by T. S. Joyce
SWIM DEEPER
(KEEPERS OF THE SWAMP, BOOK 1)
By T. S. JOYCE
Swim Deeper
Copyright © 2019 by T. S. Joyce
Copyright © 2019, T. S. Joyce
First electronic publication: July 2019
T. S. Joyce
www.tsjoyce.com
All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. No part of this book may be scanned, uploaded or distributed via the Internet or any other means, electronic or print, without the author’s permission.
NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR:
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental. The author does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for third-party websites or their content.
Published in the United States of America.
Editor: Corinne DeMaagd
Contents
Copyright
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
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Chapter One
“Check if your mic works,” Brian murmured as he fiddled with a miniature camera in the front seat of the news van.
“Again?” Bre Hayne asked.
“Look, I don’t know what’s going on with you today, but you’ve fought everything I’ve asked you to do.” Brian arched his thick eyebrows and shoved his glasses farther up his nose. “Why?”
Bre wrapped her fingers around the tiny mic, hiding it from view. “Doesn’t this feel a little wrong?”
Brian sighed and turned in his seat, leveled her with a sympathetic look. “Bre, he’s not human. You need to remember that. He’s an animal.”
Bre didn’t know what to say. She didn’t know how she felt about all this, so she just stared at the hole in the knee of her jeans and shook her head slightly.
Brian tried again. “How long have we been doing this? Huh? How long have we been reporting on shit stories and not getting anywhere? We work harder than anyone in the game. Live out of hotels, gave up raising families. We eat fast food, sleep like crap, all to chase down stories about liquor stores getting robbed and the dangers of children playing outside. The migration of a bumblebee. School cafeteria food. Fluff pieces, Bre. This is the big one. The one where our lives change and we get put at the top of the news stories. Our jobs will be safe. We’ll be recognizable.” When he squeezed her knee, Bre resisted the urge to flinch away. “This story will put us on the map. After all these years of working in the trenches, this is the one, Bre. He’s a monster. An animal. A mutant. Why do you think he had to put out an ad for a wife—?”
“Mate,” she corrected him quietly. “They call them ‘mates.’”
“Mate,” Brian conceded. “Why do you think he had to do that?”
“Because he’s lonely?” God, if she was one of the few shifters in existence, she would be lonely, too.
“No. Because no one wants to be with a monster. Get in there, get the story, get out…become mother-fuckin’ famous.”
Bre wanted to puke. Truth be told, she was scared. She was about to face one of them. One of the shifters. The animal-men. The unstable ones. The dangerous ones. The ones who lived secretly on the edges of society. They had so much curiosity surrounding them since they were discovered a few years ago, but no one knew who was a shifter…until this one had come out of hiding and advertised for a human mate. He didn’t do it publicly. It was done privately, through an underground network most humans didn’t even know existed called The Holler. The woman he chose had come to Bre to sell the story. And, oh, the station had paid. Secretly. And the woman, Cara Nailor, had fed the shifter all of Bre’s information, her pictures, everything.
This man…monster…whatever he was…was being tricked.
“He’s an animal,” Brian repeated.
“Yeah, yeah, I got it.” Except she liked animals and was pretty sure she would never treat a dog like this, but whatever. Chasing fame was important, too, she guessed. God, she was in an emotional mood today. All along, ever since the station had talked her into this, she’d been on board, but when it came down to actually meeting him, she was getting cold feet. Buck up, girl.
The used car salesman, Liam, knocked on the window. Bre rolled it down.
“I talked to my manager, and the best he can do is three thousand, but you have to pay in cash.”
Bre looked over at Brian, who nodded his head. “Deal,” she said, offering her hand through the open window for a shake.
Brian got out with the roll of cash for the truck, and Bre made her way over to her very first pickup truck. It was an old 1977 Ford Highboy. Blue like a summer sky, but the paint had chipped away over the years of weathering, and the top of the cab and the edges of the truck bed were white. The tires were huge, and when she opened the door, there was still an old can of spray paint on the seat. Good job, Liam, you sure got this one cleaned out good.
“We just got this old junker in yesterday. Sorry it hasn’t been detailed yet,” Liam said from right behind her.
Bre startled hard. “Oh, my gosh, don’t sneak up on a person like that. I didn’t know you were there.”
Liam was as tall as a house and fit as a fiddle. He didn’t look like a typical car salesman with his chiseled cheek bones and suspicious eyes that seemed to miss nothing. He didn’t smile very much either. “Where did you say you were headed again?”
Bre swallowed hard. “I didn’t say.”
“Mmm.” Liam’s eyes tightened at the corners. “Well, if you are who I think you are, you’re headed for Uncertain territory.”
“You mean Uncertain, Texas?”
“Yep. Into the swamps, right?”
Chills rippled up her arms. “You sure have a lot of guesses about me.”
“You stick out here. Them swampers will smell the city on you the second you step out of this truck. That ol’ Highboy won’t camouflage you for long.”
“Maybe I don’t want to fit in.”
Liam chuckled and walked away. Without turning back, he called out, “Wrong answer.”
Bre frowned at his broad back until he disappeared into the tiny one-room shop. She was twenty miles outside of the microscopic town of Uncertain, but maybe she should’ve bought her rig farther out. It seemed the small-town gossip reached all way out here, and she didn’t know if that was good or bad.
She dragged her suitcase from the back of Brian’s brown Astro van and hefted it into the bed of the pickup. It had been a long time since she owned her own ride. Sure, it was temporary and smelled a little like moth balls, and there was a hole in the floor by the gas pedal, but still, it was her chariot.
Brian had test driven it and poked around under the hood for half an hour before deeming it in good shape, and
she trusted him not to put her in a ride that would break down the second she left the car lot. Brian knew cars.
It was hot as actual Hell out here, and she readjusted her red silk blouse so it wouldn’t stick to her skin. The humidity was a killer. In the distance, there were storm clouds, but that didn’t seem to cool anything off. If anything, the oncoming storm made the air feel muggier and hotter. This was all very different from her home base back in Missouri.
Still, it was a relief to be out of the “news van,” as Brian had named his own ride. The back was equipped with a whole lot of tech that he would use to listen to her microphones and filter the video she captured of the elusive shifter. Sure, it would suck when she got there, but for the next twenty miles of open road, just her and her new truck, Bre was free.
Brian came out of the building with Liam, talking low, but she didn’t care about what. She turned on the truck and found a radio station to play over the rumble of the loud V8 engine. Bre rolled down the window and inhaled deeply. Mmmm, moth balls.
“Turn right onto Loft Street,” the GPS from her phone instructed her.
“Okay, final pep talk,” Brian said after he left Liam standing by the front door of the dealership.
“I’m good,” she said, putting the old truck into gear. “I’ll talk to you when I talk to you.”
“Uh, no. You’ll talk to me every step of the way. Your microphone is already on and—”
Bre waved, eased off the clutch, and hit the gas pedal. She’d meant for it to be a smooth exit, but it had been a long damn time since she’d driven a stick shift so the truck lurched and jumped, jarring her hard before it caught the gear. Bre smiled and waved to the two men staring at her with concern from the parking lot. “Bye, boys!”
“Do you even know how to drive a stick shift?” Liam called from across the lot.
“How hard can it be?” she answered through a grin.
“I thought you said you used to drive one!” Brian yelled.
“When I was sixtee-ee-ee-ee-een,” she called, lurching through the next gear as she hit the main road.
The look on the guys’ faces had her dying laughing by the time they disappeared in the rearview. Bright side, in the next twenty miles, she only stalled the truck once, and it only took her an hour to get there. But she and Beetlejuice, as she’d lovingly named the ugly truck, had bonded. And she was pretty determined to learn his tricks.
Uncertain, Texas, population 150, was located right on the edge of Caddo Lake. Bre passed a couple Swim At Your Own Risk signs and one Beware of Alligators. The one gas station she passed didn’t even have a name. All it had was a sign with a painted picture of a mosquito the size of a jackrabbit. She waved at an old man in a lawn chair drinking a beer beside one of the gas pumps, but he only frowned at her and tracked the truck with his squinted eyes. “Great,” she murmured over the country music on the radio. “Welcome to Hell, Bre.”
Beetlejuice coughed out a plume of dark smoke from the back as she shifted gears as though he disagreed.
“Sorry, boy,” she murmured, patting his cracked dashboard.
“In one mile, your destination is on the left,” GPS enlightened her.
Okay, now the nerves were really kicking in. She was really doing this, really here, pretending to be some mate for hire to a complete stranger who could turn into some unknown animal. She hadn’t even seen his picture yet. He’d refused to send her contact, Cara, one of himself. And he didn’t do social media. Of course, that was the first thing Bre had tried—to internet stalk. But she’d failed miserably.
He was probably old. And plain. And missing teeth like that man back at the gas station. Hell, maybe that man was him! What if he smelled? Didn’t matter. Bre blew out a steadying breath. This was all just temporary, it was pretend, and she could leave whenever she wanted.
The smell of lake water and earth wafted through the open window, and all around the road were tall swamp trees with thick foliage that made the evening sunlight filter down in little gold speckles all over the cracked, two-lane road. Cicadas were singing so loud. Their song came in waves, a crescendo and then fall. It would’ve been beautiful if a big fat bug hadn’t slapped her in the face and made her swerve into the other lane.
“You have arrived,” GPS said.
Bre slowed down when she saw the dirt driveway to the Lachlan House for the first time. There was a split in the road. The path to the right had a sign that read Lachlan Swamp Boat Tours Thisaway, and the left path had a sign that said Private Property, Trespassers will be shot. She took that one. It wound through the woods and eventually led to a whitewashed house on stilts, sitting on the edge of the water. She downshifted and turned onto the small road, bouncing and bumping until she came to a stop next to a jacked-up brown and cream-colored Bronco.
The biggest German Shephard she’d ever seen in her life was lying on the porch, staring at her with wisdom beyond its species. There he was—Holt Lachlan. A German Shephard shifter, apparently.
As she opened the door and got out, he stood and trotted down the stairs gracefully. Good God, he was bigger than a wolf! The closer he came, the harder her heart pounded. The tips of his ears came up to her boobs. Shifters couldn’t change humans into shifters with a bite, but that didn’t mean they didn’t bite! And she was a wiener about pain.
“H-hi, Holt,” she stammered as he came to a stop in front of her and sniffed at her hands. “I-I-I-I— Shit.” She cleared her throat and closed her eyes. “I’m Bre.” She blew out a breath and opened her eyes, locked them on his questioning brown ones. “I’m your mate.”
“The hell you are,” a man said.
Bre yelped, the dog barked, and the man closed the hood of his Bronco all in the same second. He wore a pair of grease-stained jeans that had gone threadbare at the knees, no shoes, no shirt, and no underwear if his low-riding jeans had anything to say about it. He was lean at the waist with a six-pack flexing as he cleaned his hands on a white towel. His dark hair was burred short to his scalp, and his eyes were a fiery greenish-gold color she’d never seen before. Even drenched in sweat and smeared with grease, any red-blooded woman could see Holt Lachlan was sexy as hell.
“What kinda weird shit are you into, lady?” he asked. “That’s my dog.” He patted his leg and the dog trotted over to him. “Fargo, you’re the worst guard dog on the whole planet. Bark at her, asshole.” He flicked the dirty towel in her direction. “She’s on your property!”
The Fargo in question shook his head with a sneeze and meandered back to the porch.
Mortified, she said, “I thought—I thought—”
“You got a stutter?” the man asked, looking her up and down. He shrugged. “Fine with me. The less appealing, the better. Is that silk?”
Stunned, Bre looked down at her red blouse. “Yes.”
“It’s hot, and you’re wearing fancy-pants jeans with holes in them, and if I had to guess, you probably paid good money to get those holes placed just right, huh?”
“Yes.”
“Hmmm.” He lifted his chin higher and locked his eyes on hers when he asked the next question, “You can’t have babies, correct?”
“What?” she asked, blood draining from her cheeks and leaving her skin cold.
“I said…you can’t have children, correct?”
The direct way this man questioned her made her want to answer him, but this was none of his business. “I’m not talking to you about that.”
“Then you can leave the way you came.” He twitched his head toward the road.
“Holt, I assume?” she said, offering him a shaking hand.
He clenched his teeth so hard, his chiseled jaw twitched. “I don’t want kids. What I am…” He swallowed hard. “What I am don’t breed well. This will be easier on both of us if you just can’t have kids.”
Those odd-colored eyes of his were so open as he waited for her answer. She’d always thought no one would understand her pain when it came to her answer, but maybe…just mayb
e…this animal did. He wouldn’t have kids so he didn’t pass on the animal to his sons. Only sons could get the disease. At least that’s what the rumors said. “You’re screwed out of a family just like me, huh?”
Holt shrugged up a shoulder. “It’s all a matter of how you look at it.”
Bre looked around at the swamp house, the dog, the Bronco, the shifter. “Why do you want a mate if you don’t want a family?”
“Who says a mate wouldn’t be all the family a man like me needs?” he asked.
Huh.
He scratched the short, dark stubble on his jaw with his thumbnail. “This ain’t a love match, so you get that out of your head real quick. You came here dressed up for our first meeting. Red flag. You don’t have to impress me with looks. Honestly, I don’t give a shit what you look like.” He closed the gap between them and grabbed one of her hands, turned it over, and frowned at her palm. “I care if you work hard. You apparently never used your hands to work in your life.” He lifted her hand and sniffed. “Is that lavender moisturizer?”
She yanked her hand out of his and clenched it at her side, resisting the urge to hit him across the jaw for making her feel so…so worthless.
“You’ll attract more bugs out here if you wear that shit,” he muttered. “Did you bring clothes you didn’t get at some fancy boutique? Something you can actually wear in a swamp?”
“I just thought it would be nice to wear something—”
“Stop thinking. There’s another red flag. I didn’t advertise for a thinker. You need to be able to keep me at a distance, just like I’ll be doing to you.”
“Then why am I even here?”
“I need a hard worker to help me get my swamp tour business through the busy days—”
“Then why did you advertise for a mate and not a co-worker—”
“You can stay in the guesthouse over there—”
“Holt, why am I here?” she yelled.
“Because I need something to protect!” His face twisted into something terrifying, and a deep rumbling sound emanated from him, vibrating the very air around her and freezing the questions in her throat. “Fuck,” he said in a terrifyingly deep voice. Hands on his hips, he stared up at the house and swallowed hard. “I don’t think you’re going to work out. Too many questions. I’m sorry to have wasted your time.”
