The Sweetest Mercy (Sexy Shifter Shorts) by amanda bonilla

Chapter One
    “THE ONLY GOOD lion is a dead lion.”
    Carter Hayes listened from the cover of brush, waiting for the ranchers to pass him by. Mountain lions posed a threat to livestock, but the animal responsible for the massacre of three ewes had known exactly what he was doing when he thoughtlessly killed the livestock. This wasn’t a hunt for food, it was a message. And Carter got the message loud and clear.
    He’d been tracking Reece Simonson for the past twenty-four hours, ordered by his alpha, Logan Paige, to find the son of a bitch and bring him to justice. It would have been easy to chase him down had Carter only been after Reece. But the situation was a little stickier than that.
    “I think I see tracks up this way!” One of the ranchers called to his companion. “Let’s head down this draw and see if we can find the rest of the flock.”
    Carter let out the breath he’d been holding. He was too close to risk these idiots stumbling into Reece’s self-proclaimed territory and he didn’t need the extra stress of trying to save their fool asses in addition to Drew Paige’s soon to be sister-in-law.
    Rescuing damsels in distress was not in Carter’s job description. However, capturing—and killing if need be—traitorous bastards like Reece was right up Carter’s alley. And if he was an expert tracker, he was an even better killer.
    This far into the backcountry, the trails were mainly footpaths trampled by herds of elk and deer. Carter knew the lay of the land well; he hunted on this land often. Surely if Reece had known he frequented this particular area, he wouldn’t have settled in Carter’s territory. From the draw to his left, the voices of the ranchers carried to Carter’s ears on the late afternoon breeze. He’d seen the small flock of frightened sheep the night before and if the ranchers kept going another half mile or so, they should stumble across them. Sheep were insufferably easy to scare, and Reece had obviously harried them before slaughtering the three ewes. He’d ripped their throats open and left them to bleed out. A warning to whoever was tracking him that he wouldn’t hesitate to do the same to his enemies.
    Carter snorted. Like he’d ever be afraid of a pussy like Reece.
    He never could understand why Logan had made Reece his second. Of course, none of the pride’s more worthy males had bothered to challenge Reece for the position, either. Mountain lions didn’t subscribe to pack hierarchy like wolves did, though they did acknowledge when a rival cat was stronger. Besides being dangerously territorial, mountain lions gave one another a fairly wide berth. The same went for shifters. It might have been better to simply consider the northwest Montana lion shifters as a territory rather than a “pride.” Logan kept a tight knit group at his compound on the outskirts of Kalispell: his mate, Caitlin, his brother, Drew, and three or four of the higher ranking lions. But other than that, the remaining members of Logan’s pride were scattered in a hundred-mile radius.
    The breeze shifted to Carter’s advantage, bringing a draft of air from the north. He brought his nose to the wind, his senses heightened in his mountain lion form. It was faint, but Reece’s scent hit his nostrils, indicating that Carter’s prey wasn’t far off. Though traveling in his animal form would have been more efficient, Carter planned to go the rest of the way on foot. A big mountain cat wasn’t exactly built to carry a heavy hiking pack or shoulder a rifle. In some ways, his human form was more suited for the task at hand.
    The shift was easy. Painless. In this he had the advantage over a creature like a werewolf whose transformation from human to wolf and back was rumored to be excruciatingly painful. For Carter the transformation was as easy as taking a step, walking from the skin of one being and into another. He knew the basics: their unique magic made their shifts easy and painless, but beyond that,