Atlee Pine Series Novels & Stories

Mara – Ashfang Pack Beta The pines were too quiet. That was the first thing Mara noticed as she stood on the southern ridge with the watch guards. No birdsong. No wind. Just the stillness of a forest that knew what was coming and held its breath. Below her, Ashfang's camp was a machine in motion. Warriors moving in rotating formation drills. Blacksmiths finishing blades lined with mountain iron. Runners relaying messages between command tents and border patrols. Even the Omega healers were busy, gathering medicinal herbs and boiling poultices in copper pots.

It gets quiet at once. "This year, the Alpha Kings Summit will be held at Alpha Kings Ethan and Aiden Black Alder pack lands in South Carolina. As you know, it is the largest parkland to exist, as we are second. Each Alpha King from the United States as well as their Queens, Pack Alpha, Lunas, and a few servants will be in attendance. Five of you will step forward to serve your Alpha King", he says. He then looks at me, and I know I don't have a choice. I step forward, keeping my head down.

Returning to the Pine Sanctuary The heavy wooden door of the unfinished cabin clicked shut, sealing out the crisp midnight air of the northern forest. Inside, the raw, clean scent of shaved pine was grounding. The single battery-powered lantern still cast its amber glow across the exposed timber beams, but the shadows no longer felt crowded by the phantoms of the past. Thalia exhaled a long, ragged breath, the final remnants of her coiled werewolf tension melting from her shoulders. She leaned her back against the door, closing her eyes.

He’d never been a threat to Atticus, and his land was too far for him to bother using Sea Pine to make a point. Then Atticus had learned where Lily was. Suddenly, Alpha Elijah Egon Pine and his useless pack were of a great deal of interest to him. A great deal indeed, he thought, relishing in the spring of grass beneath his booted feet and the whip of wind through his honeyed hair.

The terrain shifted again … the desert giving way to something greener and more dramatic as the elevation climbed. Pine forests materialized on either side of the road, dense and dark and enormously tall, their canopies closing overhead on the narrow mountain roads like the arching of a cathedral ceiling. Adele was more alert today. She sat up straighter in her seat, her rabbit in her lap, her glossy dark hair freshly braided because she had demanded it at the motel that morning and I had sat on the edge of the bed and worked through it section by section. She had always had extraordinary hair.

The Harlow Inn sat at the end of a quarter-mile gravel drive that wound through old-growth Douglas fir, the trees tall enough to turn the afternoon light green and cathedral-dim even before the clouds had properly settled in. Eli drove it slowly, partly because the rental car's suspension was already complaining about the state of the road, and partly because the inn appeared in stages through the trees and each stage gave him something new to calculate.

The trees that grew here were splendid long-leaf pines, shooting up straight as arrows almost a hundred feet before they broke into palm-like branches; and many of them were so large that the turpentine gatherers had been able to chip them on both sides, and hang two cups on them. For about two hundred yards this park-like growth lasted, where his horse’s feet trod silently on the thick layer of pine-needles; then a slight descent took him out into the open ground. The sunlight seemed blinding after the shade of the woods. The sky was hazily blue, radiating an intense heat. High overhead two buzzards soared in circles. The ground was a tangle of gallberry-bushes, and Joe rode through them by

My wolf crouches low, readying herself to leap. Without glancing my way, Alec snorts and says, “Figures you’d brag about fucking sloppy pussy. I guess if it’s all you can get?” He lifts a shoulder and dismisses Bram without another word, utterly, totally, completely unconcerned, and turns to Leith. “We gonna run, man, or are we gonna stand around all night? Tall Pines?” A wide smile breaks across Leith’s face. He got his way. He won. “Yeah. Tall Pines.”