1 Chapter 1

To my sister,A.August–September

Noah woke up from a restless,nightmare-filled sleep.He had no idea where these nightmares came from;they were too vague to be connected to any real events or fears he could distinguish in his waking hours.In this particular one there was always a storm raging,which was almost funny,because he hadn’t seen a proper storm in Finland yet,and he’d lived there for years and years now.The one thing he knew about the dreams was they always appeared when changes were happening around his usually stable life on the Jarvela farm.

He out of bed,stretching slowly,and scratched his stomach absently,noting the lack of morning wood while the need to take a leak was still there.Stumbling over some socks,he made his way to the bathroom he shared with Anton,the resident teenaged fox.Luckily Anton was still asleep,so they didn’t have to compete over who got to use it first.

Sure,there was another bathroom down the hall,but he couldn’t use that one because of the latest addition to the farm—a stray cheetah the younger members of the farm family had found.The cheetah was female and had been seriously malnourished and barely hanging in there when the boys had managed to get her to the farm.Nobody knew why she was so terrified of men—even the boys who found her and saved her—but there was a deep-seated fear in her,and that made things a little more interesting around the house,like making sure Anton and Noah had to cope by sharing a bathroom.

Once he had peed and brushed his teeth,Noah pulled on some camo shorts and a white tank top before walking down the stairs into the kitchen.No one else was awake,it seemed,so he started a huge pot of coffee and began to make omelets for everyone.

It didn’t take long for sounds of the other males waking up to carry into the kitchen.There were two houses on the Jarvela property on the opposite sides of the large yard.The almost-modern style,two-story building where Noah lived was the new house,as opposed to the old house closer to the lake shore,where the wolf pack were the only residents.Noah smiled when he heard the quiet bickering from the master bedroom where the owner of the farm,Mikael,was teasing his usually more serious partner Maxim.

Damn,Noah was happy Mikael had finally found his mate.Having been single,just like Noah,for all the time he had been running his family farm after his father’s death about a decade ago,Mikael’s lively spirit had suffered a bit.It wasn’t until Maxim stumbled into their lives that Mikael had begun to live properly again.

The world was what it was,shifters having to stick together because revealing themselves to the human public wasn’t an option.Finding their mate was something they all wanted,even though it was far from the life-altering event many current works of fiction painted it to be.Instead,finding one's mate was just like in human relationships,but it also connected your animal sides;it made your inner beast content.Technically Mikael was only half shifter,but his mother’s heritage in him assured that his inner“half of a tiger”had responded to Maxim’s full Siberian tiger in a way that made Noah happy but also left him melancholic.

Noah had a feeling their newcomer cheetah was bonding with their third resident female,a lynx called Lark,in a way nobody had expected,but was yet to talk to anyone about it.

“Morning.”Mikael walked into the kitchen and rubbed his newly shaved head as he yawned widely.

“Morning,coffee is ready.”Noah smiled and got a pat on his shoulder and a mumbled“good man”in response.

Maxim came to breakfast with his curly mop of hair still wet from the shower and looked much more perky than Mikael.

They sat down to eat their omelets and drink their coffees and talked about what needed to be done that day.Eventually they had refills of caffeine,and then Mikael and Maxim went outside to check on the horses and sheep,while Noah began to make another batch of omelets for Anton and the females upstairs.

He slid a mushroom and tomato omelet on a plate as Anton came trudging down the stairs.

“Morning,”Noah said in a cheerful tone he knew would annoy Anton.

“Shut up,”the eighteen-year-old said and reached for his mug that had Fox from the TV series The Animals of Farthing Woodprinted on the side.