Page 16 of Shifters Awakening

Huffing brought an onslaught of more information into my mind until I identified a mountain lion. Not a big cat shifter. The big cat clan rarely came this far west, preferring to keep to themselves. Most of those had come from the cat shifters in New Port Orleans.

Briefly, out of concern, I considered circling the camp to locate the mountain lion and then dismissed it. The mountain lion was probably up a tree, watching, and the human hadn’t asked for my help, and if she caught a glimpse of me, there would be wailing, crying, gnashingof teeth, and maybe some mace. Nobody from Willow Creek or anywhere else would see me as anything other than a big, scary canine.

Nothing about that appealed to me. Not today.

Who was I kidding? Not ever.

Human backpackers were none of my concern, I decided. The fittest survived the wilds. It was a truth made stronger by life in the pack. Alphas remained alphas for as long as they were fit to serve. I didn’t have time to be soft. My pack needed me to be the asshole.

I loped away, angling toward the far corner of our territory, the pile of boundary stones my own shifter father had used in his time as the alpha, five decades earlier.

A moment later, the sound of an attack filtered across the forest.

It was the next sound that turned my blood to ice as my body already whirled to react. My brain scrambled, trying to sort out the impossibility of it.How?

A woman had screamed my name.

CHAPTER SEVEN

emma

Saturday Night

My bacon sizzled in the cast-iron skillet, and a shiver moved through me as a breeze tiptoed down the back of my neck, reminding me of Logan’s tongue. At least the waterfall had been as gorgeous as it always was.

Absently, I wondered if Logan liked the outdoors, or maybe he would be into me in the outdoors.Figuratively and literally.

In another few weeks, the leaves would change, and the beauty would triple. It might be worth reaching out. Riley probably knew how to get ahold of him. For now, the big yellow moon beamed down on me, bright enough to cast my shadow over the log I sat on.

The songHarvest Moonby The Magic Lantern crooned on in my head in a romantic loop as I poured water from my canteen into the tin coffee pot my dadalways used to make campfire coffee. A fork never stood up in the extra-strong brew, but I’d decided it was a myth perpetuated by cowboy chuckwagon cooks and mountain men. They all probably had some kind of magic I never did. I picked at the bark still on my felled-tree seat while I waited for my water to heat up.

The cloudless sky showed as many of her stars as the bright moon allowed, and I snapped a picture of the moon, the stars, and the shadowed live oak trees, gnarled and alien-looking in the dark. The light from my cell phone screen seemed fake in the flickering firelight as I sent Mom the photo.

Mom: Oh! You remembered.

Me: I always do.

Mom: Not always.

Me: …

Mom: Looks like a beautiful night. The moon is so big. What do they call it?

Me: Harvest Moon.

Mom: You remember that song we found a few years ago… what was it?

Me: Lol. Harvest Moon by The Magic Lantern

Mom: I haven’t listened to that in ages.

Me: If only you were in my head. It’s playing on a loop.

Mom: What are those two light spots by the tree trunk shadows?”

Me: ? What two lights?

I opened the tree-shadow image and zoomed in to the space between the tree trunks. My heart slammed into my rib cage. Two luminescent eyes peered out from the blackness, reflecting the light from the fire.

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