One True Mate 8: Night of the Beast Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Glossary

  1 – Leilani Wants Out

  2 – The Beast Runs North

  3 – Foxen in the Forest

  4 – Leilani in the Meadow

  5 – The Beast kills the Alpha

  6 – He has Survived Much

  7 – Get Your Ass Home

  8 – Leilani talks to Jaggar

  9 – The Grunter and his Brother

  10 – The Beast Returns

  11 – Poor Burton

  12 – The Wolven are Restless

  13 – Winding Up

  14 – The Beast Meets Leilani

  15 – Birth of a Beast

  16 – Officer Grr

  17 – Back to the Present

  18 – He’s No Felen

  19 – Take Me to Church

  20 – The Fearsome Five

  21 – Harlan Didn’t Kiss Me

  22 – All Her Fault

  23 – Leilani Loses Herself

  24 – Drowning in Feelings

  25 – Leilani Runs

  26 – Jaggar in the Meadow

  27 – Hi. Hi.

  28 – Jaggar’s Office

  29 – She Speaks Ruhi

  30 – Eventine Returns to the Meadow

  31 – Her Mate’s Home

  32 – Eventine’s Demands

  33 – Leilani’s Purpose

  34 – Reunited

  35 – Home

  36 – Shut this Place Down

  37 – Hi. Hi.

  38 – Hi. Hi.

  39 – Mating

  40 – There’s Just One Last Thing…

  41 – This Dressing Room is Fancy, so It’s OK

  42 – Prom

  43 – To Me

  44 – In Typical VF Fashion

  XO - Notes From Lisa xxoo

  One True Mate 8: Night of the Beast

  by Lisa Ladew

  All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons or organizations, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

  Copyright © 2018 Lisa Ladew All Rights Reserved

  Book cover by The Final Wrap. <3.

  Cover model: Alfie Gordillo

  Photographer: Reggie Deanching of R+M Photography. Thank you for such awesome pictures.

  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to every reader who loved OTM7. Thank you. I loved it, too, and your feedback helped me stay in a good place about it. Most of you will never understand how much hearing from you meant to me and still means to me. <3

  SHOUTOUT to Rachel Mireles and Lori Whipkey, both of whom correctly guessed my favorite scene in that book. Hi Lori, hi Rachel!

  <3 much love and appreciation to Amanda Quiles. She named Jaggar’s cat and gave me the killer idea for his renqua and helped me through the finer complexities of this very intense and complex book. <3 Thank you, Amanda.

  Glossary

  Bearen – bear shifters. Almost always work as firefighters.

  Citlali – spiritual leaders of all shiften. They are able to communicate with the deities telepathically, and sometimes bring back prophecies from these communications.

  Deae – goddess.

  Dragen – dragon shifter. Rare.

  Echo – an animal with the same markings of a shiften. Usually seen as a harbinger of bad things, but could also be a messenger from The Light.

  Felen – big cat shifters. Almost always work as mercenaries. They are also the protectors of Rhen’s physical body and a specially trained group of them can track Khain when he comes into the Ula.

  Foxen – the foxen were created when Khain forcibly mated with female wolven.

  Haven, the – final resting place of all shiften. Where The Light resides.

  Impot – a shiften that cannot shift because of a genetic defect caused by mating too close to their own bloodline. Trent and Troy are not thought to be impots because they were born during a klukwana.

  Khain – also known as the Divided Demon, the Great Destroyer, and the Matchitehew. The hunter of humans and the main nemesis of all shiften.

  Klukwana – a ceremony where a full-blooded shiften mates with another shiften with both in animal form, then the mother stays in animal form during the entire pregnancy. The young in the litter are always born as their animal. Wolven from a klukwana always come in at least four to seven young. Bearen are always two cubs, and felen are unpredictable, sometimes only one. Shiften born from a klukwana are almost always more powerful, bigger, and stronger than regular shiften, but many parents don’t try it because of the inherent risks to the mother during the (shorter) pregnancy and the risk that the shiften young may choose not to shift into human form. A lesser known possibility is that the shiften young will have a harder time learning to shift into human form, especially if no one shifts near them in the first few days after birth.

  KSRT – Kilo Special Response Team, or Khain Special Response team. A group of wolven police whose primary goal is to hunt down and kill Khain, if that can be done.

  Light, The – the creator of the Ula, humans, Rhen, Khain, and the angels.

  Moonstruck – insane. Shiften who spend too long indoors or too long in human form can become moonstruck slowly and not even realize it.

  Pravus – Khain’s home. A fiery, desolate dimension that sits alongside ours.

  Pumaii – a small group of specialized felen tasked with tracking Khain when he crosses over into our dimension.

  Renqua – a discoloration in a shiften’s fur which is also seen as a birthmark in human form. Every renqua is different. The original renquas were pieces of Rhen she put inside the wolves, bears, and big cats to create the shiften. Every pure-blooded shifter born since has also had a renqua. Half-breeds may or may not have one. Some foxen acquired weak renquas when they mated with shiften. Also called the mark of life.

  Rhen – the creator of all shiften. A female deity.

  Ruhi – the art of speaking telepathically. No humans are known to possess the power to do this. Not all shiften are able to do it. It is the preferred form of speaking for the dragen.

  Shiften – shifter-kind.

  Shiftsegen – a special blessing left for the One True Mates by their father, a pendant that represents their angel half and the animal of their intended mate. The shiftsegen is powerful and unpredictable and its uses and powers are not clear.

  Ula – the Earth, in the current dimension and time. The home of the shiften.

  Vahiy – end of the world.

  Wolfen – a wolf shifter. Almost always works as a police officer.

  Wolven – wolf shifters, plural.

  Zyanya – when a wolfen dies, the funeral is for the benefit of humans, but the important ceremony is the zyanya. The packmates of the fallen wolfen run in wolf form through the forest, heading north to show the spirit the way to the Haven. When they reach a body of water, they all jump in and swim to the other side, then emerge in human form.

  1 – Leilani Wants Out

  Leilani lay in the bed where her body had been placed, muscles tensed and drawn in toward the center of her, eyes squeezed shut, holding on tightly to reality with both hands, but only for the moment. Reality hurt too bad and she did not want to stay there long.

  She knew where she was: Trevor and Ella’s house. Ella was her half sister and a half-angel, like Leilani was, but Leilani couldn’t pick her out of a
lineup.

  Pain pulsed through her head, pounding on the backs of her eyes in waves. Leilani pressed her ruined eyes closed and listened hard to the pandemonium that surrounded her. A pup was on her chest, it smelled good, like puppy breath and sweet puppy fur and her sisters were crowding her. The bed sagged and moved to one side as someone was placed into the bed with her.

  Eventine.

  Leilani held her breath. She’d been promised only one thing, the right to try. Rhen had told her what to do and how to do it, and Leilani had followed the instructions exactly. She hadn’t dared to ask the questions that swirled in her brain.

  Will ripping through time again make me lose my eyesight completely?

  Can my body heal from what it’s been through?

  Is she guaranteed to live if I do this?

  Will I be allowed back into the meadow after?

  It was done. Eventine was in the present, or at least her body was. Leilani had pulled Burton Risson through time, shown Burton to himself, then had him steal his beloved daughter’s body out of that reality, leaving the old Burton to explain to Harlan what had happened to it.

  Nothing is promised, Rhen had said, but everything is worth trying. Leilani had trusted her, blindly. Ha, ha, blindly. Leilani tried not to cry and squeezed her eyes shut tighter. Blind. Blind. Blind. Was she blind?

  Maybe, maybe not, but she was in trouble. Pain pulsed and ripped in her head, just behind her eyes. She tried to blink without opening them. Silver light like thick, poisonous mercury flooded her mind, making it hard to think or move.

  Fractured, disjointed thoughts came at her. Blind. Forever. Destroyed. Did it to yourself. Lost. Hurting. Useless. Done.

  She tried to concentrate, then tried to move her hands up to her face to press at her eyes, but they wouldn’t move. One thought repeated through her mind, and she could not pay attention to what was going on around her, to the grief and the whispered prayers and the confusion and the sound of big animals growling and snarling and moving through the room. She turned inward.

  Will I be allowed back into the meadow? was the thought repeating through her mind. The answer might be no, and if it was, it meant she was trapped here in this broken body. Someone had once told her that time travel comes at a great price to the traveler. Who, she couldn’t remember and trying to think about it made her eyes hurt. She’d already paid with so much, would she now pay with the only refuge she’d ever found?

  Leilani reached for the metaphorical clock in her mind, the one that caused everything to happen. She could make travel happen a few ways, but she’d discovered through trial and error that this way was the easiest.

  The clock.

  She yanked at the spot where it should be with mental fingers. Silver light flashed, blinding her from the inside out, backlighting the clock in her head. It wasn’t always there, but if she focused on the right side of her mind, it appeared.

  Everything about the clock fascinated her. Gently, she probed the face of it, squinting against the silver light, trying to see where the clock hands were. Both hands pointed straight up. 12:00. Home.

  I want to go to… she didn’t know what time on the clock meant meadow, so she said the name, instead of the time. The meadow, she whispered inside her own mind. I want to go to the meadow.

  The hands of the clock spun with a whirring sound and Leilani moved.

  She moved from the real world into that in-between place that was neither heavens nor Earth, but rather, the meadow, the spiritual home of Rhen.

  Her mental picture of herself expanded all at once, as she leapt her consciousness from her own head into the meadow, landing softly on the very end of the Path of the Catamount, becoming instantly healthy and strong.

  Allowed!

  2 – The Beast Runs North

  The beast loped through the darkness of the forest, nameless, loveless, and hurting. The darkness was soothing and did not hurt him like the light. The dark did not spear through the cells of the eyes that did not belong to one or the other, to the wolf or the cat, but rather to both.

  The pair fought bitterly within him for the right to use the eyes, to use the muscles, to use the big body that all of them shared. He, the beast, the two animals that warred to create him, and Jaggar the man, were all one.

  They could not separate. They could not unite. Like oil and water, they occupied the same space, but never combined.

  The beast snuck glances at the dark and the trail here and there, but it hurt. He mostly relied on his senses of smell, of touch, of knowing.

  All he knew at that moment was that he hurt. And that he wanted.

  The female. He wanted her with everything he was. Wanted her to look at him. To see him. To touch him. To know him.

  And to say yes to him.

  Which she never would.

  So he ran.

  3 – Foxen in the Forest

  Eventine Mundelein forced a cough as she walked through the forest. The male on the ladder ahead of her, attaching a camera to a tree, didn’t seem to notice her, or he was pretending not to notice her. Neither made sense.

  It was Timber Wheeling. Wade had rousted Timber out of the tunnels early that morning to put up cameras that spanned most of Trevor and Ella’s property, including much of the forest, all of the yard, and a few select rooms inside the main house. The reason was that Rogue had felt for days that she’d been being watched, and Mac and Crew had both caught ambiguous scents in the forest that didn’t seem to belong.

  Eventine felt two ways about the reports that were coming in. On the one hand, she didn’t think Khain was making his move yet. They should have at least a year before they had to worry about him, unless her and Leilani changing the past had also changed the timetable of his first wave of attacks. On the other hand, something was coming and coming soon. Coming fast. Some sort of immediate trouble was stalking them, and until they had identified and dealt with it, everyone would be on red alert.

  The fact was, the farm was vulnerable, because everyone was clustered in one place. Wolven found strength in numbers, but when every female was clustered in one place, those numbers made them weak in ways no one wanted to talk about. No one wanted to contemplate splitting up the one true mates on purpose, so that one attack couldn’t wipe them all out in one blow. Even Leilani was there, but not there, her body in Trent’s room in the main house, her mind most likely in the meadow. She hadn’t moved or spoken since she’d taken Burton’s hand just for a moment and brought Eventine’s body into the present.

  Eventine had been round and round these thoughts, and she was ready to give them up for now. Willow was on the other side of the country, so that was one mated female not immediately vulnerable.

  Eventine walked closer to Timber, but didn’t reach out to him in ruhi. He, like Jaggar, probably still thought she was dead and would ignore any communication from her as a hallucination.

  She didn’t dare try to contact Jaggar in his current state, it could push him over some edge he’d been walking since birth. He’d been gone for days, heading steadily northwest, not sleeping, not stopping, just moving. They knew where he was because of the news stories coming in. News stories about a rabid wolf who destroyed street lights, and sasquatch sightings on Internet trail cams. Her personal favorites were the reports that the Wendigo was moving south. She’d had to look up the Wendigo, and snarled softly at her memory of the image. The Wendigo was an Algonquin folklore, a mythical, cannibalistic monster that walked on cloven hind legs and had antlers on its head and rotting flesh hanging from its exposed ribs. Eventine was almost offended for Jaggar. The beast was big and he was a little lumpy, but he didn’t look like a Wendigo. He maybe looked like a scary bison that was almost a bear, with wicked teeth that stuck out of its mouth all the time, and claws grown too long to be good for anything but killing.

  Eventine stopped near Timber, stepping off the path to wait for him to be done. He seemed to be screwing the same screw for an infinitely long time, but at least she figured o
ut why he hadn’t heard her. He had earbuds in and the way the volume on Hanson’s Mmmbop was cranked, she would have to kick that ladder out from under him in order for him to notice her.

  She almost wanted to, so she could yell, “Timmmmbeeerrrrr” as he fell. If the morning didn’t feel so serious, she might try it, but she didn’t know this male as an adult and did not know how he would react. Everyone needed to be on their game and no one needed to be nursing hurt feelings. Something big was going to happen today. She could feel it. Harlan, too, had woken up on edge. They’d only had two nights together since she’d been back, and she did not want to imagine that things would start to go south so soon.

  Eventine leaned against a tree and watched Timber, remembering him as a precocious five-year-old who liked to pretend Precious Goat was a horse and he was a cowboy. Other times, he would pretend he was a wolf and Precious Goat was a… well, a goat, and he would stalk her through the tall grasses behind the large farmhouse Evie had grown up in. Sgt. Wheeling, his mother, had lived with no mate in the small dwelling on the back forty of Burton’s land, and so she’d seen Timber often as a child, and even babysat him a few times. He’d been hard to babysit, rarely sleeping, never sitting still, frequently hiding from her in the house, or shifting and hiding from her in the forest.

  He’d always been welcome at her and Burton’s house, but she didn’t think he’d ever come over just to visit. Instead, she and Burton always seemed to be part of some grand theatre in his mind. He couldn’t just come up and say ‘hi’, but rather, if they were out on the range, he would watch them from the corn or from the tall grasses in Precious Goat’s pasture, or from the forest on the far side. He would sneak up on them, trying to get closer and closer without them seeing him, even low-crawling over the lawn like he was invisible. If one of them called out, “We see you, Timber,” he would act like he’d been shot, and flop over on his back so they could see him clutch his chest and moan.

  Sgt. Wheeling had given birth to another son just days before Khain had poisoned the entire world’s water supply with substances that targeted all the female shiften. Eventine had been one of the ones who had died… kind-of died, and so she hadn’t paid much attention to what had happened to Canyon and Timber after that, but the story went that Timber had kept newborn baby Canyon alive until Burton had regained the presence of mind to check on them. He’d returned home after a week of sleeping in his chair at the station and found them curled up on his bed, waiting for him, baby Canyon fat and healthy.