Page 2

S ix weeks later…

“I can’t believe of all the fucked up places I’ve been, I wind up in Dry Creek, where the last thing it is, is fucking dry!” I snarled as I tried again to push the fence post back into an upright position.

Rain pelted down on me, soaking the already completely saturated and muddied ground, and making more of a mess than I could even comprehend.

Each drop felt like a tiny fist beating on me, and I could barely hear myself think over the roar of the storm.

The sometimes beautiful scenery of the ranch transformed into a blurry canvas of grays and browns. The scent of damp earth mixed with the tang of metal and rotted wood from the felled fence, beneath that was animal fur and dung.

The joyful cacophony of bleating goats a second to the rolling thunder and nonstop tinkle of raindrops hitting the tin roof of their shelter.

“Goddamn it, Dolly Sue, stop head-butting me,” I growled at the big-breasted goat who kept knocking into my backside as I worked.

I knelt in the mud, fingers sinking into the slick earth as I assessed the damage.

Fuck. It was broken at the base, and I knew then I would have to replace it. Growling in irritation, I used my strength to grip the bottom of the post and yanked it up and out of the ground.

The mud worked against me, sucking on the piece of wood like Jed did on those ever present toothpicks in his mouth. It took some finagling, but once I had a good grip, I was able to force the thing out.

I tossed it aside with a huff and stood back to look at where the next four posts were already collapsing under the weight of water soaked logs. The tree that came down, creating this disaster, was still in the way, crushing the southern part of the fence beneath its heavy, sodden branches.

This was a mess I couldn’t fix in a single day. The whole damn fence had to come out. The posts needed new holes, not to mention the fact that half the wood was rotted through.

Thoughts of rebuilding felt overwhelming, but it had to be done. But as I looked around, I also saw life teeming in the chaos—green shoots poking through the ground, resilient against the storm.

Somehow, amidst all the destruction, there was a promise of renewal.

“Quit it, Dolly Sue!” I shouted as my rear end met with another round of butting goat heads.

“That ain’t Dolly Sue, Emmet. That there is Dolly Mae,” Jed, a crazy old Prairie Dog Shifter, and official Motley Crewd Ranch goat wrangler, and vice president of our line of goat's milk byproducts, called Dolly’s Dairy Products , corrected me.

Rather unfuckinghelpfully too, if you asked me which, of course, nobody was.

Jed sort of came with the hybrid farm ranch in Barren County that my boss, and now Alpha of our mixed up group of Shifters and supes, Maximillian Leeds, bought from his own grandmother.

Honestly, if you follow all that, then you’re doing a damn sight better than I was.

“Gonna have to move these old girls, else they’ll wander,” Jed told me as he ambled on, using a clicking sound to entice the goats back over the broken fence.

He was right. But I had no idea where we would put them with all the construction we had going on and all this damned rain.

I couldn’t even tell you how I got to Dry Creek or more specifically to that ranch other than to say, I was duped.

After the Winter Falls Pack banished my sorry ass, I walked thirty miles to a bus stop and got on the first transport out of there.

My Wolf had been snapping and snarling, hating being cooped up on that bus, and I’d been asked not to get back on by two very skittish looking humans in security uniforms.

It wasn’t the uniforms that got me to listen to their suggestions, but rather the matching set of 9 mils they had aimed right at center mass.

Now, for a bullet to kill a Wolf Shifter, it wasn’t that it had to be a silver bullet. That bit of superstition was just that. An old wives’ tale.

Truth was any old bullet would do. But it did have to be very fucking accurate.

I doubted those security guards’ accuracy, but what I did not doubt was that getting shot would hurt like a motherfucker. Also, it would likely have spurred Demon into retaliating.

I might be able to heal from a lot of things, but outing the entire secret supernatural world I lived in was not one of them. Even I was smart enough to recognize that.

So, what happened was I did not get back on that bus. Rather, I hitched a ride with a trucker. And another one after that.

Eventually, I found myself at a shitty roadside motel, scrolling through Ghoulgle, which was the supernatural world’s private internet, until I found an advertisement for a job, this job , which pretty much brings us up to speed.

Did you ask where I ended up?

Motley Crewd Ranch—an apt name for a group of fuckups and misfits if ever I heard one. Located in Dry Creek, New Jersey, but commonly referred to as Barren County.

I’d recently been promoted to foreman or ranch manager, and something about being handed that responsibility sat well with me. Demon, too.

For the first time in my life, I thought maybe I could settle down. With Max, who was an actual Jersey fucking Devil, and not a Vampire as I’d originally thought, as our Alpha, and the rest of the group as my Pack mates, well, I was starting to think maybe this was kismet.

I mean, how often did a Devil, a Wolf, a Bear, A Bull, and a Dragon, not to mention a Prairie Dog Shifter, team up to make anything other than a mess?

But for whatever reason, it was working. I didn’t know if it was because Max had recently found his mate, and perhaps it was Penelope’s influence that had us all feeling a bit kinder towards each other.

I mean, I only had to break up like forty-seven fights between Dante, Kian, and Zeke this week, which was half of what it was last week.

So, yeah. Duped or not, I was starting to think maybe the Fates liked me a little. Not a lot. But just enough to keep me around.

I could live with that.

“Yo, Quinn!” Dante’s gruff voice interrupted my train of thought.

I turned on my heel, nodding at the Bear Shifter.

“What?”

“Boss found a place to move the herd. I’ll get ‘em loaded in the truck with Jed,” he called out.

I nodded.

I knew Max had been trying to solve the problem of what to do with the goats while we completely rebuilt the fences surrounding the recently refurbished holding pens and the dairy itself.

Goats were restless creatures by nature, always nipping at the edges of their enclosures, testing the limits of what they could get away with.

With the fences down, the concern about what to do with them to keep them safe was a big one. Poor Jed was beside himself with worry. Hell, he’d even taken to sleeping in a tent outside to try to keep them together.

Max had been scratching his head over the best way to keep them contained while we worked. The rain certainly did not make the task any easier.

But it looked like he had a solution. Dante had already started moving the goats into the waiting trailer and I jogged over to my cabin to use the toilet and swap my ruined jacket and jeans for some dry clothes.

Bad weather didn’t bother me. I was a Shifter, a Wolf, and I ran a little hotter than most.

But I was not fine with getting mud and rain all over the interior of one of our new rigs. Boss had bought six brand new F150 pickups for us to work this place over, and of course, Dante had hooked the trailer to mine.

Fucker .

The quicker we moved the herd, the quicker we could get to work fixing this mess without getting rear-ended by a bunch of ornery critters.

“They’re ready for you and I plugged the address into your GPS,” Dante called out as I jogged to the driver’s side.

“Okay. Where’s Jed?”

“In the back with them,” the Bear replied and smirked.

I shook my head and offered a three fingered wave as I pulled out onto the road. I could hear the damn goats bleating their opinions and Jed cooing to them softly.

I swore the old man was getting worse every day. He spoiled those old gals.

Still, I knew they were better off where they were—contained, safe, and away from the muddy chaos that surrounded us.

The ranch looked like hell, but if you could see past all that, even just a few days ahead, then you would see what I saw. You’d see Motley Crewd Ranch had potential.

Max knew what he was doing, giving us all a piece of this place. It tethered our animals to it. Made it belong to us.

Emotion filled me as I thought of the email I’d gotten, along with the rest of the Crew, earlier this week.

It was from Mr. Henries, the Leeds family’s lawyer, and it explained that along with our wages, we would get a percentage of the income from the ranch and a shared stake in the property. Ten percent for each of us.

It didn’t sound like a lot. But it was. And it meant something.

For the first time in a long time, as the rain continued to fall, and the wind howled, I felt like maybe I wasn’t a lost cause.

Maybe I was less broken than I thought.

Demon snarled, and I winced, thinking maybe I thought too soon.

Okay, so the jury was still out on that one. I didn’t want to get sappy about it. But this sure felt a lot like progress.

One fence post at a time.