Heart of Gold (Kinkaid Shifters #9)

Chapter 1

Pax stood at the window of his childhood bedroom and watched the tableau of scrubby vegetation in the sandy landscape and still morning air. There was no wind. No movement.

A lizard on a rock about twenty feet out caught a patch of early sun and froze there like it was posing for a painting. Lucky lizard. Nobody was telling it to take it easy and stay off its feet.

Pax shifted his weight and immediately regretted it. His left leg sent a sharp reminder up through his hip that it was not yet ready to be leaned on. He grabbed the window frame and breathed through the waves of pain.

“Two weeks,” the healer had said. “At least two weeks before you even think about shifting.”

It had been eleven days. Pax was counting.

He turned away from the window and took stock of the room.

His mother had kept it exactly as he and Ari had left it when they left for the Navy at eighteen.

There were two twin beds, a battered wooden dresser, a shelf of trophies from youth sports, and a few from rodeo competitions back when the Clan used to run them.

There was also a photograph on the dresser of him and Ari at maybe fourteen years old, both of them grinning with the stupid expressions of teenage boys who thought they were invincible.

He hadn’t been wrong, exactly. Jaguar shifters hit hard, healed fast, and had a metabolism that usually burned through injuries as if they were nothing.

In years of Navy service and another few doing missions as part of the Jackal’s mercenary team, he’d taken his share of punishment and walked away from all of it with only a few scars to show for the abuse he’d endured.

He’d dished out far more to his enemies, that was for certain.

The encounter in Salt Lake City had been different.

He didn’t like thinking about his recent adventures there, so naturally it was the first thing that filled his head every morning when he woke up. Probably because of the pain he still felt. The job was supposed to have been simple.

Pax and Ari had traveled back to the States to meet with the leader of the Wraiths, a shifter mercenary group based out of Wyoming, on behalf of their friend and employer, Seth, who was known as the Golden Jackal in mercenary circles.

Seth had recently mated with a woman who had inherited an honest-to-goodness castle in Germany and ousted a bunch of evil Venifucus mages who’d been using the place as their base.

The castle was on a significant power point where eight ley lines converged, and Seth was now happily mated and based from the castle, training both shifters and mages how to fight together against evil.

Pax and Ari were Americans, and they’d been happy at the chance for a long-overdue visit home, with a stop to meet with Major Jesse Moore, the leader of the Wraiths.

Now that Seth had settled down, Pax and his twin’s lives had become a lot steadier.

There wasn’t as much traveling and fighting in foreign lands, which he didn’t mind, really.

He might be nostalgic for his fighting days, but it was also good to take time to enjoy a little peace.

Going home was part of that. Neither Pax nor Ari had spent any significant time at home in years.

They both missed their family and Clan. And things were changing for shifters, especially jaguars.

After the cartel bloodshed and loss of habitat in South America, there were precious few jaguar shifters left.

The eccentric jaguar billionaire, Mark Pepard, had gathered the largest and best-funded group of jaguar shifters around himself.

He’d even bought a tropical island as a base of operations for his Clan.

The Arizona Jaguar Clan was the only other significant group in the U.S.

There were a few other groups in South America, but everyone was looking toward Mark and his group on Jaguar Island these days for overall leadership.

He was the Alpha of Alphas among their kind.

And he had offered alliance with the Arizona Clan.

There were also offers of alliance from the very large and influential Kinkaid Clan based out of Texas, Seth’s new setup in Germany, and the Wraiths in Wyoming.

The shifter world was coming together as hadn’t happened in centuries, in preparation for fighting the ancient evil they knew was heading their way.

She was known as Elspeth, Destroyer of Worlds. The last time she’d plagued the mortal realm had been a period in history known as the Dark Ages. That was no coincidence. Those in the know said she was making her way back to the mortal realm, and she’d find her way here sooner or later.

Pax hoped for later. Or never. Never would be good. But he wasn’t so na?ve as to believe evil would just go away and leave them all alone to live in peace. And so, the Jackal and the Wraiths, and others, were cautiously feeling out potential partnerships, some of which Pax and Ari were brokering.

During their visit to Wyoming, a situation arose that needed immediate attention.

Most of Moore’s men were tied up in Texas, assisting the Kinkaids, and the reserves he’d held back were spread thin, as well.

So, Major Moore had asked Pax and Ari to escort a young bear shifter to Grizzly Cove, Washington.

It meant a detour north on their way home to Arizona, but they had been willing to help out.

The young shifter was just a college kid named Danny who was a little soft around the edges.

He hadn’t yet been tested by life or circumstance, so he was an easy target for those of evil intent.

He’d had a small Venifucus incident on his college campus, and someone with connections had decided he needed relocating until things settled down.

He just needed a simple escort, Moore’s contact had said. It would be a straightforward job. Nothing to worry about.

Pax had been in the business long enough to know that when someone said nothing to worry about, you damned well better start worrying.

He and Ari had run the route twice in their heads before they ever picked Danny up, identified eight possible problem points, and agreed on contingency plans for each.

Unfortunately, Salt Lake City hadn’t been on their list.

The attack had come out of nowhere, which meant someone had better intelligence than the Wraiths.

Now that was a scary thought. Four vehicles and a dozen men, with at least two of them carrying something, or someone, that smelled wrong.

Like magically wrong. Pax and his twin had been boxed in on an interstate on-ramp at seven in the morning with Danny in the back seat and nowhere to go but through.

So they’d gone through.

Ari took the wheel. Pax took the back window and then, when one of the following vehicles got close enough, the roof.

He’d bought them thirty seconds of chaos, which was enough for Ari to thread a gap that shouldn’t have existed between a semi and a concrete divider, and then he’d gone back for more.

That was where it had all gone wrong. There’d been at least one mage in the group attacking them.

He or she had been in one of the wrong-smelling vehicles, and they’d been a lot more powerful than Pax had expected.

The attack came sideways through a parked delivery truck like the metal wasn’t even there.

The sheared side panel of the truck had damned near taken Pax’s left leg off, knocking him off the roof of their ride, and leaving him on the asphalt with the world tilted at a bad angle.

Meanwhile, Ari’s voice was in his earpiece shouting, “Where are you? Where are you, Pax? Talk to me!”

After catching his breath, Pax had talked.

He’d told Ari to keep going, get Danny north, and finish the job.

He’d told him he was fine. He’d been lying about the second part, but not the first. He was conscious, his inner jaguar was already throwing everything it had at the shredded tissue below his knee, and the attackers had followed Ari’s vehicle rather than doubling back for Pax. Small mercies.

He’d limped into the dense brush at the side of the road and shifted…

eventually. It had felt like hours, but had only really been minutes.

He’d shifted into his jaguar form and ran, because a jaguar moving along the overgrown side of a highway was harder to track than an injured man bleeding on the on-ramp, and he could hobble along on three legs easier than one.

He’d made it to the edge of the city before he had to stop.

He’d spent most of three days in a drainage culvert outside of town letting his jaguar work on the damage to his leg, and then he’d stolen a truck and driven himself home to Arizona.

He’d left an anonymous payment for the use of the truck with the owner, along with an apology when he’d had the truck returned by a shifter delivery service that would never reveal his identity.

When he’d finally made it home, Pax’s mother had taken one look at him and started crying. That was probably the most frightening thing that had happened to him in the entire sequence of events. His mother was a jaguar. She didn’t burst into tears at the drop of a hat.

While Pax had been making his way home, Ari had finished the mission and gotten Danny to Grizzly Cove.

He’d called from there, voice carefully level.

Pax had told him what had happened, minimized his leg injury, and said he was fine.

Ari had said simply, “You’d better be,” which was as close as either of them usually got to admitting they were concerned.

That had been eleven days ago. Ari was still mostly out of touch, wrapping up things for the Wraiths and taking the opportunity to talk to the Mayor and City Council of Grizzly Cove about the Jackal and a possible alliance, while he was there.

Ari was getting important stuff done, while Pax was in his childhood bedroom watching lizards and losing what was left of his mind.

He needed something to do.