Page 73 of Secret Shifters Next Door

Emily put her hands behind her back. “Hello, Harley. I’m so sorry I had to deceive you. I never meant to get a human involved in all this. I was only in town to hunt shifters.” She nodded toward my belly. “But there is the problem with the demon spawn you’re carrying in your womb. It would be best for you and the world in general if you took care of that before it’s born. It’s more humane to do it now, rather than wait until it comes out.”

Tate roared, and in a flash, shifted back to his dragon form, blocking me from Emily with a wing. Emily stumbled backward, a look of surprise bright on her face.

“You are a stain on the earth. A virus that needs to be cleansed. Hunters are coming for both of you.” She looked around Tate and shouted to me, “I do care for you, Harley. I don’t want you to become a beast. I don’t want you to die if you don’t need to. Please. Please reject thisthing. Reject him and take your girls and run.”

Tate roared at her again and swiped his tail in her direction. She was too far away, but the point was made. Emily walked backward slowly. She kept her eyes on Tate, shaking her head. “I’m going to make sure you die slow. Slow and painful.”

Without another word, she spun and ran into the forest. As soon as she was out of sight, Tate shifted back and guided me to the truck. He looked around, making sure no one had followed us, and opened the passenger door.

He grabbed my hand. “Are you absolutely sure this is what you want? If you accept me as your mate, the connection between us will only grow stronger, more intense. There’s no turning back after that.”

I heard what he was saying. I understood it and what it meant. I pulled him close and kissed him hard. It solidified my answer once and for all. I chose him. He was right, there was no turning back.

THIRTY-ONE

TATE

After hearing the plans Emily and the hunters had, we needed to make our own plans. The first thing we needed to do was find out who Emily was working for. It was obvious that she wasn’t the leader of the hunters. For one, she was a witch. Yes, hunters hated shifters and were hellbent on killing all of us, but they were suspicious of any supernatural entity. They might work with a witch to further their goals, but there was no way a group would follow a witch. Second, she seemed to be following someone else’s plan. Nothing about what she’d done so far was what I would have expected from a witch leading a team. It was like the hunters had used her to go on the front lines, do as much damage as she could, and they were set to come in and sweep up whatever was left.

The morning after I told and showed Harley what I was, I invited the guys over to explain everything. They sat in the living room while I relayed the interaction with Emily. The spell, the hunters, the fate that awaited us. All of it.

Miles put his face in his hands, then looked up and said, “So at any moment, one of us is going to meet our fated mate? Just like that? Then we have to choose between dying or turning the person we love into a shifter?”

Steff looked at him and nodded. “That’s exactly what he’s saying.”

“What if we kill her?” Blayne said.

A few weeks ago, we would have all been horrified by the idea of murder. After finding that mutilated body in the woods and dealing with Luis’s men, we were harder men. It was scary how quickly you could go from a peaceful person to someone who would kill. It took surprisingly little for that change to happen.

“If we kill her, maybe it’ll break the curse. Right?” Blayne asked.

That was a possibility, but we couldn’t be sure. What if we killed her, and the only way to break the curse was to have her undo it? Then we’d be stuck. We’d also be murderers. Looking around at them, it didn’t look like any of us was ready for that. Not even Blayne, who’d brought it up.

There were too many unknowns when it came to witches. Even those who’d had dealings with them in the past didn’t know a lot. We had the witch Miles knew, Siobhan, but she was like a roving gypsy. Way too hard to find or contact for help. It would take days for Miles to find her again. We didn’t have that kind of time.

“Look, before we decide anything, we need to find her or the hunters,” I said.

“How?” Steff asked.

“Emily has to be nearby. She keeps popping up, and nothing Miles has found shows her living in town. My thought is that she’s holed up somewhere in the forests around town. We look for her there. Based on where Harley’s house is and how fast she found me and Harley at my shifting location, I’ve got a fairly good idea where she might be living. It’s still a huge area, but we can look faster than humans can.”

“So, we become the hunters?” Miles said with a shit-eating grin.

I pointed at him. “Exactly. Someone needs to stay to watch the girls, though.”

Blayne raised his hand. “I’ll do it. You guys are the better trackers.”

After it was decided, Miles, Steff, and I left the house and drove to a pull-off on the highway. The area I wanted to search was probably fifty square miles, and would take humans weeks to search. With our heightened speed and senses, I hoped to search all of it in a day. Maybe two.

Miles and Steff shifted and sprinted into the forest. My dragon was too damned big to shift in daylight, but I was still much faster than a human. I ran beside Miles’s wolf and Steff’s bear.

Eventually, we split up to cover more ground. I followed my senses, searching for the scents of magic. We were out there for hours, meeting up every thirty minutes to discuss what we had or hadn’t found. It started to feel like it would never end, or that we’d find nothing. We didn’t even have a cell signal this far out to even check in with Blayne.

As the sun slipped lower in the sky, and right before I’d planned on calling the search off for the day, Miles howled in the distance. It was an excited and urgent sound. He’d found something. I sprinted toward him as his howls echoed across the forest. Emily might have heard it, but wolves and wild dogs were common in these woods. I came upon him in a small clearing an instant before Steff came rumbling out of the trees in his bear form. He and Miles shifted to human, and Miles grinned at us.

“You guys smell that?” he asked excitedly.

Steff and I both raised our noses to the air, pulling in the scents of the surrounding forest. My enhanced sense of smell worked incredibly well. I could smell the leaves, the rich earth, and about a mile away, a deer was taking a shit. Like I said, I had very good senses. Beneath it though, there was an undercurrentof something strong and sharp, like burnt flowers. Magic. We looked at each other, victorious smiles spreading on our faces, cutting through the dirt and sweat caked on our cheeks and foreheads.

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