CHAPTERONE
Etta – and the hits keep coming….
Iskirted the corner of the taco truck on Warren Street before ducking into the alley. Steam piping up from the sewer vents created a ghostly fog, hiding my retreat. Cordell Perkins followed me, and I wished like hell there were fewer people on the street tonight. The jerk was out for blood, and I worried about bystanders getting caught in the crossfire. He’d come at me in the Butter Daisy Diner four blocks away, flashing a gun in my direction. It was a shock to see him after all these years, and for a brief moment, I was too dumbfounded to act.
Luckily, my training and survival instincts had kicked in before he could reach me. I’d escaped out the back door and had been trying to evade him for the past half hour. Unfortunately, the man was relentless. I pulled my backpack closer to my shoulder and dashed down another alleyway.
There was a man, probably homeless, lying near a closed door, one scruffy tennis shoe on, the other off and sitting a few inches away from his bare foot. To a human, he might appear dead, but I was a lycanthrope. My eyesight, my nose, and my hearing were much sharper. Even in the darkness of the alley, I could hear him breathing, see the rise and fall of his chest, and smell the sour stench of cheap gas station wine. Gingerly, I stepped over the guy, cussing myself as I accidentally kicked an empty bottle and sent it clattering across the uneven pavement.
“Shit,” I hissed. Cordell was also a wolf shifter. A noise like that would attract his attention, and as strong as I was, Cordell was more ruthless. I might hesitate to kill him if it came down to it. He wouldn’t.
“Etta,” Cordell sang my name, his low timber holding the promise of violence. “You can’t run, and there’s no place to hide. Make this easy on yourself and give up.”
Nope. Giving up wasn’t an option. Why had I left Peculiar? William had been banished from the town on threat of death if he returned. He would’ve never come for me if I’d stayed under my stepmother Chavvah Smith’s protection. I’d been safe there.
I shook my head. I’d grown up in a pack town, and I’d been groomed by a narcissistic psychopath, aka my grandfather, to take over as the alpha when he retired. He’d also taught me to believe lycanthropes were at the top of the food chain and that all other shifters, or what we called therianthropes, were tainted products from offshoots of our ancestral tribe.
It was hard to shake that kind of upbringing. His way of governing had resulted in an over two-decade dry spell in pack fertility. In other words, there hadn’t been a single child born to his followers after the day I was born. Fate had intervened and brought us an alpha in the form of an outsider, a half coyote-half wolf shifter who married my bio-dad and changed everything for our people. In Peculiar, amongst the therianthropes, my pack, those of us who left to follow Chavvah, began to thrive again.
Unfortunately, my grandfather William Smith, hadn’t taken the “great migration” four years earlier well at all. He’d even challenged his son, my real father, Billy Bob “Doc” Smith, to a fight, then—adding salt to the wound—William threw me in as his proxy. William thought Doc wouldn’t fight his best against me. It turned out that Chavvah, was smart enough to know when to intercede. She accepted the challenge on her mate’s behalf and won. Losing the fight had been my greatest humiliation but also my greatest relief. For the first time in my life, I’d been given the freedom to choose my own path.
After a transition year of working for Doc at his family practice clinic, I’d chosen to leave and try my hand at higher education. At least, that’s what I’d told myself. As much as I’d been running toward a new life, I had also been running away from my old one. For the past three years, things had been going smoothly, if not a little lonely, until tonight.
“Come on, Etta.” Cordell had changed his tone from menacing to cajoling. “I have a message from William. I come in peace,” he said. “Believe me, I only want to talk.”
Hah. If by talking, he meant kidnapping me and stuffing me in the trunk of his car, then yeah, I believed he wanted to “talk.”
I ducked behind a dumpster, praying the pungent garbage would mask my scent. However, I couldn’t mask the intense thump of my heart trying to pound out of my chest.Keep calm, Etta, I told myself. I’d been in dangerous spots before but never without an escape plan.
“There you are.” His voice was closer. “I can hear you, girl. It’s time to come home.”
He wouldn’t stop until I faced him. I girded my loins and stepped out of the shadows. “That’s not my home anymore.”
Cordell had short blond hair and was six inches taller than me. He was also three times as wide and weighed a good three hundred and fifty pounds. He grinned. “Your father wants you back. He has a new pack, and he needs you to help him guide us.”
“William is not my father,” I spat out. “Besides, the last thing he told me was that I was worthless.” Right before he’d thrown me into Chavvah and Billy Bob’s wedding cake. It had been embarrassing but also a revelation. It had also been the tipping point for me. Even after his lies, manipulations, and abuses, up until that moment, I’d actually been willing to go back with him. Instead, I’d chosen a new path, one that would never lead back to William and his way of life.
“He took you in when no one else would. You’re a bastard, and he raised you as his own,” Cordell said. “And now, he needs you home by your birthday so that you can inherit your legacy.”
What the hell did that mean? I quirked a brow. “Legacy?” My birthday was only a few days away. I was born on March twentieth, the vernal equinox. My father…, no, William, wasnotmy father. Ugh, I hated that Cordell was getting in my head. William had told me I was born at the exact moment the sun crossed the equator. Every year he made a big deal out of the day.
Cordell didn’t answer my question about legacy. Instead, he hit me with more platitudes. “He forgives you. He needs you to come home so you can see how different things are now.”
I gnashed my teeth and ground out my next words. “The only thing William needs is to leave me the hell alone.”
His brow dipped as his tone became threatening. “That’s not one of your choices, little girl.”
“It doesn’t seem like I have any choices where you’re concerned, so I’ll have to make my own.” I’d been trained my whole life in hand-to-hand combat, and I was a master with a sword. Cordell and I had been taught by the same man. He would know and anticipate all my moves. All of them except one.
The one where I run.
Cordell surged forward, arms outstretched, but he was too late.
I took off in a sprint down the alley.
Still, he was quick for a big man. I could hear him behind me, closing the distance with his long strides. I came out onto Bar Street. It wasn’t really named that, but that’s what the college students called it. The street was lined with pubs and clubs that catered to the young, and it was hopping on hump day. Cordell wouldn’t attack me with this many people around. Or at least I hoped he wouldn’t. Of course, even if I gave him the slip, I knew he wouldn’t stop coming after me.
I pulled my backpack tighter to my shoulder and wove my way through small groups of men and women walking down the sidewalk.
