Highland Shifters: A Paranormal Romance Boxed Set

by Unknown

  She wasn’t just an interloper, an Englishwoman in Scotland, she was now a human in a world full of strange creatures, forever a stranger in a strange land, unwelcome. She had no home, not anymore, and never would again, she realized with a slow, dawning horror. She would spend the rest of her life hiding—what did it matter, then, where she did so?

  “No,” Sibyl said softly, swallowing hard. “There is no one.”

  “Then stay.” He took her other hand in his, so he was holding them both.

  She glanced down at them, and then up into those impossibly blue eyes. She was thinking about Laina and her baby and the change that came over the she-wolf, unbidden, putting her into sudden, grave danger in a world that didn’t understand her kind. She thought of God’s curses and didn’t doubt for a moment that he was a man like Alistair, someone who craved power but never did anything to earn it. She’d been raised a good Christian, a good girl, and where had that gotten her?

  Sold into matrimonial slavery to a stranger, that’s where.

  Sibyl felt the rough callouses on Raife’s hands, looked up at the kindness in his eyes, and thought she could stay here. She could, at least for a while. Mayhaps she could be of some use in this place. She might even stumble across the plant that could change all of their lives, relieve them of the curse of living this way, hidden in the side of a mountain.

  Maybe they could help each other, Sibyl thought, meeting Raife’s kind, searching eyes.

  And maybe, she realized, they weren’t that different after all.

  “Ye are welcome here, ye ken?” Raife rubbed his thumbs over Sybil’s knuckles, looking down at her hands in his.

  “Thank you.” She couldn’t express her gratitude to him, not really.

  How strange it was, to be grateful to be welcomed in a place no human even knew existed.

  How strange it was, to be so suddenly alone, so estranged from the world, she no longer belonged anywhere at all.

  How strange it was to hold a man’s hand who had, just a few moments earlier, been wielding a sword as some fantastical creature, the stuff of legend come to life.

  How strange it was, to look up at this half-man, half-wolf, and feel things she never had before, things that scared her more deeply than wolves or even the threat of capture or death.

  How strange it all was.

  How strange indeed.

  * * * *

  The wulvers were the best family she’d ever had. Sybil often thought this as she drifted off to sleep, going over the events of the day, which were always interesting. It had taken some getting used to seeing a wolf’s head on a man’s body, hearing a man speak through a wolf’s mouth, but she could enter the valley without a second thought now as the wolfen warriors trained. It took her a little longer to get used to seeing the flash of a wolf’s eyes in the darkness of a mountain tunnel, but she’d spent long enough with them to know none of them meant her harm.

  In fact, most of the wulvers had gone out of their way to make her feel as at home as possible. They didn’t tease her about her English accent, like the Scotsmen at Alistair’s castle had. They didn’t make fun of her penchant for baths like the Scottish, or her insistence on things like her own silverware and tin drinking cup. Of course, Raife had a lot to do with that, she knew. He had gone out of his way to make her feel as at-home as possible.

  She didn’t know when it had happened, but at some point, the wulvers’ mountain and valley had started to feel like home. And everywhere she went, every which way she looked, Raife was there, watching her. Watching over her. He seemed to think of himself as her personal protector, and that’s why, when Sybil started going out into the forest with Darrow, Raife had completely lost it.

  Darrow had been the one who asked her to go, and while Sybil knew what Raife’s response would be, she had gone anyway. She hadn’t asked him—and she’d known, in her heart, that the pack leader wouldn’t have allowed it if she had. So she had simply agreed, putting her arms around Darrow’s neck and letting him carry her into the woods where she had left her past behind.

  When they had returned, Raife had taken the place of the sentry, pacing back and forth at the entrance of the mountain, waiting for them both. Darrow had faced his brother defiantly. It had been Sybil who tried to slink by like a dog with its tail between its legs. Raife had caught her around the waist, pulling her to him and growling, “Wait for me in your room,” before sending her on her way.

  She heard them snarling at each other as she went back to her room. Raife came to her a short time later, his back and side scratched and bleeding, his face smeared dark red, and she was terrified to ask what had happened. She instantly wanted to apologize, to beg his forgiveness, but she did neither.

  Instead, she went to the fire to heat water to treat his wounds. He let her, watching as she washed the blood away with a warm cloth, seeing the wonder in her eyes as the gouges in his flesh healed all by themselves in no time at all. More wulver magic, she learned. Their strength made them great warriors, but their healing capacity made them near unbeatable.

  “My brother says you were out helping him find huluppu?” Those were the first words he’d said to her after she returned with Darrow.

  “Yes,” Sybil said honestly, still stunned at the way his skin pulled itself together right in front of her eyes without even leaving a scar. “For Laina.”

  Raife gave a slow, curt nod, those disarming blue eyes studying her face.

  She stopped and looked up at him, puzzled.

  “What did you think I was doing out there with him?” she finally asked and hid a smile when he scowled and wouldn’t answer her.

  She didn’t ask Raife’s permission when Darrow asked her to go again, and Raife never gave it. But he was always there, waiting, when they returned with a good supply of useful herbs and sometimes with wild berries or some other treat. Every time they came back, she thought Raife would rail at them, tell her she couldn’t go off gallivanting in the woods with his brother, but he didn’t.

  He would glare at Darrow as the wolf changed back into his human form. The brothers wouldn’t say a word to each other as Darrow started into the tunnel to go see his bride, and Raife pulled Sibyl close, his arms tight around her, hands checking to see if she was whole and unbroken, as if he believed just stepping out his sight would instantly cause her harm.

  “I’m fine, Raife!” She would laugh and take his hand as they walked through the tunnels toward the smell of dinner cooking. And then she would tell him all about their trip, and show him what she found, and he would listen as if it was the most interesting thing he’d ever heard tell about.

  Then, one day, she found it.

  He had known instantly, just by the look on her face, that their trip had finally been a success. Raife had swept her into his arms, his embrace much tighter than usual, his face buried against her neck, his whispered words, “Thank God. You don’t have to go back out again,” sending a shiver through her.

  But now…

  The willow Sybil had found and transplanted was dying.

  She looked at the browning leaves, pinching off the dead ones with her fingers. She’d found the plant Laina could not, much to Darrow’s relief, and she had transplanted it here near the stream. There was plenty of light, plenty of water, and yet the plant did not thrive. There was no reason for it and she could not figure it out.

  “It is the curse,” Laina told her simply when Sibyl went to visit her and the baby, bringing her broth to sip.

  Sibyl once would have said she didn’t believe in curses, but she had seen things now most human beings would never witness. The sight of a half-man, half-wolf carrying a sword and riding a horse was something you would never forget as long as you lived. It made you doubt and believe everything at once, including all the fairy stories and legends she had heard tell over the years.

  “Mayhaps,” Sibyl would say, whenever Laina blamed the willow’s slow death on the curse. But if it was the curse, and the willow was actually the
cure for the change, as Laina and Darrow believed, then why would it not live here, in the place the wulvers called home?

  Laina had an explanation for that too.

  “It only grows in the borderland,” Laina told her, when Sybil explained where she had found the plant. It had been too close to Alistair’s lands for comfort, and Raife had protested, but Darrow had been the one who agreed to take her out that far, to protect her if need be. “It will not live on one side or th’other.”

  This seemed ridiculous to Sybil, and she was determined to prove Laina wrong, but so far, the frustrating plant had done just the opposite. She wanted one of the wulver women to try eating the leaves before the plant died, but Laina was insistent that she be the one to try it first.

  “I will pay the consequences, whatever they may be,” Laina told her. “I don’t want anyone else to suffer any ill effects. I will try it first.”

  Laina had been doing so herself all along, harvesting and drying various species of willow, from roots to leaves to bark, and taking them to test their effects. That was how she ended up nearly bleeding to death during the birth of her son. She had lived through the ordeal, but just barely. It had taken her weeks to recover from something Kirstin said wulver women usually bounced back from right away.

  And in the month Sibyl had spent with them, she’d seen this for herself. Wulver women changed when it was time to give birth. They had one pup, two at the most, and their births were short and painless. They changed back immediately, as did the male pups. The girls took a little longer to change into human form, but babies, regardless of gender, then stayed human until they came of age. Girls changed when they began to bleed, and they would continue to do so for the rest of their lives, until their moon time was done. Boys could not only control when they changed, they could also transform into halflings, half-man, half-wolf. Female wulvers were either human or wolf. There was no in between.

  It was Laina’s desire to stop the change, so that female wulvers weren’t slaves to their own bodies. Wulver traditions were oral, passed down from generation to generation, but there was one text they considered their “bible” of sorts, and Sybil had spent time going over it herself since she’d come to live with them. It was told in pictures with only some words—human wulvers were incredibly deft with their hands and could draw anything, their mountain walls were covered with beautiful drawings—but Sibyl’s father had taught her to read.

  While most wulvers did not read, Sibyl understood the words in the book. Laina had been excited to learn this, and wanted Sibyl to pour over the text, to find the things Laina could not. Sybil understood the woman’s urgency, at least to some degree. She, herself, felt trapped by her own gender. All of the things her father had taught her—to ride, to hunt, to shoot, to track—were useless to her sex. She understood Laina’s anger at feeling trapped in her body, unable to change what nature had made her.

  But she didn’t fully understand until, one early morning while she helped wash clothes in the stream with Kirstin, she was told the story of Laina’s mother and how she had died. It was so eerily similar to how Laina had been caught, Sybil found herself getting goose flesh at the telling of the tale.

  The women took turns telling it, each of them bringing something new to the story as they went on. They told of a time when wulvers and wolves were trapped, hunted and killed. It had been just twenty years ago when “The MacFalon” and his bloodlust for wolves drove the wulvers underground. He would capture them in cages, torture and kill them. There was even a mandate from the Scottish king that wolves must be hunted at certain times of the year.

  Sybil wondered if this man they called “the MacFalon” was Alistair’s grandfather, a man whose reputation had been far worse than his son’s. Alistair’s father, according to Donal and everyone who spoke of him, hadn’t been the type of man who would shoot an animal for sport. She couldn’t imagine he had done what these women described “the MacFalon” doing.

  The tale took another turn when the women told of two young female wulvers becoming trapped in a MacFalon cage. One was in estrus, they said—in heat. The other was heavy with pup and the trauma of the cage had forced her into labor. Neither female could change back to free themselves, and they had been separated from their men folk.

  In the morning, the MacFalon himself had come to see what he had trapped in his cage. He found both of the wolves, the one in heat snarling at him, the other just birthing her pup. The young wolf pup, eyes hardly open, slipped out of the bars of its cage and ran.

  “I thought wolf pups change when they’re born?” Sybil had asked, pounding cloth against the rocks.

  “Boys do, right away,” Kirstin explained. “Girls, they take longer. It can be up to a day before they turn human.”

  So it had been a girl who had escaped that day. A young wolf girl who would later be called Laina, a name her own mother, the wolf the MacFalon had shot through with an arrow while still in the cage, had chosen before she was born. He would have shot the other wolf as well, if she hadn’t changed. Her heat was nearly over, so mayhaps it was time, the women said. Or mayhaps it was the shock of seeing her friend murdered.

  But the MacFalon, suddenly faced with a dead wolf and a very alive, nude woman, decided to drag his wolf kill behind his horse and throw the other woman across his saddle—after he restrained her, of course.

  “It would’ve been war then,” Beitris, the old wulver midwife, had told her with a nod. “Once the wolfen warriors heard wha’happened, they took to their horses and went ridin’ after the MacFalons armed with claymores.”

  “What happened?” Sibyl had asked, glancing down into the valley where the wulver men practiced the art of warfare every day, keeping their bodies in condition, just in case.

  “King Henry.”

  Sybil had stared at them in disbelief, but they weren’t jesting. Not even a little.

  “He wasn’t the king then,” the wulver women explained. “Not yet he wasn’t.”

  “He came to Scotland seeking warriors to win the crown.”

  She knew King Henry VII had been in Brittany, recruiting the French troops, when this incident was supposed to have happened. Had he really come to Scotland in hopes of finding more?

  “And got ’em, he did!” One of the other older wulver women cackled, her rheumy blue eyes flashing.

  “He came looking for the wulver warriors,” Kirstin explained. “King Henry wanted ’em to fight for him. This was all before I was born, a’course.”

  “King Henry fell in love with Avril,” the wulver women told her. Sybil listened to this tall tale with big eyes. She knew the name Avril belonged to Raife’s mother. “She was with child when he rode back to England.”

  “And the warriors promised to fight for the future king of England, if the MacFalon would agree to keep the peace. So they brokered a deal.”

  “The wolf pact.”

  That’s what the wulver women had called it.

  “King Henry VII?” Sybil had wondered aloud, utterly enthralled with the tale, even while she doubted its veracity.

  “He could’na take her back with him, ya ken?” the old woman said, shaking her head. “So she came back to us.”

  “Birthed her child here with us,” the old midwife, Beitris, said. “And Garaith raised him like his own.”

  “Garaith?” Sybil knew this name too. “Raife’s… father?”

  “Darrow’s father,” Bietris countered. “Raife is descended from King Henry VII himself.”

  Sibyl had smiled then, thinking it had to be more stuff of legend.

  “So King Henry negotiated a peace pact between the wulvers and the Scots,” Sibyl had mused. This tale was so fantastical, it was hard to believe. “And the MacFalon honored that pact?”

  That seemed unlikely, given the man’s penchant for violence and hatred of the wulvers.

  “The MacFalon was killed in battle,” the old midwife told her.

  “His son had become laird by then,” one of the wul
ver women explained.

  “And there’s been peace for nigh on twenty years.”

  “Until now,” Sybil whispered to herself, thinking of Alistair’s wolf hunt.

  If there had been such a pact, Alistair had to be aware—so why was he breaking it?

  She didn’t understand, but she knew it wasn’t good for the wulvers.

  It wasn’t until she heard this story that Sybil finally understood Laina’s passion for breaking the wulvers’ curse. Sybil had never been close with her own mother, but she couldn’t imagine losing her in such a traumatic way. The wolf-child—Laina—had been found by the wulvers in the woods and taken back to the den, raised as an orphan and adopted by a childless female.

  Sybil had done her best to help the young wulver woman and her cause, and she redoubled her efforts after hearing the wolf pact story, if for no other reason than she didn’t want the girl to take any more chances with her life and her health. Sybil had poured over the wulver text, had read and re-read the legends, had listened to story after story told around the fire, at the dinner table, at the stream while they washed or in the kitchen where they prepared meals.

  Sybil had seen pictures of the huluppu tree, and had recognized it as a willow, just as Laina had. But it was Sybil who had found it growing in the forest at the side of the very stream she had crossed to escape Alistair’s men. Now, as Sibyl stared at her little transplant, she knew it would likely be dead by the time Laina was ready to venture out of the den.

  And what then?

  Would Laina go out on her own to find it growing on MacFalon land?

  Sibyl knew she couldn’t let that happen.

  Chapter Seven

  “’Tis time to sup.”

  Sybil shaded her eyes and looked up at Raife. The wulver men fought bare-chested and bare-legged, like any Scot, but they were far bigger and more muscular than most men, even when they weren’t transformed into half-wolf form. Raife’s body glistened with sweat, his dark hair damp with effort as he squatted beside her near the stream. They spent the morning training but their afternoons in various other pursuits. Today they had sheared sheep and he had bits of fluff stuck in his dark hair.