This is the last teaser for Shattered, big thanks to Mei!

This is a post that I’ve been thinking about for more than a month. I’d hoped to have a cover to show all of you by the time I sat down to write this, but it’s been a difficult month at the Murray house (as I’m sure it has been for many of you).

Up until now, I’ve been fairly quiet about my new series (The Awakening), but today I’d like to share the current working version of the blurb and give some of you a chance to read Reborn (Book 1) for free.

The Setup:

True love never dies.

In just a few days a new arrival at Selene’s high school will turn her entire world upside down. She’s never met anyone so attractive—or so mysterious—before this, but Jace’s unyielding insistence that they’ve known each other for decades can’t be denied—not given how familiar he feels to her.

In the hidden world of god’s and fairies what you don’t know can get you killed faster than anything else and only those you love have any chance of saving you.

For the first forty readers who send me an email (dean at deanwrites), I’ll be sending out free advance reader copies of Reborn in exchange for an honest review of Reborn when it goes live. It’s that easy. A month or two from now (well before the book goes live in April), I’ll email out all forty of the readers .pdf, .epub, and .mobi copies of Reborn, with the understanding that by joining the Reborn Release Team you’re agreeing to read Reborn and leave a review on one or more of the major retailers (Amazon, iBooks, B&N, Kobo, etc.) once the book goes live.

For those of you who would like to continue to receive advance reader copies of my books, I’ll try to come up with a route for that to happen that works for everyone involved.

Thanks

-Dean

This will be the last excerpt I put up between now and the release dates for Shattered and Marked. I very much hope everyone is having a great holiday season and that you enjoy this excerpt!

Dean

—

Chapter 2

Adriana Paige
Interstate 15
Western Montana

It would have been impossible to adequately describe the chaos of the next few hours as call after call came in from our people letting us know that they had somehow picked up Coun’hij tails and that they needed help.

It wasn’t surprising to find out that our RV had been set up with advanced communications equipment—that was exactly the kind of foresight I’d come to expect out of Alec and Donovan. What was surprising was the fact that we came frighteningly close to exceeding its capabilities and it was the only thing keeping our people from being cornered and defeated in detail.

None of us knew how it had happened, but somehow the Coun’hij had managed to track most of our people from the time that we’d split up. To be honest, most of us didn’t have the time to think about the bigger picture. We left that to Alec and just focused on our little piece of the puzzle. Everyone was pressed into service in some capacity or another—even Vik, the hulking Tonopah hybrid who was currently serving as my bodyguard, ended up manning a headset.

Somewhere along the way both RV’s started moving again, but I was too busy to notice. My world narrowed down to the laptop in front of me and the procession of voices coming through my headset. I never had time to change out of my pajamas—I barely even had time to understand what I was supposed to be doing.

All of the calls into Alec’s personal cellphone were routed into the main switchboard and from there sent out to Vik or me for verification. Once the caller’s identity was established I ran through a checklist of questions and entered their responses into my laptop.

“Are there any indications that you’re being followed?” “Are you currently in motion?” “Where are you right now and where are you headed?” “How long do you have before you’ll run out of gas?”

The questions were the kind of straightforward thing that I should have been able to memorize after my first time through them, but the sheer terror in their voices made it hard to type in their responses—I was pretty sure that I wasn’t physically capable of anything more complicated than that.

As bad as the terror was, in some ways the ones who weren’t alarmed were even worse. They were confident that Alec would find a way to save them, which made it easier to get the information I needed out of them, but it was hard not to disabuse them of their faith considering that I could turn my head and see the flurry of activity taking place around Donovan’s desk.

Alec had a big map of the Western United States up on the giant touchscreen mounted on the wall and he was desperately trying to create a plan that would allow our people to survive what was coming next.

Yellow dots popped into existence every time a new call came into the switchboard. As I finished inputting the information from my current caller, a middle-aged woman from the Las Cruces pack named Daphne, a dotted line appeared around her location in Southern Utah.

The dotted line formed a circle that represented how much further she thought she could drive before she would run out of fuel. The single black dot orbiting her position on the map meant that she was being followed by only one Coun’hij vehicle.

“You’ll send help, right?”

I tore my eyes away from the screen and forced a smile on my face, hoping the old adage about people being able to hear the smile in your voice was true. “Yes, we’ve had a few calls like yours come in today, so Alec is just tracking down which of our people are best placed to intercept the group that is currently following you. For now, turn back north the first chance you get. It looks like Cedar City is probably your best bet, but give me a call once you’re headed north so I can confirm your location and the amount of fuel you have left.”

“Thank you, Mistress Paige. I swear I’ve been careful ever since I left the main group in Nevada. I don’t know how they managed to find me like this.”

“Given the circumstances, I think it would be just fine for you to address me as Adriana, Daphne. I’m sure that you were careful, but we’ll worry about how they found you after you’re safe. For now you just concentrate on driving and Alec or I will get back to you as soon as he’s arranged for someone to meet up with you.”

“Thank you, Mistr…Adriana. Thank you very much. I knew that your fiancé wasn’t the kind to leave his people hanging in the wind. That’s why I was so willing to swear fealty to him when I arrived at the estate. Oh dear, listen to me go on. I’ll let you go take care of your other duties.”

It nearly broke my heart to hear such trust in her voice. She was old enough to be my great-grandmother and she was in an incredible amount of danger while I sat in a comfortable, climate-controlled RV and made promises I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to keep.

I looked at the monitor at the top of my screen and confirmed that there wasn’t anyone else in the queue. I flashed Vik a ‘stay there’ gesture and stood so I could walk over to Alec and Donovan.

“How many of our people are still unaccounted for, Donovan?”

Alec’s voice was starting to sound a little strained, but Donovan didn’t seem to notice. “We’ve had roughly seventy percent report in on their own. I’ve managed to get through to another ten percent and per your instructions I’ve instructed them to fill up their vehicles and prepare for some kind of rescue operation, but our connection to the outside world is becoming less and less reliable.”

I shook my head. “What do you mean? It’s been nonstop calls in for Vik and me. We haven’t had anyone disconnect on us.”

Alec nodded, but he didn’t look away from the screen. “Donovan diverted most of our hacking resources toward keeping the incoming lines open, but it looks like the Coun’hij has finally entered the computer age. They are keeping constant pressure on our communications. It doesn’t really matter at this point whether they are hoping to track us down or if it’s simply an attempt to stop us from mustering any kind of coordinated response to the attack on our physical assets. At some point we’re going to have to address their growing capabilities.”

“Those are people out there, Alec. They aren’t just assets.”

Alec’s knuckles went white and I realized that I’d pushed too hard. He was too much of a gentleman to say so, but he didn’t need me jostling his elbow at a time like this.

“I’m sorry, Alec. I guess the pressure is getting to me. The calls keep coming in and I can’t offer them anything solid. I feel like I’m just lulling them into a state of complacency rather than letting them know just how bad things are. I don’t even know how bad things are.”

“Bad. Really bad, but you don’t need to apologize. You’re right, I need to make sure I don’t get so caught up in playing a giant game of chess that I forget that those are real people out there.”

Alec turned toward Donovan, rewarding me with a smile in the process, and for the first time I realized how tired Alec looked. His eyes were bloodshot and he had dark circles under them. It seemed impossible that he was the same person I’d been cuddling with such a short time ago. He was under even more stress than I’d realized if he’d gone downhill so quickly and I suddenly felt even more guilty for my recrimination.

Alec hadn’t ever forgotten that he was dealing with real people, not if he looked like that.

“Donovan, please add back in the location information for the ten percent of our people who aren’t currently being followed. Color us, Grayson and Jaclyn red so I can decide where exactly I want to position the interceptions.”

A dozen blue dots materialized on the map. The blue dots were just as scattered as the yellow dots, but they were still surprisingly comforting despite the fact that they were so few in number. I started to feel better about our situation right up until I realized that there was only one red dot on the map.

“I’m sorry, Master Alec; it looks like we’ve still been unable to contact Jaclyn or Grayson.”

Alec closed his eyes as though momentarily unable to face the reality we found ourselves in. “That’s going to make this a lot harder. Even if we manage to get ahold of the other twenty percent of our people we’re still going to be looking at something like six-to-one odds.”

“Indeed, sir. I’ll divert some of the IT assets to establishing a secure line out now that the calls in have started to taper off and I’ll personally try to get ahold of both of them.”

Alec nodded absently as he started selecting blue and yellow dots. “Sync these seven up and then calculate a least-time intercept here on I-70. Try to bring the ones without tails together with whoever is the furthest east with enough time that they can fight the first round and still have time to get set before the next batch shows up.”

It was like watching a special kind of symphony, one that used space, time and numbers in place of woods, brass and strings. We were too outnumbered to get away with just throwing all of our people into one big fight. Instead Alec wove a complex ballet of movement that resulted in our people coming together in ways that gave them sufficient numbers to have a chance of beating the opposition.

It felt like I stood there watching Alec for hours, but the truth was that the whole process took less than five minutes. At the end, Alec stepped back from the board and surveyed the results with a worried look.

“That takes care of the first round. I’m not sure it’s wise to try to lock anything else in at this point. Too much will depend on how the first set of fights go.”

“What about those two groups in the center? You’ve diverted almost everyone else who could help out away from those groups.”

Alec nodded. “It was never going to work to try and cherry-pick them off anywhere but on the fringes. Donovan, are we still headed back the way we came?”

“Yes, Master Alec. I’m sorry to say though that I’ve still been unable to reach Grayson or Jaclyn.”

“Fine. If we speed up just a little bit we’ll be in a position to bail out this group here about the time the first of them runs out of gas.”

Alec picked up a headset and keyed in a number from memory. It was obvious after the first second or two that he was going to go through to voicemail.

“Tasha, it’s me. Look, I know you’re not particularly happy about everything that has happened over the last couple of months, but this is bigger than you or me. We’ve had some kind of massive security breach. More than two-thirds of our people are being tailed right now by what we have to assume are Coun’hij forces. I’ve redeployed my remaining people, but there’s simply not enough of us to deal with this problem by throwing bodies at it. I need you and Grayson in Nephi, Utah within the next hour and fifty minutes. Faster if you can manage it, but you absolutely have to be there by then or a lot of people are going to die, including a few from your pack.”

Alec hung up on her and then turned back to Donovan. “Get me someone important in the Del Rio pack and then get started directing traffic out there. We’ve almost waited too long if we’re going to make some of those intercepts work. I kept hoping that we would be able to get in contact with more of our people, but it can’t be helped now. Once we have all of the intercepts in motion we can go back to trying to contact whoever we still haven’t heard from. I doubt we’ll be able to use them to set up any more intercepts, but maybe they will be able to tip the odds further in our direction at some of the fights we’re already committed to.”

Donovan nodded and began pulling up the number Alec had asked for. Alec gave me a tired smile. “They are going to need your help on the phones, Adri, if we’re going to make this work. Just hang in there for a few more hours and things should calm down enough that we can start rotating people out for breaks.”

“I know, don’t worry about me. I’ll call as many people as I have to.”

Donovan looked up and pointed at Alec’s headset. “I’m putting you through to a hybrid named Tiffany Marks. The last information I got out of Del Rio is that she’s the one calling the shots right now.”

I walked back over to my laptop and slipped on my headset as Alec adjusted his boom mike.

“This is Alec Graves. Am I talking to Tiffany Marks? Good, I have a business proposition for you. No, I don’t care about your supposed neutrality. You’re going to listen to me. Why? Because I’m the reason you’re in power right now. Without me your whole pack would still be under Lori’s thumb.”

Alec’s voice was completely emotionless. It was like nothing I’d ever heard out of him before and it was driven home to me once again that Alec had grown up in a very different world than I had. I was completely lost when it came to high-stakes negotiations, but Alec was perfectly at home in a world where showing the wrong emotion at the wrong time could result in people getting killed.

“I’m sorry, but a simple ‘thank you’ isn’t going to balance the ledger between us. Yes, you could hang up on me, but if you do that I’ll burn your entire pack to the ground and salt the earth as I leave town. Don’t tell me that you don’t think I could do it. We both know I wouldn’t even have to see to it myself.”

My hand was hurting, but I didn’t understand why until I realized that it was clenched around the red coffee mug that I’d filled with water hours before.

Alec continued on, oblivious to how much distress he was causing me.

“No, you’re right, on the face of things, that’s not very much in keeping with my public persona of justice and mercy, but I know something you don’t. You see, I’m fully aware that you’ve kept Everett locked up in a cage since shortly after you realized that he and his daughter have spent the last ten years playing you all for fools. I know that you’ve kept Lori in a drug-induced coma for weeks now, and that you killed Everett’s right-hand man when he protested against what your little cabal was doing.

“How is that relevant? It’s relevant because your entire pack has done enough wrong over the course of your coup that I’m sure I can find a pretext for executing you and the rest of the ring-leaders once I come to power. You have a choice—you can hang up on me now and hope that the Coun’hij succeeds, or you can do me a favor in exchange for leniency after I come to power.

“I want Lori, Everett, and anyone else you can spare on a plane to Utah in the next ten minutes. You have exactly one hour and forty-eight minutes to have Lori on the ground in Nephi, Utah and she needs to be awake and able to use her power against the Coun’hij enforcers who will be rolling into town five minutes after your arrival.

“I’m fully aware what that will mean. I suggest you leave half the pack behind to start packing. You’ll want to be out of town before the Coun’hij can reposition one of their strike teams to come after your people.

“You don’t have the option of sitting on the fence and we both know it. Right now you’re down three hybrids, and without Lori you don’t have anyone who’s capable of playing the kinds of diplomatic games that have allowed you to stay neutral up until now. It was only going to be a matter of time before you were going to have to pick a side. All I’ve done is move up the schedule a little bit.”

I didn’t get a chance to listen in on the end of the conversation because my headset started ringing as Donovan finally got the outbound call details fed into the queue.

Hi everyone, I just wanted to give you a sneak peek at chapter 2 of Shattered. We’re only six days away from it going live.

—

Chapter 2

Adriana Paige
Marauder’s Gas Station
Central Wyoming

A month ago I would have said that the underground bunker where Taggart and I had both nearly died couldn’t ever feel like home, but Isaac and Dominic’s group had worked miracles in just the week that they’d been here.

The effects of our failed attempt at saving Agony were still coming home to roost in ways that I hadn’t anticipated when we first started talking about the best way to break him out.

If we’d killed all of Agony’s guards then Isaac and the rest could have snuck back to their normal territory and probably been fine. Instead, Brandon and a few others had made it away, which meant that Isaac and likely most of the rest of his people had been recognized. Dominic had kept a low enough profile that the Coun’hij probably didn’t know anything about her, but the rest of Isaac’s people were all known quantities. If they went back to the territory that they’d been calling home for the last few years then they wouldn’t survive the month.

The Coun’hij didn’t exactly have a reputation for being forgiving and after losing so many they would make killing everyone who had helped us their top priority. Even if the Coun’hij was too busy to slap us down, I was pretty sure that Brandon would take it upon himself to kill everyone who had seen him nearly defeated and he was more than capable of killing Isaac’s people off three or four at a time.

Alec, Carson and Agony had come very close to fighting him to a standstill, but two of them had been wielding massive swords at the time. Even Heath, the most deadly out of all of Isaac’s people, couldn’t hope to beat Brandon, so instead they’d all agreed to come back to the bunker that Taggart and I had commandeered from the vampires who had tried to kill us just days before.

The bunker itself was mostly just concrete and steel, but the interior had suffered some significant fire damage from the fight between Taggart and the vampire pyromancer that had been running the show before we’d arrived.

There hadn’t been time for Taggart and I to get the bunker cleaned up before we’d left, but Isaac’s people hadn’t complained. Instead they’d just set about cleaning up the wreckage with a determination that not even the last few vampire corpses had been able to quench.

I had a sneaking suspicion that Isaac was keeping everyone busy at least partially to keep them all from fighting, but I wasn’t going to complain about that, not when the results were so spectacular.

By now, anything that had been damaged by the fire had been pulled out and some of the gold that we’d found in the armory had been cashed in to replace most of the damaged fixtures. Now that his people had run out of other things to do, Isaac had started working them in shifts to excavate a large area that would eventually end up serving as a second, attached bunker.

It was the kind of massive undertaking that I wouldn’t have even known how to start, but Isaac acted like it was no big deal. One morning he came out of his tiny private room with several rolls of paper containing the beginnings of a plan that he’d no doubt spent days researching online.

Conventional wisdom would have said that construction on this scale was impossible without heavy machinery which would have revealed the existence of the bunker. Conventional wisdom hadn’t seen what even a single hybrid was capable of.

It was still relatively slow going, but once they had the camouflage netting in place to hide the dig site from any kind of overhead observation, it was amazing what a few hybrids could do. Their claws were harder and sharper than any tool we could have purchased and their enormous strength meant that they were easily able to move around gigantic loads of rock and dirt.

Taggart hadn’t been especially happy about the cash outlay involved or the frequent trips that were made into town the first few days of the project, but the results so far were nothing less than astonishing. Isaac had found a machine shop to build several custom wheelbarrows that were so large that no normal human could have hoped to move them around once they were full of dirt, but which were perfectly sized for use by hybrids.

Isaac and the other hybrids used their claws to break up the hard-packed dirt, and then they would move to another spot while the wolves shoveled the loose dirt and rock into the wheelbarrows. Once a wheelbarrow was full, one of the hybrids would take it out from under the netting and dump the dirt somewhere out of the way.

We mostly worked at night so that nobody would be able to see the hybrids moving around outside of the netting, and everyone turned out most nights unless they had some other duty that they’d been assigned. I’d taken a couple of shifts in the pit, but I wasn’t strong enough to keep up with the amount of dirt that the wolves were moving around, so mostly I ended up manning the gas station.

Between the excavation project, keeping the gas station manned, and maintaining a twenty-four-hour watch, everyone was staying pretty busy. Normal humans probably would have mutinied under the same kind of workload, but the fact that the shape shifters needed so much less sleep meant that the schedule was almost perfect for Isaac’s people.

He kept them busy enough that nobody really had time to get into fights, but not so busy that people felt like they never got to unwind. The shape shifters slept in shifts, scattered among the various dormitories inside the bunker. There were fewer of us than the vampires Taggart had killed saving me, but shape shifters seemed to need more personal space than the average human.

Everyone had their own bed, but scheduling sleeping shifts like Isaac had done meant that the dormitories were never packed too full, which I was pretty sure went a long ways towards heading off the fights that otherwise would have broken out.

Moving out all of the dirt necessary to add such a large expansion onto the bunker was going to take weeks still, but even before then, Isaac figured that the shape shifters would be able to use the pit to spar and train during the daylight hours, which I was pretty sure would let the last of the residual tension in the group dissipate.

I looked at the big digital clock on the wall inside of the convenience store for what felt like the tenth time in the last five minutes, and then sighed in relief when I heard someone moving around in the back room. A couple of seconds later Dominic walked out into the main store area.

“Hi, Adri. Quiet shift?”

I nodded. “Yeah, just like always. The second guy who stopped by for gas pretty much cleaned us out of corn nuts though. I guess we should probably start trying to figure out how to restock the stuff we’re running low on. I think I saw some invoices or something in the back office, but I didn’t want to go in and start poking around now and then just have to start over tomorrow.”

“Oh, that’s a good idea. I’m not sure that I would have thought to look for invoices. Do you want me to start doing some kind of inventory of what we have right now?”

I shook my head. She was quite possibly the nicest person I’d ever met, but I didn’t want to take advantage of her kindness.

“You don’t need to do that, Dom. I really was planning on getting to it tomorrow—I wasn’t trying to guilt you into helping or anything, I just didn’t want you to worry about the fact that the shelves are starting to look a little bare.”

Dominic’s eyes went wide. “Oh, I didn’t think that, Adri. I just thought that since I’ll be here for the next six hours that it makes a lot of sense for me to get started, but I don’t want to deprive you of the chance to do it—it was your idea after all.”

Coming from someone else, a statement like that would have been dripping in sarcasm, but Dominic actually seemed to mean it.

“Is that really your idea of fun, Dom?”

She blushed a little as she looked away, but after a second she shrugged. “I guess that fun isn’t quite the right word. I would rather be curled up on my bed with a good book, but taking inventory of a gas station doesn’t sound too bad. It’s the kind of thing that I might have done if I’d grown up here. I used to dream of doing this kind of stuff, you know— having a part-time job, having friends I could count on not to turn on me the first chance that they got. Stocking the shelves and sitting behind a cash register is like realizing a little piece of my dream. It’s not all sunshine and roses, but it’s still better than a lot of things that I could be experiencing right now.”

I almost didn’t know how to respond, but I couldn’t just leave without saying something.

“I’m sorry, it sounds like you had it pretty rough back home. You must get tired of listening to people like me whine about how bad we have it.”

Dominic reached over and patted me on the shoulder. “I don’t resent the fact that you didn’t have to go through some of the things that I had to go through, Adri. By all indications you’ve had a pretty rough time lately yourself, but I don’t even resent the average American teenager. Once upon a time I felt differently, but then I realized that hating someone for being a product of their environment is a waste of time. Only a very few people ever manage to become more than what their environment dictates for them. It seems foolish to hate people for being people.

“Individuals like Gandhi or Mother Teresa are the wonderful exception rather than the rule. I decided that I would just take people as they were and stop expecting so much out of them. Really, the fact that so many kids our age can grow up without any worries more serious than who they are going to go to Prom with is a testament to just how civilized some parts of the world are.”

Maybe some people would have been offended by Dominic’s view on human capacity, but I knew full well that if I’d been left to my own devices I wouldn’t have worried about things like world peace. In a lot of ways I was still a product of my environment, it was just a very different environment now than what most people dealt with.

“You became more than your environment, Dom. Taggart says that he doesn’t know of any other cats who’ve come up north and peacefully integrated themselves in with a pack.”

She was obviously in the grip of some kind of powerful emotion, but in the end she just shrugged. “I wanted to leave home for a very long time before I actually acted on the urge. Looking back now, I don’t feel proud of what I’ve done. I’m just glad that I managed to get out before I turned into someone else. It was a very close thing.”

“What stopped you from coming up here when you first realized that it was a chance at a better life?”

“There were a lot of things. The wolves actively seek out my kind and kill us wherever they find us. Traveling that far for a teenage girl all by herself is dangerous, even for someone like me.”

“You mean like kidnappers?”

“Yeah, sometimes. I’m faster and stronger than a normal human, but I’m not invincible, so a group of big, burly guys could still hurt me unless I was willing to transform and try to fight my way free of them.”

“So just decide from the start that you’ll change forms and tear the face off of anyone who gets between you and freedom. Problem solved.”

Normally I wasn’t really what you would call violent, but something about Dom brought out a protective instinct that I’d only felt a few times before. She was just so good and kind that I couldn’t bear the thought of anything bad happening to her. Anyone who was willing to hurt Dom deserved whatever happened to them, and that was the end of the story as far as I was concerned.

“I wish it was that easy, Adri. Here in the United States the Coun’hij enforces the restriction against shifting forms somewhere that could result in the humans finding out about us. Have you ever wondered how my people have managed to keep our existence a secret without having some kind of similar centralized authority?”

“Actually I hadn’t thought about it quite that way, but that is pretty mind-boggling. How has your existence stayed a secret so long?”

“There are legends among my people about a shadowy figure who comes for anyone who risks our secret getting out. He appears from nowhere and then kills us quietly and without warning. He’s our own personal boogeyman and he’s the one thing that every single jaguar seems to agree on.”

“Wait, you believe this guy really exists?”

“Yes, I believe because I’ve met him. He calls himself the Hunter, which is what we call him too.”

“You met him? And survived? How did that happen?”

“I’m not sure. For some reason he decided to let me live, but he warned me that if I ever shifted shapes in broad daylight like that again, he’d kill me without asking any questions. And then he threw a bag at my feet and walked away.”

“What was in the bag?”

“It was…it was terrible. Let’s just say that he wanted me to know exactly how many people he’d had to kill to silence the rumors that I’d started by changing where the humans could see me.”

It was obvious that what she had seen still haunted her. I tried to come up with something to pull her back from the memory of what she’d seen, but I came up totally blank.

“I’m so sorry, Dom.”

“It’s not your fault, Adri. I guess now you know. I didn’t go north because I was scared. I was scared of the rape gangs, scared of the other jaguars whose territory I would have to cross in order to get to the border, and I was scared of my father.”

“Your father?”

“Yes, he is a terrible man and he told me that if I ever left that he would hunt me down and make me pay. I managed to get away after I became more scared of what I was going to become than I was of dying, but I still wonder how much longer I have before he’ll find me again.”

“I’m sure that he’s lost your trail by now.”

“I hope so, but I’m not sure that’s possible. There were rumors that my father was one of the rare cats who could track someone even without a scent trail to follow.”

“How is that even possible?”

Dom smiled at my astonishment. “You walk inside of other people’s dreams and I change shapes into a giant jaguar. How is any of this possible? I don’t know how it works, but some of my kind are able to sense the direction they need to go in order to find someone that they’ve formed the right kind of link with.”

“But that would mean that you would never be safe. It wouldn’t matter where you went or what you did, you’d always have to worry that someday your father would show up and make good on his threats.”

“Yes, exactly that.”

“So is he able to track?”

Dominic looked up at me with soft eyes that were so full of fear that I couldn’t meet her gaze without feeling my heart constrict inside of my chest.

“I don’t know, not for sure, but something tells me that he can, that it’s only a matter of time before he comes for me. I’m sorry, Adri. I’m putting everyone here in danger, but I just can’t bear to go back out there by myself.”

—

I hope everyone is enjoying chapter 2, and you are all as excited about Shattered going live as I am.

Dean

Here’s Teaser #7 for Shattered. A big thanks to Mei again for helping out! The quote on this one is from a scene that sets the stage for the next big set of developments in the series. It includes the introduction of a new character whose been a long time coming, one who’s incredibly important to the storyline!

Here’s Teaser #6. As always, big thanks to Mei for doing these. We’re now just 8 days from Shattered going live and 11 days from Marked releasing.

I’ve totally dropped the ball over the last few days and failed to get any teasers up 🙁 This is actually one of my favorites–Mei has a real gift for putting pictures together!

The quote is from Adri’s fight with Kaleb….

🙂