Girls school, p.1
Girls School, page 1
Girls School
Wolf Harbor, Volume 7
L.J. Breedlove
Published by L.J. Breedlove, 2023.
Girls School
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By L.J. Breedlove
Published by L.J. Breedlove
Copyright 2023 L.J. Breedlove
License Notes
This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not
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Thank you for respecting the work this author.
Disclaimer
This is a work of fiction. While place descriptions and news events may coincide with the real world, all characters and the plot are fictional.
Contact Information
For more information about this author, please visit www.ljbreedlove.com.
Email address is lois@ljbreedlove.com.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Girls School (Wolf Harbor, #7)
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Further Reading: Redemption Road
About the Author
Girls School
No One Knows Where They Come From
The Wolf Harbor Boarding School was mostly just a fantasy — until the students started showing up on their doorstep. First there was Pi, a Cambodian teenager. He joined the three young women who were already there, and no one thought much more about it.
There were so many bigger crises to deal with!
But then, Pi disappeared for a day and brought back a 13-year-old girl from Thailand. The next week it was two girls from Laos.
Benny Garrison, Keeper of Stories and Teacher in the Hat Island pack, began to get alarmed. He figured his father had to be involved — when it came to Southeast Asia, he usually was. But his father isn't answering his calls, and neither is his pack Second. Now, Benny Garrison is really concerned. Where are these girls coming from? And more important, why were they coming here?
Book 7 in the paranormal suspense series, Wolf Harbor.
Chapter 1
Day 155 of the re-emerged Hat Island pack, Friday, Nov. 8, Vancouver
Benny Garrison was exhausted — emotionally drained by the needs of all the shifters who seemed to be hovering around the dining room table he was using as an intake and counseling center. He didn’t think he had anything left to give.
The dining room was in Margarite Lewis’s home in Delta, a community just outside Vancouver, B.C. It was a house that looked like any suburban split-level ranch house, albeit bigger than most. Nestled into a property of five acres, it was a much-coveted property now that Delta had better access to Vancouver proper and had attracted well-heeled commuters looking for a place like this. It had served Margarite well for 40 years as her home, the base from which she roamed the world and hosted potluck picnics for neighboring shifters in Vancouver— independents and family packs, not the recognized Vancouver pack. No, the Vancouver pack was its own set of problems.
Not Benny’s problems, thank God. He had enough on his plate.
The lines that distinguished all those groups had been blurrier than people realized. Then Benny’s Alpha, Abby Stafford, showed up. Now, everyone was in an uproar. Not surprising, Benny thought sourly. Abby had managed to put every pack she’d visited this last month into a tailspin. Then she’d leave a crew to help put things right, while she returned to Hat Island.
Benny hadn’t liked it much when she’d left Ayta Vuk in Odessa, a small town in eastern Washington, to help that pack figure things out, but he’d accepted it as the smart thing to do. The Odessa pack had Russian roots, and Ayta was a Russian elder, an Alpha in her own right, visiting Hat Island for the winter. Sensible, even if it meant he and Ayta were separated.
It had made sense to leave Okami and Yui Yoshida in Kettle Falls for a week to get that pack back on its feet after Okami killed their former Alpha on Abby’s orders.
And Cujo Brown had stayed behind in Hayden Lake to help his father take over the reins of the Hayden Lake pack after Abby killed their Alpha, a man with dementia who was slowly taking his pack into insanity with him. At least that was what Cujo was supposed to be doing there. Benny wasn’t sure how Cujo had found time to find one of the missing women, Rose Evans, from the Wolf Harbor serum research and bring Rose and her baby home. That was a story he wanted to hear. Starting with how did Rose even have a baby — a cute little girl named Jenna? Rose was one of the women of the cohorts, right? All the cohort test subjects had been chosen for their post-menopausal status — Stefan Lebenev had insisted on it when he set up the serum research. As that thought occurred to him, it was all he could do to stay put in Vancouver. Even shifting to wolf and heading home had appeal, and he’d been uneasy about shifting ever since he got back from Russia.
His wolf whined a bit at that thought. I’m better, he assured the wolf. And he was. He shifted every night here in Vancouver out in the Burns Bog, just a few miles from here. Vancouver and the neighboring communities were blessed with natural wild areas where a wolf could go.
And it was the one guaranteed way to escape questions for a while! Dear God, he even got them when he was sleeping! He set that thought aside for the moment. He lacked any mental privacy in this house to think about things like that. Next run, he promised himself.
Now what had he been thinking about, before that sidetracked him?
Oh yeah, Rose Evans’s story. He frowned. Somehow, he thought that story was more important than people had considered it — if they’d had time to consider it at all before they came up here and all hell broke loose.
That’s what he was supposed to be doing — collecting stories, making connections, he thought irritably, as he stood up and stretched out his back muscles. He was a Keeper of Stories, and Teacher of the Hat Island boarding school. He wanted to be back there doing that job, not this. And wasn’t that a hoot? A man once known as the shifter playboy wanted to be a teacher?
Unfortunately, he was also Dr. Benny Garrison, a licensed psychologist. And there weren’t many shifters with degrees in psychology. In fact, most of them were probably here in this room right now.
Margarite’s degree might be in social work. Maybe an MSW? He shrugged. No telling. Shifters lived long lives, and as Okami Yoshida was fond of saying, someone might be many things if they lived a very long life. And Okami would know. Benny wasn’t sure how old that man was, but he’d been eavesdropping in Abby’s mind when Okami admitted to having been a samurai — and called Abby Shogun. It had freaked her out.
Freaked Benny out too. Another necessary story he could be pulling out of one of his packmates, he thought irritably, although he acknowledged he was unlikely to hear it until Okami was good and ready to tell it.
Abby wasn’t telling him everything either. He frowned at that. She had a secret, and she was hugging it close to her with such glee. She was happy. Ecstatically happy. His frown softened, and he smiled. It was good to feel her happy. She’d been upset when she’d left here. He’d been worried. He didn’t think they knew the complete story of what happened at the Vancouver pack house. And the three people who did know — Abby, security guard Captain Geoff Nickerson, and a once-human wolf named Emily, were now back at Hat Island, and he couldn’t corner them and grill them either.
He snorted. He’d gotten used to living in Abby’s mind, he thought ruefully. She’d opened up a wide link between the two of them so that he could use her as his encyclopedia to all things Hat Island when he’d lost so many memories in Russia.
Not thinking about Russia, he told himself firmly.
Damn it, the list of things he wasn’t thinking about was almost as long as the list of the things he needed to think about!
So yes, he had access to Abby even though he was in Vancouver, and she was on Hat Island, outside Seattle, 200 miles away. He could talk to her, he conceded. But he’d taught her how to lock up thoughts not too long ago. He might come to regret that. She was using it to keep this secret from him. Damn it, she wasn’t supposed to use it to keep him out!
He smiled ruefully at that. Of course, Abby was entitled to have secrets from him. What worried him was that he thought she was keeping this — whatever this was — secret from everybody. Even from her Second, Jake Lewis. And that was dangerous. A pack Second should know everything. If it was making her so happy, why wouldn’t she share it with Jake? She should be sharing everything with Jake!
Well, maybe it was a surprise birthday party for the man, Benny chided himself. But it felt big, whatever it was. And that worried h
Not my problem, he told himself.
No, his problem was 50 or so women who had been forced to become shifters by the former Alpha of the Vancouver pack — kidnapped, attacked and nearly killed, healed by the shifter, and then forced to change to a wolf and back again to finish healing. The old-school way of making humans into shifters.
Benny had been dealing with all the trauma Stefan’s serum had caused the human women of the Hat Island cohorts. Waking up to find you now had a wolf was traumatic, no matter how gentle the process or how horrific.
On Hat Island, the women — made-shifters was the term they used for themselves — had been turned over to Stefan’s grant funder for rehabilitation and integration into packs. Horrible enough thing to do to a person — uproot them without their permission, change them into a werewolf, and then relocate them? Ugly business.
It was made worse by the fact that the grant funder, Jedediah Jones, now deceased, had sold the women into slavery instead. When Abby Stafford rose to be Alpha and called her pack on Hat Island, she’d killed him, and put a stop to what Jones was doing. And she’d insisted that all of those women would be brought home to Hat Island.
But when Benny had met these women he had thought the physical trauma that the women had been through had made it much worse. He wasn’t as sure about that now.
The Vancouver women had been brutally changed and then confined to a barracks of sorts, allowed out only to serve the men of the pack. When one of the young men Alpha Chen had been recruiting for his army did something noteworthy, a woman was given to him as an award. Pack standing, a woman, a future in one of the most livable cities in the world — the young men of isolated packs throughout Canada and the northern United States were flocking to Vancouver to do whatever Alpha Chen requested of them.
But truly the trauma seemed to be the same — what the women on Hat Island had gone through was no different than that experienced by these women, and that made him sick to realize.
Benny had been a fitness coach for Stefan Lebenev’s serum research. He’d turned the other way when those women were sent off in the care of Jedediah Jones. He'd let it go on.
And the Wolf Harbor women they were rescuing felt betrayed by men they liked and thought liked them. Not just the trauma of being made into a shifter, and then abused, but betrayal.
He might never stop feeling guilty about it. He would always owe them whatever they asked, whatever they needed. All shifters did; their sacrifice probably gave the shifter species a future. But they weren’t asked. It was taken from them.
These women, who Vancouver shifters called once-human, knew the men who had kidnapped them and brutally changed them were evil bastards. They didn’t feel betrayed by friends and lovers like the Hat Island women did. When they first rescued these women, there had been a sense of relief among the Hat Island leadership — at least we’re better than what Vancouver did!
No, Benny had come to realize this week, they were worse. Far worse.
The shifters who ran the Wolf Harbor Resort had betrayed the women’s trust.
Benny didn’t quite know what to do with that realization, and so he added it to his list of things to think about later.
Whenever later might be. He and his helpers were putting in long hours, interviewing the women and helping to figure out what their path forward should be. They couldn’t go back to the lives they once had. Many of them had been decreed dead, buried and mourned for years at this point. None of them looked like the women their friends and family would remember. Becoming a shifter gave them youth, vitality and longevity. So no, they couldn’t go back.
Even if the women knew that intellectually, it was still a struggle to accept emotionally. The one good thing Stefan had done was to try to select only women who were elderly and alone. Even that wasn’t true in every case, Benny acknowledged, but at least Stefan hadn’t disrupted 30-some families in his serum study. Stefan had pulled women from all over the United States; almost none came from the Seattle area so that the disappearances would go unnoticed.
Alpha Chen, on the other hand, had gone for convenience. He and his goons had grabbed women within a two-hour radius of Vancouver. Young, old, married, single, mothers.... Chen hadn’t known or cared. And he’d been doing it for 50 years. Spread out like that, no one seemed to notice — and wasn’t that a horrific thing in itself? — but in the last few years, he’d started taking more and more women, and Vancouver officials had begun to think there was a serial killer operating in the Vancouver area.
That was why Abby could order Chen’s execution. Not for all the horror — by shifter law, the Chairman of the Northwest Council of Alphas didn’t have jurisdiction over what happens within a pack — but because Chen’s actions ran the risk of outing shifters to humans. Vancouver police had approached Chen with questions — the link had been made.
No one knew how far the police had gotten in their investigation. And perhaps now that Chen had ‘died of a sudden heart attack,’ with a large funeral was slated for tomorrow for all of his large extended family, the police would pursue other ‘avenues of inquiry.’
Well, it could be worse, he consoled himself. You could be in charge of cleaning up that mess. No, that was the job of the new Vancouver Alpha Gerard Gauthier, an attorney who thought he’d left the pack years ago. Turned out that wasn’t quite true.
A lot of things weren’t quite true.
Let’s start with Chen’s heart attack brought on by escaping a fire in the gym at the pack house, Benny thought grimly. The fire supposedly had claimed the lives of some 30 other shifters — although most them wouldn’t be publicly mourned like Chen. Most of them didn’t exist, not in the records of Vancouver bureaucracy. And wasn’t that interesting?
That fire worried Benny too. That very convenient fire. He thought the men had to have been dead before the fire even started. Yes, humans might get trapped in a burning building and die of smoke inhalation, but shifters?
He snorted. Hardly.
Not my problem, he told himself firmly.
Again.
But if the police were to discover that many of their missing women — the victims of that possible serial killer — were sitting in Margarite Lewis’s dining room, it would not go well. So Benny’s problem was discovering enough about these women so that they could be placed in packs away from Vancouver.
Away from anyone they might know.
It didn’t help that Chen had used ignorance as one of his methods of control. The women knew very little about being a shifter. Until Abby had rescued them, they hadn’t known how to shift!
They weren’t pack. They had been slaves.
And that sent his thoughts spiraling back to the Hat Island women. How was he any better? He forced his mind away from that question.
So he was conducting orientation sessions for the women. He had help there. Alefosio, one of Margarite’s men, was doing much of the orientation and training sessions. He had a counseling background of some kind, and the women seemed at ease with him. Well, Alefosio was Tongan. Tough warriors, gentle lovers, Alefosio bragged. Benny grinned. Guess he had a point.
The rest of his day was spent interviewing the women for possible placement elsewhere, and doing counseling sessions with those who were struggling the most. Some of the once-human women had been in the pack for 30 years — more accurately, they’d been given to a man who was in the pack. In most cases, the man had never brought the woman into the pack.
In 30 years.
That was a long time for a shifter to be without pack. Benny’s eyes burned. He’d been a lone wolf for that long, although by choice, so he knew what it felt like. Now that he was pack again, he would never let anyone take it from him again.
And the Hat Island pack was full of wolves who were just like him.
So he was doing domestic violence counseling, essentially. Did the women want to stay with their shifter man? Some of them had children — a few had grandchildren! Some had integrated into the family structure. One was even a senior wife. She wasn’t going anywhere, but even she was benefiting from some counseling.
Margarite Lewis was doing the counseling with the women who did want to stay in the households and families they’d been given into. She knew pack life as a woman better than Benny could ever hope to. And he was grateful she was willing to do it. It wasn’t easy on her. Not only was it hard to deal with their trauma, it brought up old trauma of hers. Things he didn’t think she’d completely resolved herself.
