by Lisa Ladew
Table of Contents
Title Page
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Chapter 1 - Riot’s Nature
Chapter 2 - A Call To Arms
Chapter 3 - Riot Grrl
Chapter 4 - Riot’s Girl
Chapter 5 - A Switch He Can’t Shake
Chapter 6 - Headquarters?
Chapter 7 - Home
Chapter 8 - Defend Your Riot
Chapter 9 - A Laugh Riot
Chapter 10 - Feels Just Riot
Chapter 11 - Carick’s Conniption
Chapter 12 - Riot Shield
Chapter 13 - Start a Revolution
Chapter 14 - Riot Control
Chapter 15 - Cougars And Wolves And Bears, Oh Shit
Chapter 16 - Please (Don’t) Feed The Kitty
Chapter 17 - Chastity Killed The Cat
Chapter 18 - Brothers At Arms
Chapter 19 - Means Of Destruction
Chapter 20 - Shifters’ Paradise
Chapter 21 - Stonewalling Riot
Chapter 22 - Inciting Riot
Chapter 23 - Happy Kitties
Chapter 24 - Riot In The Sheets
Chapter 25 - Act Your Rage
Chapter 26 - Read Him The Riot Act
Chapter 27 - Leap Of Faith
Chapter 28 - If It Ain’t Broke, Break It
Chapter 29 - Fight The Power
Chapter 30 - Basic Human Riots
Chapter 31 - Snoopy Switch
Chapter 32 - Bad Dog
Chapter 33 - A Riot Of Color
Chapter 34 - The Riot Police
Chapter 35 - Rebel Yell
Chapter 36 - Rebel Without A Pause
Chapter 37 - Run Riot
Chapter 38 - Mine Sweepers
Chapter 39 - Bloodsucker Blitz
Chapter 40 - Close But No Cougar
Chapter 41 - Win The Battle, Lose The Switch?
Chapter 42 - A Switch Scorned
Chapter 43 - Heart’s A-Riot
Chapter 44 - Riot’s Squad
Chapter 45 - Long Live The Revolution
Epilogue
Notes from Lisa
SWITCH OF FATE: BOOK 3
BY GRACE QUILLEN
AND
LISA LADEW
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons or organizations, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
Copyright © 2018 Lisa Ladew and Grace Quillen All Rights Reserved
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Lisa: <3 To the process. May it strip us bare and fix our shit.
Grace: Thank you readers, for all the kind words and well-wishes after Book 2, and for being willing to wait while I got myself back on track. Y'all are the best.
Chapter 1 - Riot’s Nature
Riot strained to summit the highest bluff on the cliff, his fingers pinched around rock, his toes scrambling for holds inside his soft-soled climbing shoes. Sweat poured from his forehead and he twisted to wipe it on the fitted sleeve of his black athletic shirt.
If he fell? He’d shift, of course. Shift in mid-air and land far below on his feet, like any cat. Sure, he still might die. But what a way to go.
He pulled himself up with his fingers, undiluted tension in his hands, shoulders, back, and core doing all the work. He gritted his teeth, unable to help grunting. He was lean and strong, and still his ass was being kicked, which meant his grow was safe out here, nobody but shifters could get this high. Shifters, and the most ambitious local mountain climbers who knew the Nantahala National Forest well enough to even think summiting this crag might be possible.
Riot Cofield was both a puma shifter and the most savage mountain climber in the forest. Which was why he dared to do something so fucking stupid in the middle of it.
He levered a foot over the ledge, pulled and pushed and forced the rest of himself over, taking a moment to catch his breath, face down on the rock, tiny pebbles sticking to his cheek.
Break’s over. He pushed himself to his feet, convict pushup-style, squinting against the retreating September sun, letting the view smack him in the face all at once.
Whooosh. Like a film reel rolling out, the view spread from cliffside shore to cerulean sky, where fat clouds with foamy, fiery undersides hovered. The evening sun sank quickly, creating an ever-changing work of art, making him suck in a deep breath.
So much better than being stuck in a box.
Any sky would be better than a ceiling, but this sky? Riot had lived in North Carolina for all of his thirty years and had been climbing for at least twenty, teaching and leading tours in this forest for just over a year, and he knew there was no sky like this sky. No forest like this forest. No air like this air.
From here, he could see so far that the view must encompass the entire world, and, from here, the entire world was only beautiful. Even something as destructive as a forest fire would be a riotous feast for senses that had been starved like his has been.
Riot glanced down to the bluff twenty feet below him, to his best friends, Ryder and his twin sister, Shiloh, both leopard shifters. Shiloh was working quickly in the patch, while Ryder sat off to the side, near the ledge they’d come up on. He gazed out at the view, his feet dangling over miles of open air, expression set. Probably composing poetry, Riot decided. The cat didn’t talk, but he thought, hard.
Shiloh looked up, catching Riot’s eye. “Knife!” she yelled. Riot nodded and shrugged his pack off his back, dropping the entire thing to her so that the super-light titanium knife, a present for his tenth birthday, was well-padded. He trusted Shiloh to look after it. Everyone who knew him well, knew how he felt about that knife.
Riot got down to business quickly and expertly, pulling a gallon-sized baggie out of his pocket. He knew how to do the dirty shit, had always been good at going bad, and this skill was no exception. If clearing a patch was ever an Olympic event, he would bring home the gold.
Finished, he zipped up the baggie and climbed back down to his friends, ready to call it a day, hoping and praying for the zillionth time that he was doing the right thing, and that it would never bite him in the ass.
Shiloh knew how much Riot hated what they were doing, but knew him well enough to work as fast as she could to get it done. He fell in line next to her in the quiet dusk and they passed his knife back and forth, alternately pinching and cutting off bud after bud from the patch of cannabis plants, dropping each one into the bulging sack of baggies at their feet. Riot rubbed his hands on the ground again and again. Shit, this stuff is sticky. And smelly.
Which was the reason that he and Shiloh were working their fingers to the bone picking buds, while Ryder kept his still-on-parole hands clean. The male’s cat was a clouded leopard and his long physique and black hair made him look like a photo negative of his pale and perfect snow leopard sister. He perched on a boulder playing lookout and being brilliant, occasionally writing in his ever-present pocket notebook. The fact that Riot even knew of the notebook’s existence was a testament to how deep the bond between them ran. Ryder usually kept it squirreled away where nobody could see it, ask him about it, or get their ass beat for touching it.
Shiloh cleared her throat in Riot’s direction, breaking the long silence, playing big sister. “How much longer you gonna be doing this?”
“This?” he griped. You mean how long until we’re finished for the day? Or how many more days until this patch dies and I have to figure out how to grow a summer crop in winter?
Or how much longer until I find a permanent solution and I’m not chained to an anchor six inches short of the surface? Riot shrugged and took the middle road. “One more harvest after this, maybe two. I’ve got to come back for the whole plants. Too much of the good stuff in the stems to let them sit here and rot.”
Shiloh exhaled sharply through her nose, all irritation. Riot waited, and a minute later she spoke again. “You know this kind of thing can be bought online, right? Buying CBD oil, even in an illegal state, won’t land your ass back in prison.”
Riot shook his head. “The levels aren’t right. Believe me, we tried, but nothing on the market even touches the seizures. I guess because he’s half-shifter he needs a special blend.” Riot grew a particular strain of cannabis with an exact chemical profile, alongside perfectly legal, high-CBD hemp, for a very good friend who could die without it.
Ryder hmmphed in disapproval from his boulder. Shiloh translated. “Bastard should’ve known better than to have kids with a pure human in the first place.”
Like a shot, Riot’s mind took off down that old familiar path of anger and resentment, and with an effort he reined it in. No use thinking about what could have been, all he could do now is deal with what is. One step after another until the job was done and everyone was okay. Then maybe he’d get a rest. Maybe. Probably not.
He changed the subject, hoping Shiloh wouldn’t make him work to get the answers he was fishing for. “Anything new?”
The tiniest ghost of a smirk curved Shiloh’s thin lips. With her tan skin, exotic face, and tight physique, it was easy to overlook this female’s richer depths, which was a mistake. Even though they were and would only ever be friends, Riot knew that Shiloh wasn’t someone you should underestimate. She proved his point for him when she went straight to the heart of his question.
Shiloh crossed her arms and eyed him. “Anything new with what? The Cause? I thought you were out, Lio.”
Riot flinched before he remembered that it was Shiloh speaking, that she wasn’t taunting him with the nickname. Lio was the highest term of respect a big cat shifter could be afforded by his peers. It meant they trusted that cat to be righteous, to do the right thing, even though cat shifters as a species were notorious for taking other, more shadowed paths. Not the worst of the shifter reputations out there, but still. Not great.
Riot shook the tension out of his shoulders and gave Shiloh a look. She was right, he had left The Cause, moved out of that weird-ass house, Resperanza, and had been sleeping in trees for the last few nights. And it was the smartest damn thing he’d ever done, or so he kept telling himself. Riot hadn’t been in The Cause for two weeks before he’d been over the responsibilities, the bullshit with Flint, the questionable nature of his duties, and all the people who wanted in his business. He shrugged. None of that stopped him from being curious. Curiosity killed the cat but satisfaction brought him back. All that fucking bullshit. Shiloh knew it as well as he did. “I am out, but… come on.”
Shiloh did know. She didn’t drag out the suspense, instead twisting off another bud and tossing it into Riot’s pack as she spoke. “Darby’s out of the hospital, moved into Resperanza. I haven’t seen her since the accident but I heard she’s okay.”
Riot huffed out a humorless laugh as he passed Shiloh in the row. It had been less than a week since the car accident. Goldie and Shiloh had made it out walking wounded, but Darby had been hurt pretty bad. The Cause played for keeps, and the blood was for real.
Riot hadn’t been at the wreck. He’d been on the other side of the Nantahala River gorge wrestling his motorcycle down the popular Tail of the Dragon, a series of even tighter switchbacks than the one Goldie had been navigating. He’d hoped the laser focus required by the back-and-forth, stomach-lurching ride would help get his mind off the rising tide of complications in his life, but coming off a series of tight pendulum turns, Riot’s eyes had lit up green, the coven color reflecting back to him in his helmet’s face shield. Trouble somewhere, something to do with The Cause, with the switches.
He’d still been part of it all then, and just like the Breath switches lit up green when they were doing switchy shit, the covenbound shifters’ eyes lit up too, to let them know shit was going down somewhere and they better find it. The reflection in his face plate had blinded Riot, forced him off the road, and the urge to run toward danger had pulled and punched at him, making him want so badly his whole body ached. He’d had to park his bike at a lookout and run his puma up a dozen fucking trees for an hour just to keep from charging miles across the forest, and all because he was covenbound to women he barely knew.
Fuck that. Riot didn’t like feeling used, he’d had enough of that for ten thousand lifetimes. So he’d tendered his resignation in a surly, “I quit,” after one of Flint’s bullshit tirades. It hadn’t been hard to clear out his few things.
Covenbound to women? No, it wouldn’t do to think of them like that. They were switches. Savage, vampire-killing witches destined to go mad when there were blood-suckers around. Shifters like him were their partners, like it or not.
Riot pinched a bud too hard, crushing the sticky threads with his fingers. That so-called partnership? Riot didn’t like it. He had other priorities that did not include being Breath Coven’s lackey. Their dick-in-a-pinch.
Still, his mouth ran off in front of the tirade in his brain, and Riot couldn’t stop himself from asking, “No new switches?”
Shiloh shook her head, her perfect pale bob settling immediately. “Nope. Everyone expects Darby to light up, but it’s not like we can play bloodsucker buttercup and rub a vampire on her chin to check.”
Riot laughed silently. That’s exactly what they should do, he thought.
Shiloh gestured at him. “You should come back. The Cause needs all the shifters it can get, especially cats.”
Not shifters like me, Riot silently retorted. Criminals. Ex-cons. He dropped in his last bud, checked Shiloh, and then secured the pack, changing the subject with his actions. “We’re good.” He tucked his knife away, zipped everything closed, then wiped his sticky hands on his pants. The fabric caught and pulled. Great Cat, I must smell like Woodstock. He looked at Shiloh. “Thanks.”
Shiloh shrugged. “I’ve done dumber things for less important reasons.”
“I know,” Riot said softly, looking down. His mind darkened as he tried not to replay the image of what made up his mind to help Baker, no matter what it cost Riot personally. But still he couldn’t help seeing a flash of Baker in the hospital. He’d only been two years old, and small for his age. He had a seizure disorder that didn’t respond well to medication, and he’d been seizing for hours. Something had happened and the drugs couldn’t touch it. His tiny body was wasted. He’d had tubes in his nose, his mouth, in both arms.
Faith, his mom, wasn’t eating or sleeping, just sitting by his bed, crying and praying. One of her friends had snuck in the oil her husband made for his epilepsy and gave Baker a dose under his tongue without telling anyone. Baker had stopped shaking within a few minutes. An hour later, he was asking for ice cream.
Riot shook off the memory and caught Shiloh’s eye. “Someone has to do it.”
Shiloh nodded and watched him carefully as she asked, “So what, now he’s just high all the time?”
Riot shook his head. “This stuff doesn’t give you a high, it just works. Believe me, if we could get the right kind any other way, we would. But until I can save up enough to move them somewhere it’s legal, this is the best I’ve got.” He looked at the ground, then right in his friend’s eyes. “Ten years in prison was plenty for me.”
He hadn’t gone looking for this complication. When Riot had gotten out of prison sixteen months ago, he’d been all set to move into his mother’s spare room, get whatever boring job he could, and settle into a quiet freedom. Instead Blossom Cofield had taken a long look at her son, given him a wad of cash, and told Riot to find some wide-open spaces where he could get his head together. She’d suggested N
antahala, less than an hour from Asheville, so he could visit her often. Riot hadn’t accomplished getting his head together, but Nantahala and its wilderness had quickly become home.
Riot and Shiloh packed up and headed off the rock, Ryder following in silence. They headed back the way they’d come, free-climbing down the treacherous cliffside the way only cat shifters could, until they came to a relatively flat field of boulders. From there they made their way towards the main path, leaping from rock to rock, each of them showing off - and showing the others up - until they were pulling off downright dangerous moves, flipping from rock to rock, sometimes one-handed.
They cleared the boulders, then stole down the forest path that would lead them to their cars, one behind the other, each lost in their own thoughts, in the way of cats.
Riot’s thoughts were on the grow, and on what he was doing and why. He had found the space and started planting months ago, his conscience lighter with every seed. He’d known he wasn’t doing the legal thing, but he was doing the right thing, and the right thing was worth everything, even his freedom. Faith’s friend’s husband had refused to share more of his oil with Baker, saying he could lose his medical license. The mountainside cannabis patch was Riot’s solution. Because of the wind, the way the face leaned, and the fact that almost nothing grew on the craggy rock, Riot was confident his secret would not be discovered. The only two people who knew about it, Ryder and Shiloh, he trusted with his life. And his freedom.
An hour later they stopped as a pack to change into boots, within sight of the path maintained by the Forest Service. A breeze blew from the forest across their faces and all three shifters stiffened, then laced quicker. Riot glanced to the twins, his hands working. Their eyes were identically wide. Pine and bitter herbs. Scent of a vampire, and them without a switch in sight. Shit. Shifters couldn’t kill vampires, only fight them, contain them, hold them down for the switches to kill.
Without a word, Shiloh and Ryder took off in the direction of the scent’s source, through the trees and underbrush. Riot hung back. The twins might be gung-ho for finding a vampire, but this wasn’t his fight anymore. He’d quit. But still… if the bloodsuckers were this close to his patch, he needed to know. It only made sense to go along. Riot muttered a curse and jogged after his friends.
