by Meg Ripley
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GET CAUGHT BETWEEN DRAGONS
Bonded To The Soldier Wolf
Special Ops Shifters: L.A. Force
Meg Ripley
Shifter Nation
Copyright © 2020 by Meg Ripley
www.redlilypublishing.com
All rights reserved. No parts of this book may be used or reproduced in any form without written permission from the author, with the exception of brief quoted passages left in an online review. This book is a fictional story. All characters, names, and situations are of the author’s creation. Any resemblances to actual situations or to persons who are alive or dead are purely coincidental.
This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only; this copy is not available for resale or to give to another reader aside from any transaction through Amazon’s e-book lending program.
Disclaimer
This book is intended for readers age 18 and over. It contains mature situations and language that may be objectionable to some readers.
Contents
Bonded To The Soldier Wolf
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Jude
Preview of Secret Baby For The Soldier Bear
Chapter 1
About the Author
Bonded To The Soldier Wolf
Special Ops Shifters: L.A. Force
1
Raul leaned back in his desk chair and listened to the phone ring through his headset. This was the fifth time he’d tried to contact Lindsay, and he knew what was coming. There would be a pause as the call stopped ringing, and it would last just long enough that he’d think she picked up. But then it would just be her voicemail again, reminding him to leave a message as if he didn’t already know how these things worked.
He was prepared this time. He was prepared to remind her that he hadn’t left one of his favorite collections with her just because he liked her, or even as something to remember him by when he went overseas. Raul knew Lindsay was just as much of a comic book nerd as he was, and she’d keep them safe. They wouldn’t get ruined by sand and travel as he hopped all over the world with the Green Berets, nor would they get sold at a yard sale for a quarter apiece simply because his mom wanted his room cleaned out.
“Hello?” came a breathless voice.
“Lindsay?” Raul sat back up. It’d been so long since he’d heard her voice that he couldn’t be sure.
“Raul! Hey! I’ve been meaning to call you back. How’s it going?”
He glanced at the empty place on his bookshelf. Granted, it was only vacant because when he’d moved into the Special Ops Shifter Force’s L.A. headquarters, he’d purposely left a spot for those comics, but still. “Um, it’s fine. Everything’s great. You?”
“If you were on the internet at all, you’d know!” Lindsay gushed. “I can’t believe how well my YouTube channel has been doing. When I started it up, I figured it would just be a fun little side hustle. But it turns out people really like hearing about comics, movies, and gaming from a girl. I’ve even gotten sponsors, and I quit that awful job I had down at the diner. Life couldn’t be better!”
“Sweet. I’m really happy for you.” He was. Though Raul had technically dated Lindsay for a few years during his time in the service, he’d easily come to terms with the fact that they weren’t meant to be together. She liked a lot of the same things he did, but it wasn’t enough.
“Hey, do you remember that guy Shane who used to work downtown at the coffee shop?”
“Sure.”
“We’re getting married! And it’s going to be more like a comic-con than a wedding. My mom’s pissed, of course, because she wants me to walk down the aisle wearing a god awful wedding gown. Pfft! She clearly doesn’t know me at all. And it’s not as though I’m making her dress up. I just can’t decide if I want to do a Star Wars theme, or maybe go with something like Joker and Harley Quinn. It’s tough, but I’m so excited!” Lindsay paused for a moment to take a breath. “I’m sorry. Maybe I shouldn’t be telling you all this.”
“No, it’s fine. Really. I’m happy for the two of you; you’ll be great together. I was really just calling to see if you could mail me those comics I had you hold onto.”
“Oh, yeah!” The sound of rustling overtook the phone line for a moment. “I’ve still got them all right here in the box. Just give me your address and I’ll send them out tomorrow.”
Raul rattled off the address.
“Wow, you’re living in Los Angeles? What’s going on? Are you some sort of movie star now? No. That’s not it. You’d be a screenwriter before you’d actually want your face plastered on a Blu-ray cover.”
He had to laugh a little at that. “No Hollywood stuff, just a different job that happened to fall in my lap. It’s a good one, though, and the city’s awesome.”
“Raul? I know it shouldn’t matter. I shouldn’t even be asking you this, considering everything, but are there any hard feelings between us? I’d just like to think that we can be friends.”
Raul smiled at the phone. Lindsay was a good person. He’d dated her because he’d thought they could create a solid bond over their common passions. Some of it, he could admit to himself now, was because he knew he was going into the Army and wanted a warm body to come home to. If he were honest with himself, though, there had never been a true spark between them. “Of course, we’re friends. You don’t know how good it was for me to have someone at home to write to about anything and everything—including bad movies that didn’t do any justice to the book. I appreciate every time you wrote back, and I don’t regret any of that.”
“That’s really great, Raul. You’re such a good guy; I know you’ll find the right person someday. Hey, I’ve got to go, but I’ll get those comics out to you tomorrow. Thanks for calling.”
He hung up, frowning at the phone. He didn’t mind that Lindsay had moved on and was getting married, but why did she have to end the call by reminding him just how lonely he was? Raul had grown up hearing all about how shifters were different from humans because fate pulled them together into bonded pairs that couldn’t be denied.
“It’s so much more than attraction, mi nieto,” his grandmother had reminded him when he’d first started dating as a teenager. “A woman might be beautiful, yes. But does she speak to your soul?”
Raul hadn’t wanted to admit just how much his abuela’s words had affected him, especially at such a young age. Immediately, Raul had wanted that for himself. He’d seen the soft looks his parents gave each other and the way his grandmother still pined for her late husband, and as a child, it’d merely been part of his pack’s life. That simple conversation had changed the thought into so much more.
“Raul?” Amar called from the stairs. His footsteps were noiseless as he approached the bedroom door and knocked.
“Yeah?” Raul set his phone aside.
“When was the last time you checked on your app?” Amar asked as he entered the room. His eyes swept quickly over the electronics that filled most of the cramped shelves. “My phone has been blowing up for the last twenty minutes.”
A small wave of guilt washed over Raul. He and Hudson Taylor from the D.C. unit developed the app as a way for shifters to communicate with each other without being outed. Raul had long ago found underground chatrooms where shifters spoke in code, but he and the rest of the Force knew just how important it was to g
et real information out to the shifter community. Still, he’d been too caught up in his own business to check the app that day.
“Then you might want to change your notification settings.” Raul leaned forward and unlocked his computer screen, where he could see everything within the app from the back end. It wasn’t the sleek, user-friendly interface that everyone else saw on their phones and tablets; just raw code, and he loved it. That was exactly what had inspired him to specialize in communications when he’d enlisted. “Just go into your settings menu.”
Amar sighed and handed his phone to Raul. “You do it.”
“Seriously?” Raul couldn’t hide his smirk as he looked up at his Alpha. Amar was a formidable man, and when humans weren’t looking, he was capable of shifting into a powerful dragon. He’d lived for centuries and survived wars and plagues, but the man sure hated a cell phone. “You can’t tell me you don’t know how to do this by now.”
“I’m sure I could figure it out if I wanted to,” he assured Raul, “but I don’t. I won’t deny how useful all this is to the Force and to the shifter community as a whole, but I get so tired of looking at a tiny screen.”
“Here you go.” Raul handed the phone back. “Now, let’s see what people are posting about.”
Raul had known, as soon as he’d decided to create this app, that there would be some interesting issues to tackle. First, they had to make sure it was a safe place for shifters to discuss what was happening around them. That meant giving the app a rather vague name—The Shift—that most people wouldn’t pick up on. Those who downloaded the app were met with a screen asking for their credentials. They couldn’t just make up a login name and password; instead, they had to have official credentials that were handed down from their local conclave. Hudson, who was also the CEO of Taylor Communications, had helped him work on all the security from the back end, ensuring enemies couldn’t hack the app.
Perhaps even more importantly, Raul had known how dangerous it would be if this were treated purely as a social media platform, where anyone could say anything. The Force, conclaves, and clan leaders needed reputable sources so they’d be able to distinguish truth from speculation. They were still working on that part of it, but Raul had started the process by putting different badge types next to each user. This also meant working with the conclave leaders and beefing up the national registry of shifters.
In short, it’d been a ton of work and had taken up a lot of time. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t worth it.
Raul questioned what was going on as soon as he started seeing the news feeds. “What’s all this bullshit? There’s no way we got hacked.”
“If we did, then it was by someone with a lot of talent and a very active imagination. Personally, I wouldn’t have gone with zombies.”
Raul clicked on a video that’d been recently uploaded by a clan-designated reporter. It showed a woman sitting in a house by the beach, looking terrified. “I…I don’t understand it,” she stammered. “I’d heard about people who were dead suddenly showing up again. I wanted to just explain it away; maybe those folks were just missing their deceased loved ones. But then I saw it with my very own eyes! The old man down the street died of a heart attack last week and, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I saw him out on his lawn last night!”
“Weed is legal in California now,” Amar commented under his breath.
“I ran back in the house and told my roommate,” she continued. “She said I’d been sleepwalking and I’d just made the whole thing up, but when she looked out the window, she saw him, too! He was just standing there, staring at the roses he’d planted last year, but he was so real!”
“There are tons of stories like this, man,” Raul said as he skimmed the reports. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
Amar grabbed a free chair and sat down. “I don’t suppose it’s much different than dealing with vampires.”
Raul chuckled. Amar was a mythical creature on his own, and to humans, the rest of the shifter community would be, too. But the blood-sucking undead were new to all of them, and it’d made the situation even more complicated considering one of them turned out to be Amar’s mate. “How is Katalin adjusting to life here, anyway? She seems like she’s doing well, but she’s also pretty quiet.”
The Alpha tipped his head slightly to the side and smiled, a distant look in his dark eyes. “L.A. isn’t ever going to be the perfect place for her, considering how sunny it is, but we get out at night as much as we can. And the shifter blood substitute Drake, Emersyn, and Sabrina concocted for her has made a huge difference in her lifestyle.”
“And the wedding?” Raul had been thrilled for the couple when they’d announced their pending nuptials, though it also served as a painful reminder that he hadn’t yet found his mate.
“All in due time. There’s no rush, especially for the two of us.”
Raul knew what he meant. Both Amar and Katalin had lived for several hundred years, so a few more months wasn’t going to change anything.
He focused his attention back to the computer screen. He loved the supernatural and the concept that what people understood as reality wasn’t always the extent of it. “Spooky shit like this is right up my alley. Let me dig around a bit, and I’ll see what else I can find out.”
“If you insist, but don’t go doing anything crazy. I don’t need you turning up as a zombie. I mean, no more of one than you already are in the morning.” Laughing, Amar left the room.
There were plenty of possibilities, but Raul’s intuition told him zombies weren’t on the list.
His fingers flew over the keyboard as he quickly skimmed the other sightings that had been posted to the app. Most of them weren’t from anyone with a badge. That didn’t mean they were false reports, but he wanted the most reputable and reliable information possible.
One post in particular caught his eye.
“We at the L.A. Society for Spirits want to understand what’s happening in our area. There have been far too many of these strange occurrences posted here and reported directly to us, so we know this isn’t just a coincidence. The LASS will do everything it can to help understand why deceased shifters are suddenly being spotted all over the city, as shown in the video below. If you’d like to help, the LASS is currently recruiting new members.”
The video below the post was one Raul had already seen, since it’d been shared several times. It showed a tall man breaking out the windows of a car parked on the street. Nothing would be all that unusual about the video or separate it from any other act of vandalism, except for the swirling mists that surrounded the man’s figure. And Raul had seen several paranormal groups looking for recruits even before these incidents started happening, so nothing about that was strange.
What gave Raul pause was the profile picture of the woman who’d made the post.
It was a closeup that only showed part of her face, turned slightly away from the camera. Although it was a little blurry, as though she turned to run from something, it showed the angle of her eye and the delicate flush of her cheek. Her name—since The Shift didn’t use screen handles—was Penelope Granger.
Raul blinked. He wasn’t on the app to meet chicks. He’d created the damn thing to share information, and that was exactly what he was going to do. Firing off a quick message to the poster, he logged off the app and began looking up anything he could find about spirits rising from the dead. The Force had turned to mythology and legends to help them with their vampire problem, so there was no reason not to do the same now. Raul had learned, along with the rest of the Force, that there was often more truth in fiction than they’d realized.
Taking a break, he glanced out the window at the full moon. As a kid, Raul had loved the idea of being controlled by something else, of not having any excuse for being in his human form or his wolf form. Somehow, that had sounded more exciting than being able to change of his own volition. Aside from missions with the Force, when was the last time he’d shifted, anyway? Raul sh
ut the curtains and went back to work.
It wasn’t until he finally turned to go to bed around two a.m. that Raul pulled up The Shift on his phone and checked his messages.
We’ll be at the Calvary Cemetery at midnight tomorrow night. You can meet us there.
2
Penny sat on her bed, rattling away on her laptop, with several volumes about ghosts, cults, and ancient rituals scattered at her feet. She had so many things she needed to get done! Her job at the bookstore had always been fun as far as work went, but it was nothing compared to the hobbies she pursued on the side. She’d formed the Los Angeles Society for Spirits just after high school, and even though most of her family thought it was ridiculous, she knew the importance of what she was doing.
Her cell pinged. It was Ingrid. Are you coming?
“Shit!” Penny slammed her computer shut and tossed several books on the floor as she shot up from her bed. She stashed her laptop in her desk drawer and then tapped a quick message back to Ingrid. Got caught up. Be there ASAP.
She glanced at herself in the mirror as she grabbed her keys. Pressing a fingertip to her lips, she transferred the kiss to the little stamped charm on her bracelet. The letters “BFF” were hammered onto the surface, and it dangled next to tiny glass beads of yellow and light blue for each of their birthstones. The light blue one had a swirl of white in it, where Kayla’s ashes had been incorporated into the glass.
“I miss you, girl. Every day.”
