North Star Shifters: The Complete Series Read online

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  © Roxie Noir, 2016

  May not be replicated or reproduced in any manner without express and written permission from the author. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only.

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  Table of Contents

  Grizzlies & Glaciers

  North Star Shifters #1

  Shifters & Soulmates

  North Star Shifters #2

  Forests & Fate

  North Star Shifters #3

  Grizzlies

  & Glaciers

  North Star Shifters #1

  Roxie Noir

  Chapter One

  Delilah

  1989

  Delilah drove carefully down Main Street. On the passenger seat of her little Toyota was a street map of Fjords, Alaska, and her grocery list. She’d bought the map the day before, when she’d gotten into town after nearly fifty hours of driving, but she hadn’t needed it yet — it turned out that almost nothing had changed in the town since she’d moved away nearly eight years ago.

  Even the Carrs grocery store was standing exactly where it had been while she was in high school, the biggest store in a shopping center that also had a 7-11 and a Payless Shoe Source. The stores around it had changed, but she was surprised that no new roads had been built, no new bridges from their peninsula to the Alaska mainland. When she had left for college in California, there had even been talk of building a regional airport in Fjords, but that had never happened.

  Sitting at a red light, looking at a Thai restaurant, Delilah heard the crash without seeing it. Her head whipped around and, in shock, she saw a mass of steaming, crumpled metal. For one second, there was an eerie silence as everyone stopped and stared.

  Then she realized that the mass was two cars, right in the middle of the intersection. Some kind of big SUV had t-boned a tiny car, practically driving right over it, leaving it crumpled right in the middle of the intersection in front of her.

  Delilah gaped for a few seconds — the SUV had obviously run the red light, was the driver drunk? In the middle of the day like this? — but then her training kicked in and she ran toward the wreck.

  Already, two other people were standing there, staring at the two cars now smashed almost completely together, moving their hands around uselessly as though that would help.

  “I’m a doctor!” Delilah shouted as she jogged the last few feet, approaching the two cars. The word still sounded weird coming from her mouth, but it was finally true. She was a doctor.

  Either steam or smoke poured forth from one of the cars, and for half a second, she wondered whether the cars would explode, like in the movies.

  All at once, her head cleared, and she knew she had to take control of the situation.

  She pointed at an older woman with dyed-red hair who was simply standing there, gawking. “You,” she said. The woman looked up, aimlessly. “What’s your name?”

  “Karen.”

  “Karen, I need you to go find a pay phone and call 911. Can you do that?”

  “But—” said Karen, waving her hands at the wreckage.

  “These people need an ambulance,” Delilah said firmly, far more firmly than she felt. “Go call 911.”

  Karen nodded and then ran off to the row of shops along the street, entering one and jabbering loudly to the guy behind the desk.

  Breathing deeply, Delilah approached the two intertwined cars. An instinct told her that exploding was just a myth, and she needed to see whether the drivers were still alive.

  First she approached the SUV. Inside was a thirty-something man, blood running down his face from the broken windshield, pawing at the door handle ineffectively.

  “Oh shit,” he was saying, over and over again, tonelessly.

  “Sir,” Delilah said, rushing toward him. “Sir, please just stay where you are. An ambulance is on its way.”

  “I gotta get out,” he said in that same strange, toneless voice. Delilah knew it was shock — she’d met plenty of people like this during her emergency rotation. “It’s — there’s an accident — I gotta get out.”

  “You need to stay right where you are,” she said. “You could have serious injuries and you shouldn’t move.”

  Delilah went up to the car and looked inside, down at him. He was at least wearing a seatbelt. She inhaled deeply, smelling hard for alcohol on his breath, her extra-sharp senses kicking in.

  There it was. Bud light, it smelled like, or maybe Coors — some cheap beer. Delilah ground her teeth together and did her best not to get angry. The police would test his blood alcohol level, and he’d get what he deserved.

  For his part, he just looked at her, blankly.

  “Stay there,” she said, hands up, trying to sound soothing.

  Since the guy in the SUV was talking and moving, she wasn’t too concerned about him. Besides — and she knew this was un-doctorly — he’d been drinking, and whatever he got, he deserved.

  As she was checking over the guy in the SUV, there were alarmed shouts from the little Hyundai, and Delilah looked up.

  “Stay there!” she shouted to the guy in the SUV, pointing at him, and running around the little silver car that he’d smashed into.

  From the other side, it was worse than it had looked at first: the nose of the SUV had come almost completely through the passenger side of the car, and now the woman who’d been driving — who had been completely, utterly in the right of way — was trapped underneath.

  Worse, she was unconscious and covered in blood.

  The onlookers scattered when Delilah approached, and she heard mutters of doctor, not that she paid too much attention. Right away she could see that the blood was from a huge gash in her right leg, where a piece of metal had gouged her, but that wasn’t even her worst problem: the worse problem was that the SUV was practically on top of her, crushing her.

  The woman wasn’t breathing.

  Fuck fuck fuck shit fuck damn, thought Delilah, her thoughts little more than a stream of curse words.

  She took a deep breath.

  “Someone needs to lift the SUV off of the car,” she called through the broken windshield. “It’s crushing her.”

  There was no way the woman would make it until the ambulances got there. The three men that had gathered around jogged to the front of the SUV and started a count: one, two, three, lift!

  The SUV didn’t budge. Delilah cursed.

  “Try it again,” she said. She tried to tamp down the panic that was rising in her chest. The men counted down again, but again the other vehicle didn’t move, not even a little. Desperately, Delilah tried to think — if only they could get this woman free, she could staunch the bleeding from her femoral artery, and there was a decent chance she’d make it out of this alive.

  If not, though. The woman had another minute, maybe. Delilah didn’t even hear the sirens yet.

  “Come on!” she shouted at the men. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she thought hasn’t the adrenaline kicked in yet?

  “Hold up!” she heard a voice shout.

  She knew that voice. She couldn’t think about it now, though.

  “Scoot over and let me get the bumper,” the voice said. The men reshuffled themselves, the new guy at the very front, and Delilah heard them start counting again.

  Please, she thought. Please, please, please.

  Then, on three, the SUV started lifting, moving backward away from the tiny Hyundai. Relief flooded through Delilah, and as soon as she could, s
he pressed her jacket to the wound in the woman’s leg.

  Take a breath, she thought, leaning as hard as she could against the bleeding wound, praying to stop it, just a little. Come on, breathe, breathe.

  There was a crunching sound and a jolt as the men lowered the SUV back onto the pavement.

  Delilah looked up for just a moment, making sure that everything outside of the Hyundai was still all right, that the drunk guy was still in his seat where she’d told him to stay.

  Peering in through the broken passenger side window was a very, very familiar face.

  For a split second, Delilah forgot to breathe.

  The woman in the Hyundai suddenly gasped for air, taking in a long ragged breath and then coughing so hard Delilah was afraid she’d rupture something. Delilah tried to keep her as still as she could — the woman was out cold — while keeping pressure on her gaping leg wound.

  “You need anything else, doc?” asked that voice, and Delilah looked up into Miles’s face. She’d known he was there from the first word he said. There was no mistaking that low, lazy, gravelly sound.

  “I need that ambulance to hurry up,” she said, still watching the woman’s chest rise and fall. “Go make sure that other driver doesn’t go anywhere. I’m afraid he’s too drunk to know that he’s hurt.”

  “The boys have got an eye on Larry,” Miles said.

  Of course they know who he is, thought Delilah. Everyone knows everyone in this town.

  Then, at last, in the distance: sirens.

  Delilah and Miles stayed there, Delilah in the Hyundai and Miles right behind, in silence until the sirens were right next to them. Miles met the paramedics as they jumped out, told them that the woman in the little car needed them the most, that the drunk guy in the SUV was fine.

  Someone came and relieved Delilah, taking over the job of keeping pressure on her wound. The paramedics gently got her out of the car and onto a stretcher just as she woke up, her eyes flying open in her bruised face, immediately contorting with pain.

  “It’s your lucky day,” one of the paramedics told her, and Delilah was impressed with how calm he sounded. “You’re not dead. That nice lady probably saved your life.”

  Delilah, standing to the side, didn’t know what to do anymore, so she stood there uselessly, covered in blood that wasn’t hers. The men who’d lifted the car, minus Miles, still stood around the SUV, looking almost like guards.

  “This has been coming for a long time for Larry,” said Miles, and Delilah jumped. She hadn’t realized he was right there next to her.

  “How so?” she asked. She was hugging herself hard with her arms, doing her best to stop the shaking. Why was she shaking, anyway? She was a doctor, she saw this stuff all the time. She shouldn’t be in shock.

  “His drinking’s really gotten to be a problem,” Miles said in his low voice. “Lost his job at the cannery, then his wife left with the kids, so now there’s nowhere to be at eight in the morning except the Rusty Anchor.”

  Delilah nodded. It was a familiar story to her — too familiar, really. Growing up she’d through this kind of tragedy was specific to small-town Alaska, but it turned out that it was everywhere she went.

  “The Rusty Anchor’s still around?” Delilah asked. The place had looked like a falling-apart fishing shack when she’d left, and she’d assumed that a strong wind had knocked it over at some point.

  “Course it’s still around,” Miles said. “There could be a nuclear war and it’d be the only place left standing. The Anchor will outlive us all.”

  The paramedics loaded the woman, still in pain and breathing heavily but alive, into the back of the ambulance. They slammed the doors shut and immediately, the sirens started and the ambulance lurched away, moving through the snarled traffic, even driving up on the curb.

  “Does Fjords have a hospital?” Delilah asked Miles. She was still hugging herself tightly without really realizing it, and she shivered a little in the cool May air. Alaska, she thought. Where you need a parka year-round.

  I guess I went soft down south.

  “We’ve got a little urgent care facility, but that’s it,” Miles said. He looked worried as he watched the ambulance drove off, fast.

  “They’ll probably have to patch her up there and then transfer her,” said Delilah.

  “She gonna make it?”

  Delilah looked at the ground for a second and then nodded. “I think so,” she said. “It won’t be fun, but I think she’ll make it.” She wrapped her arms even more tightly around herself.

  “That ain’t gonna be the worst part,” Miles said thoughtfully.

  “Her recovery is gonna be pretty bad,” Delilah assured him.

  “Just wait until Roy finds out what happened,” Miles said, grimly. “The worst part is gonna be letting the police do their job and keeping him from killing Larry.”

  Suddenly, everything clicked into place. Delilah had been far too concerned with the woman’s body and leg to get a good look at her face, but all at once, she realized who it was.

  “That was Susan?” she gasped.

  “Yup,” Miles confirmed.

  That was bad. Roy was the alpha of their pack — or at least he had been when she’d left town years ago — and he wasn’t known for his kindly manner or his mercy. No, he ran the Fjords shifters with an iron fist, and woe to anyone who crossed him or broke the rules.

  Susan, of course, was his mate.

  Next to the SUV, the drunk guy — Larry, apparently — was on a stretcher too, seemingly lucid and talking to the paramedics. The three men who’d helped lift the front of his SUV off of the Hyundai still stood around, back a little, like they were watching over him and making sure he didn’t try anything.

  From the corner of her eye, she could sense Miles watching her, like he wanted to say something.

  Finally, he put one hand on her shoulder. It was big and warm, and his touch sent a rush of remembrance through her. All those other times they’d touched, before she’d left Alaska.

  “Jeez, Del,” he said. “You’re shaking.”

  He took his hand off of her and started taking his leather jacket off, wearing nothing more than a t-shirt underneath.

  Peeking out from beneath one sleeve was a tattoo. She could only see the black lines the grizzly’s feet, but she knew exactly what it was: a thick black line drawing of a grizzly bear, the stars of the constellation Ursa Minor — the little dipper — arranged inside it, the North Star the biggest.

  “No, it’s fine, it’s just the shock,” Delilah said.

  He called me Del, she thought. It had been years since she’d heard the nickname.

  “Come on, take it,” he said. “The police are gonna want to talk to us, so we’ll be standing outside for a while.”

  “Aren’t you cold?”

  “Nah,” he said, and smiled the same old smile at her, putting his heavy jacket over her shoulders.

  God, he even smelled the same. His hand rubbing her back, trying to warm her up — that felt the same too.

  As they watched, the police came, sirens blaring, and started directing traffic around the wreck. Now Larry was in the other ambulance, and it set off in the same direction that the first had, going a little slower, driving a little less urgently. Delilah’s car was still parked right in the intersection, ten feet from the crashed cars, but incredibly it hadn’t been hit, not even by flying glass or car parts. The police directed traffic around it.

  Miles’s jacket was warm and comforting, and in a few minutes, Delilah had stopped shivering, finally warming up. She put her arms through it, remembering again how much bigger he was than her, how her fingertips didn’t even reach the ends of the jacket’s arms, how she could have practically worn the thing as a dress.

  She sneaked another look at his arm, the tattoo still peeking out. It didn’t look faded yet, still fresh and black. He’d gotten officially initiated, then, into the inner circle sworn to put pack above all else.

  “I heard your dad
died,” Miles said, suddenly.

  “He did,” said Delilah. “That’s why I’m back. I gotta clean out his house, deal with all of his —“ she paused. Now didn’t seem like the right time to lay into her father like she really wanted to. Speak no ill of the dead and all that, even if she’d thought she was finally free of his mess, only for it to come back on her after his death. “Affairs,” she finished. “I have to deal with his affairs.”

  “That’s gotta be hard,” he said. “Just you, no siblings.”

  “I’m hoping it won’t take too long,” she said. “A week, maybe?”

  “The clinic is always looking for doctors,” Miles said, his face half-teasing. “Especially ones who understand the most common condition in Fjords,” he said.

  That brought a smile to her face. The most common condition, of course, was bear-shifter-itis, and it was an open secret that a good two thirds of the town had it. That was half the problem: combine the strange politics of shifters with their archaic social structures with the insularity of small towns, and things got stifling, fast.

  Delilah wasn’t moving back, not ever.

  “How’s Nathan?” she asked, trying to change the subject.

  Something in Miles’s manner shifted, and Delilah sensed that she’d gotten too close to something.

  “He’s doing okay,” Miles said. “He’s not at college anymore, but I think he’s gonna get his life together.”

  “He still living with your parents?”

  “Yeah. They threaten to kick him out once a week, but it’ll never happen.”

  “How are they doing?”

  “They’re fine,” Miles shrugged. “Dad and Roy are still thick as thieves.”

  Delilah just nodded. She’d always been afraid of Miles’s dad. Nothing had been proven, but when she and Miles were twelve or so, the police had been interested in him for a murder further north. They never pinned anything on him, but she’d always suspected that he traded dirty work with another pack. After all, sometimes shifters who were causing problems up and disappeared.