Hunted: a Shifters' World novella

By Ruby Fielding

Should she struggle to survive alone or give in to desire and risk the - perhaps deadly - company of others?

In a world where plague has swept civilization away like leaves in a storm, where viruses that cause people to shift and change have altered what it is, for most, to be human, a few survivors hold out in a desperate attempt to save the human race. Selene lives alone in the forest, protecting herself from human and shifter alike until one day a stranger turns up: a young man called Skinner, out on a quest to hunt down and destroy any shifter he can find. Torn between desire and fear, Selene must confront her true nature and make some impossible choices if she is to survive this harsh, post-apocalyptic future.

Hunted: a Shifters' World novella - a shapeshifter erotic romance of survival and desire in a deadly future from the co-author of Seduced by Moonlight and The Touch.

(The contents of this book first appeared in different form as four separate stories, Lone Wolf, Wanted by the Pack, Sanctum and Hunt Her Down.)

"He put a hand to her face then, his knuckles brushing along her jaw and then he buried his fingers in her hair, tipping her head back. His mouth came down on her neck: hard lips and then the wet heat of his tongue and the delicious pain of raking teeth, dragging across her skin to that point where too hard is exactly hard enough."

• Language: English
• Publisher: James Grieve Press
• Release date: Jan 14, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311934123

Ruby Fielding

Ruby Fielding is a British author, currently living in the heart of a New England forest. She travels widely, and has lived in England, Scotland, the US, France, India and Australia. Wherever she happens to be living, you're likely to find her at the nearest wifi hot spot with her laptop and a large mug of coffee. She writes mainly paranormal erotica and romance, sometimes in collaboration with her old friend Polly J Adams; their joint stories are published separately and collected together into the single volume, Seduced by Moonlight.

Book preview

Hunted

A Shifters’ World Novella

Ruby Fielding

James Grieve Press

© Ruby Fielding 2014

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

The contents of this book first appeared in different form as four separate stories, Lone Wolf, Wanted by the Pack, Sanctum and Hunt Her Down.

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Cover images © Kiselev Andrey Valerevich and Triff, with design by James Grieve

Contents

Lone Wolf

Wanted by the Pack

Sanctum

Hunt Her Down

Afters

Lone Wolf

She woke to birdsong, alone.

Her body ached, her mouth was dry and tasted bad. At least she didn’t have that hungry knot twisting her belly any more. Food yesterday had been a welcome relief.

She opened her eyes. Sun angled in through the trees and the gaps in the broken roof and the shadow of a supporting beam drew a black line across the broken concrete floor. This ruined building had once been a hunter’s lodge, she guessed, or maybe some kind of private forest retreat. Back when the world had been a different place.

She sat, stretched, found her clothes in a pile nearby and stood to pull them on. A pair of loose-fitting jeans held up with a length of cord, a sweatshirt bearing the logo of some long-forgotten college. She found her stash of willow-bark and used a strip to rub her teeth clean. She would be nothing if she didn’t look after herself. If she gave up these last scraps of civilization she knew it would all be over.

It was more than simply looking after herself: it was human dignity, her sense of who she was. You keep yourself clean, you don’t sleep in your clothes, you do all you can to retain the civilized person you once were.

In a shard of broken mirror she looked at herself, the shadows under her eyes, her shaggy, uncut hair.

This is me, she thought. It wasn’t a question of liking it or not.

This is me.

§

There were signs of activity outside again.

Nothing obvious – no big paw-prints in the dirt. Just a sense that something had been here, that things this morning were subtly different to how they had been the day before.

She surveyed the tangle of undergrowth around the clearing that had once been this building’s front yard. Nothing. No signs of disturbance; no beady eyes staring back.

You couldn’t trust that, though. You couldn’t rely on anything any more. Not even... your memory.

Moments before... when she had been gazing into that shard from a broken mirror... she’d been overcome by a dizzying sense of uncertainty. So many gaps in her memories! All of it so unclear in her mind. She knew that mirror fragment was a prized possession. She knew that this was a place where she felt relatively secure in a world that was no longer safe.

But the face in that reflection... She did not know who she was, or who she had become.

She did not know who she had been.

Her heart had raced, as she feared that finally her time had come. One of the viruses, one of the great plagues... was this the first sign that something was bringing her down? Were the sweat on her brow, the blanks in her memory and the racing of her heart signs of panic, or symptoms of something worse?

Now, standing in the doorway of her shelter, she took a deep breath and held it until her heart slowed. She reminded herself that, sick or not, she must do what she could to survive. All she had were hope and her treasured few remnants of the civilized world.

§

Content that there was no immediate danger, she gathered the empty water drum from just inside the ruined wall and set off on the rough trail that led through the scrub and down into the trees. She was lucky to have somewhere like this: a building with a door that closed and walls that were intact until just past the level of her head. It might not look much, but it was a castle to her.

Before long, the track leveled, cutting across the sloping forest floor and then, ahead of her, there was a splash of sunlight where the trees thinned again.

She approached cautiously, a lesson well lodged in her head despite her failing memory. Clean water was a place where animals gathered, and therefore a place of danger.

She came to a place where creepers hung down from the trees forming a natural screen, a vantage point she used every time she came here.

Today, she sensed threat before she saw anything. It was something in the air. Maybe sounds her ears had picked up but her brain was yet to process. A strange scent, perhaps.

As her eyes adjusted to the bright light of the clearing she surveyed the forest fringe, looking to see if anything was lurking in the shadows. There was nothing, and then she looked at the pool itself and saw rings of spreading ripples followed by a sudden swelling of the water as a bulbous object emerged.

A head. A man’s head, dark hair and beard plastered flat by the water. Pale shoulders, a dark smudge of hair to the chest as he bobbed up and then settled again, deeper in the water. He raised a hand to rub water from his eyes, then flicked his hair back, creating a fountain of glimmering droplets flying through the air.

And then, as if water were his natural element, he dipped forward. His head submerged as his back appeared, a sinuous, flowing movement, and then his butt, legs, feet and he was gone once more, lost below the churning surface of the pool.

Briefly transfixed by the sight of the man, which had lasted only a moment, she tore her eyes away and searched the forest perimeter again for signs of any others.

Nothing.

She waited, and then there was another swelling of water and the man’s head and shoulders bobbed