Big thanks to Mei for this teaser!

 

Chapter 1

Adriana Paige
Interstate 15
Western Montana

I was running.

The sense that something terrible was chasing me was simply too strong for me to do anything else. I knew I was dreaming—my surroundings were too beautiful to be explained by anything else—but even that knowledge wasn’t enough to make me stand my ground. It was like there was some kind of evolutionary cutout at work. The part of me that was advanced enough to talk and use tools was no match for instincts developed over thousands of years—not when faced by something that ran hunched over, with claws that dripped a combination of venom and blood.

It felt like I’d been running for hours, but given the way that time seemed to skip and stretch inside of dreams, there was no way of being sure how long I’d been fleeing. I jumped over a fallen tree, clearing the eight-foot-tall obstacle without breaking my stride. The trunk, a dark bar covered by faintly-glowing moss, sailed by with a speed I never could have managed in the real world. It was one more sign that this was nothing more than a nightmare, but I didn’t slow my pace.

I was running on two feet, darting between softly glowing pillars that I knew had to be trees, and that felt wrong too. I was seeing the world the same way that Alec and the rest of my friends who were shape shifters saw it. It felt like I should be running on four legs, but there wasn’t time to stop and make myself change shapes—even assuming that I was capable of something like that inside of a dream.

Heedless of the noise I was making, I crashed through a set of tall bushes that looked like some kind of glowing, new-age glass sculpture, and then I was free of the forest. The ground I was running across now couldn’t possibly have supported the kind of dense forest that I’d just left. Rather than the soft black soil I’d been expecting, it had shifted to hard red rock.

It had been dark in the forest, but I exited into sunlight that was so bright it was almost blinding. I stumbled, squinting as I tried to continue forward, but before I’d even finished taking my second step the sun had vanished. It didn’t set, it just disappeared, leaving me in a darkness that was so profound I felt like I’d stepped into some kind of void.

Only the feel of the rock underneath my feet gave lie to the idea that I’d stepped into a realm of nothingness. There wasn’t anything living on the rock, nothing to provide even the barest hint of illumination to my borrowed, supernatural vision.

Before the light had disappeared the ground before me had been flat, but now it sloped upwards in a set of irregular steps that tripped me. I caught myself with my hands, but the impact sent shooting jabs of pain up my arms.

As I scrambled back to my feet, I heard something come crashing out of the forest. I knew I would be better off not looking back to see what was chasing me, but I couldn’t help myself. It was big, much bigger than any hybrid, bigger even than the werewolf that had nearly killed Isaac and Jasmin in New York.

I’d only thought that the night around me was dark, but now I could see that I’d been wrong. The night still felt dark, but it was nothing compared to the darkness that streamed off of the creature. It was like nothing I’d ever seen.

I wanted to say that it was a dark light, but even with my heart trying to tear itself free of my chest I still knew that was a contradiction. Darkness was an absence of light, but this darkness acted like light, reached out with greedy tendrils in an effort to fill the space around the thing slowly advancing toward me.

The blackness was strong enough that it was hard to make out details. I’d already registered the fact that it was huge. The claws flexing at the ends of its fingers were longer than my arms and I got an impression there were more teeth crammed into its mouth than could have physically fit inside of the pit housing them.

The ground shook slightly as it approached. I needed to get away, needed to run—until my heart exploded inside of my chest if necessary—but I was having a hard time looking away from its eyes. They were green and seemed to flicker, moving inside of the deep sockets in its head as though they were made out of some kind of grotesque fire.

I’d always thought of green as a color that symbolized life, but in this instance green had been perverted into something unclean, something that devoured life and left behind only ruin.

“You can’t escape me.”

Its voice sounded like plates of chitin sliding across each other, like a billion insects chittering in unison.

“What do you want?”

It was stupid. In the back of my mind I knew that nothing I was experiencing was real, but part of me couldn’t help but act as though this was all real, as though the creature was something that could be reasoned with.

“The death of everything you hold dear, the destruction of everything you stand for.”

I opened my mouth to tell it that I didn’t understand, but before I could get the words out, it sprang towards me. Nothing that big should have been able to move so quickly. I’d spent most of the last six months watching werewolves and shape shifters fight. I’d been exposed to unbelievable speed, to people who were so preternaturally fast that they could cover a dozen yards before I could even blink, but this was more than that. It didn’t just cross the distance between us, it was as though it teleported, as though the space simply ceased to exist for one critical instant.

The impossibly long claws took me in the stomach, pierced my flesh at the same time that they sent me into a state of shock. I tried to push myself off of them in a vain attempt to get free so that I could flee from something faster than thought, but it picked me up.

“So easy. I thought maybe you would be a challenge, that you would be stronger than your friends. Will you beg for me to end your life too?”

Its words didn’t make any sense. I’d never been the strong one. Alec, Jasmin, Dominic and even Rachel all had sources of strength that I’d never possessed. The very act of trying to understand what its words meant pulled my mind out of the shock that had been cushioning me from the pain up until then.

It was like having bars of liquid fire shoved into my gut. I’d spent months suffering from emotional wounds that had come within inches of destroying me. I’d thought that nothing could equal the agony I’d felt then, but this was a whole new kind of pain. It was like agony and despair all rolled up into one terrible package.

For a split second I balanced on the edge of disaster. I wanted to give up, to give into the pain and surrender, to let it carry me away into oblivion, but then I thought about Alec.

He needed me. Shawn’s gift had settled that particular question as far as the future of the rebellion went. As hard as it was to believe, without Alec and me, the rest of my friends were doomed. With me by Alec’s side they had a chance, slender though it was.

It was more than that though. I’d heard enough stories about how life in the pack had been while I’d been gone to know that Alec had been under incredible stress after I left Sanctuary. He’d dealt with things with admirable determination, but when you came right down to it he needed me in the same way that I needed him.

I wasn’t going to give up and sentence him to a life of loneliness simply because fighting back against this thing hurt.

Thinking about Alec sent a warm rush of energy humming through me. The pain was still there, but the tingling power that had filled me to the point where I nearly couldn’t contain it had somehow muted the pain to a point where I could function again.

“I’m not scared of you.”

Even as I said the words, I kicked off against the creature’s arm with every ounce of strength I could muster. In the real world I never could have hoped to muster enough force to tear myself free of three-foot claws, but in this particular dream I did exactly that.

The pain spiked as I hurled myself back and up, but I’d known that would be the case and I gritted my teeth in a vain effort to stop myself from screaming again. The creature started to bring its other hand around, trying to rip me out of the air, and I knew that would be the end of everything.

In that instant I needed to be faster, and this time reality conformed itself to my needs in the way that dreams sometimes allow. I sailed up over the grasping, deadly points of the creature’s claws seemingly moving in slow motion, but still somehow managing to be faster than the nightmare that had been chasing me.

I should have crashed to the ground on my back, but instead the dream once again molded itself to my needs. I tucked my legs and turned what should have been a disastrous, leg-breaking landing into a graceful backflip.

It wasn’t something I could do in real life. I didn’t even know how to tumble, let alone have the guts to do it in the middle of a fight for my life, but somehow it all came together for me and for one impossibly long second I felt a kind of weightless, perfection that would have probably haunted me forever if I’d been able to dwell on the feeling.

Rock shattered, crushed into powder under my feet from the force of my landing, and then I spun and took off at a run.

It was insane. I was still bleeding and I hadn’t been able to outrun the creature even when I’d been at my best, but apparently I was firmly in flight mode.

I could hear the creature behind me, claws chipping away at the rock as it used them for extra traction while giving chase. My mind whirled desperately, looking for a weapon or a refuge, but this time my surroundings proved stubbornly uncooperative.

I took another step, hands forward to help propel me up the incline, and then I was at the top of the climb. I was trapped. There was twenty feet of flat ground and then beyond that a ravine that was more than fifty feet across.

Alec would have turned and attacked the creature, using his superior position to get at its head and neck, but I wasn’t Alec. I was already gasping for breath, but I reached deep inside and tapped into some of the energy that had brought me this far. It was leaking out in time with the blood that had already soaked my pants, but there was enough left for one more good sprint.

I crossed the open expanse of rock in three impossibly long strides. I took my speed as a good sign, as proof that my dream was about to conform to my needs, and then threw myself across the ravine.

There was a glimmer of something on the other side that looked like it might be a safe landing spot, and that was what I was aiming for. I reached towards that spot with my mind and pulled with everything I had, willing the future I wanted into being.

I heard the creature scream in rage, a raspy roar that made my blood freeze, but it was too late—I was already two-thirds of the way across the ravine and showed no signs of slowing. A grin started to force its way past my concentration, and then suddenly the cliff seemed to get further away from me.

The shock as I started to fall was so complete that for a second my mind refused to function. I was dead…only a tiny voice kept trying to tell me that it was impossible to die in a dream.

Was I dreaming? Suddenly I wasn’t so sure. Maybe I’d simply had some kind of psychotic break from the stress of dealing with the attack on the estate. It was possible for multiple psychological blows to send someone over the edge like that.

First there had been Dad and Cindi dying in that car wreck and then I’d nearly died more times than I could count. Really, it was a surprise that I hadn’t completely melted down when Alec and I had broken up.

It hit me with a suddenness that took my breath away. What if everything that had happened since the accident had all been nothing more than some kind of massive hallucination? What if none of it had been real?

The universe felt like a crystal goblet vibrating a hairsbreadth away from high C. All it would take was the slightest change in pitch for everything to shatter. Life had gotten a lot harder since the accident, but that had always felt like a fair trade in exchange for having Alec in my life. The thought of going back to how I’d been, a broken little doll with nothing to look forward to, no purpose other than just getting through the day, was more than I could handle and something in the depths of my mind started to unravel.

I probably would have blacked out again, returning to the welcome oblivion of one of my panic attacks, if not for the warm, tingly energy flowing through me. That energy was Alec’s. It had been one of his defining characteristics for as long as I’d known him.

I could very nearly feel his arms wrapped around me and that pulled me back from the edge of insanity. Alec was too amazing to be nothing more than a figment of my imagination. Even in the middle of the worst kind of psychotic break, I still wouldn’t have been capable of imagining a version of reality where I ended up with him.

People sometimes say that someone—or something—is too good to be true, but this was the exact opposite of that. Alec was too good not to be true, and that was all the reassurance that I needed. Besides, I wasn’t sure that it was possible to feel this much pain in the middle of a hallucination.

Then again, it wasn’t supposed to be possible to feel pain in the middle of a dream either. That was worrisome. Alec being real didn’t necessarily prove that I wasn’t falling. In fact, it actually made more sense that a mind facing death would come up with reasons why nothing it was experiencing was real. There were probably lots of people who fell to their deaths convinced that they were just about to wake up from a nightmare.

No, I could see myself doing that, but everything that had happened during the last few minutes was too far outside even the normal dream craziness for me to believe it was all real. This had to be a dream. Maybe the pain was just a side effect of the dream power that Mallory was convinced I had.

I was still falling; my brush with insanity had taken no more than a second, but I was moving impossibly fast and the ground wasn’t very far away.

This wasn’t my first falling dream and I relaxed as I fell the last hundred feet, expecting to wake up in the instant before I would have crashed into the ground. I started to drift free and then some kind of heavy pressure pushed me back into my body.

I screamed again, my mind clawing desperately for some escape, and then another wave of energy crashed through me and my eyes popped open.

I was safely in my bed at the back of Alec’s massive RV. The chase and fall had been nothing more than a bad dream, a dream that was swiftly slipping away from me despite my best efforts to hold onto it for analysis.

There was something about what I’d just experienced that put it in a category all of its own. It was more than just seeing the world in shades of glowing white or the fact that I’d felt such intense pain. There was something fundamentally different about this dream, something that felt important.

It was right on the edge of my mind, like I’d started to say something and then had the word I’d wanted to use dissolve out of my memory. Maybe I would have managed to pin it down if I hadn’t realized a second later that Alec’s warm, muscular arms were wrapped around me.

“Are you okay, Adri?”

I couldn’t think of a better surprise to wake up to. Alec and I were still sleeping separately despite the temptation to do otherwise. Waking up and finding Alec in bed with me sent thoughts of my nightmare tumbling out of my skull.

“I think so—what happened?”

“I was about to ask you the same question. You started screaming a little while ago. I came back to check on you and saw that you were thrashing around hard enough that you’d broken the bookshelf.”

I didn’t want to give Alec a reason to let go of me, so I didn’t move very far, but I turned my head enough to see the pile of books on the far end of the bed.

“Wow, I’m lucky I didn’t get brained by one of them.”

“Yeah. In hindsight maybe it wasn’t the best idea to mount a shelf above the bed like that. I was worried you were going to break the other one as well so I immobilized your arms. I’ve been trying to wake you up for nearly five minutes. Bad dream?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“You want to talk about it?”

“Actually I do, but I don’t seem to remember much about it. I think something was chasing me, but that’s about all that stuck with me.”

“You’re sure there’s nothing else?”

“I don’t know…maybe the sense that it wasn’t a normal dream, but I couldn’t tell you for sure what made it special. I’m sure exhausted though. I feel like I’ve been running for hours—I was less tired than this when I went to bed.”

“There’s a lot of that going around.”

It was the kind of casual remark that I’d caught Alec making from time to time lately. I wasn’t even sure he was aware of what he was doing, but it almost seemed like he was trying to give those around him a heads up without actually coming right out and saying point blank that there was a problem with something.

It was the kind of thing that could be problematic in a leader if he wasn’t doing it on purpose, but I hadn’t been able to bring myself to point it out to him. Most everyone else didn’t know him well enough for it to be a problem and I was reluctant to make him any more of a closed book than he already was.

I opened my mouth and then decided once again against saying anything. Instead I turned in his arms so I was facing him. It was a calculated risk. There was always a chance that he’d take my moving as a reason to let go of me and sit up, but I kept his right arm trapped underneath my body and this time he didn’t move.

Looking into his eyes was like entering an entirely new universe, one where I was completely happy. Alec could fake a lot of emotions on those occasions where it became necessary, but he couldn’t fake the level of love and commitment that I saw reflected back at me in the quiet moments when it was just the two of us.

If his comment had been the slightest bit less concerning I would have just sat there gazing into his eyes for as long as he was willing to remain in one place, but I knew there was something important he wasn’t telling me.

“What’s going on, Alec?”

“This isn’t general knowledge, so don’t say anything to Donovan or the others, but it doesn’t look like Dream Stealer has lost interest in Kristin. All the signs point to him having singled her out as the weak link in the pack.”

“What does that mean? I know a little bit about Dream Stealer, but obviously not enough.”

“It means he’s torturing her every night in her sleep in an effort to break her. He doesn’t do it often, but he’s taken down entire packs this way. He picks out a target, either someone he thinks is weaker than the rest of the pack or someone who’s got access to something particularly important, and then he makes every night hell until they finally snap. Once that happens they’ll do anything to get him to stop hurting them.

“For someone who’s been through that, there’s no secret they won’t disclose, no ally they won’t betray, no murder they won’t commit. Sometimes he only has to break one person, sometimes he has to break half the pack, but in the end he’s always managed to achieve his goal.”

“That’s…well, it’s beyond terrible. Are you sure he’s targeted Kristin?”

“Yeah. Ash says that she’s thrashing around in her sleep every night and she’s so tired that she drops off to sleep as soon as she stops moving. It was questionable before, but it’s become pretty clear lately that she’s his target.”

I closed my eyes to stop them from tearing up. Kristin wasn’t my favorite person. She was a little too pushy for the two of us to ever be close friends, but she didn’t deserve to be put through what Alec was describing.

“She mentioned that she was having issues with him before the attack on the house, but she seemed pretty sure that he would leave her alone if she could just tough things out for a week or two.”

Alec gave me a sad smile that told me he knew exactly what I was feeling. “Yeah. So far that’s all that anyone has been able to do where Dream Stealer is concerned. He’s not omnipotent so if you can manage to fight him off for several nights running then there is a chance that he’ll reassess the situation and come at the pack through someone else.”

“So if you win then it just means that he’ll go after someone else close to you? That doesn’t seem like much of a victory.”

“It’s not. For the last few decades he hasn’t even had to break people to accomplish his ends. Once it becomes apparent that he’s decided to target a pack, it usually just disintegrates as everyone tries to get far enough away from each other that there’s no reason for him to continue to target any of them.”

“He turns families against each other.”

“Yeah, I’m afraid so. There’s a reason that nobody has come out in open rebellion against the Coun’hij since they killed my father. Between Agony, Dream Stealer and Puppeteer there’s never been any doubt as to where the balance of power rests. Agony was their scalpel, Puppeteer has always been a blunt instrument, and Dream Stealer is like a virus, just looking for a weakened host he can use to create a pandemic. Even someone like Jaclyn Annikov has had to be very circumspect about disagreeing with the Coun’hij in public.”

“We can’t let him do this to Kristin, Alec. There has to be a way to stop him. You’ve already killed Agony and you proved that Puppeteer isn’t unbeatable. If we can find a way to neutralize Dream Stealer, then the Coun’hij will fall overnight.”

“I wish that was true, Adri. I killed Agony, but we beat Puppeteer as much by luck as anything else. It’s going to be a long road to defeating the Coun’hij, but I promise I’m doing everything I can right now. There isn’t anything I can do directly to protect Kristin, so Ash and Isaac are going to take her somewhere they can keep her isolated and make sure she can’t hurt herself or the rebellion either one.

“To be honest, I’d hoped initially that I’d be able to stop Dream Stealer from getting at any of my people. I seem to be able to nullify most other powers. I stopped Agony’s cuts from scarring like they should have, I can stop Grayson from being able to send people into convulsions, it didn’t seem that much of a stretch to think that I’d be able to nullify Dream Stealer’s ability to dream walk, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.”

“You didn’t stop Dominic from being able to heal people and you didn’t seem to do anything to nullify Shawn’s gift either.”

“Yeah, unfortunately there’s still far too much that I don’t know about my ability. I need time to explore its limits, but time is the one thing that we don’t have. Many of the shape shifters who gathered in Sanctuary before the attack did so because they thought that my gift would protect them from Dream Stealer and Puppeteer. Now that they know that’s not the case we’re going to have a much more difficult time adding to our numbers.”

“Are you second-guessing the decision to split everyone up?”

“A little, but I still don’t see another way forward. Dream Stealer always does more damage in bigger groups. It’s harder for him to get his hooks into someone unnoticed in small groups, and by compartmentalizing our operations we can limit the amount of information he has access to at any one time. When you throw in the fact that Puppeteer can only be in one place at any given time, it just makes sense to try to make sure we don’t offer them a big, stationary target to come after.”

“So we scatter and hide while Kristin suffers.”

“For now. It all comes back to us needing to find the Coun’hij’s base. If we can do that then we have a chance of forcing the fight on terms that favor us. I can’t fight Dream Stealer on his home turf, but if we can pin him down in the real world then Jaclyn, Grayson or I can easily make sure he never tortures anyone else again.”

Alec had been serious about compartmentalizing his plans, but so far I seemed to be one of the few exceptions. I appreciated that fact because it gave us one more reason to spend time together, one more thing to talk about, but it created a potential problem that we were going to have to talk about.

I told myself that I wasn’t bringing that issue up because there was something else more important that I needed to ask Alec, but even as I asked my other question I knew I was mostly just waiting because I was scared of what his reaction might be.

“You don’t seem as confident in our ability to defeat the Coun’hij as I expected you to be. I thought it has always just been an issue of us not knowing where they are located.”

“That’s the main thing, the only thing that I can point to as being a concrete problem, but there are a lot of unknowns. For decades there have been rumors that there are other members of the Coun’hij who keep their identities hidden, hybrids every bit as powerful as Agony or Dream Stealer or Puppeteer.”

“Why would they do that? Wouldn’t it make sense to present the scariest front possible in order to make sure that the packs are too intimidated to rise up against the Coun’hij?”

“Your guess is as good as mine. There is a lot to be said for making sure everyone knows exactly how big a stick you’re wielding, but there is also something to the idea of keeping your enemies guessing. The less they know about your true capabilities the less they can do to neutralize your advantages through superior planning. You could argue that between Puppeteer, Agony and Dream Stealer the Coun’hij had a plenty big enough stick to threaten the packs with.”

“You’re not convinced that’s the reason though.”

“Not entirely. There are rumors that some of the Coun’hij hide their names and abilities because their gifts are so terrible that if the packs knew about them they’d rise up in a united group and try to overthrow the Coun’hij despite the blood bath that would almost certainly result.”

“And if those rumors are true, then the mere fact that you’re being so successful puts us in more danger, because that’s the kind of thing that would cause the really scary members of the Coun’hij to finally get involved.”

Alec nodded gravely. “Exactly. It’s one of those things I can’t plan around because I don’t have enough information, but it’s there in the back of my mind with every decision I make. It’s like my own personal boogeyman.”

I’d already wrapped my arms around Alec after turning to face him, but now I squeezed him harder. “It’s going to be okay, Alec. You’re going to find a way through this. We don’t know what’s coming or who else we might be up against, but we do know that it’s possible for us to win.”

“You’re putting an awful lot of trust in Shawn’s gift, and he never said we could win, just that it wasn’t guaranteed that we were going to lose.”

“No, I’m putting an awful lot of trust in you. Shawn’s gift was just a nice confirmation of what I already knew. If you really put your mind to it there isn’t anything you can’t do. Your gift has fully manifested and we have an impressive list of allies that include Jaclyn and Grayson. You can do this, Alec, and I love that you’ve chosen to stand up to the Coun’hij. You’re not doing it because you want the power; you’re doing it because it’s the right thing to do, the thing that will give your people a chance to be free for the first time since the monarchy fell.”

He looked at me in amazement and this time the smile that was tugging at the corner of his mouth was a happy one. “You do realize that most people don’t consider living under a monarchy to be a shining example of freedom, right?”

“Most people don’t have to deal with the complexity of shape shifter existence. You were right all of those months ago when you told me that shape shifters can’t live by the same rules that humans live by. Even the weakest of you are still incredibly dangerous and when you throw in the fact that you’re in the middle of three wars while trying to keep your existence a secret from the humans, it becomes painfully evident that your people need a stronger central authority than would be ideal for a bunch of suburban soccer moms. Besides, living under the rule of a Graves is the one sure way to guarantee that you’ll be treated justly.”

That earned me an eye roll. “My ancestors weren’t perfect and I’m even further away from perfection than they were.”

“I don’t know, you look pretty perfect from right here.”

That broke through the last of Alec’s defenses. He was always less guarded around me than he was around most of the rest of the pack, but my favorite times were when all of the walls came down and I saw him without any pretenses.

There was an incredible gentleness to Alec Graves that he kept carefully hidden for fear that his enemies would use it against him. He wasn’t wrong to do so. Someone like Puppeteer would do anything to exploit something he perceived as a weakness, but it wasn’t a weakness, at least not in my book.

Alec fought so hard precisely because he cared. He would attack despite all the odds because he couldn’t bear to let someone he cared about die if he had a chance to save them. The Coun’hij wasn’t capable of understanding that any more than Brandon had been.

Every momentous change in our life could be traced back to that one thing and it had caught our enemies by surprise each time. Alec had fought Brandon to save me and triggered his power, and then he’d faced off against Agony in order to save Jasmin and Isaac and brought his power fully under control.

Even his decision to try and reestablish the monarchy had resulted from the fact that he couldn’t bear to see packs being torn apart by the likes of Dream Stealer. The smart thing would have been for Alec to take a less confrontational approach, pretend to ally himself with the Coun’hij and bide his time while he gathered allies. It would have been the smart thing to do, but it wouldn’t have been the right thing to do and so he’d never even considered it.

“Adriana Paige, I don’t deserve you, but I’m very glad that you came into my life. I never would have made it this far without you.”

I opened my mouth to tell him he wasn’t giving himself enough credit, but he didn’t let me get the words out. He kissed me and there wasn’t anything hesitant about this kiss. I had a split second to be glad I’d switched to that new, longer-lasting mouthwash and then I was swept away in the moment.

Alec’s arms around me tightened to the point where the pressure was just short of painful and I loved every second of it. It was like the ultimate expression of strength and manliness. He could have crushed me without even trying, but he wouldn’t because even now Alec was in complete control of himself. That control was sexy in ways I couldn’t even begin to explain.

I reached up and cupped his face as I returned the kiss, shaking from the thrill of having him close to me, giddy from the buzz of his shape shifter energy coursing back and forth between his bare skin and my hands, face and arms.

His lips were perfectly firm and insistent against mine, and I wanted to let myself go fully, but I knew I couldn’t do that. I needed to tell him about my concern and if I didn’t do it now then there was a chance that I wouldn’t ever do it.

It was one of the harder things I’d ever done up to that point, but I pulled back from Alec and rather than keeping me there like some guys would have, he immediately relaxed his arms. He didn’t let go of me completely, but he gave me the option of breaking free if that was what I wanted.

“As much as I would love to stay like that forever, there is something we need to talk about.”

The old Alec would have become at least a little guarded after a lead-in like that, but all he did now was raise one eyebrow in a questioning manner. I took a deep breath and then forced the words out.

“What if I’m being attacked by Dream Stealer?”

“No, that’s not possible…”

I cut him off before he could finish. “Alec, you have to be rational about this. I was thrashing around and screaming. I feel like I didn’t get a wink of sleep, and I have no recollection of what I was dreaming about so I can’t vouch for the fact that I wasn’t being tortured.”

He looked like he wanted to interject something, but I gave him a stern look and just kept on speaking.

“You said that Dream Stealer likes to target the weakest individuals in a given pack, especially if they have access to important stuff. In case you haven’t been keeping score, that’s basically a perfect description of me. You need to start cutting me out of some of the planning. I probably already know too much, but at least if you start keeping me in the dark now you’ll be able to limit the amount of damage I do when he breaks me.”

Alec shook his head at me. “Are you done?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“Thank goodness. I was half expecting you to say something about locking you in the bathroom until we could make arrangements to ship you off to some kind of makeshift prison four states over.”

I shrugged. “Now that you mention it, that’s not a bad idea. I would have eventually suggested something like that—I just hadn’t thought things out completely yet.”

“I guess I should just be grateful that distancing yourself from me wasn’t the first thing that you thought of.”

His light, joking tone brought a smile to my face despite my best efforts, which just made me want to punch him in the arm.

“This is serious, Alec.”

He sighed. “I agree, but I don’t think there is a need to do anything drastic right now. Dream Stealer is something of an enigma, but while we don’t know very much about him as an individual, the packs—even the sympathizer packs—have been keeping as close an eye on his activities as possible for the last couple hundred years. There’s never been any kind of evidence of him working on two people at one time.

“There have been about a dozen times where he took a pack apart by breaking two of its members and even a few instances where he turned three people in order to accomplish his goals, but he always attacked them one at a time, even when he appeared to be working under some kind of a time limit.”

“So as long as he’s still trying to break Kristin that means I’m safe.”

“Yes, which means that your nightmare was just that—a normal, subconscious-acting-up nightmare. Ash will keep a very close eye on Kristin and as soon as there are any signs that Dream Stealer has either succeeded or given up trying to break her, we’ll get a call letting us know that we need to start keeping a closer eye on everyone else.”

I closed my eyes for a second as I tried to think through all of the ramifications of what he’d just told me.

“I suddenly feel like an even bigger jerk than I did a few seconds ago. Kristin is suffering unspeakable things just so I can be safe. It doesn’t make any sense. Out of all of the possible options, why choose her? It makes more sense to go after me.”

“That’s not true, Adri. It actually makes a lot of sense to get Kristin out of the picture. In a lot of ways her visions make her the ultimate wild card. As long as she’s in play and on our side there’s no way for the Coun’hij to guarantee that she won’t ruin their plans by telling us something that we couldn’t possibly know.”

“But her visions are so unpredictable…”

“Yeah, but even so they could make all of the difference. If Dream Stealer hadn’t locked her into some kind of feedback loop she would have been able to warn us of the attack against the estate. If we’d known that was coming even just ten minutes before the werewolves actually arrived, we could have changed the outcome there in a big way.”

“You’re right. If we’d been close together and waiting for them we wouldn’t have lost most of the people who died that night.”

My words came out rough, but that wasn’t a surprise, not considering the way that my throat seemed to be trying to close itself off. Alec pulled me close again, but this time there wasn’t any passion to his embrace, just the comfort that I so desperately needed.

“I’m so sorry, Adri. I know how much Carson meant to you. I wish I’d been there to help him.”

I shook my head. “It’s not your fault. If things had gone even a little bit differently your mom would be dead. Besides, Carson died the way that he lived—protecting someone who couldn’t protect themselves. He wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.”

“I’m not sure it was a worthwhile trade. I’m not sure even now that Mother really understands that Rachel is gone.”

Part of me wanted to pull back in shock, but I understood why Alec had said it. It wasn’t that he didn’t love his mother; he was just struggling with losing so many people.

“She’s still there somewhere, Alec. You just need to give her more time to come back from that kind of a loss.”

Alec sighed, but he finally met my eyes again. “How can you be so sure when I’m plagued with doubts? Tactically speaking, going after my mother was the worst decision I could have made.”

“I’m sure because you couldn’t have made any other decision and still have been the man I love. I’m sure because I knew Carson much better than you did and I know that he hated the fact that his life had been spent pursuing violence. The only thing that made his choices bearable was the fact that he was able to use his skills to protect people who were weaker than him. He never would have agreed to let your mother die in exchange for saving his own life.

“More than that, I have a pretty good idea just how devastated I would be in your mother’s position. It was all I could do to keep on going when I left you and that was my decision. It would be a hundred times worse if you were taken from me. She’s retreated inside of herself because she’s trying to protect what’s left of the woman who must have been head over heels for your father. That’s good though because it means there’s something there to protect, some fragment worth trying to preserve. I’m not sure I could have done as much in her place. I would have just gone catatonic.”

Alec kissed my forehead, a chaste brief kiss, but one that still left my skin feeling like it was on fire, a pleasant, energizing fire. “You’re a lot stronger than you give yourself credit for, you know.”

I snuggled in closer to him, tucking my head into the spot where his shoulder and neck joined up. “Maybe you’re right, but I didn’t start out this way. Before I met you I was a shallow little girl who was little more than a collection of razor-edged shards. You are the one who put me back together and gave me a chance to become a real person again.”

“I think in this instance we’re going to have to agree to disagree.”

Alec’s words were little more than a whisper that teased stray strands of my hair into motion. He was making me feel tingly all over again, but this time it didn’t have to do with the otherworldly energy that he gave off by virtue of being a shape shifter. This was wholly the result of him making me feel like someone who was special enough to be worthy of him.

“There aren’t very many people who could have done what you just did, Adri.”

“What do you mean?”

“Dream Stealer’s power is dangerous, but it wouldn’t be half as bad if everyone was strong enough to tell someone when they thought he was after them. You are strong. A weak person would have just stayed quiet and hoped that they were just having a string of normal bad dreams.”

“I almost didn’t say anything.”

“But you did. You’re going to make a fine queen someday, Adri.”

Normally a comment like that would have been enough to give me the shakes, but I was too blissed out to let it worry me very much. I’d raised the possibility that I was being attacked. I’d done my part and now I could happily stay where I was, cuddling with Alec, for as long as he would hold still.

Unfortunately a few seconds later my phone started ringing. I tried to ignore it, but Alec wasn’t the type to ignore calls.

“Adri, are you going to get that?”

“No, voicemail was invented for precisely these kinds of moments. Nothing that anyone could be calling me about this early in the morning could possibly be important enough to get in the way of spending more time with you.”

“Isn’t that your mom’s ringtone?”

“Yeah.”

“I really think you should answer it. Your mom doesn’t call very often—she probably has something important to tell you.”

I shook my head, still steadfastly refusing to open my eyes. As long as I couldn’t see Alec’s face he couldn’t employ his most dangerous weapon against me. His words were already persuasive enough—I definitely didn’t want to have to try and resist the earnest, concerned look I knew was currently being directed at me.

“My mom doesn’t call about important stuff, Alec. You get important calls—you know the ones where someone’s life hangs in the balance. My mom just calls once a week or so to make sure she’s fulfilled her motherly duties.”

“She’s trying to change, Adri, but if you don’t give her a chance you can’t complain that the two of you still aren’t as close as you’d like to be.”

“Fine. You win, but don’t think that there won’t be consequences later on. The last thing you want is for my mom to decide to relocate to wherever we end up living once all this is over. It’s going to be very difficult for me to look very queenly if I’ve always got my mom hounding me about the fact that I’m not going to college like a good, sensible girl.”

“No consequence is too dear if it means a happy future mother-in-law. Be sure to tell her it was me who convinced you to answer her call.”

Alec rolled off the bed and ducked out of my room with a twinkle in his eye while I was still struggling to come up with a response. I threw my pillow at the swiftly closing door and then reached over and answered the phone.

“Hi, Mom.”

“Hi, Adri. Did I wake you?”

“Normally you would have. We just left Oregon yesterday so I’m still on Pacific Time, but I had a bad dream that woke me up earlier than normal.”

“Sorry, sweetie. I didn’t know. I just figured that you were still in Utah.”

“It’s okay, you didn’t know that we’ve been travelling lately. If I get really off of Utah time I’ll put my phone on silent before I go to bed. How did your latest shoot go?”

Talking about her work was always safe territory and it was a good bet that she’d just finished an assignment sometime in the three days since we’d last talked. Russ was having a good effect on my mom when it came to convincing her to be less of a workaholic, but it was going to probably take years before she toned things down to the level most people would have called normal.

“It was really good. That’s the first time that I’ve been down to Belize. You wouldn’t believe how beautiful it was down there and the shoot went acceptably. The models were all great to work with, my equipment all arrived on schedule, and the weather cooperated completely.”

“Wow, Mom. I think your standards are getting even more stringent. If the weather and models were all taking orders and you had your gear it seems like that’s the definition of perfection to me.”

“Adriana Paige, you may be a millionaire and living on your own, but that doesn’t mean I can’t show up and spank you if you get too big for your britches.”

Part of me wanted to take exception with her tone, but mostly I was too busy envisioning Mom storming into the RV and being served tea by Donovan while he calmly explained to her that it simply wasn’t done to administer any kind of physical discipline to the future queen of the North American shape shifters.

Alec, on the other hand, would probably hold her coat for her while she tried to administer said punishment.

“Sorry, Mom. You do have to admit that there isn’t much more you could ask for on a photography shoot, though…”

“I suppose you’re right. The work side of things was fine. I guess I was just sad that Russ wasn’t able to fly down with me. We were scheduled to go down together, but then Patrick called at the last minute with something urgent and everything changed. It put me really out of sorts. Then you throw in the fact that my bodyguard was hassling some of the support staff, and it felt like the whole world was collapsing in on itself.”

Bodyguard? That was new—I’d thought I was the only Paige forced to deal with having a minder less than twenty feet away at all times. I went to ask Mom what she meant, but she’d already moved on, talking as fast as always.

“Adri, Russ hasn’t been acting like himself lately. Do you think that he’s losing interest?”

I almost dropped the bottle of water that I’d just finished uncapping. “Seriously, Mom? This is Russ we’re talking about. He’s the last person you need to worry about stringing you along.”

“I don’t know, Adri. He’s acting really different lately. He’s been travelling a lot more than normal, and he’s stuck me with a bodyguard. It was bound to happen really. Once the initial excitement wore off, there was no way I was going to be able to keep someone so eligible interested for the long haul.”

I recapped my water bottle as I reflected on just how alike we were. We had so many differences that it was sometimes hard to remember that my mom and I shared a lot of the same insecurities.

“Mom, I don’t think you’re being fair to Russ. He’s not the kind of guy to leap without looking. If he proposed to you then you’re exactly what he’s looking for. I know he could have almost any girl he set his eyes on, but I know a little bit about dating those kinds of guys. If something is bothering you then you need to sit down and talk to him about it.”

There was a long pause as my mom digested my words. “You’re right. You’re not telling me anything that I haven’t already told myself, but I just haven’t been able to bring myself to broach the subject with him. What if I don’t like the answer he provides? I’m not sure I’m ready for all of this to end.”

“Who says it has to end?”

“There’s something going on, Adri. Maybe you’re right and he’s not losing interest in me, but that doesn’t mean that things are okay. For all I know, he’s started trafficking drugs. Actually, that would explain a lot.”

A chill worked its way up my spine. “What do you mean, Mom?”

“I don’t know. There’s the bodyguard, despite the fact that Belize isn’t any more dangerous than any of the other places I’ve been to recently, but there’s also the fact that when I stopped by for lunch last week Russ was seeing some guy out that isn’t one of his usual associates.”

“Some guy?”

“Yeah, you know the type. Tattoos, piercings, looked like he could bench-press a small car. It didn’t look like they were on the best of terms either.”

I closed my eyes for several seconds and then took a deep breath. “You said that your bodyguard was causing problems at the shoot—tell me more about that, Mom.”

“I don’t know, I wasn’t watching. I was changing lenses and looked up as Jonas put some poor guy in an arm bar and then threw him off of the location. I’m right, aren’t I? Russ is working with the Mafia or something, isn’t he?”

“Is Jonas there with you now, Mom?”

“No, he picks me up whenever I need to leave and then checks the house when he drops me off, but he doesn’t stay here in the apartment with me. Adri, how bad is this? Is Russ some kind of criminal?”

“I think it’s too soon to be jumping to those kinds of conclusions, Mom, but I don’t think it’s too soon to begin taking some precautions.”

“What do you mean when you say precautions?”

“I mean you need a bodyguard of your own, one who’s on your payroll rather than on Russ’. Ideally you ought to get two bodyguards until you get to the bottom of whatever is going on right now.”

“I don’t…wait, you seriously think that I need three bodyguards? I wasn’t even thrilled about the prospect of having one bodyguard and now you’re telling me that I need three?”

“No, I’m telling you that you need a bodyguard you can trust who can worry about external threats without having to worry about what Jonas is going to do.”

“Adri, you’re completely overreacting! What has gotten into you?”

She was aiming for indignant, but she wasn’t succeeding. She sounded exactly like what she was, scared but trying very, very hard to hide it.

“Mom, this is my world now. If I had questions about photography I’d come to you and I’d listen to your advice. Worrying about bodyguards and assassins is my photography. You need to pay attention to what I’m telling you.”

I had her on the back foot for the first time in a very long while and I wasn’t going to let up now, not when her life might very well depend on it.

“Listen, Mom. As soon as we’re done you need to call the two most successful models you’ve worked with and ask them for bodyguard suggestions. Models, the really successful ones at least, probably deal with stalkers on a regular basis. I’ll go talk to Alec and see if he has anyone he can put you in contact with, but his guys are going to stand out like a sore thumb in the kind of circles you run in.”

It sounded like she was on the verge of hyperventilating.

“Mom, get a pencil and some paper and write this down. You need to get two bodyguards hired before the day is out and then you need to schedule a conversation with Russ. Make sure that you pick the location. Make it somewhere public, but run it past whoever you hire before you finalize things with Russ.”

“Adri, you sound like a spy.”

“Mom, I don’t hear you writing. This is important.”

“Russ is going to feel like I don’t trust him. I don’t think I can do this. I’m not sure I can afford to hire one bodyguard, let alone two.”

“Right now you already don’t trust him, Mom. Best-case scenario right now is that he’s keeping something back from you, something dangerous enough that he thinks you need a bodyguard. The worst-case scenario is that he’s put Jonas there to make sure he can control you. If Russ is just worried about you then he’s not going to resent you taking your own precautions. As for the money, you aren’t paying that ridiculous tuition now that I’m here, but if you need more money I can send you anything within reason.”

I could hear the sound of a pencil on paper and some of the tension inside of me started to loosen now that she was taking the situation seriously.

“Okay, Adri. I’ll start making calls as soon as I hang up. What should I be looking for as far as qualifications for a bodyguard?”

“I don’t know for sure, Mom. I’ve never been the one actually hiring our people. Once you’ve got some names ask the candidates to evaluate the other names on your list, that should help weed out the guys that are totally unqualified, but it’s still not perfect. I guess if you can find someone who helped protect a head of state that would be a bonus. Let me go ask Alec.”

I stood and started towards the door, but my mom brought me up short with a single question.

“Adri, how much danger are you in? When I was in Utah last time you made it sound like Alec was just being paranoid with all of the security arrangements. That wasn’t the case, was it?”

“I didn’t say anything that was untrue, Mom, I just let you think what you wanted to think.”

“Adri, I’m serious, how much danger are you in?”

“A lot. Probably more than you, but the difference is it was my decision to get involved with Alec and put myself in harm’s way. I knew what I was getting into. Russ is keeping you in the dark, which means you can’t even make an objective evaluation regarding how much danger you’re in.”

“What has he gotten you into, Adri? Is Alec some kind of drug dealer? I always thought it was suspicious that he had access to so much money. Have you even met his mother? The rumor back in Sanctuary is that she’s been dead for years.”

“Yes, I’ve met Samantha Graves and Alec didn’t ‘get me into anything,’ Mom. Like I said, I chose this. Alec isn’t doing anything wrong. The danger I’m in—that we are in—is because Alec is trying to stop some very bad people from doing terrible things.”

“Then he should call the police, that’s what they are there for, Adri. Don’t let him drag you into some kind of vigilante-inspired quest for glory.”

I wanted to yell at her, but I forced myself to keep my voice under control. My mother was older and more experienced than I was, but she wasn’t ready for the world I’d been living in since we’d arrived in Sanctuary. She was obsessing about my situation as a way of denying the seriousness of her own circumstances.

“The police can’t help us, Mom. They can’t do anything until after a law has been broken, and even then, sometimes there are criminals they aren’t qualified to deal with. You’re in the same situation now. The police aren’t going to be able to save you—you need to take steps of your own to make sure that you’re not a soft target.”

I opened the door to my room and looked out at the rest of the RV, but rather than the calm, ordered environment I’d grown to expect from our time on the road, I found the desperate motion of a group of people who were one step away from disaster. Alec was talking on the phone and the hand holding his cell had gone white from the effort of not crushing the device.

“What do you mean you don’t have eyes on them? I specifically told you to keep their compound under observation. Buildings don’t just disappear. If the satellite is still working then you should be able to see the compound and be able to confirm whether or not they’ve started evacuating.”

Alec turned towards Donovan and pointed at the laptop the butler was working on. “Fine, send the feed to Donovan’s machine. I want to see what you’re talking about for myself.”

Donovan’s inbox chimed as an email arrived, and then his screen flickered as he clicked on a link and a video feed started playing. It took me several seconds to realize what I was seeing. There was so much smoke filling the center of the screen that it was only the large fountain on the bottom left-hand corner that made it possible to tell that we were looking at an overhead view of the Bishop Compound in Chicago.

A heartbeat after I finally registered what was going on all of the phones in the RV started ringing at the same time.

“Mom, I’m sorry, but I have to go. I’ll call you back as soon as I can, but in the meantime make sure that you get those bodyguards.”

Hello, Everyone.

I once again lost track of the day, so I just got to the November rewards drawing.

I’m happy to announce that Anthony M was the winner for November. I’ve sent Anthony his advance reader copies of both Marked and Shattered, and will be sending off his signed copy of Riven shortly.

The Rabid Rewards program hasn’t generated much excitement, so I’ve gone ahead and shut down the program and awarded the rest of the people who took the time to fill out the form advance reader copies of both Shattered and Marked as a thanks for all of their efforts.

All the best,

Dean

For various reasons that are too complex to be worth getting into here, the Touched by Love bundle will be increasing in price to $1.99 sometime very soon. If you were on the fence about it, now’s your chance to grab it before the price goes up!

Thanks,

Dean

I can’t remember a time when I was more excited about the lineup of books that was headed your way!

Shattered and Marked are both available for pre-order, and they are both going to catch everyone by surprise. My advance readers continue to get more excited about the Reflections Universe with each book, and these two have been no exception to that rule.

My decision to re-arrange my work flow has seemed to yield all of the dividends I was hoping for. In July I wrote the first book in my new series (The Awakening–more on that in days to come). Then in Sept. and Oct. I wrote books #2 & #3 in that series.

At this point only Katie and my editors have had a chance to read any of this new world, but it’s going to take you all by surprise. The ‘magic’ is unique, and there is an incredible back story that each book reveals another layer of.

Today I finished writing Dark Reflections #5 (I’m playing around with the title of Burned, but not sure if I’ll stay with that one–what do you all think?)

I feel like each and every Dark Reflections book is better than the last, and DR #5 is no exception to that rule. There are several massive reveals in DR #5 and the ending is something that is going to take everyone by surprise.

Last year I wrote just over 581,000 words. This year I’ve written 722,000 words already and hope to knock out another 80,000-100,000 before December rolls around. Next year it is entirely possible I could hit 1 million words.

The current plan is for December, January & Feb will be spent writing a new series (probably a YA dystopian novel), then March will feature another book from the Reflections Universe, and April, May, & June will be another new series (hopefully a YA Space Opera).

July, August, and September will probably be another series altogether, and then I’ll write the next chapter of the Reflections Universe starting in October. Beyond that the crystal ball gets really cloudy, but even the plans I detailed out here are a little nebulous, so please don’t be too disappointed if things end up heading another direction.

So far over the course of my writing career I’ve written more than 2.2 million words (roughly double the size of the complete Harry Potter series). Of that 2.2 million words, 1.5 million has already been published, another 230k will be published in December, and  an additional 294k will be published in roughly the first half of next year.

If I’m able to keep up my more recent book per month pace, there’s a possibility that the last half of next year could see a book per month released, which is more than a little intimidating for me to write.

Still, a goal that hasn’t been written down is less likely to be achieved, and I’d really like to make 2015 a banner production and release year. Katie and I have committed to one more year of full-time writing, so I’m going to do everything I can to get as many books out as possible between now and Dec 2015 so that I can continue to do this for many more years to come!

A big thanks to all of you for everything you do!

Dean

I’m finally to the point where I can get into the specifics about the bundle I’ve been working on for months now!

It’s been a lot more work than expected (I read dozens of books in the process of finding the 11 authors that ended up in the bundle, and it would have taken even longer without the recommendations I got from all of you, and from other authors in the bundle), but I’m incredibly excited about this project.

Touched by Love combines the work of 11 of the best YA PNR and Urban Fantasy authors out there (plus me :))

We’re holding a drawing for signed paper copies of all 12 books–go here and scroll to the bottom of the page for the Rafflecopter and email entry options.

Here are all of the links to go buy it if you don’t need any more convincing than that:

Purchased the Touched by Love Bundle as an Ebook (just $.99):
From Amazon
From Apple iBooks
From Barnes & Noble
From Smashwords

(Kobo isn’t showing the right version-if you buy it there right now you’ll only get 4 books-so I’ve pulled down the link to Kobo. Sorry to everyone that usually shops there. I’ll keep an eye on that and let you know when it gets updated.)

If you want more information, here’s the descriptions of all of the books contained in the bundle!

Kiss of Fire (Rebecca Ethington)

Some people say love is perfect. But, I know the truth. Love is dangerous, and sometimes love can change your life, or end it.

Joclyn Despain has been marred by a brand on her skin. She doesn’t know why the mark appeared on her neck, but she doesn’t want anyone to see it, including her best friend Ryland, who knows everything else about her. The scar is the reason she hides herself behind baggy clothes, and won’t let the idea of kissing Ryland enter her mind, no matter how much she wants to.
The scar is the reason she is being hunted.

If only she knew that she was.

If only she had known that the cursed stone her estranged father sent for her 16th birthday would trigger a change in her. Now, she is being stalked by a tall blonde man, and is miraculously throwing her high school bully ten feet in the air.

Joclyn attempts to find some answers and the courage to follow her heart. When Ryland finds her scar; only he knows what it means, and who will kill her because of it.

Relentless (Karen Lynch) 

Sara Grey’s world shattered ten years ago when her father was brutally murdered. Now at seventeen, she is still haunted by memories of that day and driven by the need to understand why it happened. She lives a life full of secrets and her family and friends have no idea of the supernatural world she is immersed in or of Sara’s own very powerful gift.

In her quest for answers about her father’s death, Sara takes risks that expose her and her friends to danger and puts herself into the sights of a sadistic vampire. On the same fateful night she meets Nikolas, a warrior who turns Sara’s world upside down and is determined to protect her even if it’s the last thing she wants.

Sara’s life starts to spin out of control as she is hunted by an obsessed vampire, learns that her friends have secrets of their own and reels from the truth about her own ancestry. Sara has always been fiercely independent but in order to survive now she must open herself to others, to reveal her deepest secrets. And she must learn to trust the one person capable of breaking down the walls around her.

Hope(less) (Melissa Haag)

Our world is being judged, and we remain unaware.

In a world filled with people, Gabby is uniquely alone. The tiny glowing sparks that fill her mind and represent the people around her, confirm it.

Clueless regarding the reason behind her sight, Gabby struggles to find an explanation. A chance encounter leads her closer to the answers she has struggled to find and into a hidden society where fur is optional. There she meets Clay, the intense werewolf delusional enough to think he has a chance with her.

Gabby escapes back into her old life, but not quite alone. Clay follows her and silently makes a place for himself in her world. As if that isn’t enough to deal with, problems compound when other werewolves, ones with abnormally colored sparks, begin to stalk her.

Instead of gaining answers, her list of questions is growing. What do the other uniquely colored sparks mean? Is she not as alone as she thought?

Judgement has begun…

Broken (Dean Murray)

Adri Paige is too busy dealing with the emotional fallout from losing half of her family to deal with boys. At least she thought so until the two most intriguing guys in her new school take an interest in her.

Both boys are gorgeous and blessed with obscene amounts of money. They should have the emotional depth of note cards, but instead display undercurrents she doesn’t fully understand. Rumors the pair destroys peoples’ livelihoods seem ludicrous until she gets caught in the crossfire and her family almost loses their home. She’s increasingly unsure either boy is really human, and their rivalry is rapidly turning deadly.

Runes (Ednah Walters)

Seventeen-year-old Raine Cooper has enough on her plate dealing with her father’s disappearance, her mother’s erratic behavior and the possibility of her boyfriend relocating. The last thing she needs is Torin St. James—a mysterious new neighbor with a wicked smile and uncanny way of reading her.

Raine is drawn to Torin’s dark sexiness against her better judgment, until he saves her life with weird marks and she realizes he is different. But by healing her, Torin changes something inside Raine. Now she can’t stop thinking about him. Half the time, she’s not sure whether to fall into his arms or run.

Scared, she sets out to find out what Torin is. But the closer she gets to the truth the more she uncovers something sinister about him. What Torin is goes back to an ancient mythology and Raine is somehow part of it. Not only is she and her friends in danger, she must choose a side, but the wrong choice will cost Raine her life.

Entangled (Nikki Jefford)

Magic, Murder, & Romance – A Resurrection Spell Gone Wrong

Two months after dying, seventeen-year-old witch Graylee Perez wakes up in her twin sister Charlene’s body. Until Gray finds a way back inside her own body, she’s stuck being Charlene every twenty-hour hours. Her sister has left precise instructions on how Gray should dress and behave. Looking like a prep isn’t half as bad as hanging out with Charlene’s snotty friends and gropey boyfriend.

The “normals” of McKinley High might be quick to write her behavior off as post-traumatic stress, but warlock Raj McKenna is the only person who suspects Gray has returned from the dead.

Now Gray has to solve the mystery of her death while working out a way to disentangle herself from Charlene’s body before she disappears for good.

Kindred (Erica Stevens)

What do you do when the one you love is also you worst enemy? Trapped in a destiny she does not want, Cassie finds herself lost and adrift, until he walks into her life, turning it upside down and awakening her in ways that she never dreamed possible.

Cassie is stunned and devastated to learn that she belongs to a long line of vampire slayers known as The Hunters. A murderous rampage by a group of elder vampires has left the Hunter line decimated and the remaining Hunters scattered around the world. With her friends Chris and Melissa’s aid, Cassie struggles to rid the world of the monsters that murdered her parents. Though Cassie knows it is her fate, she chafes against her heritage, and is resentful of the shortened lifespan that has been placed upon her by the circumstances of birth. Struggling to get through every day, Cassie finds herself simply going through the motions of living. That is, until Devon arrives. Tall, dark, and mysterious his arrival turns the school, and Cassie’s life, upside down. Fighting against her fierce attraction to him, and the chaos he represents in her carefully ordered days, she is irresistibly drawn to him. Though worried that what she truly is will place Devon in danger, she is unable to fight her feelings for him. He is the one light, and the only source of hope she has in a world that revolves around death and fear. What she does not know is that Devon has some dark secrets of his own, secrets even more frightening and dangerous than hers. Secrets that threaten to tear them apart forever.

Ignited (Desni Dantone)

Seventeen year old Kris Young is on the run from a throng of superhuman golden-eyed freaks hell-bent on seeing her dead, and she doesn’t know why. Good thing she has her guardian angel to protect her…sort of.

Kris is aided by Nathan, the mysterious man that ends up being anything but angelic when he rescues her for the fourth time in fourteen years. Even if the handsome hero illusion is shattered by his harsh treatment of her, he knows how to fight this strange enemy and is determined to keep her safe at all costs.
As the body count rises in their wake, Nathan introduces Kris to a world in which not everyone is human and the battle lines between good and evil are clearly drawn. Kris’s piece in the puzzle is something neither is aware of and, as they uncover the truth, neither is prepared for what they find. Overcoming twists and revelations that shatter both of their lives, they discover that nothing is as it seems and nothing, least of all their hearts, are safe.

Significance (Shelly Crane)

Maggie is a seventeen year old girl who’s had a bad year. Her mom left, her dad is depressed, she’s graduating, barely, and her boyfriend of almost three years dumped her for a college football scholarship. Lately she thinks life is all about hanging on by a thread and is gripping tight with everything she has.

Then she meets Caleb.

She saves his life and instantly knows there’s something about him that’s intriguing but she is supposed to be on her way to a date with his cousin. But things change when they touch, sparks ignite. Literally. They imprint with each other and she sees their future life together flash before her eyes. She learns that not only is she his soul mate, and can feel his heartbeat in her chest, but there is a whole other world of people with gifts and abilities that she never knew existed. She herself is experiencing supernatural changes unlike anything she’s ever felt before and she needs the touch of his skin to survive. Now, not only has her dad come out of his depression to be a father again, and a pain as well, but Caleb’s enemies know he’s imprinted and are after Maggie to stop them both from gaining their abilities and take her from him. Can Caleb save her or will they be forced to live without each other after just finding one another?

Bound by Prophecy (Melissa Wright)

Aern’s only job is to protect the chosen. The trouble is, she’s the key to a prophecy and everyone wants her. Hiding a girl in the center of a secret war is tricky business, but when her sister shows up to take Aern hostage, all bets are off.

A slim brunette in borrowed jeans should be the least of his problems, but there’s something about Emily he just can’t put to rights. And it’s not her penchant for using hand tools as weapons or the fact that she seems immune to his sway.

Everything about her screams run. But when he discovers she’s working toward her own prophecy, he’s got no choice but to keep her safe. It might have been easy, if she didn’t think she was the chosen’s protector. When the opposition descends, their only hope is to stick together, but the truth unravels, and together might prove the biggest complication of them all.

Deadly Crush (Ashley Stoyanoff)

Dog Mountain is just like any other small town — peaceful and uneventful. Well, that is if peaceful means wolves howling all night, and uneventful means it’s overrun by pesky werewolves, then yes, Dog Mountain is just your average small town.

Jade Shaw has spent the last two years avoiding the pack. But when Aidan Collins moves to town, avoiding the dogs doesn’t seem possible. The pack wants him just as much as she does.

Determined to keep him out of the pack’s grasp, Jade does everything she can to gain his attention. Little does she know, Aidan is in deeper with the pack than she could have imagined, and competing for his attention is a deadly game, one she may not want to win.

Deep Blue Secret (Christie Anderson)

A sweet, mysterious teen romance with a refreshing fantasy twist.

California teen Sadie James thinks her life couldn’t get any better. She has great friends, an energetic mother she adores, and the beach practically in her own backyard. But her carefree life is turned upside down when she’s rescued by a mysterious and strangely familiar boy who won’t even tell her his name. Each time the boy appears, Sadie’s unexplainable attraction to him deepens along with her need to unravel his secrets. The boy is there to protect her, but as wonderful and exciting as it might be to have an irresistible boy with crystal green eyes protecting her every move, every minute of the day…why does Sadie need one? As Sadie finds answers, she realizes her life isn’t as perfect as she thought. Not only is she caught in a world of dangerous secret agents she never knew existed, but it turns out her true identity may be the greatest secret of all.

Purchased the Touched by Love Bundle as an Ebook (just $.99):
From Amazon
From Apple iBooks
From Barnes & Noble
From Smashwords

(Kobo isn’t showing the right version-if you buy it there right now you’ll only get 4 books-so I’ve pulled down the link to Kobo. Sorry to everyone that usually shops there. I’ll keep an eye on that and let you know when it gets updated.)

Chapter 1

Alec Graves
Roan Mountain State Park
Tennessee

The sword that whipped through the cool air was directed at my head, but I easily stepped back out of the way of the blow and then darted forward and stabbed at Carson’s chest. I heard a gasp of astonishment from Brindi at the ferocity of our attacks, but in truth we were relatively safe. We were using heavy practice swords that were more than capable of breaking even hybrid bones, but which lacked the fine edges that would have been required to actually cut off limbs and pierce flesh.

After our failed attempt at rescuing Agony, my people had split up. Jasmin, James and Jess had come back to Tennessee with Carson so that he could begin training me with a sword, but Carson had indicated that there wasn’t room for Jack’s people back at his cabin in Tennessee.

Jack had taken his people back to St Louis because he figured that they knew the city better than anyone the Coun’hij might send after them. It also had the added benefit of being the last place that anyone would expect him to go, but I suspected that mostly Jack just wanted to go home and get back to killing vampires.

He was as committed to trying to overthrow my father, Kaleb, as I was, but that didn’t mean either of us enjoyed killing our own kind. Most of the hybrids who worked directly for the Coun’hij were every bit as sadistic as Vincent and Brandon, but between the war with the jaguars south of the border and the various cities Kaleb and Puppeteer had tried to cleanse of vampires, the Coun’hij was spread pretty thin.

That meant that we weren’t always fighting guys like Brandon and Vincent. All too often we ended up fighting people like Alison, people who were just caught up on the wrong side of this war. Some of them actually thought we were the bad guys, but most of them fought because they had someone back home who would pay if they didn’t.

Conscripted troops would gladly turn on their masters the first chance they got, but Kaleb and the rest of the Coun’hij were experts when it came to covering themselves and manipulating everyone around them.

I didn’t think there was any way that the rank-and-file pack members would spontaneously rise up and join our side of the war, but Carson disagreed with me. We agreed that the Coun’hij was the worst thing that had ever happened to our people, but there were a lot of other points where we disagreed quite heatedly.

The question of how to proceed with the rebellion had become thorny, and it probably helped explain why Carson had come at me so much harder than normal on that last exchange.

I’d thrown everything I had into my stab at Carson, but I couldn’t seem to muster the kind of blinding speed that characterized all of his attacks. He easily knocked my blade to one side and then stepped forward and casually punched me in the side of the head.

It was humiliating. Carson was one of the best fighters I’d ever seen, with or without a sword. He didn’t have Brandon’s preternatural—even for a hybrid—speed and strength, but he was quick and he seemed to know the perfect counter to every conceivable attack. Against someone like Carson there was no shame in losing, but even he never should have been able to hit me with that kind of sucker punch.

I was better than that. I was no Brandon or Carson, but I’d spent half a decade holding my own in dominance fights, and I’d recently been involved in several weeks of heavy fighting with everyone from jaguars to vampires to Coun’hij enforcers. Nobody should be able to hit me like that without even really trying.

The massive seven-foot sword that I’d stolen from Kaleb was a weapon that would allow me to mow down regular hybrids once I mastered it. It would provide me with a reach advantage that would be almost impossible to overcome and I needed to learn how to use it if I was ever going to have a chance of killing Brandon, but so far I’d proven to be a terrible student.

Carson could have easily ripped my throat out rather than just cracking me alongside the head with his knuckles, and my beast didn’t like that we were being bested so easily.

Normally Carson used his ability—manipulating the emotions of everyone around him—to smooth over the tempers that inevitably rose to the surface whenever you had shape shifters training against each other. It was part of what made him such an incredible instructor, but today he’d either forgotten to use his ability or he’d decided that I needed to learn some kind of lesson.

It was even possible that he was waiting for me to ask for help calming my beast, but I wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction of begging. The balance of power in our relationship was already too one-sided. The first king of the wolves had trained his men without the benefit of Carson’s gift; I wasn’t going to be less than they’d been.

“You’re still too slow, Alec. You’re fighting like a hybrid rather than a wolf. That would work if you were using a rapier, but these are more like Scottish lowlander swords. If you went up against one of the Ancients like that he’d rip you to pieces before you even realized what hit you.”

Carson had stepped back out of the simple circle we’d drawn in the dirt, so I knew he wasn’t planning on coming at me again.

“I guess it’s a good thing that I’m not planning on going up against any Ancients any time soon. I’ll settle for just getting good enough to help you take down Brandon.”

It was the wrong thing to say and I knew it even before the words left my mouth, but with my beast growling in the back of my mind I couldn’t bring myself to care. Carson’s lips pulled back as his beast answered my verbal jab with a crackle of power.

“Send her away.”

Carson’s order came out just loud enough for me to hear it; there was zero chance that Brindi had heard. He was obviously angry at me, but he was still giving me a chance to save face, even around Brindi, who was still oblivious to most of the intricacies of pack dominance games.

“You don’t get to order me around. I appreciate you agreeing to teach me how to use this monstrosity, but I’m not going to let you edge yourself in and take over the show. We either do this as equals or we don’t do it at all. I’ll take my people and we’ll walk.”

Carson’s face didn’t change in the slightest. “You would walk away from the power I bring to the table? You would give that up and risk not being able to bring down the Coun’hij solely out of pride?”

I looked away from him and took in the slowly swaying greenery that surrounded our little clearing. It wasn’t an easy question to answer, but there weren’t any clues to be found in our surroundings. As always, the only answers were going to be the ones that I could hammer out myself.

“It’s not just about pride. I’m not going to help overthrow the Coun’hij just so that I can see it replaced with something worse. I like you, Carson, but I don’t know you well enough to swear fealty to you. There may come a time when I decide to bend my knee, but that isn’t now.”

“You mean to establish yourself as king.”

“Yes. I’ll have the clearest claim on the throne once Kaleb is dead.”

“Are you really so arrogant that you think you’re the only one who’s worthy of the kingship?”

“Maybe. I don’t think of it that way though. The packs need a symbol to rally around, and right now I’m the best symbol. Dream Stealer—just like Agony used to be—is compromised by the fact that he was part of the Coun’hij in the past. For now I’m that symbol and I’m also the only person I can trust completely to do the right thing with that kind of power.”

“Fine, I’m not ordering you to send her away, but I will not continue your lesson as long as she is here.”

It went beyond splitting hairs, but it provided just enough of the right kind of pretext. He had the right to establish the conditions under which he was willing to teach. I turned to Brindi and mustered the closest thing I could to a smile in my hybrid form.

“Brindi, would you please go back to the cabin and grab us a couple of bottles of water from the fridge?”

She frowned. I knew she hadn’t been able to hear Carson and me, but she wasn’t stupid. It was entirely possible that she’d picked up on some of the non-verbal clues that indicated that we weren’t particularly happy with each other.

Then again, she hated when I ordered her out of my sight for any reason. She knew that I wanted her to make progress breaking the skin addiction that made her constantly want to touch me, but she didn’t see the need.

Brindi had been addicted to a lot of different things during her life, and in her mind this was the first addiction without side effects. She would have gladly remained addicted to me forever.

“You’ve kept me at arm’s length all day, Alec. I’m practically shaking over here.”

She was exaggerating, but not by much. Still, as much as I would have liked not to take such a hard line with her, she’d proven more than once that she wasn’t above playing on my sympathies to get what she wanted.

“You know my terms, Brindi. If you want to remain here with me then you need to continue to actively work on your addiction, and you need to pull your weight around here.”

“Fine, but if I die from exposure on the way back, I’m going to haunt you for the next two hundred years.”

Carson watched until Brindi had disappeared around the bend in the trail that led back to the cabin, and then listened until he was certain that she wasn’t going to come back. My beast had mostly calmed back down by that point, but Carson reawakened the anger with his next statement.

“You understand that you’re a symbol, but you fail to grasp the full meaning of that. It’s just like with your swordwork. You understand the concepts, but you refuse to carry the principles to their logical conclusion. If you’re going to be a symbol then you need to be a symbol. Quit wasting your strength fighting the Coun’hij and fight our people’s true enemies. It is abhorrent that we wolves are killing each other while the jaguars, vampires and werewolves run around almost completely unchecked.”

I wrapped mental arms around my beast’s neck and pulled him up short, but there wasn’t anything I could really do about the crackling blast of energy that he discharged into the air. It would have been more than enough to force a transformation save for the fact that I was already wearing my hybrid body.

“I didn’t make the rules that are stopping our kind from hunting the werewolves, Carson, and I want the jaguars stopped and the vampires exterminated as much as anyone else, but there is a limit to what I can accomplish.”

“By yourself, that is true, but you don’t have to remain by yourself. You need to inspire the packs. Show them what kind of leader you would be and they will flock to your standard. The Coun’hij rules because the unaligned wolves and hybrids let them. They rule because nobody has given the regular wolves a better option.”

I shook my head. “No, the Coun’hij rules because of fear. They rule because every man, woman and child of our kind knows that if they step out of line, someone they care about will suffer as a consequence.”

Carson looked at me oddly. “It’s the same thing.”

“No, Carson, it’s not. You want me to go out and do some grand heroic thing that will make the packs spontaneously rise up. You want me to convince them to rush headlong off of a cliff. I know what it took for me to leave Sanctuary, and the only reason I was able to bring myself to act was that I took everyone I cared about with me.”

“You don’t think that the packs are strong enough to do what you did?”

“I don’t know, but I don’t think that it’s right of me to demand that from them. It makes much more sense to pull the boot off of their necks and then they can join me without having to worry about what will happen to their friends and family.”

The puzzlement that I’d seen on Carson’s face a second before was gone. He looked angry again. “If our people aren’t willing to risk everything in order to obtain their freedom, then they don’t deserve it. You can’t just give freedom to someone, Alec. Freedom has to be earned.”

He was stroking the hilt of his practice sword, rubbing the glyph that had been carved into the steel. I’d asked him about the glyph before, but all that he’d ever told me was that the man who had given him both of his swords had commissioned the glyph on the practice sword.

I wasn’t an expert when it came to the royal sigils that had been part of the pomp and pageantry of the monarchy, but I had spent enough time studying to know that there was an underlying language that the sigils were based on. By the time one of the pictorial glyphs had been transformed into a sigil—into the personal mark of a member of royalty—it was often difficult to decipher which glyph had been used as the basis of the artwork.

What knowledge I did have was the result of hours of forced study that Kaleb had inflicted on me growing up. Like so many other things, he hadn’t bothered explaining why he wanted me to learn a dead language, he’d just handed me some of his research journals and told me to learn everything I could about the royal sigils.

I’d initially tried to master the language, but my hand had always been too clumsy to draw the sigils out in the level of detail that Kaleb had demanded, and I’d eventually become an indifferent student despite Kaleb’s displeasure. For the first time in years I found myself wishing that I’d put forth a more sustained effort to learn the sigils and the glyphs that made them up.

I absently stared at the sigil as my mind spun, searching for something that I could use to deflect our conversation back onto a safer path. I started to open my mouth to ask Carson once again about the hybrids that had come with him to try and free Agony, but suddenly I was able to discern the shape of the underlying glyph that made up the sigil on his practice sword.

“Gardener…no, the Gardener. That’s what it means, right? Are you the Gardener?”

Carson went completely still. “I didn’t expect for you to be able to read that. It’s not something that I’m willing to discuss. Never mention the glyph again.”

My control over my beast had already been frayed to the point of breaking. This last order was simply too much.

“No. You don’t get to press me to leave innocent children to die and then refuse to discuss anything that makes you the least bit uncomfortable, Gardener. Unlike you and your friends, the average wolf or human that’s been caught up in pack business doesn’t have the option of just running away and hiding in a hole somewhere. I’m not going to be the reason that kids no older than Rachel are cut down in order to punish their parents for siding with me. You’ve obviously never had a family, or you’d understand that.”

I’d seen Carson angry before, but those past instances were nothing like what faced me now. Power came off him in sheets, and somehow he’d traded out swords. His practice sword was resting on the heavy material he normally wrapped it in, and the deadly sharp blade that I’d seen used to such great effect against Brandon was in his hand.

“Get your weapon, Alec.”

I opened my mouth to tell him to calm down, only he sprang at me before I could get the words out. I lunged to one side and hit the ground in a roll that let me grab my edged sword as I came back to my feet.

“Calm down, Carson!”

“You spoke about that of which you have no knowledge, Alec. Where I come from there are consequences for that kind of thing.”

Carson’s blade darted towards me and this time there wasn’t anything lazy about the blow. He was moving as fast as I’d ever seen before and it was all I could do to knock the strike off to one side as I desperately backpedaled.

His next attack took me across the chest, slicing nearly a full inch into my flesh despite my best effort to get out of the way. Hybrids were built to go forward. We are capable of retreating, and in fact we can move incredibly quickly in any direction, but we really shine when we are springing forward. No matter how hard I tried, I wasn’t going to be able to match his footwork as long as I was retreating.

I needed to shift things around and press the attack, but that was easier said than done. Carson’s blade was in constant motion as he launched a series of slashes and thrusts that pushed me beyond anything I’d ever managed before. He attacked again and I got my blade in place to stop him from gutting me, but I was already bleeding from half a dozen places.

Carson had to have tells, but I hadn’t been training with him long enough to learn them, so his techniques came at me in a blur with absolutely no warning of what was going to come next. I couldn’t plan, couldn’t think, couldn’t do anything but react and I found myself responding with counters that I would have said I was nowhere near ready to use in a real fight.

My options were limited, and as the edge of Carson’s sword took me across the stomach, leaving another shallow gash, I realized that I was only going to get one shot at stopping him. I’d thought there for a moment that he was playing with me, but he was moving too quickly for that. If I’d missed any one of the last half dozen or so counters I would have lost a limb at the very least.

I couldn’t read Carson’s attacks, but that didn’t mean that there wasn’t anything I could do. I could still try to lure him into using the attack that I wanted him to use. It was more than likely going to get me killed, but it was better than nothing.

I stood a fraction of an inch taller, coming ever so slightly out of the crouch that Carson had spent the last week drilling into me. It was a small thing, but it meant that my sword had to shield a greater volume of space. It meant that there was going to be a hole in my defenses, but this time I made sure the hole was where I wanted it to be.

The tip of my sword dropped half an inch rather than returning perfectly to position after the next block. There wasn’t a pause in the flow of battle—not exactly—but I could feel the moment in which Carson decided to exploit the opening that I’d left him.

His sword cut through the air like a living thing that wanted my blood. It was too fast, and my sword was too far out of position to block it completely. Stepping back out of range wasn’t an option either. Carson had closed up the distance between us slightly just as he launched the attack, and even if he hadn’t my weight was too far forward.

Instead of blocking or backing up, I dropped down so that my knees were almost all the way to the ground. Carson’s sword skittered off of mine in a spray of sparks and then passed over the top of my head with less than an inch to spare.

It was the kind of exchange that I knew I would relive in my dreams, waking in a cold sweat as I thought about just how close I’d come to dying, but there wasn’t time for that now. Instead I used the force of Carson’s strike to give my blade extra speed as I threw myself forward.

I’d never been so fast before, but then again, I’d never committed myself like this in any of the practice sessions we’d had together. The point of my blade darted towards Carson’s heart, blurring with speed in an attack that I knew would take his life.

My sword was too fast for Carson to get his weapon in position to block, but he twisted away from me at the last second, providing a narrower target at the same time that his right hand swept down. He slapped my blade aside with his claws and then his hand darted forward and he grabbed me by the throat.

It was a killing grip. There wasn’t any way for me to break free without him ripping my throat out. The question of who was dominant to whom, the question that the two of us had tried so hard to avoid answering, had just been resolved. He was dominant to me, which meant that even if he didn’t kill me right now, the threat of death would always be out there in a way that it hadn’t been before.

We stood there motionless for nearly a full minute. My claws ached to go for him. There was a slight chance that I could take him with me, and a part of me was sure that it would be better to die than add one more person to the list of people who could give me orders with impunity.

It was a seductive option. The kind of thing that I might have done if other people weren’t depending on me. If Carson was so inclined, and both suitably creative and ruthless, then nothing I had was safe. He could force me to hand over all of the wealth that I’d stolen from Kaleb along with my sword, but he couldn’t take away my hope.

I couldn’t throw my life away, not if there was still a chance that I might be able to throw off his chains and escape. I owed Rachel and my friends at least that much, so I forced the rage back far enough that I could stop myself from lunging at Carson.

The rage was still there. My efforts were enough to contain the anger, but I would have said that no force in the universe would have been enough to eradicate it. Only then it disappeared as completely as water out of a cracked cistern. One moment it was a frothing, burning mess and then it was leaking away to somewhere outside of me, a place where it no longer had the power to influence me.

I wasn’t angry anymore, but that didn’t mean that I’d lost sight of the consequences of what had just happened.

“Was that your plan all along, to wait until my guard was down and then defeat me so that you could take over?”

Carson let go of my throat and shook his head as he slowly backed away. “No, Alec, that was never my intention. The last thing I want is to be dominant to anyone. Once upon a time that wouldn’t have been the case. The man who thought he was the Gardener might have done exactly that and told himself it was necessary to stave off a greater evil, but he would have been wrong.

“I know now that I’m not the Gardener, and I don’t want to interfere with your free will. I would like for you and I to continue as we were, as equals exploring the possibility of an alliance against the great evils of our world.”

I wanted to believe him, but the stakes were just so high. He’d been angry in a way that I’d never seen out of him before; there was obviously more going on than he’d told me so far.

“What happened, Carson?”

Carson gave me a sad smile. “I came out here today planning on manufacturing a confrontation. You’ve continued to hold back when it comes to your sword technique. You needed a reason to commit; you needed to believe that this time our sparring was something more than just sparring.”

“We could have killed each other.”

Carson hesitated for a second before nodding. “That is always a possibility when edged weapons are used. I was fairly confident I could control the fight well enough to keep either of us from being seriously injured, but there was never any guarantee of that.”

“That’s a pretty big risk to be taking just to teach someone how to use a sword.”

“I’m afraid that you’ve entered an arena where all of the risks you take will be big, Alec. I promised to do my best to teach you the way of the sword, and I felt like I’d used all other means at my disposal and failed.”

“And that bit at the end?”

“I’m sorry. I never intended for things to get to that point. Our discussions about how to handle the Coun’hij have always been heated. That’s why I turned to that subject—I needed something that you would believe could trigger the kind of violent confrontation that would finally force you to commit. I didn’t count on you deciphering the sigil on my sword. It brought up feelings that I thought I’d managed to safely lock away.”

“We almost killed each other because I said you were the Gardener? Who is the Gardener and why did mentioning him draw that kind of reaction out of you?”

“The Gardener is a prophecy that many of my…people believed in. He was supposed to…actually it doesn’t matter. Events have proved that the prophecy wasn’t true, but for a long time the Prophecy of the Gardener was the only thing that kept my people going. There was a certain task that every young man and woman undertook when they were young. Success at the task was a sign that the Gardener had finally arrived.”

“You succeeded at the task.”

“After a fashion. There were those who said the way that I fulfilled the task wasn’t in keeping with the prophecies, that I wasn’t actually the Gardener, but as time went on it seemed as though I was fulfilling other signs.”

“That doesn’t seem like a reason to get mad at me, Carson.”

“Indeed, it shouldn’t have been, except that the day I finally realized I wasn’t the Gardener was the day that my daughter was killed, and it was my fault that she died. Everyone was depending on me and I failed with a completeness that words can’t possibly describe. I failed my liege, my people, and my own flesh and blood.”

“So me saying that you had no concept of what it would be like to lose a child pushed you over the edge.”

“I’m afraid so. I ask your forgiveness, Alec. I should not have let my demons come out like that, not in a situation already so fraught with peril.”

I shrugged my massive hybrid shoulders. “That’s part and parcel of being one of the moonborn. Our demons seem more persistent than most. At least something good came out of it all. I think I finally understand what you were trying to teach me about committing to an attack rather than thinking so much in terms of feints and misdirection.”

“Indeed, I was quite pleased with the quality of your last attack. It was well executed and you showed no signs of hesitation. You’ve taken a significant step forward. Time will see your skills continue to improve, but the basics of your technique are already good. From here you’ll find that you focus more on reading your opponent so that you can properly pick the right moment to commit.”

I nodded and turned to put my edged sword away, but Carson cleared his throat.

“There was more than one thing accomplished today, Alec. Even through my rage, I was still testing you. I never intended to push you so far, but there at the end I was able to gain an important insight into who you are.”

Now it was my turn to feel discomfort at where the conversation was headed. “I’m glad that I didn’t act on the desire to try to take you with me. It would have been a waste for both of us to die when neither of us really wanted that particular fight.”

“Indeed, that would have been a tragedy, but as far as you knew at the time, the contest was deadly serious. That isn’t the reason that you forbore from trying to kill me.”

“No, you’re right. I didn’t know that at the time. I didn’t go after you because I knew that people were depending on me. The odds that I’d be able to make much of a difference as a submissive aren’t very good, but there’s still a chance and I owe it to everyone who’s risked so much for me already to keep going as long as there is even the smallest chance that I could break free eventually and go back to fighting Kaleb and the rest.”

“And with that we return full circle. I do understand your concerns, Alec, but I’ve seen just how thin the line is between civilization and anarchy. The humans are ill-prepared to deal with the things that we’ve kept hidden from them for so long. Out of all the major powers, we are the only race that has any interest in the humans as anything other than slaves and food. The jaguars are reproducing more quickly than we are, and since the vampires and werewolves spread by way of a virus there isn’t any practical limit to how fast their population could explode. We wolves are the only thing preventing the United States from turning into something like Europe and Asia.”

I shuddered. There wasn’t much reliable information coming across the Atlantic, but everything pointed to the vampires and werewolves being locked in a shadow war that was always one slip away from making front-page news.

“I don’t want that any more than you do, Carson, but I can’t just leave the Coun’hij untouched and go after the other threats. They’d constantly be taking potshots at me. Eventually they’d get lucky and it would be game over.”

Carson nodded with a considering air about him. “What if there was a way to make it so that the Coun’hij couldn’t find you? What if there was a way to guarantee your safety from the Coun’hij while you carried on your battle against the vampires and the werewolves?”

“So now we’re going to explore hypotheticals?”

“Please, Alec, humor me.”

“I don’t know for sure, Carson, but it feels like that doesn’t drastically change things. The Coun’hij isn’t just some kind of benign dictatorship. They are killing wolves and hybrids we’re going to need in order to fight off the other threats. The best I could say is that if there was a way to shield my people from the Coun’hij then I would be more careful with my target selection. I’d make even more effort to make sure that I wasn’t killing the people who are just helping the Coun’hij because they are scared.”

Carson considered my words for nearly a full minute. “I think that might be enough of a common ground for us to continue to work together, Alec.”

“I hope so, Carson. I could really use your help. You and your friends could make a big difference with regards to whether or not this war is winnable.”

“And yet even if you knew that the war wasn’t winnable you would still fight it, wouldn’t you?”

“Yeah, I guess I would. I won’t continue to prop up Kaleb and the rest. Passively going along with them while knowing that they were massacring innocents wouldn’t be as bad as killing those innocents myself, but it would still be wrong.”

Carson’s swords disappeared into the heavy bag he used to transport them, and then he looked up at me with a sad smile. “You hold yourself to a much higher standard than you do your potential subjects.”

I shrugged uncomfortably and then shifted back to human form a second after he did. I knew that there were some logical holes in my arguments that couldn’t be fully explained away by the fact that most of the moonborn didn’t know the full extent of the Coun’hij’s crimes, but that didn’t mean I was completely ready to face the roots of those inconsistencies.

Carson adjusted his ha’bit, which he’d taken to wearing once we’d started working together, and then picked up his bag and started down the trail that led back to the cabin. I didn’t follow, and he stopped after only a couple of steps.

“I’m sorry for your loss, Carson. I can’t imagine what that must have felt like, and I’m sorry that I said what I said earlier. The closest thing I can think of is what I would have felt like if I’d had to watch Rachel die, and I’m pretty sure that still wouldn’t have been as bad as what you went through.”

Carson didn’t turn back to look at me, and for several seconds he didn’t respond. When he did finally acknowledge my words, it was with a ragged sigh that contained more hurt than I’d known was possible for such a simple gesture.

“It happened almost a year ago, but I’ve thought about her every single day since she died. She was the same age as you and your friends, in fact that girl who was with Taggart, Adri, reminded me a lot of my daughter.”

I opened my mouth hoping that something suitably comforting would come out, but before I could find the right words, the sound of Brindi hurrying back precluded any kind of further conversation.

“Alec, come quick. It’s James, something happened to his mother.”

—

I hope that you all enjoyed this sneak preview of Shattered. It goes live on December 26th, but you can preorder it at many of the retailers on the Shattered Product Page.

I quietly switched the price of Bound over from $4.99 to Free a few weeks ago. It’s an experiment to see if that will result in enough more people picking up Hunted (currently just $2.99) to offset the lost revenue from Bound being free.

I’m excited to see how Bound does under this model (that’s one of the best things about this new world of publishing–I can experiment with price and other things).

If you’ve been considering getting Bound (or have friends who have been considering buying it), now is the perfect time to pick it up. If things go well, I’ll leave it free for a while.

Thanks,

Dean

Hello, everyone.

I just wanted to take a second and let everyone know that both Marked and Shattered are now available for pre-order at Kobo, iBooks and Amazon. This is the first time I’ve been able to put together a pre-order at Amazon, so I’m excited to see how it goes!

I haven’t checked all of the retailers, but doesn’t look like you can read the sample on a pre-order at Amazon.

Do you want me to post the first chapter or two of each book here on the blog between now and the release date?

The links above take you to the product page for each book where you can find the blurb and links to the various retailers.

Thanks,

Dean

I’m happy to announce that Ashlynn W is the winner of the October drawing! Congratulations Ashlynn.

I’ve already emailed Ashlynn advance reader copies of both Shattered and Marked, and will be mailing her the final signed proof for Torn as soon as she provides me with a mailing address.

I’ll continue the rewards program in November with advance reader copies of both Marked and Shattered and the final proof (signed) for Riven. Good luck everyone.

Dean