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“I know, but the whole idea that they can shape-shift into all kinds of animals is a bit disconcerting. Warrick thinks they're somewhat limited by size, at least—most likely they can only shift as big as twice their own size and as small as a small bird.”
“It’s kind of weird and kind of a good thing that there are no insect-shifters.”
“Eww. I know, right? But Warrick is right, it also means at least with the vampires you won’t have to deal with anything as large as a dragon. So, what do they want you to do?”
“They think there are vampire and Shadow League cells, with a lot of activity here on the peninsula. I’m to gather intelligence.”
“By yourself? That doesn’t seem safe,” argued Dani.
“Trust me, both Charlie and Chris stressed safety first. Think about it, the last thing they want is for me to get caught and turned. They just need me to start mapping movements and figuring out what the structure of the vampires is with regard to the Shadow League. Warrick gave me a couple of emergency contacts: Cooper McKinley up at Denali, and some lynx-shifter over on Kodiak Island.”
Dani snorted. “Cooper’s a good guy. You’ll like him and his mate, Raine. The lynx shifter… that would be Colby,” she said, shaking her head. “He’s got to be the single most charming guy you’ve ever met. The thing that makes Warrick angry is that Colby put all of this together long before anyone else. He’s known for at least a decade and has intelligence assets all over the world. He even works in league with the Shadow Sisters.”
Salem grinned. “Yeah, Warrick told me about them, although I had to pull the information out of him like I was pulling teeth.”
“You’ll find most male shifters feel that way about the Shadow Sisters. They’ve been figuring this out for as long as or longer than Colby. Originally, they started as a kind of underground to help female shifters out of bad situations. They’ve expanded since then, and while the Resistance is glad to have their help, I have a bad feeling that once the Shadow League has been defeated, whatever governing body for shifters emerges from the chaos will try and run the Sisters down and force them back into their various packs, clans, and the like. That will be ugly.”
“What does Warrick think?”
“He thinks I’m right, but he also says he believes the majority of the dragons will stand with the Sisters. The dragons have always had female warriors, until they were almost wiped out. Trust me, it’ll get bad before it gets better.”
Salem glanced at her watch. “Shit, we’d better get you to the airport.”
Dani nodded. “One more thing. Watch out for any shifter that refers to you as his ‘fated mate.’”
“What the hell is that? I get the mate thing, but…”
“Yeah, it’s the excuse male shifters give themselves and others to force a female into a pair bonding. Most species have a kind of ritual and there’s usually a bonding link that’s formed where the two can—within a reasonable distance—communicate and track each other.”
“That sounds almost feudal.”
“It is. One thing I’ll give Colby—he’s helped the Shadow Sisters more than once hide a female on the run and has spent vast amounts of money setting them up with new identities, including letting some of them stay at Windsong, his place on Kodiak Island. He’s not tied to the idea of fated mates, necessarily.”
As she watched Dani’s plane take off, Salem was unaware of the man watching her with binoculars from the stand of trees at the end of the runway.
CHAPTER 4
SALEM
Salem held the artifact in her hand. It had been given into her safekeeping right before she’d boarded the plane for Alaska.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Not a freaking clue,” answered Chris. “All we know is that it moves around kind of like a Rubik’s cube and we believe it’s important, and as it came from Alaska, we thought you should have it.”
“And I’m supposed to do what with it?”
He grinned at her. “Your mission, Special Agent Hubbard, should you decide to accept it…”
He and Salem laughed, having discovered they shared a special love for vintage television, and in particular spy dramas of the late 1960’s and 1970’s. Chris and his husband, along with Dani and Warrick, had helped her pack. She never could have made the move without them.
“Seriously, Salem, we’re clueless. It came from a classified site known as Far Pointe—exact location and anything else, undisclosed. So, anything you can figure out about it would only add to our knowledge, or lack thereof.”
After that, her days and nights had been filled with packing, moving, and learning about everything the SPU knew as well as everything Warrick and Dani knew. In many ways, knowing Warrick was a dragon and the true story behind how he and Dani had met had helped. She’d even been allowed to visit Dragonwyk and had talked to Raine McKinley up at Denali.
Once she was as settled as she could be, she’d begun to play with the artifact. She’d finally been able to spin it around until the damn thing had lit up—not like the entire sphere, but a single beam of light coming straight out. Passing a paper through the light had done nothing to either the paper or the light. The damn thing didn’t beep or blink or whir or anything—just pointed a single beam of light in one direction.
Salem had set it down so the light pointed straight up but suddenly there were little dots all over the ceiling. Remembering a movie she’d once seen about experiments with a wormhole, as well as knowing the Inuit people had used both the sun and the stars to navigate, Salem had called Charlie.
