Shifting Fates (Sanmere Shifters Book 1) Read online

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  Ellery opened her mouth to tell him no, she was definitely not okay, praying that her words didn’t fail her. They didn’t. They came out loud and clear, but they were Kiefer’s words said in her voice.

  “I’m fine, thanks,” she smiled. “I’ve just got a bit of a migraine coming on. It’s this damned heat.”

  The man smiled and nodded, although he didn’t look convinced. He started to walk away, but he kept glancing back at her. She tried to move her feet the way she wanted them to go, tried to scream, but it was no use. All it did was give her a sharp pain in the center of her head.

  “Here we are,” Kiefer said.

  She stopped abruptly at the back doors to a white van. Kiefer pulled a set of keys from his pocket and opened the doors.

  “In you go,” he said.

  Against her will, Ellery climbed into the back of the van.

  “Where are you taking me?” she thought at Kiefer.

  Kiefer closed the doors with a loud slam, but she still heard him in her head.

  “Don’t worry, it’s not too far away. And once I start the engine, you’ll have your precious air conditioning.”

  That wasn’t Ellery’s worry, but she knew Kiefer wasn’t going to tell her anything until he was good and ready to. She heard him opening the driver’s door of the van and she felt the van dip slightly as he got in. She tried to move, but she was frozen in place. All she could move was her eyes.

  She looked around the van as the air conditioning sprang into life and a dull light came on. Her eyes landed on a scraggly-looking blond wig, and her panic doubled as realization hit her; that’s why Kiefer had looked familiar to her.

  Back in Jacksonville, Ellery had been convinced she was being stalked by a man with straggly blond hair. She had noticed him several times following her over the last few weeks before she left Jacksonville and she had seen him running from her street the day she had gone home and found her parents’ house on fire. It hadn’t registered with her at the time; there was too much other stuff taking up space in her head. But now she saw it clearly and she knew instinctively she had been right. That fire had been no accident. Kiefer had started the fire. If that was even his real name.

  “It is,” his voice said in her head.

  “Why were you following me?” she thought at him.

  “I was just learning your routine. You were never in any danger from me. At least not then.”

  “Did you burn down my parents’ house?”

  “Yes. And I bought the department store you worked in and closed it down. You see, I had to make you want a fresh start so you would move somewhere where you didn’t know anyone. It made my life so much easier. And look how it turned out; it worked.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “That’s irrelevant.”

  He sounded a little bit irritated and Ellery changed the subject quickly. She needed to learn as much as she could about what was happening here.

  “Why did you kill my parents? What had they ever done to you?”

  “Them having to die was unfortunate, I’ll admit that. Collateral damage, I suppose you would say. But it was necessary, because I couldn’t leave loose ends. People who would notice you were missing.”

  “You bastard!”

  Ellery felt hot tears flooding her eyes. She sniffed hard, biting back the tears, not wanting to seem weak in front of Kiefer.

  “So what happens to me now?” she thought at him.

  “Now you get to be quiet. I’m fed up with your questions.”

  Ellery didn’t get a chance to respond. She felt her eyes closing of their own accord and then everything went black.

  2

  Ellery opened her eyes and closed them again when a sharp pain sliced through her head. What the fuck was I drinking yesterday? she asked herself, reaching up to rub her temples.

  She realized she wasn’t lying on a bed. The surface beneath her was hard and unrelenting and it was making her hip hurt. She rolled onto her back, aware of a clanking sound as she moved and tension on her right ankle.

  She sat up and opened her eyes again. She looked around her. She was in what looked like a warehouse. The place was big with a high ceiling and hard floors. It was mostly bare. A couple of shelving units lined one wall, but they appeared to be empty.

  Slowly, Ellery’s memory of what had happened came back to her. That can’t be real, she thought to herself. I must have been in an accident or something and I have a concussion. Maybe I’m even in a coma.

  The idea that none of this was real soon went away when Ellery looked down and saw her right ankle had a metal cuff around it. The cuff was attached to a metal chain which was clipped into a ring in the ground.

  “Are you alright?” a voice said from behind Ellery.

  She spun around and saw for the first time that she wasn’t alone. Two other women were in the warehouse with her. Both had their ankles chained up in the same way as hers.

  “No. I’m not alright. I’m far from alright. What’s going on? What the fuck is this place?” Ellery demanded.

  “Calm down and…” one of the women started.

  She looked a little bit older than Ellery and she had hair which might once have been blonde but now looked a dirty brown color. Her cardigan, blouse, and jeans hung off her in tattered rags, and Ellery noticed the smell of unwashed bodies in the air for the first time.

  “Calm down? You’re kidding, right?” Ellery questioned loudly.

  “No,” the woman said. “Panicking isn’t going to help you. Once you get over the initial shock, we’ll tell you everything we know.”

  Ellery made a real effort to swallow down the panic inside of herself. The woman was right. Panicking wasn’t going to help her. She needed her wits about her. And while her situation was far from ideal, at least she could speak for herself again.

  When she felt a little calmer, she opened her mouth to ask a question, but she had so many questions swirling around in her head, that she didn’t know which one to ask first. She had never been in any situation that even remotely resembled this one, and all of her questions felt important. She didn’t know which ones she should prioritize.

  “I’m Ellery,” she said eventually, not sure what else to say.

  “I’m Ava,” the woman with the dirty blonde hair replied. “And this is Lisa.”

  Lisa, who hadn’t spoken so far, had jet-black hair and although she, too, looked dirty, her clothes weren’t quite as tattered as Ava’s. She was wearing a pair of denim shorts and a tank top. One strap of the tank top hung loose, but otherwise, her clothes were intact.

  Ellery instinctively pulled her jacket tighter around her, dreading the day she would look as beaten down as these two women. It won’t happen. I’m getting out of here, she told herself. She thought it with conviction, but she still didn’t really believe it.

  “How much do you remember?” Lisa asked.

  Ellery thought for a moment. She was pretty sure she remembered everything, but she didn’t know these two women and she wondered how much she should tell them. She told herself off for being paranoid. Whatever this was, the three of them were in it together now, and what harm could it do to tell them what she knew?

  “I moved to Miami almost two weeks ago. I lost my job back home and then my parents were killed in a fire which destroyed their house, the house I was living in at the time. Earlier today, I met a man. I was a little wary of him at first, but he seemed nice enough, and when he told me he was new to the city as well, I agreed to go for a coffee with him. Long story short, he abducted me and I realized he had been stalking me back home. He admitted to killing my parents. He knocked me out and I ended up here. God, why didn’t I say no to that coffee?”

  “It wouldn’t have made any difference,” Lisa said. “It was Kiefer, right?”

  Ellery nodded, surprised and yet not surprised at the same time to learn that Lisa knew Kiefer.

  “I met him in a bar.
He asked if he could buy me a drink. I said no and went to leave—something about him seemed off, somehow—but he took control of my mind and forced me into his van.”

  Ellery felt herself relaxing slightly. She wasn’t crazy. Somehow, Kiefer was able to control other people’s minds. He’d said he was a warlock, but Ellery doubted that. She felt sure he had somehow drugged her.

  “He did that mind control thing to me too. I was trying to run away, trying to scream for help, but my feet didn’t respond. A man stopped me, asked me if I was okay. I think he saw the fear in my eyes. I tried to say no, but Kiefer controlled my mouth, speaking through me.”

  “That’s what he does,” Lisa confirmed.

  “He’s a real piece of work,” Ava added.

  “Did he kill your family too?” Ellery asked.

  Ava nodded, and for a second, her eyes filled with tears but she blinked them back.

  “I was living with my fiancé. My soulmate. I went home and found him hanging from the bannister. I knew he would never commit suicide, but the police wouldn’t listen. I grieved and then I started trying to move on. I met Kiefer one day in the park. We got talking and he asked me on a date and I said yes. Now when I think of him, I feel nothing but revulsion, but then, I thought he was handsome and charming. I later found out that Kiefer had killed my fiancé.”

  “Shit, I’m so sorry,” Ellery said automatically. Ava shrugged. She had accepted her fate. Ellery turned to Lisa. “What’s your story?”

  “Similar. My parents were already gone and I wasn’t married or anything. But I had friends. Lots of them. Slowly, things started to happen to them. Car accidents. Fires. I moved away eventually, unable to face my old hometown. I moved to the Florida Keys for a new start and two days later, I met Kiefer at a bar and, well, you know the rest.”

  “But what does he want from us? Is it a sex thing?” Ellery asked.

  “Not exactly,” Ava said. “You’re going to have to keep an open mind for this next part, okay?”

  Ellery nodded her head.

  “Have you ever heard of wolf shifters?”

  “You mean werewolves? Sure,” Ellery said.

  “Right. Werewolves. Except the real-life version of them call themselves shifters,” Ava said.

  Ellery raised an eyebrow. The real-life version of them? What the fuck? She had promised to keep an open mind, though, and as crazy as this sounded, she didn’t want to alienate the two women who it seemed would be sharing her prison.

  “There’s a couple of shifter packs here, and one of the alphas is looking for mates. He’s not satisfied with one. He wants a whole fucking harem of women. And that’s where we come in.”

  “Assuming I believe that, why us? What’s so special about us?”

  “We have a protein in our blood called Sanmere. It means we can be turned into shifters. Without the protein, if a human tries to become a shifter, they die.”

  “So let me get this straight,” Ellery said. “You expect me to believe there’s a pack of werewolves, or shifters or whatever the hell you want to call them, living in Florida and no one knows about them? And their leader wants to turn a series of women into wolves so he can have multiple wives?”

  “That’s about the gist of it,” Lisa agreed. “I know it sounds crazy, but it’s true.”

  Ellery sat in silence for a moment, digesting the information. It did sound crazy. But was it any crazier than Kiefer being able to control her mind and telling her he was a warlock?

  “It just doesn’t make any sense,” Ellery said.

  “I know. But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s happening,” Ava shrugged.

  “So how does Kiefer fit into all of this? Did he lie when he claimed to be a warlock?”

  “No,” Ava said. “He’s a Matchmaker. That’s the word for someone in the shifter world who finds women with the Sanmere protein in their blood and sells them to the highest bidder. Shifters purchase these women to be their mates.”

  Ellery’s blood ran cold at that. It made sense. Kiefer had said he was in sales and then clammed up. Of course he didn’t want her asking questions about the kind of things he sold if those things were human women.

  “So how did Kiefer know I have this protein in my blood? I didn’t even know. I’ve never even heard of it,” Ellery said.

  “We’re not entirely sure,” Lisa said. “But we suspect that Kiefer has contacts in hospitals and labs where blood is tested. Everyone we’ve spoken to here has had blood tests done within a year of being brought here.”

  Ellery nodded. She had had blood tests done just before she lost her job, which Kiefer had claimed responsibility for. As crazy as all of this sounded, it was starting to make a strange sort of sense, and Ellery found herself starting to believe it. Was it really any weirder than the mind control thing?

  “I had blood tests right before I lost my job. I mean, right before Keifer made me lose my job.” Ellery thought for a moment. “You said everyone you’ve spoken to here. How many others have there been?”

  “I’ve been here for three months,” Lisa said. “And over that time, there have been six other women who have been turned into shifters. And then, of course, there’s Ava, who got brought here about a month after me. And now there’s you.”

  “And no one has ever come up with an escape plan?” Ellery asked.

  “Oh, believe me, we’ve come up with plans. We’ve tried so many different things, and none of them have worked,” Ava said.

  “So, what happens now? We just sit here and wait to be turned into a wolf and then spend the rest of our lives getting repeatedly raped?”

  “It’s worse than that,” Lisa said quietly. “Shifters are immortal. So it’s not so much the rest of your life as it is the rest of eternity.”

  “Shit,” Ellery breathed. “Guys, there has to be some way out of here.”

  “Well, if you come up with something we haven’t already tried, we’re sure as hell up for it,” Ava said.

  “And in the meantime, what happens? Are we just left in here to rot?”

  “We get showered once a week. But don’t think that’s a chance for escape. It’s not a shower in the typical sense. We get stripped off and hosed down in here. We get fed and given water. The pack alpha doesn’t want to risk us dying of malnutrition before he’s ready for us,” Lisa explained.

  “Great,” Ellery said.

  “Look, it’s not the Ritz, but it’s not so bad as long as you follow orders,” Ava said.

  Ellery nodded her head, although she wasn’t convinced there was anything about this experience that could be described as not so bad.

  “What about the other women? The ones who have been turned. Can’t they help us?” Ellery asked.

  “No,” Lisa said. “They’re watched closely. We tried that and it resulted in a couple of them ending up dead.”

  “I thought you said they were immortal,” Ellery said.

  “They are technically, but they can still be killed. Beheading works. As do silver bullets. Or there’s this metal, Ure. That can kill a shifter. Anyway, the women who tried to help us were beheaded in front of us, so trying that again is out. They do sneak down when they can, though, and give us extra food, or things they have managed to get a hold of,” Lisa said.

  Ellery fell quiet, trying to process all of the information she had been given. She knew she had to suspend her disbelief and accept that there were things in this world that she had never even considered, but it was still hard to do, and the fact that she was somehow mixed up in it all made her head hurt.

  Immortality was a big thing. It was something Ellery had always thought of as a curse rather than a blessing, and that was in the shows she watched now and again. The guilty pleasure kind where teenagers fell in love with vampires and werewolves, and turned into them for eternal love. Even that seemed like a mistake to Ellery. Like one day, those girls would wake up and realize they could never put down roots because they’d be found out. They could never get too close to a
nyone because they knew they would lose them eventually.

  This was even worse. The sheer horror of being made immortal and then spending eternity locked away, mated to a man you despised. And even without meeting this alpha guy, Ellery knew she would despise him. How could she not when she knew what he was capable of? The thought made Ellery’s head spin and her stomach clench.

  She felt her old thoughts resurfacing. The ones where she took her own life and no longer had to live with the horrors of the world she lived in. She could do it. She could bite through the veins on her wrists. It might take her a while to bleed out, but it wasn’t like she had anything better to do.

  The thoughts didn’t hold the appeal Ellery had believed they would. She was stronger now. She wanted to live. But not like this. She would find a way to get out of here. She had to.

  “Are you alright? You’ve gone quiet,” Ava said, her voice gentle and caring.

  “I’ve been better,” Ellery said, forcing a smile. “I’m just trying to process all of this.”

  She thought for a moment longer.

  “I’m assuming you’ve tried breaking through the chains somehow?”

  “It’s impossible,” Lisa said. “We’ve tried breaking through them. We’ve tried chipping the rings out of the concrete. One girl even snapped her own ankle to try and force it through the cuff. It didn’t work. They just set her ankle and she was in a cast for a while.”

  “And presumably the chains don’t stretch far enough for us to reach the door?” Ellery said.

  “No. Or the shelves, not that there’s anything on them. See the toilet?” Ava said.

  Ellery hadn’t noticed a toilet and she looked around for one. She still couldn’t see one. Ava laughed softly.

  “More accurately, the hole in the ground with the toilet paper roll beside it,” she said.

  Ellery looked around again and she saw the toilet paper roll. She cringed at the thought of having to use the toilet in front of the other women, but really, that was the least of her worries right now. She nodded her head.

  “That’s as far as we can go in any direction,” Ava said.