Poachers weren’t hunters, though. They were disrespectful thieves who took animals illegally, who traveled onto private land without licenses and killed what they wanted when they wanted. Poachers thought they were above the law.
They were also notoriously dangerous, weapon-carrying a-holes trying their best not to get caught. Regular, legal-eagle, respectful hunters would chat with her, sometimes for hours about what animals they’d seen and passed up. She got a lot of helpful information about the land management of an area just from having a good report with the locals during legal hunting seasons. Poachers were different, though. They ran, and when they were cornered, they lashed out like injured predators.
Georgia shook her head sadly at the expired deer that lay across the trail. The decomposition said it had died within the last couple of days. The scavengers hadn’t even found it yet. A bad shot to the back end was the cause of death. It hadn’t gone far, which proved that the animal had been poached on Damon Daye’s private land. There was no way it had traveled a mile west from the public land that surrounded Damon Daye’s mountains. Not with an injury like that.
She wanted to strangle whoever had dared come into this land and caused trouble. Already, Georgia was falling in love with this place, and a fierce protectiveness had infiltrated her over the last week. She scanned the trail behind the deer and tried to put together where it had run from. She knelt down and touched a smear of dried blood on a broken sapling. Splintered branches and trampled, dry grass helped piece together what had happened. An hour of hiking, and she found an abandoned campsite. The makeshift fire pit held only charred logs and cold ash, and she could make out stake holes in the ground where they must’ve set up a tent. Weekenders probably, gone back to their day jobs yesterday. She’d have to keep an eye on this corner of Damon’s land come Friday and see if she couldn’t get lucky and catch them coming back.
She bet Jason could scare the piss out of the poachers.
Georgia drew up short and laughed at how daft she was. Her stupid mind could bring any thought back around to him. Over the past week, she’d thought about him a ridiculous amount. In fact, it was downright embarrassing how obsessed she’d become, thinking about who he was and where he came from. She’d even researched his crew on the Internet to find out more about him. Creed, the dark-headed alpha, and Matt were easy to stalk, but Jason hadn’t any social media pages and hadn’t offered any information about himself on Cora Wright’s Web site. He was as much a ghost as the crazy-eyed phantom who’d given her that ominous warning last week.
A chill brushed up her spine just thinking about the apparition in these woods with her. Georgia picked up her pace and gave a sigh of relief when she spotted her ATV where she’d left it. She turned the engine and sped off toward the ranger station.
Everything in her wanted to see Jason again. Also to apologize for her reaction to him invading her space like he had. She’d enjoyed being close to him and now understood why he’d covered her scream with his hand after the research she’d done taught her about bear shifters’ oversensitive hearing. It had probably been an instinctive reaction driven by his rattling eardrums.
But the ghost—or whatever that thing had been—kept her firmly planted on this side of the mountain.
Chapter Four
“He’ll be back,” Creed said, leaning forward, his elbows on his knees as he wrung his hands.
Jason wished he felt as confident as Creed sounded, but Clinton hadn’t come back in two days. He’d left a note taped to his front door when he’d left in the middle of the night.
Don’t want no mate.
Short and to the point, but it was insane how much those four little words had thrown the Gray Backs into chaos. They were down a man on the landing where they stripped logs and loaded them for delivery to the saw mill in Saratoga, but that wasn’t the worst part of all this. The worst part was the imbalance in the crew now. The Gray Backs were a crew of messed-up misfits, and they’d all made the mistake of taking their progress over the past two years for granted. But with Clinton gone, and all of them scrambling with their inner animals to reestablish the pecking order, it was obvious just how far they’d come. They’d been this close to B-team level, but now with Clinton gone, they were put back to C-team.
Jason picked his sack lunch off the ground and dug out a sandwich. Creed sat in the metal chair beside him under the shade of the giant lodgepole pine near the landing. Matt sat in the chair next to his alpha, and beside Jason, the last remaining chair was open. Or it would’ve been if Tessa wasn’t sitting in it. The other Gray Backs couldn’t see her, though. Usually, they just sat on top of her, unbeknownst to them, and she would spit hoodoo curses on them that she’d learned from her family. Bayou bears were nothing to mess with, and Tessa was just as flippant now with curses as she had been when she was alive. Now he couldn’t even recall what he ever saw in her.