Chosen Mates (Beasts of the Bay Bundle)

by Bell, Lilith T.

  Dawn was a short, curvy recent graduate, a couple of years older than me. At times she was so dauntlessly optimistic and sweet-natured that it was difficult to remember she wasn’t just a teenager. She reached up to lay a hand on my shoulder, giving it a squeeze.

  “Do you mind if we have a minute in here?” she asked Hunter’s roommate. She gave him a warm smile.

  He shrugged and walked off, apparently unconcerned with leaving us unsupervised amidst Hunter’s belongings. Under Dawn’s urging I took several steps further into the room, though I felt numb the entire time. She shut the door behind us, then steered me over to the bed to sit down.

  Very little had been taken. He had a stereo and a laptop that he’d left behind, which boggled my mind. He didn’t even take the bedding. Where was he going to go where he didn’t need his own bedding? His parents had helped him out quite a bit with paying for college and all of that, but he hadn’t been answering their calls either. He wasn’t relying on them to pay for whatever he had run off to do.

  I picked up the pillow that still held his scent and hugged it to my chest while Dawn poked around the room. She opened a drawer in the dresser to look inside, then gave the closet a peek as well.

  It had been two years since my mother had disappeared. There hadn’t been anything dramatic to precede her disappearance like with Hunter, but she had never returned. She had suffered from depression for years—at least as far back since when my toddler sister had drowned—and because she didn’t take anything with her we had all made some obvious, uncomfortable guesses about what happened to her. It was hard not to think the same thoughts again.

  “Do you think he’s gone to kill himself?” I asked.

  “I doubt it,” said Dawn. “Nobody packs up all their socks and underwear to commit suicide, do they?”

  It was a very logical answer, which made me smile a bit. That was just how Dawn had been from the moment I met her and I appreciated it. Her very rational way of thinking coupled with her boundless enthusiasm just made the world seem like a better place in general. Of course, with how very logical she was about everything I knew that I’d always have to keep part of my life secret from her, because I couldn’t expect her to wrap her mind around it all. None of that had been much of an issue until now.

  Every time I closed my eyes, I saw Hunter coming back to the pack’s apartment building, our collective den. His clothing was torn from shifting in it and he was covered in blood. Some of it had been his own, but most of it hadn’t. Blood had stained his teeth. Human blood. It was the first big conflict my father had to handle since my grandfather had died the year before and left the pack to him. Perhaps that was why my father was so harsh. Perhaps that was why he refused to explain anything to me.

  Dawn came to sit next to me, wrapping an arm around me for a reassuring hug. I leaned into her, trying to absorb some strength through the contact.

  “I don’t think a big fight with your dad should be making him react so badly,” she said. “He’ll probably calm down and give you a call soon.”

  “You don’t understand how big it was,” I said softly.

  I couldn’t tell her that my father had beaten him and thrown him out of the pack for eating human flesh. She didn’t even know what the pack was. It would just sound like psychotic cult ramblings. Instead, I’d just said that they had a big fight because of the tattoos.

  My fingers brushed the bandage on my neck and when I concentrated on it I could feel the sting of the healing wound there. She wouldn’t understand what the marks were, either, so they were just matching tattoos as far as she was concerned. She had rolled her eyes and considered it a bit silly, but had accepted the story I gave her all the same.

  “Oh. Oh, Sofia...”

  I glanced up at Dawn’s anguished voice and followed her gaze over to the nightstand, where a framed picture of Hunter and me was still sitting. The picture had been taken the summer before when he had come home to visit after his first year of college, just before I left to start college myself. We had taken a trip to Pismo Beach along with my brother Aidan. Aidan wasn’t in the picture because he had taken it, so it was just me and Hunter draped around one another and beaming into the camera. I had always admired how striking Hunter looked with his dark auburn hair and eyes a shade of brown that almost perfectly matched the color of dried blood. His skin was at its tannest in the picture, with a few faint freckles showing up here and there. He had a wiry, lanky build, as a lot of werewolves tended to have. Well-muscled, but without any extra bulk that could slow him down. His lips were a touch thin, but soft and expressive. His cheekbones were relatively high and sharp, which was a good word in general to describe his face. Sharp, as if it were chiseled from stone and razor-like edges had been left in place. Beautiful and dangerous.

  My vision became blurry with tears and I had to look away. He hadn’t even taken a picture of us with him. He’d just left it. He’d taken his socks and underwear and left our picture and had turned off his phone.

  What did it all mean?

  “I’m going to call Mama and let her know what’s going on,” I mumbled, pulling my own phone out.

  On the second ring, my grandmother picked up. “Did you find him?”

  “No, Mama. He’s not here.” My voice cracked on the last word and I had to pause a moment to pull myself together again. My grandmother said nothing. In the background I could hear my younger cousin Ana chattering away. “He took some of his things, but left stuff like his computer. His roommate doesn’t know where he went.”

  “I’m so sorry, baby.” I heard her sigh and then the background noise got a lot quieter. I assumed she had stepped into another room. “What about the marks? Can you use them to find him?”

  I hesitated, glancing over at Dawn. She politely averted her eyes, but I knew she couldn’t avert her ears.

  “No. I can’t...I can’t feel anything at all. Everything just stopped during the fight.”

  “But you’d been feeling him before then? You were getting into each other’s heads?”

  “A little, I think. I was more aware of him than I am now, definitely.”

  “You’ve both got to be open to it for the marks to work, honey.” Her tone was gentle, the one she used to give harsh truths with as little harm as possible. “It sounds like he’s shut you out.”

  “I don’t understand why. I just...I just don’t understand any of this. Why did my dad say Hunter was just like his parents? Jay and Paul haven’t...” I trailed off, guiltily glancing toward Dawn. “Have they?”

  Mama went quiet for several heavy heartbeats before she spoke again. “He meant Hunter’s birth parents.”

  I thought back to the first time I’d laid eyes on Hunter, when he was a frightened little pup of just six years old. A year older than me, lost and alone in the world. Other than his name and his age, he had never said anything about where he came from, claiming instead that he couldn’t remember. I’d been told that Jay found him wandering in the woods all alone, half-starved and scared out of his mind. It sounded like a pretty good reason for a young werewolf to forget his birth pack.

  “What do you know about his birth parents?” I pressed.

  Mama sighed. “They were man-eaters and your father led a hunting party to stop them. It seemed a kindness that Hunter couldn’t remember and we all agreed to just say he was a lost orphan, to spare him the pain and shame of that.”

  I sat there in silence as I reeled from the revelation. No wonder he had run. No wonder he had left instead of waiting for his parents—his real parents, the ones who raised him—to come home from their trip back to the Philippines. It explained some of the irrational dislike my father had displayed toward him in the past, too.

  But why hadn’t he given me a chance? I was as lied to as he had been.

  “Well.” My voice was flat and dead, without any further hope to it. “Dawn and I are going to drive back once we get a chance to rest. There’s nothing more we can do.”

  “S
ofia, please don’t hold this against the rest of us. We were trying to protect him, to give him a place in the pack without judgement.”

  Fat lot of good that did, I thought bitterly.

  Out loud, I said, “Even if I can’t feel him now, will the marks let me know if something happens to him?”

  “They will.”

  There was that at least. Dawn was right in that he wasn’t dead, because he didn’t feel dead. Cut off from me, yes, but not gone. Just silenced somehow in my head. The ritual to bind us through the mating marks had been my idea, because I wanted something so much more than just words and promises with Hunter. I had wanted what my grandparents had, where they could share feelings and even thoughts through their marks. It had strengthened them immensely, as they supported one another metaphysically as well as emotionally. At least until my grandfather had died the year before, likely hastened by his grief for my mother. I’d been warned that the marks wouldn’t be at their full strength until the tattooing we had done to them was fully healed, but even after just a few weeks we’d been able to feel them. Until he cut me off.

  “Without the two of you working together, you’re both going to be weakened, though. It’s like you’ve got a big wound in your aura where his should be joined to it,” Mama warned. “This isn’t like a breakup or even a divorce, baby. This is heavy magic and it can’t be ignored.”

  I frowned, feeling a touch prickly at her warning. “There isn’t much I can do about that if he’s run away from me, is there?”

  “No,” she agreed, sounding mournful. “But you need to know it even so.”

  Once I had ended the call, Dawn finally stopped pretending the wall was so fascinating. She gave me a thoughtful look.

  “What was that stuff about marks and feeling Hunter?” she asked.

  I shook my head to dismiss her question. “Just some superstition of my grandma’s. I think it comes from Jamaica.”

  It didn’t, not exactly. I knew that. Originally, it came from feline shape-shifter tribes in Africa and had been brought over to the New World. The old traditions had been kept alive by some very lucky families, like on my maternal side. My mother had inherited a wolf form from her father and that’s what I had inherited as well, but the magic of the cats was still there, carefully kept and tended by Mama.

  And now that magic was causing me a great psychic wound.

  Chapter 1

  Hunter

  Now

  Two hundred and fifty pounds of tattooed soldier stood in front of me, just about quivering in rage. He was at least three inches taller than me and used every inch to his advantage, looming like a storm cloud made of resentment. I could have broken him over my knee.

  “I don’t need a babysitter, Hunter,” Brandon said, just about growling the words through clenched jaws.

  “That’s good, because I wouldn’t have hired you if I thought you did.” I gave him a cool look, then walked past him to the bar in my office. Drinking alcohol while working private security didn’t seem like the wisest of combinations, but having a drink to offer when people came to the office seemed to enhance our reputation in some mysterious way.

  As near as I could figure, once you got over a certain income bracket you were pretty much required to be an alcoholic, drug addict, or sex fiend. Perhaps I was uncharitable towards our clients—we were based on the western edge of what was officially the most expensive residential neighborhood in the United States—but familiarity breeds contempt. That I had done well enough financially to fit in amongst our wealthy clients was still a thought I had trouble getting used to.

  I poured two fingers of bourbon, then turned back to offer the glass to Brandon. He was just a few years younger than me, fresh out of the Army and finally realizing that he was fed a bunch of crap about his job prospects. I sympathized, which was why almost half my employees were veterans and buddies from my time in Afghanistan.

  Brandon narrowed his eyes and ignored the offered drink. “If she’s not a babysitter, why the hell are you sending me on jobs with a ninety pound girl?”

  “She’s not ninety pounds. I’d guess she weighs at least a hundred and forty, but lies in the media make people completely incapable of judging a woman’s weight accurately. Do you know what ninety pounds looks like at her height? Downright skeletal.” I paused, noting that Brandon didn’t look remotely interested in my correction. “Savannah has more experience than you and she has highly specialized training. This is how we do things here: one bodyguard who looks intimidating and has weapons experience, one security expert who slides under the radar and does hand-to-hand.”

  Brandon bristled. “I can do hand-to-hand.”

  I glanced down at his meaty fists, mentally comparing them to the raw power and threat in Savannah’s claws. He didn’t know that his assigned partner wasn’t human, of course. Keeping half my employees in the dark about the other half was difficult, but there just weren’t enough shifters for me to hire for all of the work we were getting now.

  “You can, but who’s going to try with you?” I shrugged before I drained the bourbon from the refused glass. As it burned down my throat I hissed inward through my teeth, but the alcohol would hardly have an effect on me. One of the benefits of being an alpha male werewolf is being much harder to poison and that includes alcohol. Unfortunately, it also made drinking to forget much harder.

  “Just trust me that we do this with everyone,” I went on. “It’s no insult to you. She is very good at what she does.”

  Some of the anger was finally easing in Brandon’s body as he shook his head. “I find that hard to believe, Hunter.”

  “If you don’t believe me, go challenge her to an arm wrestling contest.” At the skeptical look from Brandon, I just smiled and gave him a little salute with the glass.

  Anyone else and I wouldn’t have made that offer. It was a stupid, dangerous thing to say. We could kill humans accidentally with our strength and it took years to learn control enough to be able to use force on them without snapping bones. I knew that first-hand and those were not memories I cherished. But despite Brandon calling Savannah a “girl” she was thirty-two and had more experience in combat than him. She had learned how to control herself and I trusted her more than any of my other employees.

  At times I trusted her more than I trusted myself.

  Once Brandon finally left the office I sat back down at the desk to make a few notes on his file. He was my newest hire and I’d been impressed with the recommendations I got for him from my war buddies, but it looked like there could be some problems if he didn’t learn to set his ego aside. For his sake, I hoped he didn’t call Savannah a “ninety pound girl” to her face. It didn’t matter to me why he didn’t want to take assignments with her. All that mattered was that he got over it.

  “Hunter, can you talk?”

  I glanced up from the computer to see Savannah standing in the doorway with a frown. I groaned, closing my eyes briefly. “Please don’t tell me Brandon is still making a scene over being assigned with you.”

  “No.” She didn’t sound amused, so I looked at her more closely as she shut the door behind her. Savannah was the only lion shifter I had ever met, having crossed paths with her when I was working in LA. She was a little over average height, with sinewy muscles that would have given a hint of her strength even if she were only human. Her skin was a deep, rich brown; her eyes were a shade darker with little flecks of gold in them that matched the gold of her coat when she shifted. She was a stunningly beautiful woman, but there had never been the slightest bit of romantic or sexual interest between us. What I saw in her face now was worry.

  “I was just listening to the news,” she went on. “There was an animal attack in Mountain Lake Park last night. Two joggers were ripped to shreds. Right now the police are tentatively blaming dogs.”

  “You think it was one of us?” I asked, frowning.

  “Could be. The main thing is that it’ll be more dangerous for anyone to shift inside the ci
ty for a while. You know how people get about things like this.”

  I nodded. “Yeah, I do. We’ll have to watch more closely for any loners for the next couple weeks, for their own good.”

  “That’s what I was thinking.” Savannah gave me a tight smile, then headed back out. I hoped Brandon wasn’t going to give her too hard of a time.

  Focused again on the computer, I closed the personnel files and opened up my browser. A quick search found an article about the animal attack, but it had been written quickly and had little information to add to what Savannah had already told me. I skimmed over the comments, which were usually nothing more than inane babbling but occasionally held little nuggets of truth that hadn’t bubbled to the surface yet.

  A commenter suggested the animal attack was staged to hide a hate crime, because the joggers had been a newlywed lesbian couple. Another somehow used the animal attack as an excuse to start a racist rant. There was even the standard crank declaring that it was a sign of the end times and the deaths were actually human sacrifices. Nothing useful.

  I closed the laptop, then checked the time on my phone. Three more minutes and then I could leave guilt free.

  Big Bad Security had grown from just Savannah and me to an operation with twenty-six people. Thirteen of those were paranormals of some type, including myself. One was a human single mom—Cristina—who ran the phones. The rest were human veterans, who were often puzzled by the low-key people they were partnered with. I was proud of how confused they were, because it meant my training was working. If we didn’t know how to control ourselves, those of us with sufficient power had a tendency to leak it all over the place. Even humans without any psychic sensitivity at all would notice it and be put on edge.

  I didn’t often take jobs myself any more, putting more of my time into training and management, but I still felt obligated to put in full time in the office. The money came more easily than it used to, but I wasn’t going to be one of those assholes who got a little bit of success and then completely set himself apart from the employees who were responsible for that success.