In the darkness, she could imagine that if she fell, it would only be a few feet. In reality, it was more than a thousand. When she came to the turnoff that led back up around the mountain, she let out a deep sigh and scurried up the trail.
Being able to get on the Internet was worth it.
She sat in her little alcove and pulled her phone out of her pocket. Sure enough, she had cell reception. Three bars, enough to get online.
She brought up her favorite browser and typed Fate Mountain into the search bar. She wanted to know what was going on back home.
A news story came up on the screen talking about Corey Bright. He’d invented a dating website for shifter males and human females called Mate.com. As Lola read on, she became a little bit giddy.
There was a dating website intended for human females and male shifters? Just the idea of getting hooked up with a male shifter made her gleeful with revenge.
Justin would hate that so much. She couldn't help herself as she navigated towards the website. She had to ask herself, once again, why she wasn't just turning in her brother.
But the truth was, Lola suspected that if she did alert the police to their location, a lot of people would die. Police and Justin’s gang alike. Justin would never surrender, and he had stockpiles of weapons.
If it came down to it, he would rather get them all killed than to be captured. As much as Lola wanted to leave the camp, she also didn't want to die in a police shootout.
She was just biding her time until the opportunity to escape presented itself. Once she got to Mate.com, she downloaded the app onto her phone and began filling out the questionnaire.
Once she had finished the questionnaire, she uploaded an old picture from her phone and filled out her profile. Almost as soon as she had entered save on her profile, the app told her that she had a one hundred percent match.
That meant that her fated mate had been found! Lola's heart jumped up into her throat as she scrolled down the page to find her shifter mate.
She hadn't actually believed she’d find someone. It was all just a little vindictive game, she'd been playing in her mind. But now she really had someone. A mate.
But when she saw who it was, she couldn't have been more disappointed. The shifter she'd been matched with had no picture, a blank profile, and his username was literally “redacted”.
She rolled her eyes and groaned, shoving her phone back in her pocket. What a complete waste of time. She couldn't believe that for a brief moment, she’d thought she’d found someone who could help her.
3
For a solid month Gauge had been growing out his blond beard and spending every waking minute on the deep web forums. He'd come to the point where Stonewall666 was beginning to trust him.
He’d written several long posts ranting about the evils of shifter corruption. These people believed that the diplomatic peace treaty that the shifters had helped organize was really a cover for taking away human rights.
Gauge himself had been at the peace treaty. Maybe not at the head table of the Great Shifter Council, but he had been there to witness the historic event when he served in the Marine special forces.
The most powerful countries in the world had been moments away from World War III, threatening to nuke each other with their most powerful weapons.
But the shifters who had been forcefully drafted into the war, had gotten together and put an end to it. The Great Shifter Council was able to come together to find a diplomatic resolution to the war.
New trade routes and national boundaries had been set. Agreements had been reached and the war had come to an end.
For all that shifters had done for the world, there were still people like these guys on the internet who hated them.
As far as Gauge was concerned, it was just fear. And that fear was a sign of weakness. Men like the ones he'd been chatting with online for the last month were actually weak and scared.
They had no trust in anyone but themselves. They believed in ‘might makes right’. Gauge was a man that believed that strength was something that should be used in the protection of those who were weaker.
But he had found a way to gain their trust. He knew exactly how extreme they were, so every time he posted, he made his own opinions more and more extreme.
He once boasted that he believed all shifters should be strung up in the town square so that the local humans could throw rocks at them. That had been a hard thing to write. But he knew that in the end, it would help him achieve his goal. He wanted to bring these guys down so they stopped providing dangerous drugs to his community.
Most shifters had nothing against humans. How could they? A great majority of them came from human mothers because there were so few shifter females. For a shifter to hate humans would be like hating his own mother. Or his own mate. Shifters loved humans and wanted to be close to them. That was why the Great Shifter Council had come out to the public in the first place twenty years ago.
Men like the ones who were pouring crystal into Fate Mountain saw shifters as a competition for their women. When in reality, it just wasn't true. For one thing, human men and human women were part of the same species. There were no cultural differences. They would understand each other much more easily than a shifter male and a human female. Mating was hard for shifter males. But men like these didn't understand that. They were too weak to see the truth. All they knew was fear.
Gauge continued chatting with user Stonewall666 about how he could be of service to the cause. Gauge was so close. He knew that at any moment, Stonewall666 was going to invite him in.
"I need more men like you in my gang," Stonewall666 typed. "I’ve decided to take you on."
"Anything you need," Gauge said.
“We have one task for you before we will take you into our group," Stonewall666 replied.
"Name it."
"We want you to procure for us fifty pounds of cold medicine," Stonewall666 typed. It was the base ingredient for their drugs.
Fifty pounds of cold medicine was an obscene amount. Gauge couldn't even imagine how many Walgreens he would have to go to in order to get that much.
"Not a problem.”
"Once you have the cold medicine, contact me again, and I will give you a location. My men will meet you and bring you to our camp," Stonewall666 typed.
"Affirmative," Gauge replied.
He shut off the Internet and pushed himself away from his desk, rubbing his eyes. He was going to have to ask Commander Bear if he could get some help in getting cold medicine.
Gauge picked up his cell phone and called Rollo.
“Gauge, what have you got for me?”
“I've made a breakthrough with my internet contact. He offered me entry into his group if I can procure fifty pounds of cold medicine," Gauge said.
"Fifty pounds?" Rollo asked skeptically.
"I know it's a lot."
"I don't know if you could get that much even if you went to every drugstore in Portland," Rollo said.
"That's why I called you, Commander," Gauge said.
"I might be able to work something out,” Rollo replied. “This case is of utmost importance. The drug problem is getting worse every day. I had to arrest a mother in her own home for going on a psychotic rampage. A neighbor called us about the screaming. He had to arrest her and remove the children from the home."
"That's horrible," Gauge said.
"The worst part is, a year ago, this woman was on the school board. She coached a soccer team. Now she weighs a hundred pounds and had her children taken away from her," Rollo said. "These drugs are ruining the community. The dealers are selling crystal as some kind of solution to what they call the ‘shifter problem’. This is out of control. We're going to lose our town and our community. We can’t let that happen.”
Gauge knew that Rollo's wife Zoe was two months pregnant. They hadn't really told anyone, but Rollo had let it slip to Damien, and Damien had told Gauge during their last internet research session.
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"Don't worry, Rollo," Gauge said. "I will do absolutely everything I can with the last bit of my strength to bring down these psychos."
They got off the phone, and Gauge continued to prepare himself for his entrance into the group led by Stonewall666.
He went into his bathroom and looked in the mirror. Gauge had grown his blond hair and his beard until it was full on his chin. It was time to complete the disguise.
Gauge mixed the hair dye and rubbed it into his hair and beard, darkening it to a shade of warm brown. With a full beard and dark hair, he looked like a completely different man. When he put in brown contacts over his bright blue eyes. It completed the look. Now his blond, blue-eyed, polar bear looks were nowhere to be seen.
Gauge had also wiped clean his social media, and any picture of him on the internet. Damien had made sure of that. And because Gauge spent so much time on private investigations for the police department, his public presence was very low. There was a minute chance that any of these men would ever recognize him.
He went to the kitchen and pulled a bottle of Fate Mountain lager from the fridge. He popped off the cap with a bottle opener and went into the living room, his phone in his back pocket.
Gauge sat down and waited for Rollo to call him back about the cold medicine, placing his phone on the coffee table in front of him.
He put up his feet and turned on the TV, clicking over to his favorite sports channel, where he watched a game of hockey by his favorite team, the Alaskan Polars who were from his home town.
He watched the Alaskan Polars dominate to the Minnesota Blacks on the ice with a score of 10 to 0. He was smiling and tilting his third Fate Mountain lager to his lips when his phone rang.
It was Rollo.
"Tell me you have good news for me, Rollo," Gauge said.
"I definitely have good news. I talked to a contact in the Portland PD, and they have agreed to release to me a fifty-pound bag of cold medicine they confiscated from a recent drug bust in town."
"That is excellent news, Commander," Gauge said.
Rollo had really come through for him once again, and it was part of the reason that Gauge trusted the man with his life.
Gauge had been a part of Rollo's crew since their first days as special forces officers in the Marines. Rollo had been the Commander of all the men on the Bear Patrol, and he continued to be their Commander today.
Rollo was a wise and effective leader who knew how to make decisions for the best possible outcomes for everyone. Gauge had nothing but respect for his alpha and prided himself on being just as good a man.
“They'll have the cold medicine to Fate Mountain by morning," Rollo said.
As Gauge put his phone in his pocket and started toward his bedroom, he felt it ping. He drew it out and looked at the screen. To his complete and utter astonishment, he had been matched with a human woman on Mate.com.
He stood in the hallway with his feet grounded in place. He stared at the screen, seeing a beautiful young woman with curly black hair and dark copper skin.
She was wearing a camo headband, had a crossbow slung over her shoulder and a pheasant in her hand. She had a spunky gleam in her eye and a warm, friendly smile. Her shapely legs were hot as hell in the cut off jean shorts she wore under her form-fitting black tank top.
Holy hell. How had he been mated with a woman like her? Being from rural Alaska himself, Gauge had a sweet spot for country girls. Her name was Lola, and she was the prettiest thing he'd ever seen in his life.
Finally, uprooting his feet from the floor, he made his way into the bedroom and sat on the side of the bed, still dumbfounded.
Why did he suddenly have a mate now? He'd signed up for Mate.com two years ago when the website had first come out. Now, when he was about to engage in his most important case ever, she just appeared out of nowhere.
He growled angrily and set his phone down on his nightstand, already feeling too distracted by the knowledge of her existence. Lola Lockheart was everything he'd ever wanted in a woman. Strong and warm and beautiful.
His bear roared inside his mind, insisting that he text her right now. How could he possibly start a romance? He had to meet Stonewall666 in the morning with fifty pounds of cold medicine slated for crystal production.
Now was not a good time. He flipped off the light next to his bed and lay down, groaning loudly. His polar bear reared up on its back legs inside his mind, letting out a tortured roar.
Gauge pressed his palms into his closed eyelids and gritted his teeth. His investigation was going to be compromised if his bear was acting crazy. Gauge had to concentrate on the case.
The next morning, Gauge picked up his phone while his head was still on the pillow. He opened the photograph of Lola on the Mate.com app, and gazed into her lovely cocoa colored eyes. His bear moaned at the back of his mind. He had to text her.
“Lola, please wait for me,” was all he typed.
He pressed send and got up to start his day. After showering and dressing in hiking gear, he answered a call from Rollo. He told Gauge the Portland's PD detective dropped off the cold medicine in a garbage can in a rarely used local park.
Gauge left the house and found the bag of cold medicine without any problems. Once he had it he went home and contacted Stonewall666 on the deep web.
"I have the cold medicine," Gauge typed out. In a private message to Stonewall666.
"Good. Come to the Cedar Crest Trail at noon and be prepared for a long hike."
Gauge agreed to meet Stonewall666 at noon and closed his deep web browser. He already had a feeling that the gang’s camp was somewhere way out in the furthest reaches of the Fate Mountain wilderness.
He already had a pack prepared and waiting. Gauge dressed in hiking gear, slung his pack over his shoulder, and hurried out the front door.
He couldn't drive his own car up the mountain. Instead, he walked out to the highway and put out his thumb. Considering he was a shaggy looking bearded man with a backpack, he had a bit of a hard time finding a ride.
After about half an hour of walking up the highway, a bunch of locals in a truck stopped in front of him, just as the heat of the noon day sun was starting to get to him.
"Where are you headed?" the man on the passenger side asked.
"I'm headed up to the Cedar Crest Trail," Gauge said.
"Hop in the back and we’ll give you a ride," the man said.
"Thank you," Gauge said.
Gauge climbed into the back of the truck and took a seat next to the wheel hub. The guys in the pickup dropped him off at the Cedar Crest Trail, and Gauge thanked them one more time before they drove away.
Gauge hefted his backpack onto his back and lifted his bag of cold medicine tablets with his other hand. He made his way into the parking lot in front of the Cedar Crest Trail and waited.
He glanced at his watch to check the time; he'd left his phone at home. It was almost time for Stonewall666’s men to arrive. Gauge had been in hairier situations than this, but he couldn't help feeling a tight lump in his throat as he waited. How he handled the situation could play a huge role in the future of Fate Mountain and the people who lived there.
He had an important mission to do and he could not fail.
Just when he was becoming genuinely worried, about forty-five minutes later, an old pickup truck rattled into the parking lot and stopped in front of him. A man in full camo gear with an obvious bulletproof vest underneath his jacket hopped out of the truck.
"You are Anarchy161?" the man asked.
He and his partner had pulled shotguns out of the cab of their pickup and were staring intently at Gauge as they held them. Gauge stood from his rock and nodded at both men as a sign of respect.
"Yes, I am Anarchy161. I presume you are Stonewall666’s men?"
"Did you get the pills?"
"I did. They’re in the bag," Gauge said, handing the bag to the man who had driven the pickup.
They yanked open the bag and looked inside. When
he saw the hundreds of boxes of tablets, a slow smile crept over his face.
"I have to admit, I doubted you'd come through. But you've done better than expected," the driver said.
The second man took the bag and threw it in the back of the old truck.
"We don't allow any electronics up at the camp," the driver said. “Take off your pack. We’re going to look through your things, to make sure that you aren't bringing in any illegal equipment."
The driver took Gauge’s pack and pulled it open, going through all his things. The second man patted him down from head to toe, making sure that he didn't have anything hidden on his body.
Once they were satisfied, they invited him into the truck.
"So what's your name, Anarchy161?" the driver asked as he pulled out of the parking lot.
"Y'all can call me Cody North."
4
Lola washed her face in a basin of tepid water, wondering if she should wash her hair. She hadn't even put a comb through it in two days. She looked at herself in the cracked mirror and saw the frightening reflection staring back at her.
Gone was the girl who had played soccer as a little girl. Gone was the confident outdoors woman. She'd been replaced by something else entirely. A woman with sunken eyes and ashen skin. It scared her.
Lola decided that the least she could do was wash her hair and body and use her one last razor to shave her arms and legs. Over the last year, she’d almost gotten used to the lack of hygiene at the camp, almost.
As she poured water over her hair into the basin, she tried to remember who she used to be. Lola lathered shampoo into her hair and imagined that she was at a fancy hotel room at Fate Mountain Lodge. She’d been to Fate Mountain Lodge once during a summer field trip back when she used to be in school.
She rinsed the shampoo out of her hair, patted it dry with a thin towel, and then combed it out.
Then she thought about the shifter she'd been mated with on Mate.com. He was a real man out there somewhere.
This website was supposed to be able to predict a shifter fated mate with hundred percent accuracy. There was some fancy algorithm that sorted the answers in the questionnaire and matched people at an incredibly high rate.