Frost Security: The Complete 5 Books Series

by Glenna Sinclair

  “What’s up, Cap? Already told you I’m coming back to Frost. Be there as soon as I can.”

  “Don’t worry about that. Take as much time as you need to help with Elise. We all understand that.”

  “What is it, then?”

  “I have a murder case. A few of them, actually. And I need your help trying to solve them.”

  “Murder cases? Plural?” I asked, frowning, as I shifted around to face him in the chair. “Whose? We don’t handle those kinds of cases. Not normally.”

  “Mary’s family. And believe me, this one is about as far from normal as you can get.”

  Chapter Fifty-four – Vanessa Springer

  She’d smelled them from a mile away, their gun oil and gunpowder, and tracked the exhaust of their vans and cars through the forests of the Pacific Northwest. Now, as she sat on the edge of their compound, she couldn’t help but stare in open awe at how organized they were.

  The building looked like a modern mansion—if it had been built by a Bond super villain bent on world domination. Uniformed men paced the outer perimeter, just inside the ten-foot tall chain link fence with concertina wire running across the top.

  She sniffed the air again, trying to see if she could detect that same smell of wolfsbane she’d detected earlier in the day at the little community airport she’d staked out. It was there, definitely there. That same smell she’d detected years ago when her sister had been murdered by these bastards.

  Vanessa Springer licked her chops before picking up her the small bundle in front of her and slinking back into the woods. She circled through the underbrush. There had to be a weakness to their defenses, a way she could slip in without being noticed. There wasn’t any place a cat burglar couldn’t get into if she tried hard enough.

  She found her prize after a few minutes’ search—a storm drain that looked like it would lead back beneath the compound. Every structure that large needed wastewater disposal. Not that she liked the idea of climbing through the sewers, especially not with the sensitive nose of a shifter at the end of her snout, but what was a girl to do? Back off? Go running for help?

  Fat chance of that happening.

  She dropped her bundle on the forest floor and began her slow, exhausting shift back into her human form. Her reddish fur receded, leaving only her medium-length auburn hair atop her head. The cold air hit her naked skin, and she scrambled into her all black tactical gear.

  Minutes later, she was navigating through the storm run-off system, the dank smell of the place filling her nose and mouth. The structure seemed new, like it had been built within the last decade or two. That lined up with what she knew of the history of the organization hunting her kind. They’d only come to America recently, and had been more focused in Europe for centuries. Why they’d changed their focus to the States, no one could say. But they’d certainly made a splash when they finally arrived.

  “Here we go,” Vanessa whispered as she found a ladder leading up to the surface. She killed her mini flashlight and climbed to the top as quietly as she could. Based on her calculations and the measurements she’d been taking on her little exploration, this should put her somewhere in the basement of the building she’d been spying on.

  Cocking her ear to the side, she listened carefully for any noise of footsteps. Nothing. Just the sound of mechanical equipment and a boiler, HVAC systems. The metal access hatch grated on concrete as she pushed it aside and popped her head up to look around.

  It was a dimly lit room that looked like any dimly lit service room in any commercial building out there. She pulled herself out of the access tunnel and replaced the hatch, staying in a crouch as she surveyed the room. Stairs on the other side of the building led up a sturdy metal door. “That’s my ticket,” she whispered.

  She glided up the stairs, her footfalls silent as a ghost.

  She hadn’t always been this silent. It had taken years of training. Years of living on the run after her family had been murdered, after her mate had disappeared. But she’d eventually been able to change her circumstances, to carve out a new existence for herself. She’d found a true master of the craft of burglary. A savant. She took Vanessa under her wing and taught her the trade.

  She cracked open the door slightly, her ears open to any telling creaks or squeaks from the hinges. Nothing. She crept out into the bland hallway, with its institutional walls and cheap paint. If she didn’t know any better, she would have assumed she was breaking into some random university’s administration offices, or even the DMV.

  The halls were nearly deserted. The organization must have only kept a skeleton crew working this late. Idly, she wondered what the lives of the men and women in this place were like. Did they have families they went home to at night? Or did they marry the organization when they joined, so they never had time for friends or a life of their own? And, if they were married, did they have to keep their mouths shut about the butchering of innocent shifter packs around the globe?

  Eventually, she found her target.

  The records office.

  People always think the secrets are in the C-suite. Not Vanessa Springer, though. She knew from experience that the skeletons are always kept in a closet.

  She picked the lock and slipped into the room, quietly closing the door behind her before turning to survey her find.

  Boxes. Boxes, boxes, boxes.

  And one computer. Too bad she didn’t know anything about hacking or electronic surveillance—that would have been a dream come true.

  Instead, she slipped back into the room and began checking over the collected banker boxes to find the newest-looking ones. Maybe she could see if there were any pertaining to her family’s murders, or even some open cases.

  Fifteen minutes of searching later, she had something. A box with the label of the last name of her former alpha.

  Frost.

  She pulled it down from the metal shelf and placed it on the floor, flipping it open and beginning to go through it as she knelt on the floor.

  Photos, written reports, transcripts of video and audio surveillance. They’d tracked her family’s pack for months, almost a whole year, all without them being the wiser as the organization patiently took its time like true hunters.

  It seemed the files were separated by members of the pack—last name, then first. She thumbed through the files and found her sister’s. She pulled it out and began to go through it. Vanessa’s younger sister Ophelia had been a late bloomer, one of the oddities that had come late into her shifting abilities. In fact, if Vanessa remembered correctly, Peter had been serving overseas when she joined the pack, just before the end. She found a black and white picture of her little sister. It was a surveillance photo, one taken of her while she was at school. Volleyball practice, it looked like.

  The shifter woman closed the file, shoved it back in place, and began to look for Peter Frost’s. Her mate’s.

  Vanessa still stayed up at night wondering what had really happened to him. If what her alpha, Peter’s father, had said was true. That he’d turned his back on shifters everywhere and wanted nothing to do with them. That he’d joined the military and swore he’d never come back.

  But then, when the fire had happened, Vanessa had had to make a run of her own. Had been forced to learn to hide. If they’d been able to bring as much force to bear on that small farmhouse, there was no telling what they could do. Putting out feelers for Peter, or doing a true search for his whereabouts, would have been too dangerous for them both. At best, it may have gotten her killed. At worst, it would have lined him up in the organization’s crosshairs.

  She finally found one file. It was thinner than the rest, which made sense considering he probably hadn’t been around when the surveillance had begun. He’d been off serving with the SEALs, most likely.

  She flipped it open. Inside was a single report, a neatly typed and formatted note that was punched through the top and attached to the manila folder. Vanessa glanced through it, reading as quickly
as she could.

  She stopped when she got near the end, cocking her head to the side.

  Had she just heard something? Or had that just been her imagination?

  She shook her head and went back to reading, trying to finish as quickly as possible. Even if it hadn’t been her just imagining things, she still needed to get out of here before she was discovered. This was the last plate a shifter burglar wanted to get caught burgling.

  What was this?

  She didn’t believe it.

  She couldn’t.

  She reread the file.

  Enchanted Rock? He had a private security company that they were monitoring? And his own pack?

  Swallowing hard, she closed the file and slid it back into the box. He was an alpha now? A real one, like his father before him? That didn’t make any sense, though. Peter’s father had said he turned entirely away from shifters. If that were true, had his father been lying?

  This was all just too confusing.

  She grabbed the box and reached up to put it back on the shelf.

  “Hello in there, little intruder.”

  Vanessa slid the box home and stopped her movement entirely. That voice, it had come over the intercom.

  “Yes,” said a voice over the intercom, his voice thick and heavy with a German accent. “Hello, little shifter.”

  How the hell had they found her? Seen her? She’d been able to skirt by all the cameras without being seen, and had avoided any guards. But, most importantly, how did they know she wasn’t entirely human?

  “You may be wondering how we know what you are, little one. Body temperature. You shifters burn a little hotter than humans, so you change the ambient room temperature slightly more than a normal intruder. We have an algorithm for determining the likelihood of your species, and it had figured you are a shifter with a 99% likelihood.”

  And just like that, Vanessa ran. She hit the door at a sprint, her boots stomping the tiled floor as she made her way back to the subbasement room she’d entered through.

  “Oh, poor little one!” called the same voice behind her, no longer on the intercom. “Do not run!”

  Vanessa didn’t listen. She threw open the door to the subbasement and bolted inside, vaulted over the railing at the top of the stairs, and tucked into a roll as she landed on the floor below.

  Behind her, the door slammed and a man entered. A giant of a man. He would have looked huge even in a WWE ring. Veins stood out all over his body, his muscles bulging almost obscenely. He bent low and ducked beneath the top of the doorframe, stepping onto the stair’s landing.

  “Little friend!” he bellowed, his voice so loud it boomed within the room like a sub-woofer turned as loud as it would go. “Wait! We only want to play!”

  Vanessa didn’t wait, though. She threw open the hatch and was back inside in a flash, so fast she knocked her knee against the bottom few rungs as she slid down.

  The giant stuck his head in the hatch. “Please! Wait! We only want your blood!” And then he laughed, a great sound that seemed to vibrate her bones and shake her to her core.

  Panting, she began her shift. She went as fast as she could, tearing her clothes and other gear off. In no time, she was back to her wolf form, her clothes bundled back up and in her jaw. She darted off through the sewer system and out into the fresh forest air.

  The whole time she ran, though, it was like there was a competition in her mind for what was most important.

  “Oh, my God, that was a fucking giant!”

  And, most importantly, “Peter’s being watched. Peter’s still one of us. Peter’s alive.”

  BOOK FOUR: Matthew

  Chapter One – Matthew

  The campfire smoke filled my nose and painted the air with reds and yellows. Embers rose on eddies of heat from the flames like burnt offerings to the stars overhead. The birds had quieted for the evening as the sun fell and the cool air began to settle over the firs and pines and mountain peaks of the High Rockies.

  I lowered my red-furred wolf body to the forest floor, my belly brushing over the dirt and fallen pine needles as I slunk closer to the backs of the men circled around the curling and crackling flames.

  “Man,” one of them said, “he should’ve been back by now. How long does it take to get more beer?”

  “Don’t worry,” said another, “he will be. He just headed into Yellow Rose. Quit worrying so much, buddy.”

  My nose caught a whiff of raw meat, thick cut steaks which had been salted and were ready to toss on the grill propped up over one dying end of the fire.

  “Maybe he got lost?” suggested another of the guys.

  “Come on, how could he get lost? He knows more about wilderness survival than any of us. He was Pararescue for Christ’s sake.”

  Drool trickled down my jaw at the scent of the meat, soaking the heavy duffel bag straps I held in my teeth, a small whimper escaping my mouth at how delicious it smelled.

  “There he is!” called Peter, his speech just barely slurred. He must have heard my little whine over the crackle of the fire. “Told you it wouldn’t take him long.”

  “Come on, Matt,” Jake called from the other side of the fire, “that beer ain’t getting any colder.”

  Crushed that they’d figured out I was there so quickly, I padded out of the shadows and dropped the duffel, beer bottles clinking together.

  Three of the four guys seated around the campfire all rose to their feet. Peter Frost, our boss, was the only to remain seated.

  “Thought I smelled something,” Richard, one of the grooms-to-be teased as he knelt down next to the duffel and unzipped the bag. He rummaged through it and began to distribute longnecks to all the guys. Beers given to everyone, he reached in and grabbed my clothes and draped them over my back. “We’ll have a cold one popped when you get back.”

  “Yeah,” Frank, the other bachelor of this little party, replied, “thanks for rustling up the brews, pardner.”

  “Owe you one,” Jake added, idly scratching his thick black beard as he took an offered beer from Richard.

  Panting and nodding, I stepped back into the woods away from the fire and began to shift back to my human form.

  I guess I could’ve just hoofed the two miles down to Peter’s old beat up Bronco on my own two feet, but the guys had been practically howling for more beer and getting there in wolf form was just so much easier when I had rough ground to cover. I moved like the wind when I shifted, and a couple miles was trivial, even when you added in the amount of time to pack and unpack the duffel bag or change forms.

  My name is Matthew Jones, and I’m a shifter. A wolf shifter, to be exact. And the guys back at the campfire were my pack mates. The five of us made up the team at Frost Security. Our pack might have been small, but we were a tight-knit group.

  As my body began to change, with my fur shrinking back into my skin, my legs lengthening and my arms shortening, I heard the guys continue to laugh and chug their beer.

  We were out in the wild on a bachelor party for both Richard Murdoch and Frank O'Dwyer. They both met their true mates last year, and were already on their way to saying “I do.” Jake, too, had met Elise Moon, his own mate, just a few months ago and had just finished moving her up to Enchanted Rock, the town we called home.

  As my teeth shrank and my muzzle shortened, I thought about being the odd man out on this one. Not that I really minded too much. Sure, the guys were happy. They were in love. But it wasn't any skin off my nose. I’d grown up as a lone wolf, adopted into a family of normal humans. I’d hid my abilities ever since I was a teenager, and this was my first real pack.

  But there were benefits to not having a mate like the guys. For one, I didn't have to check with my mate, or anything like that, if I wanted to go do something, like go out to a bachelor party with the guys, head into Denver for a long weekend, or go camping by myself in the northern part of the state for a change of scenery.

  Unlike the other three mated shifters at Frost Security,
I still had my freedom, and my time was still my own. It just meant I could work more with the Enchanted Rock Volunteer Fire Department. Seeing as we were about to enter into the fire season, they needed all the help they could get.

  Besides, I’d never been a one-woman kind of wolf. Even before I found out there were others of my kind out there, or all this true mate stuff, I’d just loved women. Getting to know them, spending time with them. One-night stands, even. This whole idea of meeting someone and knowing almost right off the bat that I wanted to spend my life with them just sounded crazy to me.

  With my tail and fur entirely gone, I groaned as I pulled my underwear back on. There was nothing quite like being naked in the woods on a spring night, even if it did get a little chilly at this elevation. I scrambled into the rest of my clothes, silently reassuring myself that being single was a good thing. That I shouldn’t worry that was going to be alone forever.

  Not that I needed to find the love of my life. Like I said, I was fine with not having anyone depending on me, looking to me for help or comfort or company every single day. Who needed a special someone to curl up with by a fire on a cold winter night? Or someone to cook dinner for? Not me, that was for damn sure. I could find a woman to do that most nights without needing special shifter mojo to guide my decisions.

  I sighed and slicked a hand back through my blonde hair, tussling it a little as I ran a hand over the reddish stubble on my cheeks. But, still, I had to admit: the guys seemed genuinely happy. Happier than I could even imagine. Having quiet, ecstatic joy rubbed in your face every day was pretty damned hard to ignore.

  “Matt!” called Richard. “What’s taking so long? About to throw the steaks on, and your beer’s getting warm.”

  “Coming!” I called back from where I was bent over, lacing my boots back up. I straightened up and tramped back to the fire, taking the offered beer from Richard. I glanced over at Peter, who looked about as distant as I felt.