Beauty and the Shapeshifter (Evil Rising Book 5) Read online

  by

  Melody Raven

  Copyright

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. Fonts used with permission from Microsoft.

  Copyright © 2019 by Melody Raven

  Melody Raven (02-03-2019). Beauty and the Shapeshifter (Evil Rising Book 5)

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

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  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Epilogue

  Free first look at PRIDE AND MAGIC!

  Ella shoved open the door to the sheriff’s office, slamming it against the wall. So what if all the deputies were staring? Let them know she was angry.

  Gus looked up from his paperwork, a lazy grin planted on his face. “Ella, if you really want to see me, all you have to do is call,” he said with his signature drawl that had all the girls in the small Maine town of Pine Springs drooling.

  All the girls except Ella.

  “Have you found my dad?” She crossed her arms over her chest.

  Gus stood up from behind his desk, towering over her tiny five-four frame. “We were able to track his car down, but there was no sign of him. It was out in the middle of nowhere. He’s probably in the woods, tinkering with some new invention or whatever the hell it is he does.”

  Ella chewed her bottom lip. “He wouldn’t run off without telling me. I called the Lexington Hotel. He never checked in, and he was supposed to present at the science convention last weekend. I haven’t talked to him in a week.”

  Gus nodded as if he were listening, but she could see in his eyes he’d already written her off. “Normally, that would all be quite alarming, but you can’t exactly call Dr. Murray ‘normal.’”

  She clenched her fists and took a deep breath. “Why aren’t you taking this seriously?”

  Gus moved to stand in front of her and set a hand on her shoulder. The touch sent a shiver through her. She pulled away, wrapping her arms around herself.

  “Your dad’s a biologist. You said yourself he used to specialize in bats, and it’s the best time of the year to view them. Why don’t you take a walk to collect yourself? I’ll swing by your place after I get off and we can discuss this over dinner.”

  She didn’t even dignify his offer with a response. Her father had been missing for a week and he wanted to go on a date? They needed to be doing something!

  “Where was his car?”

  He rolled his eyes. “Off Aroostook Highway, about sixty miles out. No signs of struggle. No sign it was stolen. If it’s still there in a few days, I’ll scrounge up some of my men to take a look at the woods around the area.”

  Ella tightened her lips. Dad could already be dead in a ditch somewhere and Gus wanted to wait even longer. She opened her mouth to argue more but stopped herself. It was pointless. He was so convinced her father was crazy, he wasn’t even considering Dad could be in danger.

  Sure, Dr. Scott Murray was eccentric. She had yet to meet a scientist who wasn’t a bit scrambled in the head. Though, considering she normally only met scientists her father worked with, maybe that said more about him than his profession.

  But he needed her. Heck, he couldn’t even remember to feed himself when he was in the midst of one of his experiments. If he was going out into the middle of nowhere for God knew how long, not only would he tell her, but he’d probably demand she come with him.

  He hadn’t said a thing to her about taking a trip. He wasn’t even studying bats anymore. The presentation he’d missed was supposed to be about the possibility of echolocation in the Mexican Long-Tailed Shrew. Mexican—as in they lived in Mexico. Nowhere near the forests of Maine.

  Ella shook her head and turned to leave.

  “Should I pick you up at your place around six?” shouted Gus as she walked out.

  “I’m sure you have much better things to do,” she called over her shoulder, not bothering to turn around.

  Deputy Louie caught up with her brisk pace and Ella fought the urge to walk even faster.

  “I wouldn’t worry, Ella. Gus is great at his job. He knows what he’s talking about.”

  Gus did love to surround himself with devotees. “Easy for you to say. It’s not your family.”

  “You know Gus has a soft spot for you. He’ll make sure you’re taken care of,” assured Louie.

  Ella didn’t even argue with him. What was the point? He was obviously as infatuated with the sheriff as the rest of the town. She pushed open the door as the deputy rushed to hold it for her. “Good-bye, Louie,” she muttered.

  Gus didn’t have a soft spot for her. He had a soft spot for the former Miss Pine Springs. Her beauty pageant days were long past her, but people in small towns had long memories. Other winners of the pageant had a bad habit of marrying young and getting the hell out of Dodge, so Gus decided to make her his mark.

  He didn’t like her, and marriage probably wasn’t even on his radar. He liked the idea of bragging about banging a beauty queen.

  Ella slid into the driver’s seat of her old Chevy Malibu and rested her head against the steering wheel. Her breaths came faster and her face scrunched up, but she refused to cry. She would find him.

  Dad might be a bit out there, but he was brilliant. No matter what trouble he got himself into, he was a survivor. That being said, she couldn’t abandon him. He was all she had. What little family Dad had barely spoke to him, and her mother had been MIA for the entire twenty-five years of her life.

  Dad was all she had.

  Ella took a calming breath and turned the key in the ignition, letting the AC cool off the heat of the early August sun. Gus might not be good for much, but at least he’d given her a clue.

  The clock on her dashboard read three fourteen. If she could get her boss to give her the night off, she would be on the road by five and have just enough daylight left to check out Dad’s car and make sure Gus wasn’t playing her when he said nothing was suspicious about it.

  Wasn’t the very idea of a car abandoned sixty miles outside of town suspicious?

  After a short drive—everything was a short drive in Pine Springs—she parallel parked in front of Off the Page, the used bookstore she’d worked at for the last five years.

  Her boss, Ray Menken, looked up from the book he was reading, probably some King or Koontz, his favorites. They made a good pair: he tended toward the suspenseful and scary while Ella preferred the passionate and sensual romance section. And if
a book happened to have all those elements, Ella was in heaven.

  He must’ve seen the frustration on her face, because he set his book down and walked around the counter, consoling expression firmly in place. “Gus didn’t find anything?”

  Once again, Ella found herself fighting back tears. It was so much easier to deal with Gus’s arrogance and stupidity than the honest sincerity of a friend. “He found something. He just doesn’t seem to give a crap. Apparently they found his car out in the middle of nowhere, way the heck out of town, but he’s not even looking into it because there aren’t any ‘signs of struggle.’”

  Ray frowned at the strange logic. “He’s been missing for a week. Don’t the police usually get involved after twenty-four hours?”

  Ella shook her head. “Not necessarily. If there was evidence of a kidnapping or something, they’d get involved sooner. Gus thinks Dad is crazy.”

  “You think he was kidnapped?” Ray’s brow furrowed, as if imagining the elderly Dr. Murray being dragged off.

  Ella rubbed her hands over her eyes and shrugged. “I don’t know. All I know is that Gus isn’t doing enough. I need to go look at the car.”

  “So this is your way of asking if you can have the night off?”

  “More like the week. If I don’t find anything tonight, I might be doing some hiking. Gus thinks Dad is out in the woods, doing some experiments. I don’t know how much credibility I’d put on that theory, but I still want to look around. Make sure he’s not stuck in the middle of nowhere with a broken leg.”

  Ray shook his head. “Even if you go out there, how do you expect to find him all on your own?”

  “I can’t do nothing. No one else is even looking for him!” Ella took a deep breath as she tried to calm down. Ray didn’t mean anything; she was just on edge. She’d barely gotten any sleep since Dad went missing, and she was tired of people telling her to sit back and let the police do their job.

  Ray took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I know this is important to you.” Ella breathed a sigh of relief, but Ray wasn’t done. “However, you don’t have the best attendance record. My niece is in town and she can cover your shifts, but she’s been asking for a full-time job for months. If you aren’t back by next Tuesday, I’m going to have to offer her your position. I’m sure we can still work something out on a part-time basis.”

  The pounding in her head suddenly intensified. “You know I’m not taking a vacation to the beach.”

  “That’s the problem. You always have an excuse. Reasonable excuses. Always for your father. You’re a good daughter, but you’re not the only one with family. I’m here fifty hours a week when I’m not working your shifts for you. I can’t keep this up. I’m getting older. There are more and more grandchildren popping up and I need to make sure I’m there to see them grow.”

  “So you’re firing me?” She didn’t want to sound surly, but it was hard not to.

  “Not firing. Warning you. I’ve cut you a lot of slack because of our friendship. I know you might not trust Gus, but he is good at what he does. Take the night off and drink a glass of wine. Read a good book. Let the police do their job.”

  Ella shook her head. One more of Gus’s worshipers. “You just agreed they need to take this seriously.”

  “That doesn’t mean you should go out on your own looking for your father. You need to consider your own safety.”

  “I’ll try to be back by next Tuesday.” Ella strode back into the late summer heat.

  Three hours later, Ella pulled the Malibu over next to Dad’s 1997 Ford Ranger. Her first instinct was to run to the truck and look in all the windows, but she held herself back. She circled the vehicle, looking at the ground and surrounding brush for anything Gus and his guys might’ve missed.

  Patches of grass were scattered along the side of the road, but the majority of the ground was covered in old and dead pine needles. She could see multiple disturbances that were probably footprints, but she was no tracker.

  It could have been the cops checking out the abandoned car or it could’ve been a bear for all she knew. Sighing at her poor detective skills, she trenched her way over to the Ranger and looked in.

  On the seat were some printed directions. Ella squinted and struggled to read the upside-down writing. The directions seemed to lead to exactly where he was parked. Why would Dad be going here as his destination?

  Ella looked around her, but all she saw was the curving highway and pine trees as tall as skyscrapers.

  She took a few steps back, looking for tire tracks, but came to the same problem she had with the footprints. She couldn’t make anything out too clearly, and anything she saw could’ve been tracks from the cop cars that had originally located the Ranger.

  The sudden electrical sound from the trees made her jump around. Craning her head up, she was barely able to make out a small amount of movement.

  Without thinking, Ella ran to the base of the tree, never taking her eyes off the black object that scanned the ground and highway.

  Was that a camera?

  Lucian looked through the computer screen at the beauty staring back at him. Well, not at him. She stared at one of the hundred or so cameras placed on the perimeter of his Maine compound. His predecessor made sure the land was spelled to keep all humans away, but there were much worse creatures out there than humans.

  Lucian would know. He was one of the worst.

  He pushed away from the collection of monitors, showing twelve different views of the surrounding woods, and reached for the phone. He hit the speed dial for his head of security, Cade. Ever efficient, Cade picked up before the phone finished its first ring. “Hey, boss. I heard the alarm go off. Did the cops come back?”

  Lucian shook his head, even though the other man couldn’t see him. “Why don’t you come look at this?”

  In less than a second, Cade materialized behind Lucian. “Who is it?”

  The large male was roughly the same size as Lucian, standing at six four, but Cade looked military with a blond buzz cut, standard khakis, and black T-shirt.

  Lucian preferred his hair longer, just long enough to pull back if he needed it out of his face, and tended toward black slacks and buttoned-down shirts. After all, he was coven master. He at least needed to look polished.

  Cade was a soldier. All he needed to do was be ready to kill.

  Lucian pointed to the screen. “See for yourself.”

  Cade bent over to look at the monitor in question. “Holy fuck. Can we keep her?”

  Lucian laughed, but it wasn’t as if the same thought hadn’t crossed his mind. The woman, probably closer to a girl, was drop-dead gorgeous. She was dressed modestly enough in a V-neck that showed no cleavage and denim shorts, but even through the black-and-white screen, he could see how generous her breasts and ass were. She was on the shorter side, and her dark hair against her pale skin surrounded a pert nose and eyes that were large, dark pools of curiosity.

  “She found the camera, but I don’t think she’ll be a problem. I thought you might want to take a look,” said Lucian.

  “She might be lost.” Cade cracked a smile. “I should really make sure she doesn’t need help.”

  “You have better things to do,” muttered Lucian, not taking his eyes off the girl, who was now looking around at the other trees. Probably searching for more cameras. “How is the good doctor doing?”

  “I wouldn’t know. He hasn’t said a word to me in days. We stopped feeding him Saturday and he isn’t showing any signs of breaking.”

  Lucian frowned. “Three days without food. How long before humans die? Is it a week?”

  “Google said Gandhi survived for twenty-one days. Should we cut off his water too?”

  Lucian shook his head. Torture was never a good way to get someone to help you, but he was getting desperate. When he took over the coven ten years ago, he’d promised his men he’d help them replenish their numbers but had gotten nowhere. The only one who’d seemed to come
close was Dr. Scott Murray, and he didn’t exactly have a good history with the myotis.

  The woman walked back to her car; Lucian made sure the camera followed, enjoying the sway of her hips. His lips curved as he imagined what those hips would look like without the shorts. What they would look like bent over her rundown car.

  His smile dissipated when she strode back to the camera, cell phone in hand.

  “Is she taking a picture?” asked Cade in a shocked voice.

  “Fuck,” muttered Lucian.

  Cade squinted at the screen. “It’s too sunny for a vampire.”

  Lucian had been sure she was human, but that was impossible. Any human who approached his land was overcome with the urge to get the hell out of the area. The girl put the phone back in her purse and took a long swig from a plastic water bottle before she walked farther into the woods and out of view from the camera.

  “Fuck,” he repeated.

  Cade grabbed a handgun and silver blade from the weapons cabinet. “I’ll take care of her.”

  Lucian stood, accidentally tipping his chair back far enough to send it clattering against the floor. “Stay here. Watch the doctor. I’ll see what’s going on.”

  Cade looked Lucian over. “You just want to see her because she’s hot.”

  “I want to see her because she’s a curiosity.” And because she’s hot. Cade didn’t have to know that, though.

  He closed his eyes and focused on a spot in the woods about two hundred yards from where he’d last seen the woman. The last thing he needed was her seeing him teleport.

  When he opened his lids, all he saw was trees and the barest hint of highway. No sign of the girl. He sniffed the air and caught her scent mixed in with the sap and pine.

  She smelled like shampoo and aloe soap. Nothing overpowering, but subtly feminine. A predatory grin covered his face and he followed the scent.

  Dry needles crunched under Ella’s tennis shoes as she walked farther into the trees. She kept her eyes to the forest floor, searching the dried pine needles and dirt for signs of where Dad could’ve gone, but didn’t see anything resembling a footprint.