Amber Green : Shapeshifters In Lust

LIGHTS OUT! Excerpt

Jack paced like a caged tiger. Four paces to the window, with its thick blackout curtain. Four paces back to the door. Lorie watched him with a touch of resentment. He sure did take up all the space in this tired old hotel room. Far below, delivery trucks bugled at one another. If the streets were already clogging with morning traffic, Jack needed to be pacing his way down to the bus stop.

He paused at the window, picking at the curtain. "I can't leave you every morning like this. I can't watch night ooze through the city before I can get home to you, and wonder every minute if I'm too late."

While I have to think of you walking home from the bus stop. She shook her head. "You can. What a person has to do, a person can do."

He grinned over his shoulder at her, an ugly snarl of a grin that twisted her insides. "That's my line."

"Then you know it's true. Men go off every day knowing something could happen at home -- "

"Those are men, sweetheart. I am a huntsman. I have thumbed my nose at the enemy. He knows -- they know -- who I am and where I am. Or they will know very soon."

"How? What's different now?"

He picked up the telephone handset and thunked it down again. "Damned contraption."

"Are you going to tell me or do I have to torture myself wondering?"

He clapped one hand to the back of his neck, and squeezed as if it hurt. "They don't inquire at the switchboard, sweetheart, but they have ways of collecting basic information..." He paced again, maddeningly. "Not all of them can talk, but if they have Tommy, they can make him answer any question they're capable of asking. It's only a matter of time."

He picked up the telephone again. "I'm calling in drunk today."

She put her finger on the hang-up button. "Not unless you want to lose your essential-worker card and visit the draft board! Put on your coat, Jack, and go to work, Trust me to be okay for today."

He jerked her close. She flinched, expecting one of those near-bite kisses, but he merely brushed his lips over her cheekbone.

"If the telephone rings," he whispered into her hair "I don't care if you're on the throne -- get up and answer it. But if someone knocks..."

THE SUBJECT Excerpt

The earthquake struck at midnight, lifting the streets of West Memphis and dropping them with enough force to break car axles and set off whooping, beeping, blaring alarms. Debris banged against Esau's truck, shooting white spiderweb cracks across the glass. He swerved to stay on more level asphalt.

Help! David's mental scream seared through him. He was close-even absolute panic couldn't make his nephew's cry so clear, unless he was very close.
David's mental scream seared through him. He was close-even absolute panic couldn't make his nephew's cry so clear, unless he was very close.

Vehicles clogged the next intersection, lit by headlights at all angles, but the four-story white building a block ahead should be the lab. David and his young mate Gabie had left a note that this place experimented on involuntary human subjects. They said they wanted to sneak in, get photos to send to the media. They'd been caught.

Another shock slung the truck like a carnival ride, and a flash threw stark shadows on the buildings ahead. Esau braced against the dash.

Another mental scream brought details: David crouched in the dark, shivering against a glass wall. The ceiling came down, and the link broke.

Thrown back into his own head, Esau watched the white building ahead flatten, floor dropping on floor in slow motion. His heart stopped. David! His nephew didn't answer. "David!"

Dust rose in a cloud, reflecting a dull red from the riverfront fires. Screams, alarms and sirens made a cold stew of meaningless sound.

A subsonic wumpf, more felt than heard, brought him back to his senses. That would be the fuel storage tanks at the riverfront, four miles behind. He left the truck and ran, pausing at a fallen billboard to shed his clothes. The fires rimming the horizon stained the gibbous moon like an eclipse, but he hadn't needed moonlight to shift since his teens.

With faint creaks and a burning cramp, his bones shortened and flesh flowed to the four-legged shape he knew best. His wolf nose would find a miracle, if any existed.

Minutes later he found the miracle: David's scent. He squelched the flare of hope. He'd put David on his first bike, led him through his first shift. If David was alive, I'd know it. But Gabie?
He lost the scent in a nauseating mélange of spilled gasoline and ruptured sewer lines. Circling a half-buried fire truck, he heard bulkily dressed humans yelling about whether to go to the riverfront on foot. They need to help right here. Nothing short of the Mississippi would put out that fire tonight.
He lost the scent in a nauseating mélange of spilled gasoline and ruptured sewer lines. Circling a half-buried fire truck, he heard bulkily dressed humans yelling about whether to go to the riverfront on foot. Nothing short of the Mississippi would put out that fire tonight.

Past the truck, he recaptured David's scent. He sniffed madly among shuffled slabs of cement and asphalt to follow it.

At the edge of the lab's rubble, he found a naked woman prying open the door of a car that would never run again. She wore David's scent, and others, in a haze of sex and blood. The moonlight showed numbers and letters painted on her back.

Esau shifted to human and called out.

She scrambled away, but fell on a pile of broken cinderblocks. He pounced without thinking, and pinned her there.

She moaned. Her horror-stricken eyes did not fix on his face or track his waving hand.

The musk and dust-caked blood on her skin, and the dizzying mix of fumes on her breath, tangled his instincts. She was soft, feminine, ripe for breeding, and his skin heated as she struggled under him. But she had been bred; David and two other shifters had left plenty of scent on her.

Gabie would have David's balls for that. If she lived.

Thick lashes fluttered. "Run," the woman breathed. "Got to run."

A different tremor, like a rumble of distant thunder, shook the earth. As Esau looked up, the ruddy fire-stain vanished from the clouds. The rumble continued. The Mississippi.

Four miles. A safe distance? What was four miles to the Mighty Mississip?

If he left her to search for his packmates-for the bodies of his packmates-she could drown. Forced to a decision, Esau scooped her up and ran to his truck.

HAWKMOOR Excerpt

Once in Mary Alison's neighborhood, Darien left his lieutenants around the corner with the van. Four shifters together generated enough energy to make some humans shiver and look over their shoulders. Mary Alison would certainly feel their massed power, and after so long on her own, she might well take that as a threat.

He paused at the entryway of her building and examined the doorbell signs. The basement was listed as "For Rent" with a "NOT" marked over it and the phone number marked out.

He climbed down the stairs cautiously, and entered a tiny reception area. The cinderblock walls had been painted glossy white and hung with a trio of needlepoint landscapes in shades of gray. He examined one, a precisely rendered view from the floor of a massive conifer forest, and grinned. Most shifters lost color vision on all fours, but wolves and bears also lost clarity of vision. From the detail here, Mary Alison must see with cat eyes.

What kind of cat? Lions, being pack animals, predominated among felines. Every so often they got careless and made the tabloids. Or would she be a tiger like her mother?

A woman's voice echoed from the back room. "You got him off balance, Joey, but where's your own center?"

So that was a real Southern accent. It sounded different on television.

She continued calmly, an expert in her element. "Put your knee in his butt and push forward hard so he can't get his weight back on his hips. Keep hold of his left arm; pull it up under him. Right. Now shove forward with your hips and ride him down."

"Cripes! It feels like I'm trying to do him doggy style!" That was a New Yorker. Male. Darien's fangs reacted, startling him.

"Then y'all got it right. Who-" The woman's voice sharpened. "Who's out there?"

He pulled in his fangs. "Darien Hawkmoor."

He licked his teeth; they felt human. He smoothed any wrinkle from his coat with his hands and stepped around the partition wall to a gym half the size of a basketball court. Under the piercing scent of liniment, he smelled fresh sweat and bleach and old socks.

Mary Alison stood between two big men who radiated the assured control of law enforcement officers. One man wore a black orthopedic girdle. Both wore gray sweatpants and sweaty undershirts; they stood protectively, flanking her.

She was small, and looked smaller between those men. She wore a gray sweatshirt with the sleeves hacked off at her elbows. Gray sweatpants. White sneakers that barely dimpled the padding on the floor.

She gave him a bright smile. "I'll be happy to speak to you in about fifteen minutes, sir, but I only work with two students at a time. Please wait out front."

Darien shoved his hands in his pockets. "We might not have fifteen minutes, Mary Alison. Dismiss your students."

The men bristled. Mary Alison raised her hands to stay them and took one step forward, into the margin of his extended aura. Astonishment splashed through her face. She flushed and snatched in her own margins, like a woman snatching a long skirt out of a puddle.

"I'm Darien," he said again.

"Gentlemen," she murmured, her accent very Southern now, "may we pick this up another day?"

"You sure? I don't like-"

"Please," she said, still staring at Darien.

The men exchanged unhappy looks, but reached for their bags and left without further protest.

"What did you call yourself?"

"Darien Hawkmoor. Your husband."

"I don't recall getting married, Darien Hawkmoor."