Lola Vargas

Stars Without A Pack

Contained

Free

The council does not gather for comfort. Something fell from the sky and lived, and that is not a thing this settlement can ignore. Sera keeps her report short. Contained. Guarded. Roan wants a word for it, something to hand the other clans when they come asking, and Sera gives them one. A prisoner, still being assessed. It satisfies the room. Not everyone in that room says what they're thinking. Elsewhere, the stranger in the cell has stopped waiting to be understood and started teaching himself how to be. Stone by stone, he is building something out of nothing, in a language no one gave him.

Magical Tether

Someone Like Us

Free with Gold

A week. That's all it's been since Sheryl let the human into her bed — and her jaguar hasn't stopped purring since. Back in McIntosh territory she should feel safe. She has her clan, her sharp-tongued sister Veronica, her father's watchful eye, the whole found family gathered around the fire each night. But you can't outrun a mate bond by teleporting home, and her family can already smell the truth on her: she didn't resist. Not even a little. Sheryl's kind lives for hundreds of years — long enough to watch a mortal mate wither and fade in a handful of decades. She's already buried her mother. She knows exactly what fate costs, and she isn't sure she can survive paying that price again. Her jaguar doesn't care about the math.

Magical Tether

The Library

Free

Sheryl McIntosh has exactly one place that belongs to her alone — a hidden library sealed behind her late mother's magic, where no one can follow. No one human, anyway. So when Ryan keeps turning up inside her sanctuary, grinning and infuriating and impossibly there despite being no shifter at all, Sheryl knows something is wrong. Her jaguar knows something else entirely: that the man with the maddening scent and the lazy "Princess" is theirs. Their fated mate. The other half they were never supposed to find. She tells him no. She tells herself no. But Ryan is patient, her own instincts are a traitor, and "no" has a way of softening into "yes" when fate is the one doing the asking. And what comes after that yes? She'll admit it was… nice. Pleasant, even. And absolutely never happening again. Fate, of course, has other plans.

Stars Without A Pack

Something Like This

Free

The Ashfang hold had stood through worse than this. Bad winters. Border disputes. Alphas who died before their time and left everything unsettled behind them. It had a long memory and a short tolerance for disruption, and it expressed both through the people who ran it. Sera came out of the cell with her questions answered. She told herself that was why she had gone in. The hold was busy the way it was always busy. People moving, work continuing, the courtyard indifferent to whatever had just happened below it. Roan fell into step beside her the way he always did. She told him to tell the elders to wait. He told her that wasn't going to be enough. She told him it would have to be. Councilwoman Victoria Crane had other ideas. She expressed them quietly, carefully, with Sera's father's name in her mouth like a courtesy. The hold had not yet decided what it thought about the stranger below. It was only just beginning to ask. Sera already had her answer. She simply wasn't ready to say it out loud.

Stars Without A Pack

Fire From Nowhere

Free

Something came down in the East Ridge borderlands and did not come down quietly. Sera of Ashfang brought it back to the hold herself. That is the part everyone is still talking about — not the crater, not the wreckage, not the thing that was breathing in it. The part where she crouched in the dirt of a burning field and said he is mine before she had any reason to say it. He is a prisoner. That is what she told Roan. That is what she told the hold. Her wolf has been silent since the crash site. Not cautious. Not watchful. Silent in a way she does not have a word for yet. Several hours later, Sera goes to the cell. She tells herself she needs information.

Stars Without A Pack

Something

Free

The sky broke open over the East Ridge borderlands. Sera of Ashfang does not wait for answers to come to her. She never has. Her wolf was already moving before Sera had a name for why — certain of something Sera wasn't ready to name. Roan called after her. She told him to stand down. Her wolf had never gone quiet like that. Not once. Not for anything.

Stars Without A Pack

The Watch

Free

The Ashfang hold has stood for six generations. It has never once asked permission to stand. Sera holds her father's watch on the rampart every night. Has held it for six months. Cavan keeps sending men. She keeps sending them home. Her father is getting smaller by degrees. She already knows what's coming. She just hasn't said it out loud yet.

Stars Without A Pack

Prologue: The World Before

Free

Aldrath is an old world — older than anyone living in it can remember. It has shifter clans in the hundreds, each with an alpha, each with a territory, each with borders that are really just politics with better manners. In the free towns at the crossroads, wolves and great cats and bears share tables and trade gossip. Tonight the talk is about Aldric of Ashfang — the steadiest alpha on the northern borders for thirty years — and what happens when his seat goes empty. His heir is ready. Everyone who has dealt with her says so. The question is what comes at her the moment the seat is empty. Aldrath had been turning for a very long time. It did not know it was about to be seen from somewhere else entirely.