Untamed (Dark Moon Shifters #2) Read online

  Untamed

  Dark Moon Shifters Book Two

  Bella Jacobs

  Contents

  UNTAMED

  About the Book

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Sneak Peek

  About the Author

  Also by Bella Jacobs

  UNTAMED

  A Dark Moon Shifters Novel

  By Bella Jacobs

  Copyright UNTAMED © 2018 by Bella Jacobs

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. This contemporary romance is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners. This ebook is licensed for your personal use only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with, especially if you enjoy sexy, fast-paced urban fantasy reads. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author’s work.

  Created with Vellum

  About the Book

  Once upon a time there was a very good girl, who followed all the rules.

  That girl is dead.

  I am no longer Wren Frame, the bird with the broken wing. I am Wren Wander, a rare shapeshifter determined to take back everything the cult stole from me—my health, my hope, and most importantly, my family.

  My sister is still out there somewhere. Alive.

  And with the help of the four brave, formidable, sexy-as-hell alphas destined to be my mates, I intend to keep her that way.

  All I have to do is gain control of my unpredictable new powers, learn hand-to-hand combat, avoid capture by a mad scientist out to rid the world of shifters, and stay ten steps ahead of a Big Bad Evil hungry for my blood.

  And that's not the worst of it.

  In order to fully control my powers, I have to form bonds with all four of my mates. But for a woman who’s been betrayed by every person she’s ever loved, trust doesn’t come easy, no matter how much I'm coming to adore these incredible men.

  Can I win this battle of the heart in time? Or will the enemies closing in end our fight for the future before it even gets started?

  UNTAMED is part two of the Dark Moon Shifters series, a red-hot reverse harem paranormal and urban fantasy romance. Expect pulse-pounding action, suspense, swoon-worthy romance, and four sexy shifter men who will make you wish you had a bear, wolf, lynx, and griffin of your own.

  To all the brave women who inspire

  me daily. Thank you for your big, beautiful,

  fearless hearts.

  Chapter 1

  Dr. Martin Highborn

  The lights are dim in the operating theater, so dim the students watching from the back of the bleachers won’t be able to observe the finer points of the procedure.

  All they’ll see is red and white.

  Blood and sheets.

  Flash of silver as my scalpel darts into the open cavity, flutter of gloved hands and glowing metal wands as my assistants rush to cauterize the wounds.

  But sometimes shadows are necessary.

  Tilting my head, I raise my voice to be heard through my surgical mask, “Feline shifters have highly sensitive eyesight. By keeping the lights low, we reduce the risk of a fight or flight response should the subject regain consciousness during the procedure.” I draw my hands away, motioning toward the abdomen as I add to my team, “Suction. Keep that area clear.”

  “Why not increase the dose of anesthesia, doctor?” a trembling voice asks from the darkness.

  I encourage questions, but first-year apprentices are often timid about speaking up. It takes time for these former med school students to adjust to the reality that no hospital board or government agency is going to rush in and shut us down for coloring outside the lines. It takes even more time for them to accept that our patients aren’t people—not really, no matter how much they resemble our species in their bipedal forms.

  They aren’t fellow humans deserving of compassionate care. They’re apex predators poised to wipe our species from the earth, and we at Elysium are on the front lines, fighting to save humanity from certain annihilation.

  Our work is sanctioned by the government and assisted by the Department of Homeland Preservation. Without their support and funding none of this—not the reassignment we’re completing today, or any of our more classified projects—would be possible.

  But so many of my students are still naïve young people. They think the big bad wolf is a character from a fairytale, that the monster under the bed becomes a harmless pile of clothes once the lights are flicked on.

  So, we go slow, each dose of reality cloaked in soothing half-truths to make the pills easier to swallow.

  “We’re administering the maximum dose of intravenous drugs recommended for an organism of this size,” I reply, returning to work as the blood pooling near the remaining ovary is suctioned away. “A higher dose would increase the risk of heart failure and compromise the subject’s ability to survive the procedure. Forceps.”

  I hold out my hand, palm open, waiting until my scalpel is replaced with the clamps to continue. “Ideally, we work to slow the subject’s metabolism in the days before surgery with fasting and the addition of nightshade to the diet. But with subjects who are apprehended, rather than recruited, we often aren’t able to obtain that level of cooperation.”

  In other words, this little beast fought capture with every mutated cell in its body, wrecking a containment van and nearly killing two men before it was tranquilized into submission. If my students were ready, I could explain that the subject’s DNA has already been altered with IV therapies and that the procedure they’re watching today is simply a garden variety hysterectomy, the old-fashioned kind performed before surgeons developed more sophisticated techniques to avoid cutting through the abdominal wall.

  But there’s no need
to be gentle with this creature. It will recover quickly enough. Even with most of its shifter genes disabled, it will continue to heal at an accelerated rate. We’ve honed the therapies needed to shut down the ability to transition into animal form and to access the telepathic powers possessed by so many of their kind, but we've yet to fine-tune the suppression of their superior immune systems.

  We’re getting closer every day.

  If only I could concentrate fully on the work…

  Soon. Only one obstacle still stands in the way, and her days are numbered. The girl escaped capture, but we learned so much about her in the process. She believes she has a soul. She values kindness and imagines herself capable of mercy, love, and a host of other emotions only humans can fully experience.

  Which reminds me…

  “Rilke once wrote that perhaps everything terrible is, in its deepest, truest being, something helpless in need of aid,” I say as I transfer the last of the reproductive organs to the stainless-steel basin, ensuring this monster won’t be able to breed again.

  Leaving my assistants to finish and close, I strip off my gloves and step away from the table, tugging my mask down as I address the faces floating in the darkness, “After you’ve completed the assigned reading for the day, I’d like you to meditate on Rilke’s thoughts and come prepared to offer insight at the start of class tomorrow.” I smile. “And if you signed up to bring coffee or donuts, please don’t shirk your responsibilities, First Years. Especially the coffee. I can’t be expected to talk philosophy without caffeine.”

  Laughter murmurs softly through the group of eighteen or twenty as they rise to file out of the operating theater.

  I can’t remember how many we have left this semester. We’ve lost several. Even with our rigorous vetting system, some students prove unfit for the work.

  It can be distressing to watch a subject go into seizures during IV therapy or come out of sedation too early, weeping, begging to be allowed to go home to a partner or child. The pre-pubescent subjects are especially challenging for the more tender-hearted students. The little ones do such an excellent job of playing human, of hugging their stuffed toys and crying for their parents the way a real child would.

  It can make it hard to remember that it’s all a smokescreen, an adaptation for survival.

  Shifters instinctively mimic human behavior. For thousands of years, their existence depended on passing as human. Their “emotions” are plumage allowing them to hide in plain sight, blending in with their prey. In evolutionary biologist circles, it’s called aggressive mimicry. Creation is rife with spiders camouflaged as ants, beetles pretending to be fireflies, and serpents with tails adapted to resemble the insects the birds in their habitat love to eat.

  The one thing they have in common?

  Mimicry makes it easier for them to kill.

  Shifters are no different. The very young and those who have been raised in human homes may not realize they aren’t experiencing love or fear the way a human would. They may not consciously understand that they are predators, but biology always betrays them in the end.

  Nature wins over nurture. Every. Single. Time.

  This girl will be no different. Her savage side will win out, sooner or later.

  In the meantime, we’ll use her delusions to our advantage.

  After washing up and changing into clean scrubs, I leave the operating theater antechamber, making my way to the restricted wing at the far edge of the facility. Pressing my palm to the sensor on the door, I push inside, bound for the decontamination rooms and the cellblock beyond.

  It’s quiet as a tomb in this corner of the Institute, without the curses and cries for mercy so common in the other wings. Here, we’ve taken full control of our subjects. They don’t eat, sleep, shift, or shit without guidance from the handlers controlling their biological cues. They are perfectly docile in their cells and ruthlessly vicious when our occasion calls for it.

  They are abominations, weapons destined to be destroyed as soon as every shifter has been sterilized and reassigned, but they are also…magnificent.

  I would be lying if I said I wasn’t proud of our beautiful monsters, these beasts who will help reclaim the world from the things that go bump in the night.

  I step out of the lab into the decontamination area and suit up. A compromised immune system is one of the unfortunate side effects of our work with these subjects. They sicken easily and struggle to fight off even the mildest infections. We lost one to strep throat in December and another to complications from a staph infection last month.

  And the bears killed their share in the raid last week.

  Even the girl killed one. Almost killed one. According to the footage obtained from the subject’s corneal implant, she was prepared to show it mercy once it shifted into its human form. Someone else pulled the trigger, someone out of our subject’s line of sight, who I’d like to have strapped to my table, prepared to pay for the damage he’s caused.

  The subject he destroyed shouldn’t have been able to shift until the transformation was triggered by his handler. It was a glitch, one I would have been able to fix if the subject had been returned to the lab with the rest of the deployed. Instead, his body was lost to us, presumably burned with the rest of the bear shifters’ dead.

  Burned.

  Such a waste. Not only of the knowledge to be gained from study of the corpse, but of the tech that could have been recycled for use in another subject.

  Reduce, reuse, recycle—if humanity had taken the mantra to heart earlier, we might not be where we are today, pushed inland by rising tides and fearing the super storms sweeping across the skies the way our ancestors feared their gods.

  Though there are upsides to living at this point in history.

  Now, men can be gods, bending the building blocks of creation to their will.

  “Dr. Highborn. Glad you’re here.” Dr. Monroe, my lead on the Apex experiment, greets me inside the cellblock, his brown eyes troubled behind the plastic visor of his full body suit. “I wanted to touch base. Be sure I was reading your directions correctly before I started the therapy on Subject Seven.”

  “You read them correctly.” I lead the way down the quiet hall toward the last cell on the left. In the rooms on either side, the subjects are sleeping off their daily infusion, curled quietly on their bunks, as docile as any well-trained animal. “I want the subject isolated in a biohazard-secure cell in C block and infected with Devour virus.”

  Monroe makes a note on his clipboard. “Might I ask why, sir? It’s a strong specimen, in perfect physical condition. With proper modification, it could be a valuable asset now that we’ve lost Subjects Four, Eleven, and Sixteen.”

  I stop beside the last cell, where Subject 7 is proving her mettle, the only subject still upright after her daily infusion of nutrients, immune-system-boosting drugs, and heavy sedatives.

  I meet her pale eyes, not surprised when her expression remains sluggishly hostile. “Tell me, Dr. Monroe, what do you see when you look at Subject Seven?”

  He shifts beside me. “Subject Seven appears to be female. Of Irish or Germanic heritage, perhaps both.”

  I smile. “You’re cheating. You’ve seen her chart. Use your eyes, doctor.”

  Monroe clears his throat, falling silent for a long moment before he offers, “She’s a young woman, no more than twenty, maybe still in adolescence. She’s petite but strong, with good muscle tone. Attractive. Pretty when she smiles.” He pauses, cocking his head to one side. “And her eyes are striking. They draw you in, make you want to know what she’s feeling.”

  “Good,” I murmur. “It’s the eyes I want. Those big blue eyes. Think how much bigger they’ll seem when she’s wasted away to practically nothing, so frail and helpless it will hurt to look at her.” I step closer to the bars, gaze fixed on 7’s heart-shaped face. “What have we learned about the young Fata Morgana, Alex?”

  “That she’s coming into her powers quickly, and that she’s surrounde
d herself with potential consorts who will make her even more dangerous once they’ve formed power-sharing bonds.”

  “What else? What do we know about her human life? About who Wren Frame thinks she is?” I ask, lips curving as Subject 7 drags first one leg and then the other across her cot, letting each fall heavily to the floor.

  “She’s been sheltered,” Alex says. “She was a Church of Humanity rescue who spent most of her life on shifter suppression drugs. She only recently learned of her true nature and likely still identifies as human. At least in her own mind. She’s a rare shifter with challenging powers and no willing mentors, which means we likely still have time before she becomes a serious threat.”

  Subject 7 scoots forward on the mattress.

  Monroe steps away from the bars; I stay where I am, watching the girl rock back and forth as I ask, “And what else? What about her weaknesses? What makes her different than the man she was born to challenge?”

  Monroe pulls in a breath, holding it before he lets it out soft and low. “I see. At least, I think I do.”