Ridden by Darkness Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  About the Book

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  Epilogue

  The B Team

  More Shifters

  More MC Romance

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  Ridden By Darkness

  A Dark Leopards MC Novella

  West Michigan Chapter

  Christine Michelle

  &

  Bella Hickman

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction.

  All rights reserved.

  Ridden By Darkness

  Copyright 2020 © Christine Michelle/Christine M. Butler and Bella Hickman

  Edited by: Bella Hickman, Tiffany M. Foster, and Darlene Tallman

  The character of Thian is created by Mandi Konesni and is copyrighted to her but used with permission for purposes of the previous anthology release and this extended book version.

  The characters of Dmitri aka Snow and Verity are created by Maria Vickers and copyrighted to her but used with permission purposes of the previous anthology release and this extended book version.

  The characters of Knox, Wooly, and Mammoth were created by Darlene Tallman and are copyrighted to her but used with permission purposes of the previous anthology release and this extended book version.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized scanning, uploading, reprint, distribution or use of this material is prohibited. Further, no part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from Christine Michelle, the author.

  www.moonlitdreams.org

  About the Book

  Gray

  I screwed around for years, drifted for a few too many, and then I found a home with the Dark Leopards Motorcycle Club. No, we’re not all leopard shifters, but we do all have one thing in common. We don’t fit anywhere else, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.

  The pull to find a mate was never in my blood like it was for so many of my kind. Not until recently, anyway. Each woman who caught my eye also lost my interest just as quickly. That was until I saw her. Lying face down in the alley, her sweet coppery blood tinged the very air I breathed. I felt the pull and did what was necessary to ensure she survived.

  Keeping her safe from the men who attempted to steal her pelt meant she had to be claimed.

  Mated.

  Mine.

  Chantal

  I knew my legacy and the dangers that lie in wait as a result. Still, I attempted a normal life. I tried to keep who I really was hidden so deep down that no one would ever notice me. Unfortunately for me, someone did notice. They forced my hand, my change, my fate. As it turned out, my fate wasn’t so damn bad after all. Not once Grayson Brewer stepped in to save my life and make me his.

  1

  Panic.

  It was the flavor on the air, the taste that would never be forgotten. My parents were trying to separate my sisters from me, but I was having none of it. “You can’t!” I screamed once more before my grandmother reached over and smacked me right across the face.

  “It is for your own good, child. You can die together or live separately. Choose now. We must go.”

  “Die?”

  “All will be explained, but right now, we have no time.”

  I never realized, until that moment, what a commodity time was. Our kind were destined to live out our lifespan over the course of centuries. There were shifters rumored to have lived for almost a millennia. I couldn’t fathom having to live even a moment without my sisters. They were just as much a part of me as my right arm, or my left. We were one unit operating out of three bodies most days.

  Tears poured down my face as I watched each of my sisters being dragged away and thrown into different vehicles. My parents with one, an uncle with another, and then there was me, left in the care of my grandparents. “Why?” I mumbled as they put me in the recreational vehicle they lived in. “Why? Why can’t we stay together?”

  “It’s for your safety, my love bug. You will never be safe together, at least not until you pick a mate one day.”

  “You don’t get to decide who your mate will be, fate does.” Even then I knew, or thought I knew how fate worked with mated pairs.

  “Ah, that is true for most shifters, my love bug. You and your sisters are a different kind though. You will be allowed the choice of whomever you want, so long as they aren’t mated yet.”

  “And what if I want a lion shifter?”

  “Then you shall have him. You will become the animal that your mate shifts into. You won’t have a choice in that part, so pick your mate wisely. His animal will become yours too.”

  “Why am I so different?”

  My grandmother laughed at my question instead of answering. “The rainbow wants to know why she makes the rain infinitely more beautiful,” she scoffed while shaking her head in a clear sign of disapproval. “Maybe, instead, you should be thankful that you are different. Embrace your own beauty, and don’t question it right now. All will be revealed, in time.”

  There it was again, that word, ‘time’. I didn’t like it. Either it seemed to signify things that couldn’t be helped because they were already in the past, or it was about something in a far off, obscure future. The only thing I wanted to do with time was stop it and roll it back to the moment before my sisters and I were so rudely awakened in the middle of the night, only to be sent on three separate journeys.

  That wish had been beyond my powers.

  Present Day

  “Alright class, you know what I expect of you! Your projects are due in two weeks.” The expected grumbles from students drifted my way as all of them gathered their things and prepared to leave school for the day. If only they knew, I was looking forward to the project even less than they were. Most of my students wouldn’t even bother to do their own project. Their parents always stepped in at the last minute and put everything together for them. I really wished they wouldn’t. The kids learned nothing that way, except to brush off their responsibilities on others.

  My phone vibrated in my pocket as I was leaving the school a little while later. I decided to ignore it because there was no way, no how the school was going to trick me into extra duty. “Not today, you soul-sucking leeches,” I mumbled under my breath. They were simply going to have to wrangling kids onto buses or out to their parents without me. Ignoring my phone once more, I climbed in the driver’s seat of my car and headed toward home on autopilot. It should have probably been disturbing that I couldn’t remember the drive to my apartment, but the truth was, it happened more often than I liked to admit. Driving through traffic was the only time I allowed myself to wallow in the fact that most of my family was probably dead now and those who weren’t may or may not be safe from people who would prey on them. I tried, often, to put out psychic feelers to see if I could still sense my sisters. When we were young, we could tell if one of us was in a nearby room by doing that. I ne
ver stopped hoping that one day it would work and I’d find of them on the other end of a psychic connection.

  Our triplet powers didn’t seem to work anymore though. It had been far too many years since the last time I had been able to conjure any type of feeling about either of them. It was that dismal thought that led me to believe I might just be the last one alive. Something always made it feel false to say that, like I’d know for certain if one of my sisters no longer existed, but who knew?

  What if the reason I couldn’t feel them, but I still believed them to be alive, was because they no longer felt that same attachment to me? What if they moved on, and no longer thought about their long-lost sisters? What if I was the only one still hanging on to the hope that we would all come back together as a family one day?

  It was rather unfortunate that I’d been so lost worries and thoughts of my family because it made it that much easier for my kidnappers to nab me. One moment, I was headed into my condo, until I remembered I hadn’t stopped at the grocery store to pick up things for dinner like I had planned. Too lost in thought to have remembered, I’d made it home on autopilot skills alone. “Shoot!” I huffed the word out loud as I turned to go back to my car. “This day just keeps getting better,” I muttered as I grabbed at the fob on my keychain to unlock my car door again. I never made it to my car though. Instead, I had a dark bag shoved over my head as the stench of an unclean panther and a leopard clouded my senses. Rough hands held onto each of my arms as I tried to figure out what was happening.

  “What’s going on?” I managed to get out before I felt the pinch of a needle being pushed into my neck, then the push of fluids that burned into my body and immediately made me flush and feel lightheaded. I fought against whatever they had pumped into my system, but the battle was lost quickly as the drug they used washed through me and dropped me into unconsciousness.

  2

  The woman shrieking my name from across the street could have been ignored if it weren’t for the way her tits were bouncing all over the place in the barely there shirt she had on. “Grayson Brewer? Is that you?” I hadn’t been called by my full given name in so many years, it seemed foreign to hear it from someone I couldn’t readily identify. Grayson had been my father’s last name. Not that I ever did more than meet the man and hear stories about him. Having the knowledge that he fathered more offspring than just myself and left us all behind, was plenty of reason to hate the name my mother had given me in desperation. It hadn’t worked anyway. The bastard never stuck around, or did anything for me to warrant the kind of loyalty my mom hoped his name would bring.

  “Conquest of yours?” Knox, my club’s president, smirked as he asked me.

  “Fuck if I know.” The woman who yelled my name bounced her tits, along with the rest of her, all the way across the street to where we were just about to hop back on our bikes to head to the clubhouse. She poked her overly made up lip out in a pout as she neared and realized I had no clue who she was.

  “You don’t remember me, do you?”

  “Listen, I don’t have time for games. I don’t know who you are or what you want, but I got places to be sweetheart, so…” I just left the last hanging, hoping she would get to the point or get out of the way. There was a hint of feminine cat, something other than leopard in the air. I licked at my lips, catching the taste of her in the air. Panther, maybe.

  “Well, we met when you first moved here. I thought maybe, if you hadn’t found a mate yet, um…” Her eyes darted with a great deal of interest toward Knox before shifting back to me. It would take a complete moron to miss the fact that this little kitty cat was about to go into heat, and she was looking for someone to put little kittens in her belly. That was something I had no interest in. If, one day, I actually found my mate, there was no way I wanted her to be saddled with my cubs and a baby momma hanging around that she shouldn’t have to deal with.

  “Sweetness, don’t you have a leap you belong to?”

  “I’m not leopard,” she hissed at me for insinuating as much. “I’m panther.”

  “Well, honey, I am leopard. You look down your nose at being called one, then maybe you shouldn’t be looking to get knocked up by one either. Go on, get out of here and let your claw take care of you then.”

  “If I mate with one of them,” she started to say, but then stopped. “Never mind. You wouldn’t understand.” She turned on her heel and moved with far more grace and swiftness while crossing the road this time. Thankfully, she was also headed in the opposite direction I was.

  Knox shook his head while laughing at me. “Jesus, Gray. What the fuck kind of pheromones you putting out over there?”

  I grinned at my long-time friend. “Dead fuckin’ sexy, that’s what!” I was only half joking. I knew the effect I had on the opposite sex, especially other feline shifters. Some of it was just the sheer confidence I typically exuded. The rest of it was because I could usually read their wants or needs in an otherworldly way. I couldn’t quite read specific thoughts from people, but it was close enough that knowing exactly what they wanted was never a challenge. When I was younger, I used that knowledge for my benefit more often than not. Hell, I probably still used it too often, just because it was second nature at this point. I firmly believed that was why I had been made vice president of the Dark Leopards Motorcycle Club’s Western Michigan Chapter. I just knew shit that other people had to guess at. It made my presence indispensable during business deals.

  “What do you think she was getting at about her claw?”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “Who the fuck knows. Maybe she didn’t want to feel owned?”

  “You didn’t get anything off of her?”

  “She’s about three days off from going into heat. I didn’t get shit, beyond her being nervous and horny,” I told him, only to have the bastard laugh at me.

  “You have the control of a saint, Gray.”

  “Nah,” I disagreed. “I swore I’d never leave a bunch of women with babies trailed across the country the way my father did before he found his mate. What that poor woman had to go through before he moved them to another fuckin’ country to get away from his brood. Hell, he moved them because it made his mate so sad to see all the children the bastard had before her, but him moving and abandoning them, has made it so his mate up and leaves him every time she goes into heat.”

  “You shittin’ me?”

  “Nope. She was heartbroken that the man she was destined for would stick his dick in so many women knowing he might find her someday, let alone having babies with so many. But the icing on the cake was knowing the bastard had no qualms about leaving all of us in the dust once he found her. She said she couldn’t trust him to do right by their children if they had any and anything ever happened to her.”

  “Damn, Gray. I knew you had it rough, but that’s some shit.”

  “Why do you think I cringe every time I hear my name?”

  “Maybe we need to come up with a new road name for you?” Knox meant well, but I figured that’d just cause more issues with the guys.

  “Nah. It’s all good. How about we just get back to the fuckin’ clubhouse so I can release some tension? I might not be knocking up any panther bitches in heat, but damn if I’m not rearing to get my dick wet now.”

  Knox adjusted himself. “No shit. It is uncomfortable as fuck being around one in heat that’s been unclaimed.”

  He was not wrong about that. I might have had the patience of a saint in being able to turn down an offer from a woman that close to her heat cycle, but it didn’t leave me unaffected. It also left me wondering if I’d ever come across my own mate. I had moved away from my place of birth, then moved again after growing up a bit, and finally found myself here. I often argued with myself that if I never went back home, there was a chance the woman destined for me would never become my mate. Then the opposite side of the argument would play out, and I’d wonder if maybe that’s why I ended up heading this way, because my mate was here. The fates sure as f
uck knew how to curse us. It was why our numbers stayed small. We didn’t tend to find our mates early on, and most wouldn’t reproduce without their mate. Again, my father’s story was a great example of how it worked out if you chose to ignore fate or test it.

  3

  Fire crept up my legs. The burn was such a torment that I almost missed everything else around me. That was, until I caught a whiff of the acrid stench of vulture. No. This could not be happening to me. I was not meant to be a feast on the side of a road, mistaken for carrion. The unique musk of a leopard spilled over into my senses. Dirty. Unkempt. I felt hands on my legs, two sets. Touching me. No. Hurting me. My pelt. The coppery tang of blood was on the air. My blood. Far away, there was something else. More leopard. Different. I needed him.

  I hoped I had enough strength that he would heed my call and put a stop to this. Whatever this was. Prone, in a dirty alley, bleeding, missing part of my pelt, and still not quite with it thanks to whatever I’d been drugged with, I was giving some stranger my every faith that he wasn’t involved and would be able to save me.

  “Please,” I groaned into the air, only to be hit upon the head. For a moment, nothing happened, then a quick flash of pain, bright light, and what I thought was an almighty roar just before the darkness swallowed me.

  Slowly, I managed to pull back up into consciousness, though I continued to breathe shallowly and keep up pretenses until I could figure out who might have me. Had my savior won the battle and come for me? Was he a noble choice, or would he abuse me more? I had no way of knowing and so I just lie there on what felt like a soft bed, while listening as two men spoke quietly with one another. Actually, one voice sounded more like a person growing into becoming a man. It still had a slight adolescent edge to it, whereas the other screamed dominant manly-man.