Hunted (Auralight Codex: Dakota Shepherd Book 2) Read online

  Contents

  Description

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1 Varulf

  2 Little Sister

  3 Where Your Rump Rests

  4 Showing Off

  5 Moving In

  6 Where the Heart Is

  7 The Night Watch

  8 Sniffing Around

  9 The Walls Have Eyes

  10 Distractions

  11 Ancient Ways

  12 Plesant Dreams

  13 Running Free

  14 First Blood

  15 Raelya

  16 Hit the Road

  17 Consequences

  18 Truth & Reconciliation

  19 History Lessons

  20 Sunrise

  21 Parlor Tricks

  22 Changes

  23 Territorial Disputes

  24 Tresspasser

  25 Drums of War

  26 Awaited in Valhalla

  27 Flight of the Valkyries

  28 Fools Rush In

  29 Little Love

  30 Hero's Luck

  31 Making Peace

  32 Wake Up Call

  More Dakota

  Before You Go

  More DarksbaneBooks

  Acknowledgements

  Pronunciation Guide

  About the Author

  Hunted

  Part of the Auralight Codex: Dakota Shepherd

  by Shei Darksbane & Annathesa Nikola Darksbane

  Dakota Shepherd is such a newb: newly Awakened, rookie werewolf, supernatural investigator in training. Her command of the wolf inside is shaky at best, and her grasp of the unstable magic she wields is worse. She sure has a lot to learn about her new life in the supernatural world.

  So why would anyone want to stalk her?

  A trespasser in pack territory. Blood on the mountain. An urban legend, spoken only in whispers.

  Can Dakota rise to the challenge of a deadly foe?

  There’s no shame in being new: everyone starts out that way. But in a world of powerful supernatural threats, being a newb could get a girl killed. And if Dakota isn’t up to the job of protecting herself, how can she hope to protect her loved ones from the ancient supernatural killer that hunts them?

  Hunted

  A Dakota Shepherd Novel

  Part of the Auralight Codex

  By Shei Darksbane

  &Annathesa Nikola Darksbane

  Copyright © 2015 by Shei Darksbane.

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

  may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever

  without the express written permission of the publisher

  except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  First Printing, August 14, 2015

  Darksbane Books

  247 Macedonia Loop

  Jasper, AL 35503-5959

  DarksbaneBooks.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real people and events are coincidence.

  For the dreamers, and the Awakened.

  For the Wise Man who loved me.

  And for the kind Souls who believed in me.

  1

  Varulf

  My soul was on fire. My world, a hazy red, stained by fury, girded in rage.

  Every inch of me burned from deep inside my chest, to my bones, to my muscles, to my horrifically stretching skin. My body was coming apart, and I was breaking; I knew it.

  “Keep going, Dakota! Feel the rage. Let it carry you through the pain.” The voice of Ralof, my Alpha, carried me onward as the wolf in me rushed up to obey his commands, his encouragement.

  I roared in agony and triumph as my bones snapped and popped, creaking their way into place as my small frame realigned into the hulking creature that was my rage incarnate. I had unleashed the fury I carried inside, the wrath that was the wolf, and my body had warped into the legendary creature so iconic that the world had known its name for centuries, for millennia.

  Varulf, Garwalf, Lykánthropos, Loup-Garou.

  Werewolf.

  I unfurled my war form to its full six-foot-six height, and looked Ralof in the eyes. My vision was narrowed; I couldn’t focus on anything but that which was right before me. But Ralof was not my prey, nor my enemy. He was Alpha. I was his to command, and I would do as he desired, because the Alpha was stronger than me, more dominant, and I believed in him to my core.

  Ralof nodded once in approval, a human gesture tainted by wolfish body language that appealed to my dual nature in this form. “Good. Well done, Dakota. Now shift back.”

  It was hard to focus on words; I wanted action. I wanted to run, to hunt, to tear into my prey, to battle a mighty foe. But Ralof was my Alpha. And he said to shift. It was hard. I didn’t feel a need to shift back to my scrawny human form, but my Alpha’s eyes met mine and I knew I must obey.

  I curled in on myself as I tried to shift back into my human self, reversing the steps I’d taken to achieve this form in the first place. I shut the rage out, focused on the person I was: an average, skinny girl with short, choppy brown hair, and light golden-brown eyes. A scrawny, ordinary woman no one in their right mind would ever have imagined was a werewolf.

  And as I focused, Ralof spoke, murmuring soothing, gentle words. He caressed my back, running his hand gently along my fur, his touch calming me as much as his words. The beast inside me relinquished its hold on me easily enough, slipping back and away as my human mind re-emerged. And as the varulf receded, the pain returned in full force.

  But I did as my Alpha commanded. I shifted back to my human form with a strangled cry of pain that left me gasping on the ground in front of him. The agony of the shift was even worse coming out than it was going in. At least, it felt that way. When I was shifting into the war form, the rage had shielded me from focusing on the pain. “Oooowww. Holy Flying Spaghetti Monster, that hurts.”

  Ralof tilted his head, a confused expression crossing his face. “Holy… what?”

  I shook my head. “Nothing. Anyway, so… How was that?”

  Ralof crossed his arms. “Not bad. Not bad at all. Especially for your first time.”

  “Thank you for being gentle with me.” I straightened and rolled my shoulder once before reaching for my shirt. Standing around butt-naked in the back yard of a busy house with floor-to-ceiling windows on the wall I was facing didn’t quite feel comfy yet, even if everyone inside was a werewolf and absolutely used to seeing naked shifters running around, even if those werewolves were my own pack. I was new at this. Give me a break.

  Ralof held up a hand to halt me. “Do not get dressed again just yet. I want you to try it again. I pulled you back very quickly the first time, as soon as you had finished shifting. This time, I want to walk you through the basics of movement in the war form before you come back out.”

  I groaned. “You couldn’t have done that while I was still in it the first time?”

  Ralof grinned at me. “You must get used to the pain, Dakota. Mastering your various forms is very important. Knowing how to use your shifting to your advantage in a fight is imperative. It will certainly save your life one day.”

  “Okay, okay…” I straightened and faced Ralof, drawing myself up to my whole five-foot-five height and clapped my hands together. “Let’s do this then.”

  Ralof nodded approvingly. “Good. The first time, you were able to shift into the varulf fairly easily, I think, because of the anger you felt while relating your story to me.” He was referring to the st
ory of my past, of how my mother had driven me to my first shapeshifting as a teenager by showering me in her bigotry. My Southern-Baptist mother had never accepted the fact that I was a lesbian, and when she’d caught me kissing a girl, she’d unleashed the full fury of her Bible-thumping religion upon me and the fury of my wolf had risen to the challenge.

  My Nan, as it turned out, was a fairly powerful Mentalist, a magic-user who could alter things with her mind, including other people’s minds, including other people’s memories. Nan had blocked out my memories of being a werewolf and all the events surrounding it, and locked away my ability to shift. She’d done it to keep me safe, to give me a happier life, and it’d worked well enough until a chance encounter with a rogue wizard had caused me to Awaken. Then I’d run off to SII, the Supernatural Investigation Institute, for help and they’d shipped me off to Calgary to visit an even more powerful Mentalist than Nan who had helped me recover the memories I’d lost.

  I had been telling Ralof the details of my so-recently recovered memories of those events when I’d felt myself starting to shift involuntarily. Ralof had recognized what was happening, and since we were safely tucked away in the back yard of the pack house which rested on a few acres of the Great Smoky Mountains, decided that it was as good a time as any to start teaching me to shift into the werewolf’s most powerful form: the varulf, or as we called it in English, the war form.

  But technically, it had happened by accident. So I had no idea how to do it again.

  “Now remember, the varulf is not the wolf, nor is it the woman you are. It is a joining of the two, and one crucial third element.” Ralof held my gaze as he explained.

  “Ooh! A secret ingredient?” I grinned.

  Ralof shook his head at me, amused. “More or less.”

  “Okay, what is it?”

  “Rage.” Ralof lifted his hand and I watched it carefully, thinking he was going to show me the trick to taking on the new form. I was completely surprised when he slapped me across the face.

  “Wha—” I was shocked. It hadn’t been all that hard; he had only made the skin sting. But I hadn’t expected him to hit me. “What was that?”

  Ralof slapped me again. “Think about something that makes you angry.” The wolf surged in me, snarling. I felt my nose crinkle as her anger rolled out of me readily. The Templar. I had already explored the anger I felt toward my mother and the events of my past. But the most recent cause for rage had been the stranger in black who had tried to kill me and my packmate on our way to Calgary.

  I clenched my fists. “Good.” Ralof slapped his hand across my arm, a little harder than before. “As the anger rises, feel the connection with the wolf.” They hurt Raelya. I growled, an angry human sound that reverberated in my chest in an impossible manner. Ralof slapped my other arm. “Let her come to the surface. Focus on the anger you share with her. Then, merge yourself, the wolf, and the anger together.” I thought of Raelya’s wrists, burned and bleeding from the silver handcuffs the Templar had locked onto her. Incensed, I pulled the wolf close to me, and my body started to change.

  First, I felt my muscles swelling outward, my joints started popping, and the pain hit me like a truck. As soon as my body started tearing itself apart, the agony of the change fueled the rage that Ralof and my thoughts had started. I grew mindlessly irate. My bones crackled as the transformation continued, mangling my torso as my body stretched, making more of me than had been there before. I screamed at the agonizing pain, my voice a mix of human and wolf that made a terrible, fearsome sound. My vision clouded and for a moment, I couldn’t see anything before me; all I could see was the Templar’s snarling face in my mind and the burns on Raelya’s wrists. I roared in fury the like of which I’d never felt before in my life, and I wanted to fight.

  I wanted to hunt, to find the Templar I’d left alive in the airport, to run him down and sink my teeth and my claws into his flesh. I wanted to tear him limb from limb, to rend his flesh from his bones and scatter his remains. I surged forward, aching to seek him out—

  Ralof slammed into me, catching my arms in his mighty, dark-furred arms. At first I was irritated. He was my pack, and yet he was standing in my way. I rolled my weight against him, trying to get him to let me go, but he held me tightly. I growled at him indignantly and tried to jerk my arms free, but Ralof pulled me sharply forward and caught my eyes. I snarled, flexing my body toward him when the strength of my Alpha’s will impacted me, catching my frenzied mind, and commanding me to be still.

  I could barely breathe, so great was the ache for the hunt. I struggled to obey my Alpha’s demanding presence as the rage in me threatened to tear me asunder. But Ralof’s lambent golden eyes were unyielding as the mountain on which we stood. The wolf in me recognized his dominance, recognized him as my pack, and as my leader, my Alpha.

  The rage quieted suddenly, like a bonfire drenched to a smolder. I bowed my head to him, rumbling quietly in my throat as I lowered my eyes submissively. Ralof pulled my arms down, leaned forward, and held me as he placed his teeth against my throat, holding me for a moment as I relinquished control and acknowledged his dominance over me. A moment later, he took a step back and released me. “Good.” His voice came out in a half-growl, but he sounded calmer than I’d expected.

  I glanced down at my hands and saw that they were thick, strong and furry, with long, sharp claws extending from my fingers. I glanced toward the house and caught my reflection in the bay windows. I was the same tawny and charcoal colors as I had been as the wolf—

  I couldn’t focus! This form was a roiling fury, aching for violence; everything else felt distant and unimportant. I leaned back and howled, feeling the anger and the powerful need for violence surging in me again.

  Ralof shifted back into his human form, his body cracking and shrinking into the more compact, but still large shape of the furless version of his body. He grunted and breathed out a pained sigh, but shook his head once and was done with it. “Good, Dakota. No doubt you are feeling an urge to run off into the woods and hunt, but I command you to resist that urge.”

  I growled deeply. Damn straight I wanted to run off and hunt! I couldn’t focus on his words. I wanted a deer in my jaws. I wanted a challenger to fight. Anything but standing still and listening to words right now.

  Ralof held my gaze with his vice-like will. “I want you to run once around the yard and come back to me. You are not to go into the trees, and you will come back to stand before me when you are finished. Go!”

  I was off like a light. Freedom to run was better than standing there listening to words. No matter how much I wanted to hunt down a deer or battle an enemy right now, I could not dart off into the forest to seek them out. The Alpha said not to. So I tore across the yard, racing along the treeline like the wind, like an angry, furry wind.

  I sunk my claws into the earth before me as I climbed back up the sloping yard to where Ralof stood waiting, naked from his shift, eyes piercing into my soul, where the wolf and the woman were united. I rushed up to where he stood and threw my head back to howl. Ralof waited patiently until I met his eyes again, then caught me up in the iron hold of his will once more. “Change back. Now.”

  I wanted to obey him, but it was hard. The rage was trying to rise in me again.

  “Dakota!”

  I met his eyes. My Alpha commanded me to change.

  So I changed.

  My body came back to itself in a cadence of cracking bones, accompanied by the cacophony of my screams, which ended at last in a shuddering cry that almost turned into a sob.

  Ralof embraced me suddenly, keeping me on my feet as I nearly fell. “Holy crap, that hurts.” Tears stung my eyes as I tried my best to stay strong. Ralof held me carefully until I found my feet and nodded to him. “That was… intense.” I choked up at him, wiping at my eyes.

  Ralof nodded gently, not letting go of my arms until I had been steady for a few seconds. “Very intense. It always is. But you did well.”

  I gl
anced at the clothes on the bench next to me and decided that I deserved to be comfortable after all of that. Ralof nodded to me and we both started redressing ourselves. “I did? I almost didn’t come back when you asked me to.”

  Ralof laughed heartily. “You think that was bad? I suppose you do not know any better. You did very well actually.”

  I smiled weakly. “Well at least there’s that.” We finished dressing then settled down on the benches, facing one another.

  “So,” he began after a moment, “You can shift into the wolf, and you can shift into the war form. I suppose that means the trip was a success.”

  I nodded. “Yep.” I rolled my shoulders again, relieving the tension that had risen in them from shifting. The pain had faded quickly, probably because werewolves regenerated quickly, and any damage the shifting had done to my muscles and bones was mending already. My stomach rumbled loudly.

  Ralof must have heard it, not that he’d have needed werewolf-enhanced hearing for that. He smiled. “Dinner will likely be ready soon. You should go inside and see. We can change our forms at will, but there is a cost in energy. Our bodies must recover from the violence of the shift, and food is the fuel for our regeneration.”

  I smiled. “I know. I read about it in my SII training materials. It’s part of why we eat so much.”

  Ralof barked out a laugh. “That and because Elisa is such a good cook.”

  I grinned. “Took the words right out of my mouth.”

  Ralof stood and clapped me on the shoulder. I grinned up at my Alpha, a tall and broad-shouldered man with strawberry blond hair that fell past his shoulders, and a matching beard that he regularly kept braided and sometimes beaded after the fashion of his Viking ancestors. “Go on and eat. I need to go talk to the others.” He meant the two wolves who were staying at the pack house this weekend, visiting since they lived further out and weren’t always around for our more regular events.

  “Are you going to go running?” I peered up at Ralof eagerly. I had regained the ability to shift my form only a few days ago, and my wolf was restless, eager to go running with her pack.