Southern Shifters: Bearing the Ink (Kindle Worlds Novella) (Black & White Book 3) Read Online Free Page B

where no one would find them for weeks, maybe months.
    And then he realized where his thoughts were going. He was formulating a plan to take Bex and run, to hide her away, to keep her safe.
    He shook his head. His instincts were always to run and he had to change because if he didn’t, he was afraid he’d one day steal her away in the middle of the night and force her into a life of hiding from herself and her past, the way he did.
    God. What a fucking mess he was when roots came into the picture.
    “Gus? You listenin’, man?” Michael asked.
    “Nah.” Gus shook himself out of his head. “Sorry, what?”
    “Should I text her instead of calling? You know, what she said about the cameras around the house?”
    “Might be best? Send a text, a code, something that if found wouldn’t mean anything to anyone but us and her? Shit, man. I’m out of my depths with all of this.”
    “We all are,” Michael agreed. Gus watched for a second longer as Michael began typing with his big fingers on the small phone.
    As Michael sent a text to Maxine, Gus studied the areas of the maps that had been circled, mostly in red, to denote locations where shifters had disappeared. Would more be added when Luke returned?
    He ripped a piece of paper and wrote down a question, then slid it toward Michael. His brother nodded once he’d read it.
    Michael’s phone rang within seconds. “Hello?”
    Gus heard the faint female voice on the other end once Michael answered.
    “Hey, it’s Michael. Yes. The bear.” Gus did smirk, then. Even if Michael denied it, Gus had noticed the interest that passed through Michael when the she wolf approached them.
    “Look, we have something of a home base in Dandridge. Yep. That’s the place. Would you be willing to — Great. Right. We’re interested in hearing what happened to your brother. Uh… Yeah.”
    Gus tried to decipher more of the conversation from the one side he could hear, but to get closer to eavesdrop, may tip Michael off that Gus knew of his attraction to the wolf.
    “One more thing before you go… The general location where your brother disappeared? Do you know anything about the area? I’ll explain why I’m asking when I you get here. Okay.” The last word was clipped and when Michael turned to face Gus, his lips had thinned into an unsmiling and unwelcoming line. He said goodbye to the she wolf, and ended the call. “Her pack is up near Bristol. On the Virginia side. He disappeared about forty-five miles outside the town limits. He used to go fishing in a small pond and that was the last place anyone knew he was going that day.”
    “A wolf that fishes?”
    “Go figure. Catch and release, maybe?”
    Gus grabbed an orange marker that was mixed in with all the maps and papers, and drew a circle around Bristol, Virginia. He put a W in the center of it. “She comin’?”
    “Tomorrow afternoon.”
    “You going to get her?”
    “Nope.”
    He wanted to rib Michael some more, but the wise thing would be to keep his mouth shut. Instead, he stared at the map, making mental inroads from all the various locations. In his head, he could see specific trails where people might hike. Most of the areas where shifters had disappeared were protected by Federal Law and were not hunting grounds. The Mayor had been a politician. Did he have connections higher up than the North Carolina government? Or was he truly acting on his own?
    Gus wanted to make some sense of it, the circles here and there, the clusters and the spread out by hundreds of miles sites. “It’s random. All of it. Sometimes I think there’s a pattern, but then other times I don’t see anything except a hell of a lot of red circles, various elevations, and places a man with a bow and arrow or a gun could hide out, blend in.”
    “I don’t think there is a pattern or any sense to make of it. They’re poachers. Murderers. You didn’t see the inside of that house, the heads on the walls. None looked familiar, but there were