Total pages in book: 23
Estimated words: 20835 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 104(@200wpm)___ 83(@250wpm)___ 69(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 20835 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 104(@200wpm)___ 83(@250wpm)___ 69(@300wpm)
I almost turned around when it split into three directions, but as the beam of light from my phone swept across one of the paths, I spotted a rock that looked out of place on the ground. Creeping toward it, I gasped when I crouched low and traced my finger along the top. I’d never seen one up close, but it looked an awful lot like a lunar meteorite photo Dr. McCord had shared with the class during one of his lectures. He’d said it was the best rock in his personal collection and paid quite a lot for it because of how rare lunar meteorites were.
The one at my feet was much bigger than the small moon rock my professor had bought. My best guess when I lifted it from the ground was that it weighed about two and a half pounds. Finding it here made no sense when I remembered Dr. McCord told us that no lunar meteorite had ever been discovered in North America.
Meteorites found on public land could be collected, up to ten pounds, but I was almost definitely still on Leyton’s family’s land. If this rock turned out to be what I thought, I’d need to call him because it belonged to them. First, I wanted to show it to my professor to make sure I wasn’t wrong about what I was holding. I’d hate to get anyone excited about my find if it turned out to just be a big chunk of magnetite.
3
ARTEMIS
The life of a dragon shifter without his mate was a lonely one. Not many of my kind were left in the world, so few that only two dragon holds remained. One in Aruba and another in Florida. Our beasts thrived in hot weather, so we tended to settle in warmer climates. But after roaming the world for a decade on my own, I decided almost twenty years ago that I enjoyed the changing of the seasons enough to settle in a cave in a forest where I could experience them.
I hadn’t known back then that someone owned the land I made into my home. Not until I came across a grizzly shifter marking the territory by raking his claws against a tree only a few hundred feet from my cave. My dragon had been pissed enough that he wanted to send a stream of fire at the bear to burn him to a crisp. Luckily, I had been in my human form, and logic prevailed.
I introduced myself to the grizzly, and after he shifted back, he let me know he and his brother had just finished building a few log cabins farther down the mountain and had several more in the works. In all my travels, I had never met a pack that included different animals, so I was surprised to learn a cougar helping him with the builds had claimed the third cabin that was finished and a wolf planned to live in the next one that was done.
Not that Keane had called it a pack back then or thought of himself as the alpha. That had come with time. Which was a big part of why I’d been comfortable with accepting his invitation to take the fifth cabin, although I had them focus on the one at the end of the row so I had a little more space to myself before they eventually filled up.
I quickly learned that I often needed even more distance from the other shifters, so I still spent a lot of time in my cave. So much so that I had the cougar shifter, Garner, help me turn it into a second home for myself. One that more than rivaled my log cabin with all of the amenities I had added over the years.
I spent more time at the cave than my cabin, which worked well for me as The Wilderness Pack grew when several of the guys found their fated mates. I was happier for my packmates, but they were all younger than me, so I was also envious that they had the other half of their soul while I was still alone. It made me grumpier than usual, which was saying a lot since I had a well-earned reputation for being surly.
In an effort to be around more for my pack now that it had grown so much—and to get the female mates off my back about never being around—I had started to spend at least a couple of nights a week at my cabin, which meant keeping some of my treasures there instead of the cave.
Until this morning, remembering where one of my beloved items was hadn’t been an issue. I had never misplaced anything from my hoard before, so I was stunned when the lunar meteorite I had found in the Sahara Desert wasn’t anywhere to be found in my cabin. I’d been almost certain that I hadn’t moved the moon rock from the spot where I’d placed it in the back side of my cave but had hoped that I was mistaken. The black chunk had brought me good luck over the years, and I was pissed as fuck that I couldn’t find it.