Shifters: A Samantha Reece Mystery Book 1 by Jaime Johnesee (libby ebook reader txt) 📕

hoping it was Gerry calling to tell me babysitting duty was off.

“Sam Reece.”

“Hey, Sam, it’s James.”

“How’s it going, coffee man?”

“Pretty slow. We’re still digging through the sludge from the motel. I’m calling because Gerry asked me to get in touch with you. He said that in regards to babysitting duty you were to keep your ass right where it is. He told me to let you know he’ll be sending someone to spell you in a few hours.”

“Oh, joy.” Be warned, I come equipped with sarcasm and I’m not afraid to use it.

“That bad?”

“It’s fairly uncomfortable.”

“Sorry to hear that. I had to look after a dental hygienist that saw a mob hit once. All she wanted to talk about was plaque and tartar and how bad coffee is for your teeth.”

“Yikes, that’s like the ninth ring of hell for you, isn’t it?”

“If not, it was closer than I ever wanted to get.” James laughed.

“Well, if there’s nothing else, I’m going to get back to my charge.”

“Just that you should be careful. Grisly is a scary one.”

“Thanks, James. Hey, thank Gerry for me, too, will ya?”

“Sure thing. Double the usual snark?”

“Sounds about right, thanks bud.”

“Night.” James hung up.

I sat with the phone in my hand for a moment wishing that the conversation had gone another way entirely. I really could have used a pass on babysitting duty. I liked Ben, but I still didn’t want to sit in his apartment any longer than I had to.

Now that my general disdain for him had waned, in light of our honest clearing of the air, I was finding myself more drawn to him than I had been when I first entered his apartment, and that just didn’t feel like a good thing.

I made some calls, and dropped some threads on my message boards about sire bonds earlier, but nobody had gotten back to me. While Ben watched some cheesy B movie, I took advantage of his Wi-Fi to look up more about them. I found a forum on a shifters board and dug in. The original poster asked if anyone had heard about sire bonds affecting the way people felt about their makers. There was the usual crap from trolls and assholes, but one fellow had posted something interesting.

I never believed in sire bonds until I decided to sire a friend who’d been begging me for months. I bit him and, inexplicably, both he and I shared a greater sense of intimacy and comfort than had been there previously. We’ve been dating two years now and I have to say if not for the sire bond I don’t think I would have looked at him twice. He is a super nice guy but he definitely wasn’t my taste. After I turned him, however, he became far more attractive to me and I became more attractive to him. Do they exist? I now believe they do.

Signed,

Wolfesbane

If this person was to be believed, the sire bond increased the attraction on both sides. I never considered that perhaps Ben was feeling it, too. I kept reading, hoping someone would link to some other article on sire bonds or shifter imprinting.

I found nothing.

I Googled shifter imprinting and came up with some crazy site with info about the Gutenberg press. I wasn’t interested in moveable type and went back to looking up shifter sire bonds hoping that adding the word shifter in there would pull up more reliable sources.

I was wrong.

After spending hours combing through the most ridiculous crap the Internet had to give, not to mention meeting with guys named Krunkmaster in little known back chatrooms, I decided to call it quits. Maybe I’d hear back from one of my wolf sources about it later. I looked up from my phone and met Ben’s eyes. He reddened and looked away. I wondered how long he had been staring at me.

My jaguar was excited he had noticed us; I metaphysically swatted her nose and told her to stop going gaga over this guy. She scoffed and twitched her tail in a way that screamed for me to shut up.

Rude.

At least I learned he wasn’t quite the asshole I’d thought he was. It was going to take some time to trust him, but I’m starting to believe it is a possibility for the future. Here’s hoping he truly wasn’t as big a dick as I’d originally thought.

I get where he is coming from a bit better now, but it still sucks he bit me without consent. Then again, he was in a fevered state, had to be in order to have been infectious at the time. Then again I understand how difficult it is to think clearly when the virus is in full swing.

As I said earlier, I’d had many an unfortunate furry-tongued morning after a bunny feast that spoke to how difficult it was controlling the shift when the virus was in bloom.

It’s fairly safe to say that I could see how my reaching out to his cat form could be misread by a fevered brain. I still thought it sucked, but it was far better than his indoctrination into the shifter world.

I wasn’t sure what to do about what he’d told me. I get that he meant to stick around and help me transition and I understand that he was called away for a good reason. What I don’t get is why he waited so long to get in touch with me and why he was doing it now.

There was a paranoid part of my brain wondering if maybe there was more to his coming back than he let on. Perhaps there was something about the Grisly Adams case that led him here. Call me paranoid, but I found it too coincidental that he showed up amid the first serial murder case involving lycans in Birmingham’s history and just happened to be a witness.

I looked over at him; Grisly’s scent was undeniably different from Ben’s, but could he have something more to do with the case than