Eoin dove for it, but he couldn’t reach it in time. The sword plunged straight into the earth between Rae’s outstretched arms, quivered, and went still. The light died and Rae’s pain faded.
“What the hell?” one of the trackers growled.
Rae slowly climbed to her feet, groaning all the way, having to use the hilt of the stupid sword to brace herself.
Eoin had halted a few feet away, his face drawn, his eyes wet. “The Goddess has Chosen,” he said in a hushed voice.
“What?” Rae tore her hands from the sword. “What are you talking about? It was a lightning strike, or something . . .”
Eoin seized Rae’s hands and turned them upward. Burned into each palm was the symbol of the Celtic knot, the sign of the Goddess. Though Rae’s hands were clearly branded, she felt no pain, not even itching.
Her heart hammered. “No way. Dad—no!”
Tears rolled down Eoin’s cheeks. “The Goddess has Chosen,” he repeated, his voice breaking. “We have our new Guardian.”
The Shifters, Rae’s brothers most of all, stared at Rae in shock. Dead silence filled the clearing, broken only by the morning breeze that sprang up to clear away the mists.
An elderly Feline male stepped forward, giving voice to the thought in the head of every Shifter present.
“But she’s a woman!”
* * *
Zander’s cell phone rang. “Aw, son of a . . .”
Zander vented to every deity, familiar and obscure, as he hoisted himself from the chair at the stern of his boat. His fishing pole, secured to the deck, went on enjoying itself dangling bait in the water, while Zander trudged down the swaying boat, shading his eyes against the setting sun, to where he’d left the damn phone this time.
He should just throw the bloody thing overboard. The point of being in a fishing boat all alone off the coast of Alaska was being alone.
Zander knew why he didn’t toss the phone even as the thought formed. If someone had dire need and they couldn’t reach him, he’d never forgive himself.
Zander’s two braids swung against his cheeks as he reached for the phone he’d left on top of the cooler. He figured he might as well grab another beer at the same time, and came up with a phone in one hand, a can in the other.
“Go for Zander,” he growled.
He stilled as a voice from far away rumbled in his ear. Kendrick, a white tiger Guardian and leader of a band of rogue Shifters, wouldn’t call for no good reason. Zander’s reflection in the window of the wheelhouse showed his dark eyes growing wider and wider as he glued the phone to his ear and listened.
“You want me to what?” he yelled when Kendrick finished. “Seriously, what the fuck? How am I supposed to teach her to be a Guardian? Hello? I’m not a Guardian.”
“I know.” Kendrick’s voice wavered with the bad connection. “But she needs—”
At the end of the boat, the fishing pole started to buzz. “Kendrick, I’m busy. I don’t have time to babysit a woman who thinks she’s been chosen by the Goddess to be a Guardian, for crap’s sake. There are no female Guardians! I’m supposed to be the crazy one. When you regain your sanity, call me back.”
Zander moved the phone but Kendrick’s stern voice had him listening again. “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me,” Zander snarled. “You’re going to play that card?”
Over the whirring of the fishing pole came the drone of a motor, a boat rushing toward him across the deep waters.
Zander yelled into the phone. “Do you know how much shit you’re in right now?”
Kendrick rumbled something Zander couldn’t make out, but he heard the amused bite in Kendrick’s voice. The man and his cute little mate must be laughing their asses off.
Zander clicked off the phone and tossed it down. The boat moved closer. Three figures stood on its deck—the man piloting it, a tall stern-looking Feline Shifter, and a smaller woman—a Lupine—with a Sword of the Guardian strapped to her back. The sword’s hilt gleamed in the light of the sinking sun.
“Perfect,” Zander said. “Just effing perfect.”
He squeezed the can of beer until the pop-top burst open, then he poured the cold liquid down his throat, wiped his mouth, and strode to meet the intruders.
CHAPTER TWO
Rae looked across the tossing water at Zander Moncrieff and couldn’t decide whether she should jump overboard or leap onto his boat and smack him.
He was huge, a bear Shifter, with muscles bulging out of a black sweatshirt with a Harley logo and hard legs stretching out blue jeans. He wore a long black duster coat that whirled in the unceasing wind and thick-soled boots for walking around a wet deck. Zander’s white blond hair was cut short against his head, except for two dreadlocks that hung on either side of his face, swinging down to his shoulders. He’d braided blue beads into the dreads, stark against the white. His trim goatee beard was, in contrast, jet black.
His eyes were the same black, burning with anger and glaring at Rae. Rae read a boatload of other emotions behind those eyes—pain and a loneliness that ran deep.
Goddess-touched, Eoin had called him. Brimming with power but never quite fitting in.
Like me, Rae thought with a jolt.
Zander’s fury reached Rae across the narrowing space between the boats. He was not at all happy Eoin wanted to bring Rae aboard.
Well, tough shit. Rae didn’t want to be out here either. One day she’d been an innocuous Lupine Shifter, hanging out with her friends and comfortable with her family, the next she was a Guardian, sent away to the middle of the northern Pacific to be trained by a polar bear everyone claimed was insane. Doesn’t play well with others, they’d said.
The boats bobbed up and down out of sync, the waves becoming more pronounced the closer the boats slid to each other. Rae was getting seasick. She’d been fine riding on the boat from the island where the small plane had landed, but now that both boats were rocking in the calm, rising and falling at different rates, she grew dizzy.
Eoin sprang to the deck of Zander’s boat with the grace of a Feline and faced him, one Shifter entering another’s territory.
Now it was Rae’s turn. She paused with her feet on the edge of the speedboat, where a gate in the rail had been opened for her. Rae was wolf, okay with water but not with boats. And by water, she meant streams, lakes, and ponds, not the vast expanse of cold ocean she found herself in now. If she fell into the drink, she’d freeze to death before she could be fished out.