Bound to Change
A Limited Edition
Spring Shifter Romance Collection
Table of Contents
Title Page
Bound to Change
SPRING CLEANING
CAPTURED BY THE DRAGON
A TIGER’S CLAIM
FILTHY VANDAL
CURSED HEART
THE SILVERLIGHT HEIR
ECHOES OF DARKNESS
THE BETRAYAL OF WOLVES
ORIGINS
ONCE UPON A WOLF
WOLF’S BANE, BEAR’S BOND
LAST DRAGONS
MIDNIGHT MAGIC
PET
EARLY ADMISSION
BETWEEN WORLDS
ORION OVER ATLANTIS
Bound to Change © 2020 Margo Bond Collins, Dangerous Words Publishing
All copyrights remain in control of the individual authors over their own works:Copyright © 2020 Margo Bond Collins, Blaire Edens, Amanda Sievert, Lia Davis, Leigh Kelsey, Helen Scott, Emma Cole, Raine English, Keira Blackwood, Liza Street, Jen Ponce, Niobe Marsh, Sapphire Winters, Dana Lyons, Kyrii Rayne, K.B. Everly , Crystal Ash, Ivy Hearne, May Dawson
Cover Design by Camila, Open World Covers
All rights reserved under the International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
These are works of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, organizations, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Warning: the unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.
SPRING CLEANING
A Heavy Metal Magic Story
Margo Bond Collins and Blaire Edens
1. Blaize
“So what the hell are we doing here?” My traveling companion, Wolf, and I rolled to a stop in front of the Amtrak station in El Paso, Texas. I hadn’t ever been here before, despite all my travels across the southwestern US. Primarily because I’d never been Called here.
And that, I assumed, was because nothing supernatural had ever threatened El Paso’s Amtrak passengers before.
I put the van in park and leaned back in the driver’s seat to check out the terrain.
Wolf leaned forward and pressed his nose up against the windshield.
From the outside, the building was pretty enough—red brick with a copper roof, a bell tower rising to one side, all of it bright and cheerful in the beautifully clear sunlight of a desert winter.
It didn’t look terribly dangerous. But if I had been Called here, then there was something monstrous lurking inside.
“You know,” I sighed, “I had hoped we would get a few more days off.”
Wolf gave me a lupine shrug.
“I guess I’d better gear up, then.” I climbed into the back of my retrofitted van. At first glance, the cargo area looked perfectly innocuous—a thin mattress the top of built-in cabinet with drawers filled with clothes, some cooking gear, a few other odds and ends. But if you knew how to look, where to flip the switches and press the panels, various parts of my mobile home revealed a surprising number of weapons. Well. Surprising for anyone who’s not me, anyway.
Some of them were hidden in plain sight, like the copper stiletto blade mixed in with my flatware, or the tiny golden blow darts mixed in with several pieces of jewelry.
Since I didn’t have any sense yet of what was awaiting us inside the train station, I gathered up a small mix of an arsenal. I took the stiletto and the blow darts, along with a steel hunting knife. I even packed a simple wooden stake, though I didn’t often see vampires in the Southwest. And finally, I strapped on the shoulder holster and tucked my loaded pistol into it. We were in Texas, so I had a concealed carry permit. Daddy had suggested I get one for every state I worked in that allowed it. Just in case.
When I had finished arming myself, I carried something for just about any kind of supernatural monster I might come up against.
Except werewolves.
Those required silver to kill from a distance, and that was the only metal I couldn’t even touch. If I touched it, it would burn me. If it got under my skin, inside my body in any way, it could kill me.
That was part of my curse as Blaize Silver, Monster Hunter.
I couldn’t touch the very thing I was named for.
The curse was even more convoluted than that, though. I was the heir to a curse created back in the 1800s by a demon with a twisted sense of humor. He’d laid some serious whammy on my ancestor, Ruby Silver, who had followed him down into a mine in the Rockies somewhere, along with several other demon hunters. They’d gotten out alive, but only barely, and although they’d managed to contain the demon, at least for a while, he’d cursed them on their way out. And now their descendants were doomed to deal with the fallout.
We couldn’t leave the geographical Old West. I think I had pushed harder than any of the other descendants, and every time I tried, I ended up sick as hell for days after I crawled my way back into my approved geographic area.
We were also Called to hunt all the monsters that haunted the Southwest. And whatever that had meant in the 1800s, now it included every kind of creature that America had inherited from all the cultures that inhabited these lands. We were never going to get rid of all of them.
I’d grown up training for this life. Even after my mother died, Daddy continued making sure I knew how to battle the demonic, the paranormal, the supernatural, and the just plain weird.
The descendants of the other people who’d been in that mine also had their own version of the curse that differed only in the kinds of metal we couldn’t use. There were always three of us when I was growing up. Me, my cousin Cassidy, and my cousin Gracie. Of course, “cousin” was a misnomer—we weren’t exactly blood-related. Probably. There might have been some crossover among our family trees early on. Nothing brings people together like a curse.
But it didn’t matter. The shared heritage had made us family.
And then I’d gotten Gracie killed. She came to help me with werewolves in Arizona and ended up getting killed by a demon we hadn’t expected to encounter.
I still couldn’t think about her without crying.
That’s when I met up with Wolf, too. Technically, he’s a werewolf. I have only seen him in his human shape once, though, when he dragged my dying ass out of a silver mine in Colorado where I’d gone to take out a vampire. I didn’t know his reasons for not shifting more often. But I did know that having him with me had saved my life. So I’d taken him home for Christmas to meet the family—in this case, Daddy.
I hadn’t had anywhere else to go.
I had no idea where that son-of-a-bitch demon had gone after it killed Gracie. There were no news reports about any monsters on the prowl anywhere in the Southwest. No chupacabra sightings. No werewolf attacks. No cow mutilations, even. No nothing.
I was on my own for the first time
in years.
Well, if you count spending all my time with a werewolf who won’t shift into his human form being alone. Anyway, I didn’t have any human companions.
We’d stayed with Daddy for while after Christmas, then struck out again. Really, he’d taken Wolf’s appearance better than I had anticipated.
Apparently, it’s not entirely unheard of for some of the monsters to come over to our side once in a while. That’s what Daddy said, anyway. Wolf didn’t say anything, of course, since he won’t make himself the human mouth to say it with. Or maybe he can’t shift on demand. I’m not sure.
Anyway, as gracious as Daddy was trying to be, I could tell Wolf made him nervous, so we didn’t stay very long. Just long enough to trade Christmas gifts—a bottle of Jack Daniels from Daddy to me, a new blanket I’d picked up on the Navajo reservation last time I’d been out that direction from me to Daddy—and to go out to eat at his favorite diner, where we had our traditional Christmas Day dinner of chile rellenos, Mexican rice, and beans.
I’d given Wolf a gift, too, and wrapped it up in paper with pictures of dog bones tied up in red-ribbon bows. I thought it was hysterical. When Wolf saw it, he rolled his eyes, and when he ripped open the packaging with his teeth and paws, he huffed in irritation.
“It’ll be useful when we have to go into towns.” I clasped the turquoise-sequined collar around his neck. “And it’s pretty. It makes you look...approachable.”
Daddy hooted at that, and Wolf lifted his lip in something halfway between a smile and a snarl.
All things considered, it was probably the best Christmas that Daddy and I’d had in years. Part of that might have been because he confined his drinking to after dark—and he didn’t even get into the bottle he’d given me.
I didn’t know how much of that was Wolf’s presence, but I could almost hear him say, Staying sober when there’s a werewolf in the house is always a good idea. It was the kind of thing he would have told Gracie and Cass and me back when he was training us to be hunters.
The day after I’d given Wolf his new collar, we awoke to two freshly killed rabbits on the steps outside Daddy’s trailer. Wolf’s Christmas gift to us, I guess. Luckily, I’m not squeamish when it comes to cleaning the kills after a hunt. Even luckier, Daddy makes one hell of a rabbit fricassee. We all really enjoyed dinner that night.
But the next day it was time to move on. A few weeks later, I’d gotten Called to the El Paso Amtrak station.
And now Wolf and I were heading inside to see what the hell we were up against.
I just hoped I wouldn’t need silver to fight whatever it was.
2. MaddieAnne
When I stepped off the train, the heat was like a wall. I’d expected early spring to be at least tolerable, but I was wrong, just as I’d been wrong about nearly everything else on this stupid trip.
Carrying my valise in one hand, I made my way across the platform and into the station. It was a large brick building with a tower that looked more like the Methodist Church in my hometown than a depot.But in the hours I’d been traveling across Texas aboard the Sunset Express, I’d learned one thing: Texas is nothing like Greenwild, North Carolina.
Not even close.
Inside the depot, it was dark and cool. The highly polished floors were tiled in a star pattern and pine benches crowded the center of the large room. I walked directly to the window.
“What time will our train be leaving?”
The man behind the window, a small balding man who looked like he’d rather be anywhere other than here, shrugged. “They’re working on it now. Likely will be at least a couple of hours before she’s ready to roll out of the station again.”
I sighed. “But I’m due in Los Angeles.”
“You’re welcome to use the phone over there to see if there’s a flight.” He pointed to a red phone mounted on the far wall.
“I have a phone,” I said, holding it up. “Thanks.”
I sat on the far end of one of the benches and placed my valise beside me. I had no idea how I was going to pass the time until the train was repaired. I’d already read everything on my tablet, knitted three hats and run out of yarn on the fourth one, and journaled until I was sick of all three of those mindless activities.
When I’d boarded the Sunset Limited in New Orleans, part of my plan to spring-clean my life, I’d thought that traveling across the United States via passenger train sounded romantic and exciting and just the prescription for my overworked, overstressed life.
Lord have mercy. No one told me that trains were more boring than going to a tractor pull.
Instead of metamorphosing into a more vibrant, dynamic version of myself, my hair was flat, my clothes were wrinkled, and I’d pretty much decided to hate all of humanity, starting with my fellow passengers. They were loud and stinky, and about as common as pig tracks.
Maybe I should just fly home. Swallow my pride, buy a plane ticket to Charlotte, and forget the whole stupid transformation idea. In all honesty, I was worse as a person than I was before I left. And it had only been a few days.
What kind of heathen will I be once I get to Los Angeles?
A man wearing a starched white shirt, jeans so tight they looked like body paint, and a belt buckle the size of a Wedgwood plate sat on the bench next to me.
There was another thing I wish I’d known before I’d waved goodbye to my life and boarded this God-forsaken locomotive: a single woman, traveling alone, will meet every uninteresting man from point A to point B, and every one of those men will think he’s clearly the answer to a single woman’s prayers.
After nearly two days on the train, I was well prepared for this guy’s pitch.
“You on the Sunset Express?”
It was the railroading equivalent of “What’s your sign?” So very, very original.
I ignored him. Instead of meeting his eyes, I opened up my valise and pulled out a tattered fashion magazine. After adjusting my sterling silver monogrammed cuff bracelet, I opened the magazine and flipped through it, feigning interest. I’d read the damn thing cover to cover before the train had left Louisiana, but he didn’t know that.
“I’m talking to you,” he said, his voice louder. In the mostly empty train station, his voice echoed off the hard surfaces and sounded menacing.
I placed the open magazine on my lap, took my time smoothing out the pages, and then looked him squarely in the eye. “And I’m ignoring you,” I said, my southern accent dripping with sugar. “I’d be most appreciative if you did the same.”
With a huff, my would-be beau flung himself back against the bench.
Men like that have such delicate egos, always swanning about when their feelings get hurt.
With a secret, satisfied smile, I went back to flipping through my magazine. He should have taken one look at me and realized I’d never be interested in a man who didn’t know to take his hat off when he was inside.
I’d be out of here in a few hours, but that wouldn’t be soon enough.
3. Blaize
The El Paso train station was enormous inside, with white tiles floors and a second-story accessible by some kind of indoor balcony. “At least there will be plenty of room to fight,” I muttered to Wolf.
I blinked for a moment to let my eyes adjust to the comparative dimness inside. There weren’t very many people inside, and most of those were sitting in the benches clustered together. But as I glanced around, I didn’t see anything that looked unusual. A woman with a child walked around the perimeter of the room, the kid running ahead of her. A woman sat on a bench flipping through a magazine, doing her best to ignore the cowboy trying to hit on her. A few families sat on the benches, too, and one old woman knitting a long, light blue blanket. A dark-haired woman in a floral dress and a sweater wandered toward the bathroom. Several people were heading out the door to the trains. The ticket agent sat in his booth.
We took a few steps inside. I’d looped Wolf’s leash through his new collar but hadn’t hooked it.
He’d be free to run as soon as we figured out what fight we were running toward.
Then I saw it. The young woman who had been walking away from me toward the bathrooms, her dark hair flowing down the back of the sweater she wore over a floral print dress, stopped and tilted her head up to check the air.
It was a scenting motion, the kind that predators used. It wasn’t a movement most humans made.
The motion was a subtle thing, but whatever she was, she was sniffing out her prey.
Wolf stiffened, his hackles rising and a deep growl starting in his throat as he pointed his nose toward the same woman I had noticed.
Good. He recognized it, too. Whatever she was, she didn’t belong here.
I glanced around at all the civilians in the room. I would have to find a way to get her, whatever she was, outside before I could kill her. Trying to take down monsters with regular people standing by was never easy.
From the way she was sniffing the air, I expected her to turn to attack me—or more likely, Wolf, since supernatural predators seemed to recognize each other’s scents.
But it was worse than that. She made her way directly toward the benches in the center of the room.
Crap. She’s going to take out a civilian.
“Let’s go.” I flicked my hand to pull Wolf’s leash out of his collar even as I said the words, and the two of us took off running toward the monster woman.
This was odd. Most of the time, monsters came for me right off the bat—and if they didn’t attack me, they went after Wolf. But she was headed directly toward the cowboy trying to pick up the woman to on the bench.
No. Wait. As the monster got closer, she dove for not the cowboy, but the woman who was flipping through the magazine.
The woman might have shot the cowboy down, but he was still, well, a cowboy—he was determined to be chivalrous, whether Magazine Chick wanted it or not.
In this case, it meant grabbing the attacker and holding her at arm’s length.
Unfortunately, he didn’t know what I realized as soon as I caught a look at her face.
Bound to Change: A Limited Edition Spring Shifter Romance Collection Page 1
