Highland Shifters: A Paranormal Romance Boxed Set

by Unknown

  The footsteps of his pursuer echoed against the brick of the buildings that rose above him, joined by the sound of a second, and then a third person running toward him. Panic flooded Callum’s veins and he pushed himself, lungs burning, heart thundering in his chest.

  The alley turned sharply to the left and he rounded the corner and then skidded to a halt. The alley ended in a brick wall. Callum ran up to it, hands on the brick, searching for any kind of handhold. Even though the bricks were old, they were smooth, the mortar between them solid. He looked up at the windows above. Some were lit, some dark and abandoned-looking, but all of them were too high for him to reach. Even the rusted metal fire escape was too high. He swore under his breath.

  Behind him the footsteps suddenly stopped, but Callum knew better than to think they’d given up the chase. He turned, rain pelting his face, his back pressed against the dirty bricks, and faced his attackers.

  Two wolves, eyes gleaming yellow in the darkness, blocked the entrance to the alley. Behind them stood a single man, hidden in the shadows and driving rain. A flash of lightening lit the alley and Callum briefly caught the hard glint of the man’s eyes before the wolves demanded Callum’s attention. The wolves advanced, stiff-legged, hackles raised, fangs bared, cutting off his escape.

  Callum had no choice if he wanted to live. Before the wolves got any closer he shut his eyes, the ancient power of his kind rising up inside of his body, filling him with primal energy. He braced for the brief intense pain he hated—and loved—to fill him. Then he dropped on all four paws to the ground.

  He faced the wolves, one a shaggy gray, the other with a matted yellow coat, for a brief instant. Then Callum let loose with a terrifying howl of rage, the sound rippling from his throat. The two wolves hesitated for a split second and Callum grabbed the advantage and charged.

  The shaggy gray wolf took a step back and Callum veered away from him, hitting the yellow wolf low, knocking it off its feet. It sprawled on the ground, kicking out, catching Callum with its sharp claws, slicing open his underbelly from neck to back legs. The sickening scent of blood filled the air, hot and heavy, and Callum could taste it on the back of his tongue. That it was his own blood filled him with rage.

  The gray wolf recovered and charged, its jaws closing down on Callum’s shoulder. Callum struggled, snapping at the wolf with his fangs, but he wasn’t able to reach it. The wolf twisted its head, tearing Callum’s flesh with its teeth. Callum howled, thrashing in the wolf’s grip.

  Yellow light suddenly spilled down into the alley from above. “Hey, damn dogs! Get out of the fucking alley!” A beer can came hurtling down, bounced off a garbage can, rattled the lid, and then rolled into the shadows.

  The wolf clamped on Callum’s shoulder released him, skittering away into the shadows. Callum scrambled to his feet, claws scratching across the pavement. He looked up at a man in a dirty white t-shirt glaring down at them from an open window.

  In a split second, Callum made the decision that would either save his life or end it. He shifted quickly, letting his body go limp, falling to the dirty pavement in his human form. From the cold pavement he looked up, saw the man staring open-mouthed from his window.

  “Holy shit! Jackie, call 911. The damn dogs attacked a man in the alley!” The face disappeared and Callum closed his eyes, listening to more shouts from above. The wolves whined indecisively for a moment, then their footsteps retreated down the alley.

  Callum let himself believe he’d gotten away this time. His blood was running onto the ground, mixing with the rain, but he knew his wounds would heal. Somehow they’d managed not to kill him. Either they were novice assassins or just plain lazy. But he didn’t care. In a few minutes he’d get up, sneak away and find some place to hide for the night. Then tomorrow, he’d go home to Scotland.

  The wail of a siren and urgent shouts broke his thoughts. He’d waited too long and now the police had arrived. Someone had told him the police took forever to show up in America. So much for believing that bit of rubbish.

  He heard the sounds of rattling wheels on pavement, probably a gurney, coming down the alley. The shouts grew louder and then someone was shining a light in his face. There was nowhere for him to go, no place to hide. Callum did the only thing he could do; he played dead.

  * * *

  Aspyn Montgomery glanced up at the clock on the wall. Twenty past midnight, twenty minutes past the end of her shift. The Chicago Mercy Emergency Room hummed with activity around her. There was a full moon, it was Friday, plus a storm raged outside, which added up to a rash of bar fights and car accidents. Since the beginning of her shift over eight hours ago, she’d been swamped with patients and paperwork. Just get me through this last stack of charts and get out the door before something else happens.

  “Ambulance!” The night-shift ER clerk Jane leaned around the corner into the nurses station where Aspyn sat, shouting the last word Aspyn wanted to hear right now. She swore under her breath and jumped up from her chair, heading toward the large double doors that led to the ambulance bay.

  “What is it?” She grabbed a pair of exam gloves from the box by the door, then hit the automatic door opener with her hip. Lightning streaked overhead, followed by a crack of thunder. She could see the flashing red lights approaching, the thin wail of the siren rising above the wind and rain.

  “Suspected animal attack. Male, mid-twenties, unresponsive. Vitals dropping, significant blood loss, lots of lacerations. IV started en route.”

  “Dog?”

  “Not sure. Animal was all they said.”

  Aspyn turned to Jane. “Get Dr. Morris. I think he’s in the on-call room. And get Metro Police on the line, tell them we have a possible dog attack. They’ll need to follow up, if they haven’t already.”

  “Got it.” Jane grabbed the nearest phone, punching in numbers. The siren grew louder, then abruptly cut off, replaced with an incessant beeping noise as the ambulance backed into the bay.

  The doors opened and the guys inside quickly slid out the stretcher, snapping down the wheels of the cart. Aspyn glanced at the cart and had the brief and irrational thought that they’d replaced the regular white ambulance sheets with red paisley ones. Then she realized she was looking at the blood-spattered covering over the patient.

  Rain pelleted her face, soaking through her scrubs. One of the EMTs began rattling off vital signs as Aspyn grabbed the handrails of the gurney and they pulled the stretcher inside the building. Over the clatter of the wheels and the voices surrounding her, she registered enough of what the EMT said to know this guy was in pretty bad shape.

  “Trauma One!” Jane waved them toward the nearest trauma room. “Morris is on his way down.”

  “I’m here.” Morris’s deep baritone rode over the rest of the noise in the room as he strode through the door behind the gurney, snapping on gloves. “What do we have?”

  “Male, some kind of animal attack. Vitals dropping, blood pressure en route was…” The EMT’s voice cut off as Aspyn stuck the ear tips of her stethoscope in her ears. She quickly fitted a blood pressure cuff around the man’s arm, inflated it and listened. There was nothing.

  Her eyes drifted to the man’s face. He was startlingly handsome. She’d seen enough guys come through the ER that she was immune to their looks, but something about this man drew her attention. Even though his high cheekbones were peppered with cuts and dried blood crusted his forehead, she found herself drawn again and again to look at his face.

  “Aspyn! BP?”

  She yanked the stethoscope out of her ears. “Fifty over palp.” Her heart sank. That was pretty much no blood pressure at all.

  Margaret, the night shift supervisor, was slapping EKG electrodes to the man’s chest. Aspyn attached the leads to the electrodes and the erratic beeping of the heart monitor filled the room.

  She hooked up the blood pressure cuff to the monitor and slipped a pulse oximeter over one long tapered finger. Glancing up she saw there was practically no pulse an
d the guy’s oxygen levels were dangerously low. This was a train wreck.

  Morris pulled back the sheet and Aspyn got a good look at the man’s injuries. She’d seen a lot in the ER, but this was incredible. His torso was slashed from neck to navel, long rents running side to side, blood pouring from every wound. There were deep puncture wounds on his shoulder, almost tearing off the arm. If this had been an animal attack, she sure as hell hoped the police or animal control found whatever it was.

  “Start another IV and push fluids. Call the blood bank, type and cross for six units. And call OR. We need to get him to surgery ASAP. He’s bleeding out.”

  Before Morris could issue another order, the monitor began screeching that high-pitched sound that always sent Aspyn’s heart racing. It was the sound of someone dying and she’d never gotten used to it. But her training kicked in and as Morris shouted orders, she and Margaret followed them.

  Twenty minutes later, her scrubs covered in blood, she dropped into a hard plastic chair in the lounge. The man had been pronounced dead by Morris a few minutes ago. It was sad, beyond sad. The guy was young and whatever had happened to him, it seemed a hard, cruel way for his life to end.

  “Aspyn?” Margaret stuck her head through the door. “Can you do one last thing before you check out?”

  Aspyn sighed, stretched, and pushed herself out of the chair. “What do you need?”

  “The police are on their way to get a report, and I’ll handle them. Can you collect his belongings and bag them for the morgue? I’m sending an orderly to collect the body.”

  “Do we have any next of kin to call?”

  Margaret shook her head. “No, not this time. Pity. He was so young.”

  Aspyn walked back to Trauma One, pulling on a pair of surgical gloves. The lights were down, just a single beam spotlighting the body. He’d been moved to one of the hospital gurneys, the EMTs taking their stretcher when they left. Someone had disconnected the monitor leads and covered him with a clean white sheet.

  “Sorry, guy, whoever you are.” She pulled back the sheet. A gold necklace with some kind of strangely shaped insignia hung around his neck and she tugged on the chain until she found the clasp, her gloves making it hard to get it undone. She held it to the light, squinting at the design. It was like nothing she’d ever seen before, strange shapes incised on the front and what looked like Latin on the back. With a piece of gauze dipped in alcohol she cleaned off the drying blood. In the light the piece gleamed dully. There was no ring on either hand.

  The EMTs had apparently cut off his clothes in the ambulance and she picked up the plastic bag that held a ruined pair of jeans and a t-shirt. She rummaged through the blood-soaked pockets of his jeans looking for some kind of identification. She found a small leather wallet and flipped it open. It had an identification card with a small picture, and what looked like an international driver’s license. There was also a battered passport. She flicked it open. So the guy finally had a name.

  Callum McCourt.

  Beyond that he carried little else. There were a few crumpled bills and a well-used credit card crammed in the wallet, but nothing personal. No photos of girlfriends or a wife, mother or father, scraps of paper with phone numbers written on them in faded ball point ink. Aspyn frowned, looking from the serious face on the plastic card to the man on the bed.

  “Callum…” She had an urge to smooth down his hair, sticky with drying blood. Her hand hovered over him for a moment before she pulled it away.

  “You’re losing it, Aspyn. You need to go home.” Her voice echoed in the still room. She heard someone running down the hall, Jane calling for Dr. Morris, the crash of the ambulance bay doors again. Best to finish this last task and get home before something else happened to pull her in.

  She took an envelope from a drawer and scrawled the man’s name across the top, along with the date and time of death. She wrote down the items on the front, the list looking pathetically small. There should be more, she thought, than just a few items and some loose change to sum up his life.

  “Who are you, Mr. McCourt? Where did you come from? Who did you belong to in this world?”

  There was a crash behind her as the orderly arrived with the morgue cart. It was a big silver thing with a flat top and a recessed place for the body to rest. It resembled an overly-tall catering cart.

  “You got his stuff? Margaret said you’d have that ready.” The orderly pulled the Kelly green cover from the cart. Aspyn always thought the color was oddly out of place as a shroud for the dead, but she guessed a cart covered in black being pushed down the halls would be too morbid.

  She dropped the items in the envelope and sealed it shut, writing her name across the flap.

  “All done. Not much with him.” She set the plastic bag with the bloody clothes at the foot of the cart. “The police might want the clothes. They’re pretty trashed, between blood, being shredded by whatever attacked him, and then being cut off him by the EMTs.”

  The orderly grunted a non-committal reply. He motioned her to grab the man’s feet and she helped slid him into the opening in the cart. With a flourish, the orderly pulled the cover back over the cart. Aspyn handed the envelope to the orderly and watched as he pushed the cart into the hall.

  That was it, she was free to go. She stretched and headed for the nurse’s lounge. Quickly stripping out of the bloody scrubs, she dropped them into the laundry hamper. Tugging on her shirt and jeans, she mentally kicked herself for not bringing along a jacket, much less an umbrella. It hadn’t been raining when she’d left home.

  Waving to Jane, she headed for her car, a folded newspaper held uselessly over her head. She fumbled with the key in the dark, finally getting the door to her ancient Dodge open. Rain pelted the roof as she waited for the defroster to kick in. Leaning back she was swept with a sudden wave of sadness. It wasn’t often a death got to her like this. She wasn’t calloused or immune to having patients die but it wasn’t quite the same with this one.

  The windshield finally cleared and she drove home slowly, the wipers barely able to keep up with the driving rain. She made another mad dash from her car to her apartment door, her fingers clumsy with exhaustion.

  Once inside, she locked the door and dropped her purse and bag, and began shedding her soaking wet clothes as she walked to her bedroom. She was almost too tired to contemplate turning left into the bathroom instead of right into her bedroom. But she needed a shower. Twenty minutes found her clean, padding naked across the hall to her room. She grabbed clean pajamas and pulled them on, barely registering if they were even on right side out.

  She crawled beneath the covers, pulling them up over her shoulder. Lightning flashed outside her window and rain hit the glass hard. One good thing, she would sleep soundly. Rain always lulled her to sleep. She took one deep breath, then another, blowing out the last of the tension still held in her body. Then she closed her eyes and fell asleep.

  * * *

  Surfacing from a groggy dream, Aspyn heard rain hitting her window, and then a muted crash of thunder. The storm was still going strong and she rolled over, pulling the blanket around her shoulders. Then the thunder faded, replaced with a strange tapping sound. For a long moment she lay still in the dim room, confused, wondering how thunder could sound like that. Then it hit her.

  Oh, shit. It’s a leak from the storm. She opened her eyes, flicked on the bedside light and scanned the ceiling, looking for water dripping from above. But the ceiling was dry.

  The tapping continued and she glanced toward the window.

  Aspyn was pretty sure she screamed. Just to be certain, she screamed again. I should have taken the second floor apartment.

  There was a man at her window. Not just any man. It looked like Callum McCourt.

  * * *

  Callum swore under his breath. This wasn’t anything like he’d planned. Aspyn’s scream had easily reached him through the window. And if he could hear it, he was pretty sure everyone else could, too.


  He really hadn’t thought this through. He’d followed her scent from the hospital, trailing through backyards and gardens, waking up neighborhood dogs, running barefoot in a pair of stolen hospital scrubs. When he’d found her he’d been so anxious to get out of the rain, and out of sight, and get inside that he’d rapped on the window the instant he saw her.

  What an idiot. What woman in her right mind would willingly open a window to a guy standing outside, especially one she’d watched die earlier that night.

  Callum dropped out of sight of her window, circling the building, looking for the front door before she woke up the neighbors or called the police. At least she lived on the ground floor and he wasn’t having to climb the side of the building. He should have just gotten in and got on with getting what he came for. Now he risked drawing attention to himself. That was the last thing he needed.

  Getting past the security lock at the building’s front door took Callum only a few seconds. He managed a grim smile. No building was ever secure if he wanted to get inside. He’d gotten out of the morgue freezer within minutes, before he either froze or suffocated inside. This was even easier. The security door clicked shut behind him and he moved silently down the hall until he stood in front of the door to Aspyn’s apartment.

  Her scent filled the hall and he knew he had the right place. He tried the door, knowing it would be locked. The apartment was totally silent beyond and he listened for a minute. But he didn’t have a lot of time to try to figure out what the hell she was doing behind that door.

  The lock was but a moment’s work. The click of the latch seemed very loud and he tensed, holding his breath, waiting. But there were no screams from the other side of the door. Something was going on, but he didn’t know what.

  Carefully he pushed the door open. It was dark in the apartment, dim light from outside coming through the living room windows, but the short hallway he stood in was in shadow. He stepped through the doorway, pushing it closed behind him.