Huntress Unleashed E-Book

Aimee Easterling

• Herausgeber: Aimee Easterling
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

Werewolf. Baker. Spy.

Empathy-squashing drugs have sent shifter society into a tailspin. Only one person is innocuous enough to infiltrate the culprit's pack --- Ember Wilder-Young, packless wolf and expert baker.

Unfortunately, cupcakes alone aren't sufficient to soften her new employer's hard heart. Instead, Ember is faced with an impossible dilemma.

Will she risk the lives of shifters everywhere by rejecting her boss's offer of pharmaceutical initiation into the pack? Or will she imbibe the very drugs she's been sent to wipe out and lose her own humanity in the process?

The grand finale of the Wolf Legacy Quartet concludes the tale that's been described as "intense and full of emotions."

Leseprobe

Huntress Unleashed

Wolf Legacy, Volume 4

Aimee Easterling

Published by Wetknee Books, 2018.

This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

HUNTRESS UNLEASHED

First edition. March 10, 2018.

Copyright © 2018 Aimee Easterling.

ISBN: 978-1386907145

Written by Aimee Easterling.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Wolf's Bane

Chapter 1

“I can’t, Dad.”

“You can, Buttercup.”

Across the gleaming conference table, the room’s third occupant cleared his throat, the electricity of an annoyed and extremely powerful shifter permeating the air. But Wolfie and I both ignored our audience, leaning closer in a father-daughter noggin knock we’d perfected when I was a mere pup.

“I’m not saying I won’t try,” I elaborated for both of their sakes. “I will, of course. But Dakota will never let me onto her property, let alone into her pack.”

After all, the female in question was my precise opposite. Left to my own devices, I spent most of my time baking goodies to cheer up friends and family. In contrast, Dakota had been responsible for my cousin’s death, had slaughtered an entire compound of humans, and had taken my only brother into custody where he disappeared without a trace...all within the same week.

Unbeknownst to me, she’d also started selling large quantities of never-before-seen pharmaceuticals to dozens of innocent shifters around the same time period. As the region’s enforcer—the one in charge of making the rules, not breaking them—she might have gotten away with the trick, too...if she hadn’t spread out her net to include the clan I used to call my own.

For an alpha like Wolfie who lived by his duty to protect, finding out that two of his pack mates had become hooked on empathy-squashing medications must have been a punch to the gut. For the other male in the room, who was legally responsible for Dakota’s actions, the female’s power-hungry manipulations came as an even more personal affront.

So this time, it wasn’t just our obliviousness to his presence that brought our companion’s wolf into existence as a shadow beneath his human skin. Instinctively, I ducked my chin down tighter to keep my jugular inside my throat where it belonged. Only then did I close my eyes in total submission, hoping that what I couldn’t see wouldn’t kill me.

Dad wasn’t oblivious to the danger. Still, the entirety of his interest remained fixated upon his only daughter—which is to say, me. “You’ve been through enough already, Ember,” he said, offering me a way out while ignoring the quivering ball of rage at his elbow. “I know this. You know this. If you want to come home and let someone else solve this problem, no one will think any worse of you....”

Wolfie’s voice trailed off hopefully, but I merely pursed my lips and shook my head. No, I couldn’t leave Sebastien’s side, even if the professor didn’t want me present. And I also couldn’t let someone with fewer connections infiltrate Dakota’s pack, only to sit back and watch as the luckless spy failed at her unenviable mission.

The fact that I’d be forced to deal with overbearing alphas like the third inhabitant of the room during the course of my spying was irrelevant.

“I’ll do it,” I repeated when both males seemed to be waiting for a verbal reply. “The only problem is—Dakota and I have history. If I apply for a job with her pack, she’ll laugh in my face then boot me out the door.”

True or not, my words were apparently not what Albert Chamberlain wanted to hear. I’d learned the Tribunal member’s name when Dad introduced us at the beginning of this negotiation, but as the pall of dominance that had been pressing against my cheeks for the last several minutes darkened and deepened, I stuck to the initial assessment I’d made when meeting the older male via video chat two weeks earlier.

His name might be Chamberlain, but to me he would always be Scary Guy.

Now, my shoulders creaked beneath overwhelming pressure as the male spat out words intended to bring our discussion to an abrupt close. “Dakota will welcome you if I tell her to,” Scary Guy retorted. And that, he figured was that.

***

ONLY, OF COURSE, IT wasn’t. For several seconds, every ounce of concentration I could muster focused upon forcing my lungs to billow and oxygenate my blood. But, at last, I was able to glance at the Tribunal member out of the corner of one eye and consider telling him that his grasp on reality was severely cockeyed.

“With all due respect, sir,” I answered, keeping my eyes carefully lowered so as not to provoke Chamberlain’s ire further, “if you were able to keep Dakota in line, you wouldn’t need me to help you.”

I didn’t expect the Tribunal member to like my answer—no dominant shifter likes to have his weaknesses thrown in his face. Still, I wasn’t prepared for the intensity of his reaction either.

Because before the final word had even left my mouth, Chamberlain’s inner wolf was growling so violently that it drowned out my assertion. Then the stubble on his chin stretched into proto-fur even as his manicured fingernails began lengthening into vicious claws.

Backing away as subtly as I could manage while still maintaining my seat, I decided that I hadn’t broached the subject in the best way after all. We all knew that the balance of power in the region was shaky, that we couldn’t afford risking civil war when one Tribunal member unilaterally squashed the actions of a regional enforcer. Thousands of lives rested in the balance, and Chamberlain was taking a risk even coming to speak with us today.

So, yes, Scary Guy had reason for his hair trigger. Maybe I should have let him maintain a foothold on his fantasy world for just a little while longer....

Luckily, Wolfie was no pissant and our father-daughter bond was fierce. “Back off,” he hissed, rising slightly to tower over the other male. And even though shifter protocol gave Scary Guy the higher rank, Dad’s boldness paid off.

Or maybe Chamberlain just remembered that he was the one asking for a favor this time around. It wasn’t as though there were other innocuous werewolf bakers waiting in the wings ready and willing to take my place.

Either way, the other male subsided gracefully, his aura of danger receding so dramatically that I was finally able to pry my eyeballs off the table and risk another fleeting glance in his general direction. “My mistake,” Chamberlain murmured, the words only moderately laden with a promise to rip my skin from the underlying bones in the near future.

“No offense taken,” I murmured, doing my best to defuse the aggression that inevitably arose when two strong males from different packs were cooped up within the same small room.

Dad was less politic. “So we’re all in agreement,” he summed up. “Ember is willing to infiltrate the pack and find out where the drugs are coming from. Her human partner will be brought in to analyze the chemical composition and determine what can be done to counteract them. But the whole strategy falls apart if Dakota won’t even let my daughter through the door in the first place.”

“So we sweeten the pot,” Scary Guy answered, his tone raising hairs all up and down my arms even though his words were perfectly cordial. “You’re a worried papa who needs Dakota to keep his wayward pup out of trouble with an easy job. And in exchange...”

I sighed, realizing at last what would make the other female willing to deal. “...and in exchange, you give Dakota the acknowledgement she craves. She becomes my alpha, my boss, my handler. Tell her you need the shifter equivalent of boot camp to shape me up. In other words, we let her win.”

And after that, it would all be up to me.

Chapter 2

Five months later...

I loaded the last dirty plate into the industrial-strength dishwasher and exhaled for what felt like the first time in five endless days. It was Friday at 4 pm. Dakota’s pack could catch their own dinner tonight—likely on the hoof, with no cleanup required—and leftovers would tide them over for the rest of the weekend. Which meant I could finally head out to my other life, the two days that made my current gig worthwhile.

“Hey, Ember, save me anything?”

Ryder’s shoulders were so wide that he had to turn slightly to pass through the doorway, and his face was scarred and pitted from the hard life of a member of the regional enforcer’s pack. Still, I smiled rather than cringed as he towered above me. This hard-edged shifter was a softy where it counted and he was always appreciative when I saved him a treat.

To that end, I bent to peer behind a stack of mixing bowls in search of the small tupperware container I’d hidden away from the ravening hordes who blew through the door in search of a snack two hours earlier. “Of course I did,” I told him, then waited as he cracked open the plastic lid to reveal the donut therein.

The scent of licorice and sugar made my nose crinkle in protest, but Ryder rolled the same air around in his mouth like a wine connoisseur. “My favorite,” he rumbled, breaking off a tiny piece between thumb and forefinger and nibbling at the tidbit with all the dignity of a debutante.

He was watching his waistline, he’d explained last month. So he preferred to make this one treat last for days rather than sucking it all down at once the way most wolves would have done. Despite everything—my human not-quite-mate three towns over, the perilous secrets I hid behind my easy-going smile, and my deep-seated aversion to the flavor of licorice—Ryder’s obvious appreciation of well-formed baked goods filled me with an abiding sense of satisfaction.

The zing of awareness as my patience paid off, though, was twice as sweet. “You still on the hunt?” Ryder asked after his Adam’s apple bobbed once to mark the passage of donut bite from mouth to rather flat stomach.

“For my brother?” I asked, heart lifting at the thought that Derek had resurfaced at long last. Because my gut told me that Dakota was the key to finding my missing sibling. And even though I was really here as a mole for my father, I kept hoping Derek might pass through the compound if I waited long enough....

But Ryder’s eyes slid sideways rather than meeting mine head on. “Naw,” he elaborated. “I meant—are you still looking for those pills?”

This time, it was my turn to raise my brows even as I breathed out a cautious “Yeah.” Because I could have understood Ryder coming to me with information regarding Derek’s sentencing. But the current change of tune felt like a trick.

After all, when I’d first asked Ryder about the drugs in question, he’d told me “No can do, pup.” The gift of a licorice-studded scone hadn’t softened his initial stance one bit, and I certainly hadn’t blamed him for the refusal. Not when Dakota doled out her pharmaceutical treats with ruthless efficiency, watching as avidly as any ER nurse to make sure the pills went down the gullet rather than being spit back out into waiting hands.

But perhaps there’d been a policy shift in the interim. Or maybe weekly licorice pastries had worked their magic in a cumulative fashion. Either way, I could barely believe my eyes as three white tablets clanked down onto the counter beside me, one nearly rolling away before it landed at last on its flattened side.

I reached out to nab them, but Ryder’s hand settled atop mine. “Careful, pup. This shit can really fuck you up,” he warned.

The haze of licorice and testosterone surrounding the words tickled my nose into a near-sneeze. But I squashed the urge and instead nodded vigorously, hoping a gestured reply would suffice since I wasn’t quite able to untangle my tongue.

Sure enough, acknowledgement was answer enough. Without another word, Dakota’s second-in-command picked back up his precious donut and ambled out of the kitchen, leaving behind contraband that would not only fuck me up but might actually get us both killed.

Good thing I had a tray of cupcakes on hand to cover up objects that shouldn’t have rightfully been in my possession. Poking a finger into the side of one pastry just beneath the line of frosting, I tucked the pills away in the handy hidey-hole then smoothed the icing back into place. Within seconds, the subterfuge was complete.

No one would have guessed that the pastry originally intended for my house mate was now sullied with illegal narcotics. No one except me and—soon, I hoped—my patiently waiting father.

Chapter 3

I really thought I was home free, key already in the door of my battered Toyota Corolla and mind three towns away. But I should have known any alpha worth her salt possessed a sixth sense that would alert her when an underling tried to carry purloined goods out of her territory unhindered.

“Wilder-Young!” Dakota called from three doors down. And maybe it was my guilty conscience or my inner wolf’s intuition, but I somehow knew she wasn’t hailing me to shoot the breeze.

Still, it would have looked suspicious to tear out of the parking lot without answering. So I left the bin of cupcakes balanced on the car’s metal roof and turned to face my employer. “Any luck?” I asked, referring to the lawbreaker she and a third of the pack had set out to capture earlier in the afternoon.

...Or, rather, to kill. Because Dakota licked what I’d previously assumed was red nail polish off one sharp fingernail in lieu of a reply, teeth glinting wickedly in the late afternoon light. “Plenty,” she answered at last. Then her eyebrows rose as she took in the bin of cupcakes only partially shielded by my head. “Are you sure Daddy Dearest would approve of you bringing sweets back to your fuck buddy?” she added, tone remaining emotionless and cool. “Perhaps I should call and make a report.”

In lieu of a response, I inhaled sharply through my nose, refusing to grace Dakota’s assessment of either relationship with a verbal reply. The poke at me and Wolfie rolled off my back like syrup over a hot pancake—if anything, it proved that my cover was still holding months later. But the jab at Sebastien....

So what if we aren’t mated the way shifters would be by now? I thought rebelliously. Yes, the professor and I were dating in a human manner that felt subtly wrong to my inner wolf. But Sebastien was human. It made sense to get to know each other in a human fashion before we chose to commit in a bond unbreakable even by death.

Or so I told myself every time doubts cascaded over my head, threatening to drown me in their dark, malodorous depths.

Only when I smelled sweet humor rolling off Dakota’s slender body did I realize I’d been played yet again. Dakota didn’t care who I was dating or whether I was dating. She just liked to see if twisting my metaphorical underwear would make me jump.

Once again, she’d goosed me precisely where it hurt.

Well, two could play at that game. “Yeah,” I responded as easily as I could, picking up the big round container I’d filled with presents for Sebastien then sliding into the driver’s seat with cupcakes in tow. “Some of us have a life outside of work. Speaking of which....”

I started easing the door shut between us, but Dakota was too fast for me. In the time it took to slip fingers into the door handle in preparation for a door-slamming escape, she’d swooped forward and snagged a cupcake right out from under the plastic lid

Only when the irregular line of frosting on the far side of the chosen pastry made jagged shadows against my employer’s incisors did I realize that I’d been right from the beginning—this supposedly chance meeting wasn’t random at all. “Don’t...” I started.

But I couldn’t think of a single excuse sufficient to wrench the pastry out from between Dakota’s fingers before her teeth crunched against the pills inside. And, sure enough, the sound of enamel pulverizing pre-powdered chemicals emerged from her mouth like the sharp crack of rabbit bones on a January night. Meanwhile, the air filled with the harsh haze of incipient fur.

Despite my best intentions to stand my ground, I cringed back into my vehicle, expecting a vicious tirade the like of which had left an underling bed-bound last week. But my boss didn’t flinch or spit the tablets out. Just chewed thoughtfully, swallowing drugs and cupcake as easily as if the pastry was oven perfect.

Her eyes didn’t dilate either. Three pills would have been excessive for anyone else’s body, but they didn’t impact my small-framed boss’s behavior in the slightest. Instead, Dakota moved as easily as ever when she dropped the rest of the cupcake to the pavement and ground it into mush beneath one booted foot.

“I told you I’d hook you up if you ever wanted any,” the other female told me, her voice just as sugary sweet as it had been a minute earlier. “Offer’s still open.”

Only then did her eyes narrow, the bloodthirsty wolf I knew was inside making itself evident at last. “But here’s the deal,” she added, enunciating carefully to overcome the lupine tendency to lisp. “Pharmaceutical improvements in this pack come only from me. You’re not irreplaceable, so don’t act like it.”

Then, warning concluded, Dakota yawned and dismissed me as easily as she’d threatened my life. “Have fun with your fuck buddy,” she finished, turning away without another word and disappearing back into the maze of buildings that housed her pack.

And even though she’d dismissed me after only a minor tongue lashing, I could barely fit the key into the ignition due to the shaking in my fingers. I’d failed yet again in my attempt to gather evidence for the Tribunal. Perhaps my task was simply impossible to achieve.

Chapter 4

When I chose to start working for Dakota, I made one firm rule for myself—no bringing pack nastiness home for the weekend. And that resolution held up. Even though there were only eleven cupcakes present inside my tupperware bin instead of the full dozen, my wolf eased us back into TGIF by the time we exited the freeway and pulled to a halt in front of Sebastien’s welcoming abode.

Too bad the voices emanating from that cozy interior didn’t match the cheer of my newly rejuvenated mood.

“...there’s something wrong with that girl.” I winced at the sound of Sally Sugar’s voice, even before gathering that I was the one being referred to in such a roundabout manner. Because our neighbor was nowhere near as sweet as her name suggested. And I’d rather face down a dozen scary enforcers than stand up against one meddling human whose age required her to be treated with kid gloves.

When faced with octogenarian bluster, I usually either growled back or ignored her entirely. But Sebastien somehow managed to toe the line of propriety while still getting his beliefs across.

“Ember has proven herself a quality addition to the neighborhood,” my not-quite-mate countered, his words so quiet that I had to emerge from my car in order to hear even with full lupine senses alert. “Her cookies made the school’s bake sale an unadulterated success,” he continued as I padded up the sidewalk toward the closed door that hid both him and our neighbor from view. “And you saw how good she was about getting the Henderson’s cat out of the tree...”

The latter point was actually one of the lapses I preferred not to think about. Glancing up at the branches above my head, I recalled the joy with which I’d climbed after the stranded kitten...then my mistake of baring lupine fangs while chinning up onto a distant limb. The poor critter did get out of the tree, but it also scurried back home with its fur puffed out so severely the kitten appeared to be four times its actual size. No, that wasn’t the way an ordinary human being would have achieved the feline-rescue feat.

Sally Sugar, of course, had been privy to the entire episode. How could she not be when she spent her entire day at the window waiting for something to go wrong? The busybody had seen first-hand that I wasn’t an ordinary human, not just that time but several others also. Which made it even much more difficult to counter accusations grounded so firmly in fact.

Sure enough, our neighbor wasn’t willing to let the issue go now that she’d cornered Sebastien alone in his home. “That girl doesn’t belong here,” the older woman griped as I hovered on my own doorstep, trying to decide whether I should get back in the car and drive around the block a few times to give Sebastien time to soothe the neighbor’s ruffled fur before sending her away. “The slut should go back where she came from.”

This time I winced, and not because of the four-letter word either. Instead, it was the twin scents of anger and frustration drifting through the crack between door and jamb that counteracted my planned retreat.

Sebastien was about to say something we’d all come to regret. For his own sake, I needed to prevent the upcoming lapse.

So I pushed open the door with tupperware bin in hand and fake smile on my lips. Sometimes, it was better to take the offensive, even against the world’s oldest busybody.

“Who wants cupcakes?” I asked all and sundry. Chocolate, I was sure, would sooth even Sally Sugar’s ire.

***

AN HOUR LATER, OUR neighbor had snagged a cupcake then beat a hasty retreat to her observation post across the street. Which left me alone with Sebastien...and his all-important data.

And while I would have liked to talk about something a little more personal, Sebastien’s eyes kept drifting toward his tablet no matter how much I angled my neck to waft pheromones in his general direction. So, after a few moments of frustration, I gave in to the inevitable. “How’s the experimentation going?” I asked, pulling the battered tablet toward me so I could look over the numbers for myself.

“The results are problematic,” Sebastien answered, running one hand through already rumpled hair as I scrolled through columns of information taken over the last week. The mere existence of this data should have been a triumph—after all, the professor had moved on from testing on rodents to testing on humans only ten days earlier. It was miraculous to me that he’d managed to take the one small pill I’d brought back from our summer tussle with Dakota and tweak it to create a proposed antidote. Still, my companion’s current body language suggested that the results weren’t panning out as expected.

So I squashed my own libido and hummed absently as I assessed the data more keenly. Five months earlier, I wouldn’t have understood any of this, but now regression analyses, P-values, and ANOVAs were as familiar to me as the proportion of baking soda to cake flour. And as I assessed, the meat of the week’s experiments gradually became clear.

As best I could tell, Sebastien’s test subjects were acting just as expected despite the extremely low doses of experimental pharmaceuticals being imbibed at this early stage of the testing. Cooperation was trumping competition, students were displaying stronger than average reactions to emotionally charged words like “love,” “kiss,” and “terror.” I wasn’t seeing the problem....

“There,” Sebastien said, leaning closer to highlight a column I’d previously overlooked. He was right—that was distressing. Three out of thirty students willingly taking part in this unofficial experiment had noted trouble sleeping. Two reported lower grades than expected on their midterms. One was dealing with strange outbursts of rage hours after the medication should have worn off.

“I must have missed something in my chemical analysis,” the professor continued, his breath hot against the top of my head. “And I don’t have any of the original sample left to test against. Do you think your father...?”

I shook my head, hating the fact that I’d had three pills in my possession less than an hour earlier...then lost them all as easily as they’d initially come. “The pipeline from Dakota to Haven dried up the instant she hired me. And none of the other packs will admit to having accepted her drugs in the first place, so we can’t get samples there.”

And while the werewolf inability to work across pack lines was incomprehensible to someone like Sebastien who made a living building on the work of other scientists, he accepted my word as gospel. “So I’ll keep tweaking,” the professor agreed, pulling me in a little closer as I continued to poke at the tablet screen, hoping something my brilliant partner had missed would pop out to my far-less-trained eye.