Page 102 of Corbin
Her mother had picked a bad group to cross and died for her mistake. If only her mother had listened when Elianna warned of her vision.
Her mother had refused to take the vision seriously, though, and now an innocent six-year-old child was in danger.
Elianna tried to recall the last time her mother had been happy. Too many years to count. Her mother’s mind was broken, thanks to Elianna’s biological father. The poor woman dragged strange men home more and more often lately, anything to make her feel loved, but it was false love. Elianna had begged her mother to stop until she found a place to live with Nico.
Then her mother could put out a sign for men if she wanted.
But no.
Her mother, a polar bear shifter, had gone to her regular Friday drinking hole last night and turned down a wolf shifter. She’d believed that by sleeping only with humans, she was being true to Elianna’s father, a man Elianna had never met and never would if she had any luck left.
He was the most powerful grizzly shifter in this part of Russia, which was why the vision weighed heavily on her mind.
In the vision, Elianna had seen wolves all around her mother, but not what happened in the end. That vision had ended with blurry darkness.
Sadly, she now knew how the end of that vision played out.
The rejected wolf’s pack had paid her mother’s crappy little third-floor apartment a visit just before dark.
Wolves did not accept no, especially from a shifter who took a human to her bed.
Elianna could still smell the fresh blood. She’d scented it as she neared the apartment building over an hour ago with Nico’s tiny hand in hers. She’d asked a friend to watch him today or he would have been with Elianna’s mother and would also be dead. Standing out of sight near the apartment, Elianna had listened as the wolf shifters descended the stairs and laughed about killing that ‘bear bitch.’
Then one of the wolves brought up smelling a second female and young male in the apartment.
He still had a taste for bear. The wolves howled, ready to hunt.
Elianna had gone into protection mode.
She’d taken her coat off and wrapped Nico in it, then carried him as she ran to a restaurant dumpster filled with table scraps. Disgusting, but it would camouflage his scent. She’d rubbed her hands on everything at the entrance to the alley, then left to find the wolf shifters. When she did, she found an upwind spot and lifted the tail of her shirt to give them plenty to smell, then started walking away.
When she heard a wolf howl, she’d taken off running.
Now she waited a kilometer from Nico, hoping to survive.
How close was that pack of five shifters?
Glancing around, she familiarized herself with the area she’d chosen to take a stand. Moonlight danced over large, earth-moving equipment, creating long shadows across the open space in this fenced-in storage lot behind a construction business.
Any other shifter in her shoes would probably consider changing shape right now.
Herbear would be of no help in a fight.
Also, even though she’d be stronger as a bear, she could blend in better and escape more easily as a human if she had to run. Having had no chance to change clothes for her night job, she still looked like every other dockworker in her dull-gray pants and long-sleeved pullover stained with diesel oil and mud. Smelled like them, too.
A shifter could identify her true scent, but humans had no idea she was anything more than a low-paid laborer like they were. Theywouldhave known about her if a bear clan had accepted her.
Invisibility among humans was the only benefit she’d derived from being an outcast among her own kind.
Shifters were first revealed to humans in America eight years ago. Elianna suspected many of the old-timers had been aware of the Romanov Kamchatka bear shifter clan even before then. Elianna’s genetic father ruled that clan. His family had descended from royalty and had been in power long before the general human population of this country found out that monsters walked among them.
With her father’s reputation as a powerful alpha and his family’s royal ancestry, no one in this part of the world dared cross him or his clan.
Living on the remote Kamchatka Peninsula on Russia’s lower Pacific coast offered her father a perfect location. Alexandre Romanov was treated as the king he believed himself to be.
As for her, she was fair game to any threat, be it human or shifter.
Something clanged close by.
