SHIFTER PLANET: THE RETURN
by D.B. Reynolds
Shifter Planet, #2
Publication Date: October 14, 2019
Genres: Adult, Entangled: Amara, Paranormal, Romance, Standalone, Romance
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SYNOPSIS
Rachel Fortier is a much sought-after expert when it comes to exotic planets—especially the deadly kind. So when she’s hired by Earth Fleet’s most respected scientist to join a mission to the tightly closed planet Harp, it’s a dream come true. Until she discovers their mission is to capture shifters and sell them to the Military.
Shifter Aidan Devlin is on patrol far from his clan when he sees a shuttlecraft landing where it definitely shouldn’t be. As the invaders emerge, he’s surprised to see a lone lovely woman, who doesn’t seem to belong. But when he’s captured and put in a cage, he has no one but her to help him escape.
Drawn together by a hunger they can’t resist, and desperate to discover who betrayed Harp, Aidan and Rachel first have to survive a deadly journey to the city. But once there, they find themselves confronted by a conspiracy that goes even deeper. Because Harp is harboring a traitor. And he’s willing to destroy their world—and everything in it—to get what he wants.
EXCERPT –
INVADING SHIP LANDING
He watched as a definite new threat settled onto the planet’s surface. The noise and stink of the vehicle disturbed the Green’s usual peace, but the landing place was well-chosen for all that. By avoiding any damage to the trees, themselves, the ship minimized the possibility of the forest sending out an alarm right away. Which was alarming in itself. Whoever was onboard that ship knew enough to conceal its arrival, which meant they were almost certainly up to no good. One thing he knew for sure, they had no business being way out here at the outermost edge of Harp’s mountain range. His mountain range. The Ardrigh ruled the city, but the de Mendoza clan chief ruled the mountains, and with Rhodry gone, Aidan was his de Mendoza surrogate.
He had to find out who the hell was in that ship. Harp was a closed planet. No one, and that meant no one, was permitted to land a ship here—a restriction insisted on by the Ardrigh and supposedly enforced by Earth Fleet. And that brought up yet another worrisome point—that ship sure as hell hadn’t snuck through a reentry into Harp’s atmosphere. The planet had a perfect, natural defense mechanism in the form of a violently destructive electromagnetic anomaly that dominated the atmosphere. Any ship making that passage was easily detectable by the fleet’s science center in the city, which was partially responsible for enforcing the planet’s embargo. Any ship trying to break the embargo was marked and targeted for destruction. Given the already hazardous atmosphere, it didn’t take much to destroy an incoming ship. The fact that this ship had managed to evade detection and land way the hell out here, in the middle of nowhere, told Aidan that it hadn’t evaded detection at all. Someone in the science center had been bought off.
He frowned. All around him, the Green remained silent, waiting. Whoever had advised the intruders had done their job well. The forest didn’t see them as an immediate threat. At least, not yet. But they hadn’t gone to the trouble and expense of sneaking onto the planet in order to do good works. Aidan was certain of that, but he took his cue from the trees, watching and waiting. So far, the intruders hadn’t done anything but land far from the city, which was suspicious enough that he considered racing directly back to the Clanhome to raise an alert. But he needed more information, and he was also reluctant to leave the ship out here alone. Even with a shifter’s speed, the journey to Clanhome would take many days there and back. Who knew what damage the intruders might do in the meantime?
When the Earthers had first rediscovered Harp, more than two years ago, a handful of fleet personnel had wiped out an enormous circle of forest and razed an ancient grandfather tree nearly down to its roots. They’d paid for it with their lives in the cataclysm, but nonetheless, they’d been nothing but a small group of fools who’d thought the rules didn’t apply to them. He was looking at a well-armed shipload of potential danger.
Decision made, he took off in the direction of the uninvited vessel. He’d cross the swamp and survey them first—evaluate the threat, and then, if necessary, rally some of his cousins out of Clanhome, which was a lot closer than the city. Whoever these invaders were, he was certain they’d never met a hunting party of shifters. Because if they had, they wouldn’t be alive to tell of it.
ABOUT D.B. REYNOLDS
D.B.Reynolds is the RT and EPIC award-winning author of the popular Vampires in America series, as well as other paranormal fiction. She lives in a flammable canyon near Los Angeles, and when she’s not writing her own books, she can usually be found reading someone else’s.
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