She stuck her hand out the window and extended her middle finger.
His grin turned feral. Oh, that one was going to cost her.
He reached into the hidden inside pocket of his denim jacket, pulled out the extra set of keys that he always kept there, and pressed the kill switch on the key.
The pickup truck slowly glided to a stop. He would have given every single penny he had in his bank account to see the look on her face at that point.
He stuffed the spare keys back in his pocket and jogged down the road, not even bothering to shift, and rapped on the driver’s side door.
Her glare could have set a lesser man on fire. Slowly, she rolled the window down.
Austin leaned in, resting his arm on the window sill. “I believe you’ve got something that belongs to me. Its name is Torrin. Also my truck. Stealing a truck is considered a felony pretty much everywhere.”
“Please die, Austin.” She bit the words out as if they tasted foul. “Right here, right now, so I can watch.”
He winked at her. “On the plus side, if you ever get tired of pretending you’re a bounty hunter, the bar owner would pay you good money for a mud-wrestling gig.”
Her face was turning redder and redder.
Suddenly, she turned the keys in the ignition and started the truck up again. Austin let out a low growl of annoyance.
Again, he pulled the keys out of his pocket and hit the kill switch. The truck had only driven a few hundred feet down the road when he stopped it. He started jogging towards it.
The back door banged open, and Torrin flew out of the car and shot into the woods. Austin spat out a curse.
Savannah had slashed through Torrin’s ropes and let him go rather than let Austin have him.
He started to run, snarling, because although Torrin was a skinny little bitch of a shifter who would break if Austin smacked him too hard, he did have one skill. He was a very, very fast runner. He’d had to be, to survive this long with all his stupid vandalism and thieving.
As he ran, he shed his jacket and kicked off his boots. Then, in one fluid motion, he unleashed his wolf without breaking his stride. He felt the mild sting as his bones snapped and cracked and reset, his fangs shot out, his ears lengthened and sharpened to points. Fur flowed over his skin like a river, and his clothing shredded and fell away.
The colors of the world faded from technicolor to dull and muted, but the richness of a thousand scents flooded his nostrils, more than making up for it. Rich loamy earth, sweet sun-ripened berries, the tracks of raccoons and squirrels and rabbits criss-crossing through the dewy grass, the green smell of crushed leaves, rushed at him as his legs slashed through the air.
Savannah was in fox form now, chasing him, and she smelled musky and sweet. His wolf wanted her. It wanted her bad. Wild power flowed through his body, and he yearned to skid to a stop and let her catch up to him. His animal was clouding his thoughts. It wanted him to chase after Savannah and pin her to the ground and… No!
He banished those treacherous thoughts from his head. With a massive wrench of effort, he forced himself to ignore her, arrowing through the underbrush, heading deep into the woods after Torrin.
Then he felt a sharp sting as Savannah clamped her jaws on his flank, piercing his flesh with her needle-sharp teeth. He let out a howl of fury and spun in a circle until she flew off, landing with a thud on the soft, mossy forest floor. But she kept chasing after him, tripping him up, until he realized that it was too late. Torrin was long gone.
With a snarl, he spun around to face Savannah, who was already vanishing into a thick clump of underbrush. Genuinely pissed off now, he forced his way through the tangle of snarled branches – only to see her bushy, white-tipped tail vanishing into a hole in the ground.
Damn foxholes.
Cursing, he turned around and trotted back the way he came.
His mark was gone, and so was Savannah. He’d just had his ass handed to him by a shifter a third of his size.
I’m coming for you, foxy lady. I know where you sleep. And payback’s a bitch.
He was trotting along, panting, laughing ruefully to himself, when he felt it.
The darkness.
He froze where he stood, heart jack-hammering in his chest. Hellish visions swarmed in front of him, crowding out the trees and the scents and the sunlight.
He was inside the Watering Hole again, and someone was slumped over the bar, their head a bloody ruin.
Instantly, he did what Korbin the healer had told him to do – resisted with all his might. Tried to use his Dominus power to push the images from his brain.
Instead, it grew more warped and horrifying. Barry was the one lying slumped over the bar, his head half blown off, and demons were clawing at his face. Austin’s brother Grant crawled over the bar in human form and began gnawing on Barry’s arm. Savannah, her hair in flames, danced on a table, flapping bat-like wings. Horned monsters swarmed over Barry’s body, tearing at his flesh, their eyes wild, their faces twisting in hideous snarls.
It wasn’t a future vision. Some shifters had those, passed down through the father’s side of the family, but his father hadn’t been a Seer, and future visions showed things that were actually going to happen – not these hideous visions of hellscapes.
So he was just going crazy.
He pawed at his head, as if he could claw the visions from his flesh. As he backed away, snarling and snapping, he tripped over a chair leg and crashed to the floor. How? How could he feel anything in this hell-vision? How could he be physically affected by it when it wasn’t real?
Someone was shouting his name.
It sounded like Barry.
But Barry was dead. His brains were leaking all over the bar, his flesh stripped down to the bone.
No, no, no…the creatures were fading away as he swung around wildly, desperate to fight, and when he snapped at them, his jaws closed on thin air.
Slowly, the vision receded, and he realized he’d tripped over a tree branch, not a chair leg. He was alone in the woods. His heart pounded in his chest as he staggered to his feet, head low to the ground.
Off in the distance, he could hear Barry shouting. “Austin, you dumb motherfucker!”
Yeah, that sounded like Barry.
When he reached the edge of the woods, he saw Barry standing there, looking annoyed. “You left your truck parked in the middle of the road, dumbass. It’s blocking my customers. Move it.” That was Barry’s way of checking up on him without actually admitting that he was checking up on him.
Austin shook himself hard, sucking his fur back into his skin, drawing in his fangs. “Thanks, Barry, I love you too,” he growled, climbing to his feet.
“Say that again, asshole, and I’ll chew your face off, Dominus or no.” Barry turned around and walked away.
The world was back to normal. For now.
Chapter Two
Savannah’s lips wrinkled in a wordless smirk as she popped up out of the foxhole near her family’s restaurant. The whole town of Foxhaven was riddled with underground tunnels, and she knew the location of every one of them. Austin didn’t know the area like she did, and he was no fox, so he’d never catch her in these woods.
Ditching Austin had been a breeze. That part had been fun.
Losing that big fat bounty? Not so much.
Her smile faded. She’d won the battle but lost the war.
A warm breeze rustled her fur, stirring the underbrush and whispering through the towering Douglas fir trees that scraped the blue sky overheard. The fox hole would be all but invisible to an outsider, set among wild grasses and sword ferns and thorny blackberry bushes.
She slid through the prickly branches into the open and shook herself hard, scattering the dirt off her fur. Then she let her human self take over. Fur sank back into her skin, her tail vanished, colors brightened, and the thousands of scents swirling in her nostrils faded. The air around her shimmered as she quadrupled in size. She knelt there for a moment, lett
ing herself mentally readjust as her fox settled down inside her. Then she climbed to her feet from a crouching position.
“You don’t look happy. Why don’t you look happy? What went wrong?” her younger brother Niall called out as he trotted over to her. She was stark naked, but shifters were very comfortable with nudity.
She shook her head and snapped open the lid of the plastic bin full of clothing that they kept near the family foxhole.
“Austin, that’s what went wrong,” she grumbled, pulling out a pair of underwear. As she quickly dressed, donning jeans, sneakers, socks and T-shirt, she explained what had happened, and Niall’s face twisted in dismay.
“I can’t believe you let the mark go,” he groaned. He was a redhead like her – like all fox shifters – but where she was short and curvy, he was a tall, skinny beanpole. With his thick thatch of red hair sticking straight up, he looked like a match that had been struck. “That was five thousand bucks. We really needed that money.”
“I know,” Savannah said glumly. “But we wouldn’t have had the money either way. Austin would’ve taken it. And there was no way I was letting that dickwad take my bounty.”
“Do you think he would have at least split it with us? Since you did all the work finding the guy?”
“Him?” Savannah scoffed. “Hell to the no. If you look on the periodic table of the elements, there is a compound called asshole-onium. And guess what Austin is composed of?” She pulled on a pair of sandals.
Niall arched an eyebrow. “Um, if I have to go along with this tired attempt at science humor, I’m guessing he’s pure, one hundred percent asshole-onium?”
“No, actually, he’s about eighty percent asshole-onium, twenty percent dickbreath-onium. And no, he wouldn’t have split the bounty with me.”
“Yeah, whatever. I might as well start packing now. To get ready for being homeless,” Niall said glumly, and headed back towards the restaurant.
As she followed him, she wondered if she was right.
Ever since Austin had shown up in Greenville, the town bordering Foxhaven, three months ago, he’d been a hard one to read.
He was temperamental and deadly in a fight, but she knew that in his off time he went hunting and donated all his catch to the local food bank. Rumor had it that he came from an extremely wealthy wolf pack in North Dakota, the owners of Bronson Pharmaceuticals, one of the richest of all the shifter packs in the world. He was actually a billion-were. But he’d left them behind after some disagreement with his family. And apparently he wouldn’t touch a cent of their money.
He certainly didn’t live like a rich man. He was renting a little trailer in Greenville, he drank at that godawful Watering Hole, he drove an old truck, and he wore cheap jeans and scuffed boots.
So did money really mean that much to him?
She hadn’t even asked if he’d split the bounty with her – she’d just gone in hot and tackled him, because she’d wanted to show him up. And also, maybe, if she was absolutely forced to admit it, because rolling around on the floor writhing under Austin’s rock-hard body hadn’t been the worst experience ever.
Had her stubborn pride just cost the family money that they desperately needed? Twenty-five hundred dollars would have been better than nothing.
As she trudged through the woods toward the restaurant, with her brother hurrying on ahead, she tried to imagine herself asking Austin for half the bounty.
Ugh, what if he’d made fun of her and demanded that she ask nicely?
And then what if he’d said no?
She imagined her rage, her humiliation. Her fists clenched just thinking about it. Years of schoolyard teasing rang in her ears. Fatty, fatty, two by four… She instinctively sucked her stomach in.
But she didn’t know that Austin would have turned her down. Her mother always said she loved to borrow trouble. Personally, Savannah found that anticipating the worst and sometimes being pleasantly surprised was less painful than thinking everything was fine and having her heart broken.
Her heart sank as she realized that if the situation happened again, she would probably have to swallow her pride. She’d have to at least try to be nice to Austin Bronson.
That sucked, because torturing Austin was her favorite way to distract herself from her family’s money problems.
Her body had its usual reaction when she thought about their sparring. Nipples hardening, skin tingling, a rush of moisture between her legs. She suddenly felt exquisitely sensitive; every tree branch slapping against her skin, every caress of the warm breeze whipping through the trees, made her bite down on her lip so she didn’t whimper with need.
She was like a bitch in heat.
It was so ridiculous. Why did he affect her like that? If the old wives’ tales were to be believed, that kind of reaction meant that he was her True Mate. But that was impossible. Not only did he drive her insane, and she was pretty sure she hated him – they weren’t compatible. She was a fox, he was a wolf. End of story.
Or was it? She didn’t know of any fox-wolf pairings, but that didn’t mean it never happened anywhere.
Fox shifters tended to lie low, even more so than wolf shifters, because they were the low shifters on the totem pole. They couldn’t defend themselves against bears, wolves, or big cats. Whenever possible, they kept their existence secret from all other shifter species, because as soon as other shifter species found out where fox territory was, they tended to move in and take over. Like they had when they’d created the wolf-shifter town of Greenville twenty years ago, encroaching on fox territory and daring the foxes to do something about it.
Fortunately, the wolf pack in Greenville was pretty wimpy. Their Alpha was not a Dominus, and in fact he barely deserved the title of Alpha. Otherwise, the foxes might have found themselves driven right out of Foxhaven, forced to find a new territory.
Foxes, unlike wolves, didn’t form packs. All shifters needed to socialize with others of their own kind if they didn’t want to turn feral, but foxes did it in family groups.
Up until recently, shifter packs, prides, clans and families had kept pretty much to themselves. They all lived in remote areas; they shunned the outside world. There was a certain level of cooperation necessary, to help keep their existence secret from humans, but there wasn’t a lot of intermingling among different types of animal shifters.
In response to the increasing difficulty of hiding their existence in an overpopulated, technologically linked-up world, a national database had recently been created, set up to help shifters around the country work together, but that was very new and mostly served the wolves.
So were there any cases of fox-wolf matings?
She pushed it out of her head. Why was she even giving it that much thought? It was irrelevant. Austin was a thief. He stole her marks from her. She had no respect for thieves. That was what she would keep telling herself, over and over again, until she believed it.
She trotted out of the woods and into the clearing where the To Dine For restaurant nestled among the tall pines, as it had for generations. In an adjacent clearing, her family’s two-story white clapboard farmhouse sat on a lot that was choked by weeds that none of them had time to cut. They were too busy scrambling night and day trying to earn enough money to pay off the lien on their house.
That was why she had first gone into bounty hunting five years ago, when she was seventeen. She’d always been a whiz at self-defense and tracking, and bounty hunting paid a heck of a lot more than waitressing at the family restaurant.
They had a month left. They had taken out a massive loan from Algernon, Lord of All Foxes, and they were still sixty thousand dollars short.
They’d never get the money in time.
Her younger sister Jessamine spotted her and came hurrying across the yard. Jessamine, a born rebel, refused to accept the flaming red hair color that nature handed out to all fox shifters. She had dyed her bangs and the tips of her hair black. Then she’d gone out and gotten piercings all over her fac
e. Septum, stud on the side of her nose, lip ring, eyebrow ring.
She was working today, which was why her apron partially covered her favorite shirt, the one with fishnet sleeves and a picture of a cartoon kitty with a Mohawk and nose ring.
Jessamine pointed at the side of the house. “Where were you? Mom’s doing it again!” she complained shrilly, with a stamp of her combat boot.
Savannah bit back a curse as she looked at where Jessamine was pointing. Yep. Old Man Herbert was chopping wood by the side of the house.
That meant that the jerk had just eaten for free at the restaurant, and now he was doing chores to pay for it. Savannah was sympathetic to people who were just having hard times, but Herbert wasn’t one of them. He had a gambling addiction. All the money he should have been paying for meals with went to the horses.
“And those stupid Haymarch kids are in the restaurant! And Mom is letting that thief Anthony work as a busboy, even though we don’t need him and we can’t afford him and he always steals food. Six pies went missing last week. And he just called me sweetcheeks, and I slapped him! You’d better go deal with him, because if he even looks at me cross-eyed again, I’m gonna knock him into next week.”
Frustration surged through Savannah as she walked into the restaurant.
The eight Haymarch kids and their parents were sitting around the biggest table, tucking into bowls of stew. Mr. Haymarch, a carpenter who was a heavy drinker, kept getting fired because he showed up sauced or didn’t show up to work at all.
Anthony was sitting at the counter, chowing down on an entire pizza instead of working. Looking around the dining room, she saw twenty people, which should have been good news. But she estimated that only half the people eating were paying customers.
She marched into the kitchen, smacking open the swinging door with the palm of her hand. Jessamine followed her in.
Her mother Laurel, a plump, smiling, thirty-years-older version of Savannah, with streaks of gray in her wavy red hair, looked up from chopping onions and smiled.
“Mom!” Savannah hissed.
“Oh, hello, dear! Back already? Did you collect the bounty? How did it go?”
The Billion-Were's Foxy Forever Page 2
