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Shifters, Inc.: The Alpha Meets His Match
Copyright 2013 by Georgette St. Clair
This book is intended for readers 18 and older only. It is a work of fiction. All characters and locations in this book are products of the feverish imagination of the author, a tarnished Southern belle with a very dirty mind.
License Statement
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Wolf shifter Jax Mackenzie has never been accused of being a nice guy – but being nice doesn’t get the job done. A wolf without a pack, he works the most dangerous assignments doled out by a private security company – and his latest case is a real killer. A fatal Rage virus is spreading among the members of an elite BDSM club, and Jax is determined to get to the bottom of the case. To get what he wants, he’ll ruthlessly use his supernatural strength, his wealthy connections, and Bobbi, the beautiful coyote shifter who’s following him for reasons of her own. But the coyote is his fated mate – and possibly his mortal enemy. Now it’s not just Jax’s heart that’s at risk – it’s his life.
Prologue
Playa Linda, California
Friday, September 28
“Silence In The court. All rise, the 13th District Court is now in session, Honorable Judge Robert Galbraith presiding.” The clerk’s voice rang through the room. Overhead, wooden fan blades swam in lazy circles through a soup of warm, humid air.
The air conditioning system, which dated back to the 1970s, was on the fritz again.
The defendant, a tattooed gangbanger charged with first degree murder in a driveby shooting, stood sullenly with his arms folded, looking ridiculously out of place in an ill-fitting three piece suit. His lawyer whispered something to him in a low, urgent voice, and the gangbanger responded with a murderous scowl.
Court reporter Camilla Timmons delicately blotted the back of her neck with a lace hankie, and wished that she could shift to her otter form. Her otter form liked the heat. Her human form did not. Unfortunately, in otter form, she couldn’t transcribe 200 words a minute on her stenotype, so she was stuck in human form until 5 p.m. It promised to be a miserable day in Courtroom 3B, she thought to herself.
She had no idea how right she was.
“Air conditioning’s broken again?” Bailiff Thomas Hamilton said in a low voice, leaning in close to her. A big, beefy, blond farm boy who’d grown up in Oklahoma, he’d recently come back from a 6 month stint in Afghanistan. He always made it a point to flirt with Camilla, who was a tiny brunette with an elfin face and short curly brown hair.
“I’m afraid so,” Camilla said. “And if you make an otter joke, I will stab you with my ballpoint pen.”
“Me? Joke? That’s otterly ridiculous.”
She stifled a giggle and kicked him in the ankle. Then she followed his gaze to the door that led into the courtroom from the judge’s chambers.
“That’s odd. Where is he?” she asked in a low voice. She could see the court clerk glancing worriedly at the door. Judge Galbraith was never late. He was known to fine people who showed up five minutes late for a court appearance.
The entire courtroom was on their feet, waiting for Judge Galbraith, and people were starting to mutter under their breath and glance at the clock on the wall. After a minute, the clerk started to walk towards the door, when it suddenly flew open with a bang, making everyone start.
Galbraith stumbled through the door, and the assembled spectators, defendant, and courtroom personnel, all let out a gasp.
Galbraith was a wolf shifter, a handsome gray-haired man in his sixties who carried himself with regal dignity when he swept into the courtroom each morning – except for this morning. Today, his eyes were glowing red, his ears pointy and hairy, his face a hideous contortion as he struggled between wolf and human form.
He staggered several feet, stopped, threw back his head, and bayed at the ceiling.
“Your honor?” the court clerk’s voice rose in a tremulous squawk.
Judge Galbraith swung to face him, and his face rippled and shifted, his muzzle protruding, black lips wrinkling back to reveal gleaming white fangs. The court clerk stumbled back a step, eyes bulging with alarm, and then the judge leaped forward with a roar, shifting completely in mid-air. Algernon Grey, court clerk of the 13th District, folded like paper underneath the judge’s massive gray form, and let out a gurgling scream as Judge Galbraith ripped his throat out.
Pandemonium erupted in the courtroom. Camilla, blind with panic, stood frozen by her stenographer’s stand. The judge swung around to face her, his eyes glowing red orbs of rage, and crouched down, prepared to leap. Thomas jumped in front of her and charged at the judge, weapon drawn, and fired two shots, two useless shots. The bullets weren’t silver-coated, so their only affect was to further infuriate the judge. Camilla, who’d covered her face with her hands, heard a scream and a ripping sound.
There was more screaming, more horrible death gurgles, and then the defendant’s head flew through the air and landed with a wet thud at Camilla’s feet, eyes wide open and staring, blood splattered across the teardrop tattoos which dripped from the outer corner of his right eye.
Thomas was lying on the floor, blood pulsing from his arm in bright red arcs. With her heart in her throat, Camilla flung herself to her knees next to him, shoved her fingers into his wound, and squeezed hard. The bleeding slowed to a trickle. Thomas stared up at her.
“Run,” he said.
“No.”
“Run, damn it!”
“Don’t be such an otter moron,” she said, tears filling her eyes as she forced a smile on her face.
Screaming and growling, people running, trampling each other in a desperate rush for the exits…the smell of blood and fear…
She looked up and saw that the judge had swung back to face her, and was crouching down again, his eyes fixed on her throat. A picture of her parents and younger sisters flashed through her mind, and she swallowed hard, breath frozen in her chest. Then she heard a series of bangs, and watched as black holes opened in the judge’s chest and flank. The holes began sizzling. The judge crumpled slowly, so very slowly, onto the floor, and Jennifer turned, wild-eyed, to see an attorney standing in the back of the courtroom, hand shaking, finger still squeezing the trigger of his gun even though he’d clearly emptied his weapon. Silver-coated bullets. He’d had silver bullets in his gun.
A bailiff grabbed the attorney’s arm and led him, ashen faced and trembling, from the room.
Chapter One
Monday, October 1
An angry red sun boiled up over the horizon, a hungry alley cat rattled through a tipped-over trash can, and nobody was foolish enough to mug Jax MacKenzie.
He strolled slowly down Washington Boulevard towards the water, hands shoved in his pockets. He’d deliberately worn a silky bl
ue Armani blazer and carried a Gucci leather briefcase to up the odds, but apparently, the predators who lived in the shadows of Playa Linda’s warehouse district weren’t fooled. They sensed the raw power radiating from the big wolf shifter, and stayed away in droves.
It was a pity, because Jax was spoiling for a fight.
His wolf was pacing angrily under the surface, struggling to get out. He was frustrated and irritable and all he wanted right now was to blow off steam in a whirlwind of fang and fists.
He was about to start working on one of the most important cases of his life, one which came with a huge payoff attached if he succeeded, and those idiots at Hammersmith Security were trying to stick him with some annoying little baby-sitter from the National Enforcers Council. Some pencil-pushing desk jockey named RJ Simpson. Even the name pissed him off.
In the past, he’d had pretty good luck finding likely takers in the warehouse district. He’d come in raging, his fury burning nova hot just underneath the surface of his skin, and would leave bruised, bloody, and feeling much better, with the bodies of those who’d attacked him cooling in the shadows.
But he’d been walking around the warehouse district for an hour now, and he was finding that there was an unfortunate lack of deadly assaults on the menu today. He was just about to wrap it up and head back home when he heard the terrified screams of a woman shred the air, a block ahead and around the corner.
Was it the woman who’d been following him in a not at all stealthy fashion for the better part of the day? The woman who was driving his inner wolf crazy and setting off alarm bells all throughout his body? Somehow, he was willing to bet that it wasn’t. The woman who was following him was a coyote shifter. The woman who was screaming sounded human.
Whatever. Since it was clear nobody was going to mug him today, this would do nicely as a tension reliever.
He broke into an effortless run, racing around the corner faster than thought, to find two jackal shifters ripping the clothes off of a screaming young human. In the amount of time it would take a human to draw a single breath, Jax’s gaze swept the scene. She was young and pretty and far too clean to have come from this neighborhood; her clothes were from the Gap, her hair was golden, flat-ironed and shiny, her purse was a Coach knockoff which had been dumped and spilled on the ground.
She lay sprawled on the ground a hundred feet away from a little green Volkswagen bug which had a plastic flower pot in it; she and the car belonged together. She was a middle-class college girl come slumming.
Jax recognized the jackals, they were a group of wretched, low-level group of gangsta wannabes who sold drugs and mugged tourists. They wouldn’t last five seconds against the real criminals in Playa Linda – but they could still cause plenty of harm to the weak and the foolish.
Take the human in question. She lay sprawled on the asphalt, crying hysterically, her shredded clothes hanging off her body in tatters. Her neon pink bra and panties peeked through the slashes in her jeans and shirt. There was a red mark on her right cheek where they’d struck her; she’d have a massive bruise there tomorrow. On the ground next to her was a plastic baggie full of weed; the jackals had clearly used it to lure her out of her car.
The jackals had been taking their time with her, cutting away at her clothes with knives, which they dropped when Jax burst around the corner with a roar.
They swung towards Jax with a snarl, half-shifting, their clothes falling from their bodies. Their faces elongated and turned into snouts, gray and black fur rippled over their bodies, and black claws sprung from their paws.
Jax shed his jacket and let out a mighty howl of rage, and fell into a half-crouch as the jackals froze where they stood, realizing too late what they were up against. He let the fury sweep over him and transform him, and a red haze descended over his eyes. Bones stretched and muscles shifted, and his sense of smell and hearing blazed to life as the colors of the world around him turned black and gray. He barely registered the yelps of shock and dismay that came squealing from the jackals’ throats as he launched himself through the air, a massive gray blur of fang and muscle and claw.
It was over in less than a minute; what was left of the jackals lay in two bloody heaps twenty feet from Jax where he’d hurled them. Hardly a fair fight; he wished there had been more of them.
He shifted back to human form and quickly pulled his clothing back on. The woman had scrambled over to her car and was pressed up against the door, cringing and crying. Her arm was scraped and bleeding and her eyes were huge with fright; black makeup streaked her cheeks.
Jax swung towards her, his eyes glowing red, his face still half-wolf.
“You look tasty. I haven’t had my dinner yet,” he snarled.
“No! Please! Don’t eat me, please!” she screamed, clutching the open door but making no move to flee. She just stood there shaking and sobbing. Stupid human. What did he need to do to get her out of this neighborhood – run over there and bite her?
“This is the part where you run for your life!” The words came rumbling from his chest.
“Oh! Oh God, Oh God, Oh God…” she wailed. She fell into her car, fumbled for the keys, turned on the ignition, and raced away, her loud sobs drifting through the air through her rolled-down passenger window. She’d left her pocketbook behind. She drove off so fast that she rode up onto a curb and hit a garbage can, sending it flying, and didn’t even stop.
Jax shook his head as her tail lights disappeared, and reached into her wallet for her credit cards, which he shredded with his fangs to ensure that nobody would come steal them and treat themselves to a shopping spree at her expense. Then he ground her cell phone under his foot.
He left the cash scattered on the ground. Somebody was in for a treat today.
With any luck, she’d never set foot in this neighborhood again, never buy drugs again. If she did…well, as Jax’s grandfather had been fond of saying, there’s no cure for stupid.
As Jax buttoned up his blazer, he bent his head and surreptitiously took a deep whiff, scenting the woman who’d been following him. The scent rolled into his nostrils, rich and sweet and heady, a smell that was familiar and yet somehow oddly unique. Female coyote shifter, for sure. Who the hell was she and why was she following him?
His heart still hammered fast, adrenaline singing through his veins. His eyes gleamed with anticipation. She’d been following him since mid-morning, and he was about to find out why. He wouldn’t hurt the woman unless he had to – unless, say, she was an assassin sent to kill him, which was a distinct possibility – but he had no qualms about sending her home crying to her daddy the same as he’d just done with the human female.
Chapter Two
Whoever the woman was, Jax suspected she must be able to handle herself pretty well. She’d managed to stay out of his sight, and she’d come into the warehouse district all by her lonesome, without getting murdered. Yet.
So much the better; it wouldn’t be any fun if she were a yowling little puppy.
He turned and casually strolled back in the direction that he’d come from, hands shoved in his pockets. She was hanging back, staying just far enough away that she could easily duck into one of the mazes of alleyways that snaked through this blasted, godforsaken pit of a neighborhood.
Unfortunately for her, he’d lived in this town for a year now and made a regular habit of visiting these parts. He jogged through the streets at night, he scaled the fire escapes and leaped from rooftop to rooftop by day. He knew every inch of this neighborhood intimately. He felt at home here; it called out to the dark places in his soul.
After a few blocks he slowed down at the storefront of an abandoned grocery store, yanked open the door which was hanging off its hinges, and strolled in.
The counters and shelves of the store were bare, stripped clean long ago, but a sour, musty smell lingered in the air. Thick gray dust coated every surface like fur.
He walked to the back of the store and out the back door, and began quickly weavin
g his way behind buildings and through alleys until he found her, standing at the mouth of the alleyway by a dumpster, watching the front of the store and waiting for him to come back out.
She was an athletic looking woman, tall and compact but muscular, wearing jeans and a hooded sweatshirt. The hood was down and her hair, so black it was almost blue, was yanked back into a ponytail that dangled halfway down her back. The alarm bells that had been ringing through his body were clanging loudly now. Something about her…
He felt his heart clench with something he didn’t recognize, but he thought it might be fear. Fear of what? She couldn’t hurt him, not that it would have mattered. Pain didn’t frighten him. Nothing scared him. When things attacked you, you fought back and killed them. Or you died. End of story.
That scent, that restlessness he felt in her presence, that unfamiliar feeling that had bubbled up in him…could it be? No. He pushed the dreaded thought below the surface before it even had a chance to form. No, hell no.
She stiffened and tipped her head back, sniffing the air. Despite the sour reek of the overflowing dumpster, despite the fact that a stiff breeze was coming down the alleyway towards her, she had scented him.
Jax rushed down the alleyway before she had a chance to turn around, slamming into her and pinning her up against the wall with her head turned away from him. As he touched her, his senses roared to life and he felt a rush of desire sizzling through his veins, and a very unwelcome swelling in his crotch. He firmly tamped down his lustful thoughts, shoving them to the back of his mind as he pinned her wrists over her head against the wall, trapping her with his body and wrapping one leg around her.
God, that felt good. Way too good.
She went rigid, and didn’t bother to struggle, staring straight ahead and drawing in deep, angry breaths. Even with her face turned away he could see that she was beautiful, her cheekbones sharp enough to cut glass, her small nose tilted impishly.
The Alpha Meets His Match Page 1
