman’s sobbing
escalated. She tried to jerk her chin out of Les’ grip, but he held fast.
“Yes,” she gasped out. “Yes. I hated that bastard. He…used me, hurt me the way
men hurt women, when I was only ten years old and never stopped until I ran
away when I was sixteen. No one believed me. No one c-cared.” Her last words
were almost obliterated by sobs.
Suddenly her phrase
to stop him took on a whole new meaning. Jed just stared at her. “So it’s not
that you didn’t say anything today. You never told him anything.”
She did yank her chin
away then and spat on the dirt floor. “Hell no. I haven’t spoken to him in ten
years, but he’s blood and he shows up in my visions.”
Running on instincts
that had rarely failed him, Jed glanced at the four wolf shifters ranged around
him. They didn’t need to talk. After hundreds of years of working together,
they understood one another.
“Stand up.” Jed told
the woman.
“Why?”
“Did you see your own
death in your vision?”
An odd look washed
over her face before she shook her head and pushed herself upright. Standing
she was of a height with Jed, and her hair reached past her ass. She squared
slender shoulders. “Is that a backhanded way of saying I can leave?”
Jed shook his head
and hurried to add words before she sank into a puddle of terror again. “You’re
right that we can’t allow you to return to your life. We have no idea who you
are, who you’d tell. We could wipe your memory of us, but you’d still recall
the death that happened in this canyon.”
“What are you going
to do with me?” Her voice shrilled and she jerked her chin upward. “If you
think you’re going to abuse me like my brother, think again, white man. I’d
rather be dead.”
“We don’t do that to
women.” Terin pushed into her line of vision so she had to look at him.
“Not what I’ve
heard,” she retorted. “My brother said he learned it from you.”
“Bull crap!” Jed said
succinctly. “I’ve never known a shifter to take a woman against her will. Not
on my watch, and not in my clan.”
“You planning to
bring her home with us?” Bron quirked a dark brow.
Jed nodded. “The only
question—” he focused on the woman “—is whether you come willingly, or we knock
you out and carry you down the mountain.”
“Home as in staying
under the same roof with five men?” Her face twisted into a grimace. “No. Not
happening. Just kill me here and get it over with.”
“We’re mated,” Karl
informed her. “Les and I have a mate. Her name is Megan. And Jed, Bron, and
Terin are mated to Alice.”
The woman tossed her
head. “Fine. Just because you located some sluts who—”
Jed snaked out a hand
and slapped her hard across the face. He grabbed her head between his hands and
forced her to look at him. “Never say one bad word about my mate. I love her.
So do Bron and Terin. Don’t disparage what you don’t understand.”
A shocked look
blossomed on her face and she muttered, “Sorry,” before looking at her feet.
“Let go of her,
boss.” Bron pulled Jed’s hands away. “She only understands what she’s lived.
And it hasn’t been pretty.”…
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