Blood Oath (Shifters Unlimited Prequels Book 1)

  Blood Oath

  Shifters Unlimited Prequel #1

  KH LeMoyne

  Digital Crystal Press

  © 2017, KH LeMoyne

  Published by Digital Crystal Press

  www.khlemoyne.com

  All rights reserved.

  GENRE: Paranormal/Fantasy Romance

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any for or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

  BLOOD OATH is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed herein are fictitious and are not based on any real persons living or dead.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-937080-06-8

  ISBN-10: 1937080064

  Editorial Team: Linda Ingmanson, Toni Lee, and Kate Rothwell

  Cover design: Clarissa Yeo

  Contents

  Blood Oath

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Epilogue

  Bonus Story: Fight Night

  Preview: Hidden

  Chapter 1

  Also by KH LeMoyne

  About the Author

  BLOOD OATH

  A Shifters Unlimited Prequel Novel #1

  How fast can you outrun death when it has you by the throat?

  Callum Mann will do whatever it takes to get his pregnant mate across the territory line to safety and free from his alpha’s grasp. Even if he has to sacrifice himself.

  Raised a survivor, Gillian isn’t about to let anything stand between her family’s freedom and happiness. Not a vengeful alpha, a twisted killer, or a rogue enforcer.

  This book includes the novel BLOOD OATH, a Shifters Unlimited novelette: FIGHT NIGHT, and a short preview of Book 1: HIDDEN.

  Sign up for KH LeMoyne’s newsletter for the latest news!

  http://khlemoyne/newsletter

  1

  Near Williams Lake

  British Columbia, Canada

  August, 1921

  “Williams Lake Station, next stop. Fifteen minutes.” The bass of the conductor’s voice vibrated from a dozen seats behind Callum.

  Not soon enough. He rolled his shoulders, but the anticipation knotting his muscles refused to let go as his blood pumped through his veins in a fevered rush. For six long hours, he’d battled his cat. Fought the demand to leap from the stifling train car into the surrounding woodlands and speed through the forests in his feline form. His body wound tighter with each mile as the train drew closer to home.

  Not a response driven by his connection to the wood-and-mortar building on his parents’ parcel of land that had been home for the early years of his life.

  No. The nexus of this calling originated from a live and vibrant entity binding him by equal parts instinct, emotion, and primal need. The dynamic link pulled at him, straining his normally solid composure.

  He tugged at his starched, white dress shirt to ease the chafing around his neck. It didn’t help. Even his tailored suit, pressed hot and rough against his skin, felt as if it had shrunk two sizes since he dressed this morning. He forced a slow exhale through the wild yearning swelling inside him. There was no salve for what he felt. No cure. No bandage. Only a lifelong exposure to one unique scent that lingered on his tongue in a combination of sweet apple and honey.

  He could withstand the trials now assaulting him with pleasure. The past several years had taught him anticipation added final gratification despite his current, brief pain. He’d consciously taken jobs requiring travel. He knew the price he paid, and it was worth this constant battle. He could wait.

  Patience.

  He leaned back in his seat. He accepted his nature, both the beast’s compulsion to protect and his human need to plan everything down to the last detail. Habits he’d built on the ashes of disaster. Fortitude was his strong suit and planning his impenetrable armor.

  This morning, he’d boarded the train just north of Vancouver, prepared for the hours to pass without notice. Details for new business ideas needed his attention. Mental lists required checking and rechecking to itemize favors owed by friends. Favors he soon needed to claim.

  Yet the closer he got to Williams Lake, the more insistent his cat became. With single-minded focus, his inner beast challenged him for dominance. Sensing the call of its mate, it refused to back down, holding his mind and body in a stasis of controlled torture. But he wasn’t a juvenile and hadn’t let his beast rule him for over a decade.

  Easy boy. Callum withheld a smirk. Within the hour, soft kisses and sweet smiles would satisfy them both.

  As if to spite him, prickly tendrils of need tightened again in his groin. All right, desire and longing refused to conform to planning. His fingers brushed along the inside of his jacket, stroking the soft strands of ebony hair bound in a simple white bow and pinned to the fabric where no one could see. The touch placated both man and beast, and he bit back a growl. One soothing touch of the fragile memento would hold him.

  He drew in a slow breath and dipped his fingers into his jacket pocket. Leaning on the armrest, he slid a coin over the top of his forefinger and rippled the coin over each finger until it was tucked safe in his palm, only to start the pattern again. Just like the surety of his well-practiced coin trick, he’d have his Gillian wrapped in his arms. Better still, he’d soon have all the pieces in place to flee with her from this territory and never again worry about Alpha Gauthier Karndottir’s threats.

  Callum focused on the hypnotic slide of the coin across his fingers. The practice involved dexterity, but his internal ritual included locking down any outward evidence of his emotions. He traveled often, dealt with strangers every day. A spy, an alpha’s enforcer, even the alpha himself might see through his motives and take him to task. The direct result of his betrayal would be a swift death.

  His impenetrable façade required diligence…and practice. Not something he found difficult on any other day. Yet with only minutes until he could bask in his sweet mate’s smile and lose himself in her scent—well, locking his emotions against her impact was impossible.

  “Almost home, Callum? And looking rather dapper.” With his conductor’s cap pristine and recently brushed, Lewis Newton sidled up against the bulkhead with a grin. His suit jacket, not receiving the same diligence, bore a stain of seafood sauce from the club car. “Or do you have a new job?”

  Distracted, Callum shifted his hand, and the coin dropped into his lap. Served him right for letting a human sneak up on him. “Still working replacement jobs for railway telegraph offices. However, I take extra work when I find it.” One job ties a man down, but a skill gives him options. He had a rigid work ethic drilled into him by his father. A practice his father didn’t follow, having never left their small town for anything greater. Just two months before Callum was old enough to shift, his father and mother fell victims to hunters, yet his father’s sage advice lived on.

  “Aye. I’d never enjoy your vagabond lifestyle. I’m fine never having to get off the train for my job.” Lewis gave a throaty laugh. “Meet all sorts of folk here too. However, you being young and single, must be tempted to travel.”

  “Not so much,” Callum said. The truth was, he already indulged in jobs he loved. Clandestine jobs targeting emerging financial opportunities he turned into lucrative partnerships appealed to his sense of adventure.

 
“Then again, you must meet people too,” Lewis prodded. “Ever any intrigue in those telegraphs?”

  “Very little. Dry banking notes, new baby notifications, and the occasional mail-order bride request.” He chuckled as Lewis’s eyes disappeared beneath his brows.

  “You’re pulling my leg about the bride.”

  “No. That telegram broke the monotony of a long day.” A white lie, but he met and interacted with influential people who’d changed his life and couldn’t disclose their secrets. Callum’s modest-paying telegraph job for the railway came with free passage along the rail line. But the work connected him with bankers, land barons, and kings of industry who wanted their transactions handled discreetly via telegraph. The silver lining—the alpha’s soldiers had even less of a fondness for trains and newfangled equipment than they did for humans. They stayed clear of the innovations and populated cities, letting him focus on his side business of providing private telegraph operator support to wealthy clients off the books.

  Those same millionaire clients appreciated his skills and accuracy, but his ability to hold his tongue about their business rewarded him twofold. Free with details about how they achieved their success, they were generous with guidance on his ideas. Ideas guaranteed to put money in his secret funds and not in his alpha’s pocket. His fifty percent clan tithe, the blood tax demanded from every pledged shifter, came from his work in the railroad telegraph offices. A pittance, but paid from the job everyone saw him doing in public.

  Lewis’s head jerked as he looked at a passenger a few rows back. “Aye, sir. I’ll be right with you.”

  As the conductor made his way toward the back of the car, Callum focused his gaze out the window.

  Bronze and red-wine forests whipped by in a kaleidoscope of colors. A random splash of emerald green winked from between the gaps in the surrounding mountains. Pines as vibrant and brilliant as his Gillian’s eyes. Ones he’d only glimpsed in his dreams for the past interminable weeks.

  He played the coin several more flips and then pocketed it again.

  Lewis strode back beside him as he shouted to the six occupants in the car. “Next stop, Williams Lake Station. Please wait until the train comes to a complete stop before disembarking. You have been riding the Pacific Great Eastern Railway, end of the line, Quesnel Station. For those disembarking, we hope you have enjoyed your trip.”

  “Does anyone ever complain?” Callum asked as he rose.

  “Never.” Lewis Newton’s mustache twitched as Callum stood up. “Exciting plans while you’re home?”

  “People to check in on. How about you?”

  “Craving slices of my Jessie’s apple pie something fierce.”

  Right, just her pie. Callum eyed Lewis’s solid middle. It looked as if he didn’t miss much of his wife’s pie, but his tone implied he missed a sweetness far greater than any combination of sugar, fruit, and spice. He knew that longing, even though he couldn’t admit it as he kept Gillian a secret. “I envy you.”

  “As well you should, lad.” Lewis moseyed on down the aisle as a high whistle cut through the final clacking of the wheels and the decking of the rail station came in sight.

  Callum slammed on his hat, grabbed his satchel, and vaulted from his seat. Within seconds, he jumped free and onto the boarding planks of the station before the train stopped. His feet sprang as he sprinted toward the far end of the platform closest to the few buildings of the town. With a wave to the clerk in the office and the telegraph operator seated next to him, he hopped onto the rocky field between the station and the back of the stores along Main Street, the only paved street in town.

  He revisited the seeds of the plan he’d set into place as he walked. Each one crystalized into numerous detailed plans in his eidetic memory, revolving around information he’d gathered from shifters fleeing the territory. They’d been easy to detect. Desperate people wrapped themselves in a cloak of agony, no matter how hard they tried to mask it. Given his own circumstances, he paid particular attention to those who had succeeded in escaping Karndottir. People on the run required cash and a way to survive.

  He needed both as well. Because while every instinct had nagged him to take Gillian and run the day she’d hit puberty, he couldn’t in good conscience take her from her home without money and a new home to provide for her.

  So he’d waited and watched. Of the few escapees he’d found and helped, all were men. Hardened individuals who’d lost their heart and entire future due to Karndottir’s callous decisions. No families took their lives into their own hands by illegally crossing the alpha’s territory—at least none had done so and lived. A single runner stood a chance evading and outsmarting the enforcers. More than one person created exponential problems. The Karndottir horror stories recounted hundreds who’d failed.

  It didn’t matter. Callum had no choice. His plan needed to be foolproof.

  Once he got Gillian away, he’d buy them passage on a ship headed for the Hawaiian Islands where Alpha Ping shared borders with Alpha Deacon Black. They wouldn’t be there long enough to register the interest of either alpha. He hoped. He’d then reverse their course toward the mainland on the first ship to San Francisco. Once they landed, they’d make their way toward the wine valley regions of Napa and property he planned to buy.

  Simple. Precise. Dangerous. A plan almost complete.

  Once they ran, they’d have a brief window of opportunity. Karndottir might be a bastard, but he was a smart, huge bastard. If he sensed them fleeing, he’d dog them until their dying days. A challenge Callum had to win since his life meant nothing if he lost her.

  Callum’s strides faltered as sweet scents of early apples teased his nostrils from Mackin’s package store. He slowed and grabbed a Red Delicious off the top.

  “Think fast, Higgins,” he called, and tossed a coin to the pre-teenage stock boy hauling baskets from the back stoop into the storage room.

  The boy spun and snatched the coin out of midair and stuffed it into his britches pocket. “Thanks, Mr. Mann.”

  Callum ducked around several delivery wagons and into the alleyway that abutted Deemer’s Hardware, then headed toward the main street beyond. At the end, apple halfway to his mouth, he froze.

  Three burly men, wearing worsted wool shirts stretched across their barrel chests and canvas pants held up by suspenders, surrounded a petite woman with a large basket of produce. A rabbit shifter female.

  One of them poked at her basket, flipping several potatoes out into the dirt. Another sidled in close, rubbing up behind her as he bent and sniffed at her neck. She smacked at first one and then another, not deterring either of them. The last shifter even went so far as to pull at the pale brown hair she wore in a tidy bun at the nape of her neck.

  Callum hadn’t seen the men before, and though he wasn’t close enough to test their scent, he knew in his bones what they were. Wolves. Lawless, defiant, and empowered—part of Gauthier’s enforcer patrol.

  Plenty of time, my ever-loving ass. Here he’d thought he was smart. All the while, the monsters were already sniffing through town canvassing for broodmares to haul off to their alpha. Fine. He could handle this.

  He waited a second, torn between helping the rabbit shifter and leaving to seek out his own lady. Fortunately for the harassed woman, she was also married to the sheriff. A man certifiably one hundred percent human and two hundred percent no one for any man or beast to mess with. Ever.

  All seven feet and two hundred eighty pounds of him stalked across the street from the grain-and-feed store. Even without Callum’s keen shifter eyesight, he could see the throbbing vein in the sheriff’s temple. The men sniffing around his wife were about to regret they’d ever been born, much less considered harassing her.

  The enforcers eyed the sheriff warily and with good reason. If the sheriff had been born a shifter, he’d be a rhinoceros. Tough, fast, and with a trigger finger that would put the legendary Jesse James to shame. What the idiot enforcers didn’t know—the sheriff’s wife,
at last count, had delivered six daughters to her husband. Not a temptation for an alpha hell-bent on breeding a male heir, but the sheriff prized his wife along with each of his daughters and didn’t take kindly to men showing them an interest.

  Callum backed up. His Gillian wouldn’t be as lucky if these men found her alone.

  He hoofed it back down the alley in time to see a Deemer delivery wagon pulling away from the back doors of the lumber store. Hans Deemer hauled lumber for his father’s local yards and if his wagon was empty, then he was heading Callum’s way home.

  Deemer slowed his horses at Callum’s call with a backward wave of his hand. Callum jumped onto the open flatbed with a shout of thanks and dropped onto his back. Any passerby would think he was staring at the passing clouds, not staying out of sight of the enforcers. Hans didn’t bother with words and neither did Callum. As a youth, he’d worked at the Deemer yard for several summers and then moved on to keeping the books and reconciling the accounts once old man Deemer realized he had a talent for numbers. He’d more than earned a short lift from Hans.

  He needed his scent kept from the enforcers, not layered in a perfect trail to Gillian’s front door. If only the plodding horses would just pick up their pace. The urge to shift and bolt to get to her set his skin alight.

  Mentally, he ticked off the path from her mother’s cabin to the hideout at the base of the cliffs. It should be easy. They’d practiced it a hundred times. He kept the hiding place stocked with food and supplies. Gillian should be safe there until the brain-drained wolf enforcers drew a blank on available females and moved on to the next town. Yet a plan didn’t stop questions from flooding his mind.