Mate Marked: Shifters of Silver Peak

Shifters of Silver Peak: Mate Marked

Copyright 2015 by Georgette St. Clair

This book is intended for readers 18 and older only, due to adult content. It is a work of fiction. All characters and locations in this book are products of the imagination of the author. No shifters were harmed during the creation of this book.

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The morning of May 15th started out like any other in Silver Peak, Montana, a shifter-only town made up of a scattering of houses and a cluster of shops hugging either side of the town’s main road.

A group of pack members were gathered at their usual table at the Chatterbox Diner, squabbling and worrying about their future, since their so-called Alpha had run out on them like a scared little pussy.

Erika Schmalz, aged twenty-three, was being chastised by her aunt Louise for slurping her soup and not sitting like a lady.

Barbara Tudor, owner, reporter, photographer, blogger, advertising manager and gossip columnist of the Silver Peak Signal, was glumly typing up the crop reports on her laptop and wishing for some real news.

The handsome wanted poster of Roman Kincaid, tacked up on the wall of the Chatterbox, glared down on them all, as he had for the last eighty-two days. Roman Kincaid was a hard man to arrest. He was also hard all over, if the rumors from his many female admirers were to be believed.

He had long, thick, dark hair that swung past his shoulders and cheekbones sharp enough to cut glass. In the picture, he wore a black leather jacket and a rakish expression.

“That is one good-looking outlaw,” Erika said, glancing at the poster. “If I wasn’t practically engaged, I’d be all over that.”

“See, there you go, not being ladylike,” her aunt Louise scolded her, shaking her head. “What if Terrence hears you talking like that? You’re lucky he overlooks your terrible manners and your completely unfeminine behavior. Keep this up, and you’ll never get Mate-Marked.”

Louise glanced across the room at Sissy Castleberry, who had a big, giant Mate Mark on her neck from where big, dumb Roger had bitten her last week. Sissy kept simpering and tossing her hair to the side, to display the Mate Mark, which drew admiring squeals from all the girls at her table. Louise glanced over at Erika, made a clucking noise, and shook her head sadly.

Sissy had been a year behind Erika in high school, and she was now mated for life, as was everybody from Erika’s class – except, of course, Erika.

Erika winced. “First of all, I may be practically engaged, but I’m not dead. I can look. And secondly, it’s not my fault that Terrence doesn’t know how to change a tire and I do. If I’d waited for him to figure it out, we’d have been stuck by the side of the road in the hot sun for hours.”

Her aunt shot her a reproving look that said it would have been a better option.

“I only want what’s best for you,” she said, with a drawn-out sigh that would have been heart-rending if Erika hadn’t heard it so many times before. “Me and Herbert, God rest his soul”—pause for a quick heavenward glance—“had fifty happy years together. And I can tell you, in all that time, I never once used foul language, made”—delicate shudder— “bodily noises, or—”

A yell from the other side of the room made Erika jump. “We can’t go on like this!” shouted Lorena, the head healer for the Silver Peak pack, slamming her hand on the table. She also owned a gift shop. “The teenagers are running wild and we’ve got nobody to rein them in! My store’s been vandalized for the third time this week! Everything’s in chaos! We need to find an Alpha!”

Erika glanced up at the wanted poster on the wall. Yeah, as long as Roman Kincaid and his gang were hanging around the outskirts of town, that was gonna be a problem. Word had gotten out. No aspiring pack leader wanted to come to town just to get their ass handed to them.

And there she went, thinking unladylike thoughts again. Thoughts with swear words in them.

Anyway, with the town’s paper mill gone out of business after the earthquake and most of the pack having moved on, Silver Peak was hardly an attractive prospect for potential sheriff candidates these days.

Erika sighed, took a big swig of her coffee and let out a small burp, earning her a look of disgust from Sissy all the way across the room, so maybe it hadn’t been so small after all.

And then it happened.

They all felt it, even before she arrived. They were wolves, after all; they had that sixth sense.

It was a subtle change in the atmosphere, a lightening, as if a fresh spring breeze had blown into town carrying the scent of wildflowers with it.

They watched in astonishment seconds later as the car drove by. It was a VW Bug, it had big fluttery eyelashes on the headlights, and it was
pink.
And somebody had painted adorable purple cartoony flowers on it. The car was being driven by a woman with a big mop of red curls. Human or shifter? She almost certainly had to be a shifter; humans rarely visited shifter towns.

They all stared through the big picture window as she drove past.

* * * * *

Chelsea Wintergreen hummed the tune to
Rocky Mountain High
as she wound her way along Moose Antler Trail. True, they weren’t in West Virginia, but they were high up on a rocky mountain. The views were breathtaking; the icy cool blues and grays of the mountainside, the towering green pines whose tips brushed the azure sky.

“This is it, Pepper,” she announced to the fat old beagle who lay curled up on the passenger seat next to her. “We’ve finally found a home!”

She’d found Pepper abandoned in a grocery store parking lot the last semester of college, and she had gone through great pains to keep her hidden from the dorm monitor. But now, the days of rushing Pepper into her dorm room closet two or three times a week were officially behind her.

Pepper yawned and put her paw over her nose. She shot a reproachful look at Chelsea, a look that said,
Let me sleep.

“No more hiding!” Chelsea said, trying to drum up some excitement in her canine companion. “You can roam wild and free! Well, in a fenced-in backyard, of course.”

She was rewarded with a gentle snore and a mild blast of flatulence that had her quickly rolling down her window. Realistically, it was hard to imagine Pepper roaming anywhere other than from her dog bed to her food bowl and back again. Also Chelsea was pretty sure that Pepper could fart at will, the rotten little beast.

Well, she wasn’t going to let anything dampen her enthusiasm. She was sure that Silver Peak was meant to be her home and her pack. Growing up in a foster home, without a pack or a family, had been tough. She’d learned to make the best of it, though. She’d pretty much had to, given her…condition.

She’d been worried, though, when she’d graduated from the Culinary Institute.

Like all shifters, she was required by law to sign up with a pack or pride as soon as she graduated from college or by her twenty-first birthday. Most shifters belonged to their family’s pack, but shifters like her, with no family, faced a dilemma upon reaching adulthood. Shifters who did not belong to packs or prides, and who did not have regular contact with other shifters, went feral within six months. The only way to ensure that no shifter went feral was to require that they be a member of a shifter group, and also to require that the leader of that group sent regular reports to the Council for Shifter Affairs certifying that all members were socializing like good little human-animals.

Of course, a lot of shifters resented having to report to the council in the first place. Humans had created shifters with the illegal experiments of the 1930s; there was understandable suspicion of any human agency overseeing them.

But, as compensation, the U.S. Government had given shifters enormous tracts of land where they could live completely free of human supervision or law, with one exception: monthly socialization reports. Or else.

Fortunately for Chelsea, as her twenty-first birthday had approached, the Council for Shifter Affairs had found a distant relative on her late mother’s side and put her in touch. Her choice was to join that relative’s pack or have the Council try to find her some random pack somewhere that was willing to accept a mutant strain of shifter like herself.

Well, the third choice was to live among humans, apart from all shifters, and go slowly crazy until she went feral and attacked someone and was put down with a silver bullet, but that didn’t seem like a really fun choice.

Mel, her third cousin twice removed, had responded to Chelsea’s phone call with great enthusiasm. She’d assured her that the pack would love her, and that Chelsea could crash on her couch as long as she liked and Pepper could come too.

This was it, then. This was the beginning of her new life.

One not-so-small ghost of worry nagged at her. She hadn’t yet told her cousin about her…condition. Not that it was so terrible, but it was something that put people off when they knew about it. It was why she’d never really had close friends in college, why she hadn’t yet found a pack to call her own.

Distracted, she almost missed the sign for Rural Route 501, it was so small. It was hand painted on a board stuck next to a towering Douglas fir tree.

“Here we go!” she sang as she drove down the narrow dirt road. And drove. And drove.

“Good heavens,” she muttered as she slowed to avoid hitting a deer. “Rural route? They weren’t kidding.”

Now she was starting to get a little worried. She’d passed 100 RR 501. It was a small log cabin style home with chickens pecking in the dirt out front. She was looking for 110 RR 501. But she passed by a big empty lot, and then came to 120 RR 501, a modular style house with floor-to-ceiling windows and a sharply slanted asymmetrical roof.

She slowed down, turned her car around and headed back to the empty lot. There was a mailbox there, with the number 110 on it. But there was no house behind the mailbox.

She climbed out of the car, standing there with her door open and squinting into the woods behind the empty lot. Was the house back there somewhere? She had pretty good eyesight, and she didn’t see it anywhere.

She heard rustling from the underbrush, and a woman’s voice called, “Hello?”

She felt a wave of relief roll over her. Maybe her third cousin twice removed lived in a tent? Or a treehouse? Whatever it was, she’d take it. She could hardly be choosy; she had eleven dollars left to her name, and everything she owned was crammed into two suitcases and two plastic bins.

“It’s gone,” the woman’s voice called from the shrubbery. Then the woman, who appeared to be in her forties, pushed her way through the underbrush, striding towards her. Too old to be her cousin; Mel was twenty-two.

She looked at Chelsea with her yellow wolf’s eyes, the only physical sign that she wasn’t human. Chelsea caught a faint scent of wolf as well, but unlike most shifters, she had a terrible sense of smell and wouldn’t have been able to scent her from a distance.

“I beg your pardon?” Chelsea said uneasily. “What’s gone?” Was the woman referring to her cousin Mel as an
it
?

“The house. It’s gone.”

The woman walked closer. She had brownish hair streaked with gray and yanked back into a bun, and wore a flowery apron over her jeans and T-shirt. There were suds on the apron; Chelsea must have interrupted her washing dishes.

“”I’m supposed to meet Mel today. She lives here.” Chelsea gestured at the empty lot, as if by waving her arms around she could conjure up a house and a person where there were none.

“Lived. The house is gone.”

Were the people up here crazy? Some strains of shifter were definitely a little weirder than others. That was what came of government experiments gone wrong.

“It’s a house,” Chelsea said patiently. “How could it be gone?”

The woman wiped her hands on her apron. “It was a mobile home. She upped and left yesterday. She’s always been kinda a rover. Comes and goes. There’s not much to keep a young gal here these days. There’s some gypsy pack in California she said she’s going to join up with.”

“Oh,” Chelsea echoed stupidly. “I see. She’s gone.”

The woman gave a short, sharp nod. “Ayuh. Gone.” Then she turned and walked back towards the underbrush.

Now Chelsea felt panic tightening in her chest. No house, no pack, no job. Half a tank of gas. And eleven dollars in her pocket.

Pepper wandered up to Chelsea, leaned on her leg in seeming sympathy, and let out another blast as if to comment on the general undesirability of the situation.

“Your sense of timing always was impeccable, Pepper,” Chelsea sighed.