Chapter 1
“I can’t do push-ups.” Sweat slid down my neck, clinging to the top of my shirt. It was only eight in the morning, but it was also August in Kansas’s Cimarron National Grassland. “In case you forgot, my hand hasn’t been fully functional since I jerked it through a pair of handcuffs.”
“Of course you can,” Liam said, pouring a bottle of water over his head. “You’re a Shifter.”
“Which means I’ll have use of my hand tomorrow.”
“Fine. If you can’t handle it, do them one-handed.”
For two weeks I had been roaming across the United States in a car with Liam Cole. During our road trip from Hades, he only spoke to inquire on the state of my bladder (which is exactly how he phrased it); offer up some more Tylenol or Advil (the only medicine I was taking for my shattered hand); or ask me what I wanted from the latest drive-thru window (where he always ordered a cheeseless triple cheeseburger). Now, the morning before the full moon, he was suddenly a chatterbox, with every single word used solely to antagonize me. I could tell I was being baited, and it should have stopped me from trying to do them two-handed. Unfortunately, I’ve never met a challenge I didn’t like.
There was a chance the residents of Timber, Kentucky, heard my scream.
As if the physical torture and snide comments weren’t enough, Liam also felt the need to enrich my brain with a tedious lesson in Shifter Basics.
“And how do you react if you run into a member of the Chase Pack tonight?”
I willed my eyes not to roll. “I drop my head and expose my throat in submission since this is their territory and I have no desire to take it over,” I said for the fifth time.
“It’s not going to be easy,” he assured me, also for the fifth time. “You’re going to have to override your instinctive response to exert your dominance.”
“I know.”
“But if you don’t, it could get ugly. You might be able to take another Shifter in a one-on-one match, but if you Challenge someone, the whole pack will come.”
“I know.”
“The Chase Pack normally doesn’t come over to this side of the park, but you need to be prepared just in case.”
“I know.”
And to think, just weeks ago I wanted to learn more about the Shifter world.
“We’ve been over this,” I said, grabbing yet another granola bar from the backseat of the car. It was the last one in our third box of the day. “I promise I’ll follow your lead, stay on this side of the park, and treat any other Shifter I come across with the utmost respect. Seriously, Liam, I’m not going to flake out on you. I don’t want someone snitching my location to the Alpha Pack any more than you do.” Because God only knew what they would do to me when they found me. Well, I guess God wasn’t the only one. I mean, I had it pretty much figured out since they tried to chop off my head with an actual guillotine.
“Good,” he said. “Now let’s go over the landmarks you need to be on the lookout for again.”
There were oh-so-many reasons to be excited as the light of day began to fade from the sky.
In the Cimarron, there aren’t a whole lot of places to strip naked and wait for your body to rip itself apart so it can reform in the shape of a wolf, but we found a large turtle-shaped rock which would offer up a reasonable amount of privacy. As we were heading over Liam said, “Remember to pull the energy from the ground as you Change.”
I stopped at the edge of the rock. “What?”
“Make a conscious effort to pull the energy from the ground. It’ll make the Change quicker.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Energy transference.”
I thought about it, searched the recesses of my memory, and… “I have no idea what that is.”
Liam looked towards the setting sun with obvious annoyance. “I thought you said you understood the science behind the Change.”
“I do, but Dr. Smith’s book never said anything about energy transference or pulling stuff from the ground.”
“Dr. Smith…” Realization flashed in Liam’s eyes. “You have Dad’s book?”
This was not going to be a comfortable conversation.
“Alex gave it to me,” I said. It had been a Christmas present. Alex knew I would have a million questions about the whole Shifter thing once I discovered he was a werewolf, so he gave me the one book in the world that explained the science of what happened to the body during the Change. It talked about bone reconstruction, cellular regeneration, and nerve remapping, but never delved into the stimulus for those transformations. “I was going to give it back, but then…” But then Alex died in my arms after a horrible accident. It still caused me physical pain to think about, and I knew it couldn’t be any easier for his brother to hear, so I just shrugged off the end of the sentence. “I’ve been taking really good care of it. You can have it back.”