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Love's Timeless Journey

He has one chance to defeat a demon before it destroys the woman he loves—again.

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  • U.S. Forest Ranger Annie McGowen sees what roams the Cabinet Mountains woods after dark when she runs under the moon as a white wolf. But after an earthquake strands her with a wrecked truck, she encounters something her years of wilderness experience never prepared her for. A tall, hot First Nation man holding an enormous scythe and standing over a bloody body. Against all evidence, her inner wolf insists he’s innocent.

     

    Hualpa and two other warriors were put in stasis two thousand years ago, to be awakened if a ravenous demon ever escaped its prison. Now the monster is loose and his brothers are dead. Hualpa stands alone between a bloodthirsty threat and an unprepared world that’s nothing like the one he left behind.

     

    Hualpa’s grief and aching loneliness ignite Annie’s compassion, which flares into soul-deep attraction. But with their newfound love comes a growing fear in Hualpa’s heart. Fear that if he fails to kill the demon, it will destroy the one precious thing he has left. Annie.

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Love's Timeless Journey

Love's Timeless Journey

He has one chance to defeat a demon before it destroys the woman he loves—again.

Excerpt

“Come, both of you. Hualpa, I have something of yours,” Charlotte stated. “We’ve much to discuss.”

Hualpa frowned. “Something of mine? What do you mean?”

She reached out to take his hand. “There’s something that’s passed from hand to hand, generation to generation. It feels like you. I know it—you’re the one we’ve awaited.”

“What do you mean it feels like me?” His heart pounded. “Are you saying something of my people survives even now?”

She nodded. “Let me show you. Annie, take him into the living room. I’ll be back.”

Hualpa sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the hearth and clenched his fists to keep his hands from shaking. What could it be? Weapons? Tools? Ceremonial mask? When the Old One returned to hand him a box of sanded cedar the length of his forearm, Annie curled up on the rug beside him. He was grateful for her comforting presence, an anchor of familiarity. He stared at the box, afraid to open it. Hope. Fear. Death and demons he faced unflinching, but hand him a simple wooden box and he broke out in a cold sweat.

“Do you want us to go?” Annie whispered. “Would you rather do this alone?”

Hualpa shook his head as he slid off the cover and reached inside. His fingers tangled in corded thread and knots. He froze. Impossible. “Do you know what this is?”

“We’ve never opened the box,” Charlotte told him. “It wasn’t our place. We were its keepers, nothing more.”

He took a deep shuddering breath and drew the folded woolen quipufrom its nest of darkness into the light. It spanned the full length of his arm when fully unfurled, the netlike disc a tale of centuries, and its colored, knotted threads—the full spectrum of the rainbow after a storm—were still bright. They shimmered out of focus through a haze of tears. “This belonged to Tith in my time.” He could barely form the words around the lump in his throat. His voice was hoarse. “It is the record of my people, kept by the head shaman of each generation.”

He searched through the knots. “Here is when we moved north. Here is when we built the pyramid.” His fingers stilled on a black knot. “Here is when the Supay came.” He shuddered. “Here is when our tombs were built.” Blood thundered in Hualpa’s ears as he counted the strands after he left. “So many.” He did a quick calculation and almost swooned. “A thousand years?”

Annie’s jaw dropped.

Charlotte shook her head. “No, Hualpa.” When he looked up her eyes were sad, her expression compassionate. “We’ve held on to this for that long, passing from caretaker to caretaker, one to a generation.”

It took a moment for her words to sink in. “Two thousand?”

“If not more. I have no idea how long it was hidden away before discovered.”

He scarcely comprehended such a vast stretch of living. “What happened?”

“It was found in the ancient ruin of a stone pyramid with catacombs inside. Our best guess is a tremendous earthquake leveled the mountain.”

Yet that earthquake had not released the Supay? Was it simply that the binding had taken that long to erode, or was there a more sinister answer?

A chill swept through him. “Are my people gone then? All of them?”

She nodded and placed her work-roughened, age-spotted hand atop his. “Since long before our time.”

Gone. All gone. Lost. Forgotten but for this. He was alone. Knowledge of the Supay too had been lost to the passage of time. None lived who remembered the great struggle—or the demon. Despair crushed the breath from him. Hidden beneath his shirt the amulets sparked against his chest. Shoving the quipuand box aside, he dropped his head and, for the first time, wept.

“You aren’t alone, Hualpa.” Annie clasped his shoulder. “What can we do to help?”

He shook with dark laughter. Entire war bands had been lost in the fight. What was he to do with two split-soul women who could not even touch the ahnkeisha amulets? Belief powered the amulets—the belief of a dead religion long gone. “Nothing. There is nothing you can do.”

“Oh yes, there is. Look at me, Hualpa.”

He forced himself to meet Annie’s burning gaze.

“We’re children of the earth, guardians of the earth. We’ve existed since before your time, and there are hundreds of us if we summon all the Packs together. Surely we can come up with a way.”

The amulets stirred, a faint spark of life against his skin, a glowing warmth in his heart. Hualpa flinched and held his breath, shocked. Could it be that any belief would do? Then there was hope.

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