Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

GARRETT

I rested my head back on the headrest. Sleep had been difficult last night. I don’t know if it was watching the devastation on the news or seeing people crying on social media as they searched for their missing loved ones. It wasn’t nerves for what we were about to face. My sleuth was often called upon following a natural disaster or a horrific event to help with search and recovery.

Hurricane Helene had ripped through the Carolinas and southern states like a wolverine on a path of vengeance. Many packs had to abandon their territories and homes. Others had stayed to protect their land. But the devastation had not cared if you were human, shifter, or animal. It had taken everything in its path and then some.

Rodger was my team’s leader. He was around two hundred, give or take a decade, and had seen his fair share of natural disasters as well as events caused by man. He was also our sleuth’s heir. His father, Nicolas, was our Alpha. I liked Rodger. He wasn’t the type to let power go to his head.

Despite his advanced age, Nicolas was a forward thinking Alpha. Centuries ago, he had forged a pact with a nearby coven. We sent shifters to help protect their lands and they sent us witches to help with healing and necessary spells. So far, it seemed to be a fair trade.

Unlike shifters, witches’ lifespans matched that of humans’. Maybe a little longer if they worked the right spells to keep themselves healthy. The only known way for a witch to gain the immortality shifters had was to mate with a shifter. To my knowledge, there were only three such bondings in existence.

Natalie was traveling with us too. Despite her four foot-ten stature, which had earned her the playful nickname of Gnat with a G, she was an extremely powerful witch. In her early twenties, she was still learning how to harness her immense gift and be as powerful as her mother. Her father was a notorious seer who had gone public with his gift and now had his own psychic TV show. Thankfully, he kept his visions vague and wasn’t so accurate that people got suspicious. If the Head Coven chose, they could have executed him or spellbound him for using his gift in public.

Humans could not know the paranormal existed.

When they’d known in the past, the results had been disastrous and catastrophic.

Shifters were not immortal because we couldn’t die. We couldn’t die by natural causes. Our advanced healing prevented us from getting sick or being poisoned or aging. However, there were instances where we could die.

Drowning was probably the most common in modern times. Decapitation, fire, blood loss… We could die. It was just extremely hard to kill us. Most of the time.

My sleuth was a mixture of different bears. Some kept their lines pure and did not mix, but mine had never had an issue of taking in different types of bears and even the occasional orphaned shifter of a different species. Dameon, the fourth member of our party, was one of those additions. He’d been captured as a calf and kept in a circus for decades. So long, in fact, that he forgot about his human side. After being rescued, he’d been brought to my sleuth so our witches could help him. It had taken time, but eventually Dameon was able to shift back into his human form.

The fact that my sleuth of bears was now home to a twelve thousand pound bull elephant still brought chuckles to me, though I did empathize with Dameon’s circumstances.

Captivity is one of the reasons humans could never know about us. With how long-lived we were, the prospect of being trapped in a cage could be exceedingly daunting.

Rodger was a black bear, which was ironic given he had Caucasian skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes.

I was a Kodiak. My father served as Nicolas’s second in command. Occasionally, he was referred to as a Beta, but bears tended to just say ‘Number Two’. The terms Alpha, Beta, Omega… They were generally reserved for canine packs. Bears by nature were loners. We lived in our sleuth for protection and companionship, but we weren’t as social as other packs. We were, however, great at the heavy lifting.

It was why we were in this rental van after flying down to North Carolina. Our sleuth was well known for our search and rescue services. A fox skulk reached out following Helene’s devastation. They were missing several members of their skulk. Many of them were injured and unable to hunt for their missing members. While foxes had excellent eyesight and sense of smell, they did not have the sheer strength bears had—or elephants.

The Alpha’s own daughter and granddaughter were among the missing. The fox needed all the help he could get. If we rescued some humans along the way, so be it.

Rodger, Dameon, and I had been on these sorts of missions countless times. Gnat was understandably nervous. She’d helped out before, but not on this type of scale.

What I didn’t understand was why I was feeling antsy. I was six hundred and forty-seven years old. So why did it feel like I was a cub fresh off his mama’s tit about to embark on his first adventure? One thing I did know: that feeling only intensified the closer we got to North Carolina.