The Keeper of Promise Read online

  THE KEEPER OF PROMISE

  (THE WOLVES OF PROMISE FALLS, BOOK 6)

  A SPINOFF SERIES FROM OATH OF BANE

  By T. S. JOYCE

  The Keeper of Promise

  Copyright © 2022 by T. S. Joyce

  Copyright © 2022, T. S. Joyce

  First electronic publication: August 2022

  T. S. Joyce

  www.tsjoyce.com

  All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. No part of this book may be scanned, uploaded or distributed via the Internet or any other means, electronic or print, without the author’s permission.

  NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR:

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental. The author does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for third-party websites or their content.

  Published in the United States of America.

  Editor: Alyxandra Miller

  Other Books in this Series

  The Fall of Promise (Book 1)

  The Rise of Promise (Book 2)

  The Blood of Promise (Book 3)

  The Mercy of Promise (Book 4)

  The Edge of Promise (Book 5)

  Contents

  Copyright

  Other Books in this Series

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

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  About the Author

  Prologue

  The Trader Pack may have changed its name, but that wouldn’t protect them from what was coming.

  Werewolves had a long memory. From the time Danielle Truman was four, she understood grudges lasted generations. By five, she hated whoever her parents hated, popping off in her cute childlike voice about which Packs could burn, even though she didn’t really know what that meant.

  Hate was taught, and werewolves were very diligent teachers. At least the ones she’d known.

  By six, she was Changing into her wolf and play-fighting with the other kids in the Pack. They didn’t play cowboys and Indians, or cops and robbers. It was Pack versus Pack, and they fought to be the good guys. They wanted to be the Hells Creek Pack. As she’d grown older, she’d realized that bad guys and good guys were all relative to the individuals’ experiences and decisions. She’d seen the Pack she’d grown up in do very good things, and some not-so-good things that made her question if they were the good guys all the time, but when she was a child? With a very minimal exposure to the politics and war room discussions that took place behind closed doors, all she could comprehend was that her Pack were the good guys.

  Up until they were all destroyed in the territory wars for the Cascades.

  Mountain ranges were important for werewolves, and here was why—humans. Humans loved to preserve the land around mountain ranges. A hundred years ago, in a world where the human population was exploding and land was growing scarcer, werewolf Packs began clustering around mountain ranges. Not all of that transition was smooth. Sometimes entire Packs were forced out of homes they’d held for generations, and then had to settle wherever they could after. Packs required a lot of territory so all their members could run wild on the nights they had to Change, and so they could avoid the threat of another Pack encroaching on a too-small territory and putting everyone in danger.

  Packs, from Danielle’s experience, didn’t work well together. She’d never seen it. She’d never even witnessed a meeting between two Packs resolve without bloodshed.

  It was every Pack for itself—that was the law of the claw, and truth of the tooth.

  The Cascade Wars. Every werewolf in the world remembered those. She’d been thirteen at the time, and as it happened, her thirteen years had led her to a three-week bloodbath in which four Packs were snuffed out of existence entirely, and eight more suffered horrific losses that would echo through the bones of werewolf history. She hadn’t understood all of the buildup, or the push for the territory surrounding the Cascade mountain range, because she was still a child and not privy to those meetings.

  She’d only understood the hate she’d been taught.

  Her father was the Alpha of the Hells Creek Pack, and perhaps he’d kept them in the fight too long. Their numbers weren’t where they were supposed to be because of deserters. They’d lost five members in the weeks leading up to the wars. Cowards. Her father didn’t have a back-down button in him though. Not until the fourth night of war, when their ambush had gone wrong and they’d been surrounded. He’d ordered the young wolves off the fight. He’d told her to run, and she had to obey. He was the Alpha, giving an Alpha order.

  She’d never seen her parents or most of her Pack again.

  Danielle had made it out by the skin of her teeth with her brother and three other young werewolves that had minded orders.

  She’d bounced around a few Packs with her brother and the other kids, but that only worked for young male werewolves. Bachelor groups. It didn’t work so well for a young female werewolf with little protection. It got her attention that would ruin her life, so she ran to a place she could be alone, and safe, and heal up from the downfall of the Hells Creek Pack.

  Alaska had gobbled her up.

  It was easy to go lone wolf in Alaska. There was so much space, so much territory, and Packs didn’t tend to settle there for long. It was a sanctuary state. No one was fighting over the frozen tundra. The wolves loved the cold and the space, but the human sides? Most didn’t like it unless they were already loners, which most werewolves were not.

  Most werewolves were already mental. The less sunshine there was, the worse off they became. Alaska was temporary for most, and only the real headcases stayed long term.

  For Danielle? She didn’t mind the clouds, or the cold, or the long nights.

  No one messed with her in Alaska.

  Not until recently.

  And now here she was, in Leadville, Colorado, trying to barter her safety with monsters who had single-handedly caused the second-biggest territory wars in werewolf history.

  The Trader Pack, run by Nathaniel Tellings, had almost caused the Cascade Wars all over again.

  This was the end of her journey.

  Maybe she would live.

  Maybe she would die.

  Either way, the Trader Pack—now named the Stryker Pack—had to pay.

  Chapter One

  Danielle turned the radio down in her two-door, ruby-red Jeep, and squinted as her windshield wipers sloughed off another layer of snow. Leadville, Colorado was reminding her of Alaska right now.

  The man jogging across the parking lot to the back door of Weston’s Bar and Grill was too short and too utterly human to be Bootlace. She could tell, because he slipped and nearly busted his ass in the middle of the parking lot. No way would a werewolf ever be clumsy like that. She expected Bootlace to be stupid, but not clumsy.

  It was already well into lunchtime, and she’d been sitting here in the back parking lot all morning. He still wasn’t here. Maybe he didn’t work the morning shift. Or maybe he didn’t work today at all. Her sigh tapered to a growl as she lifted her phone back up to see if he’d updated his social media page.

  Bootlace. Just his nickname, no real name, no last name. His entire bio said, Single & ready for Pringles, with a side of eggplant emoji.

  Insufferable.

  He had one hundred and thirty-seven followers, but she’d gone through every one and none seemed to be personal connections. None of the other members of the Stryker Pack were on social media. Just this village idiot.

  His social media page was the entire reason she was here. She didn’t know why, but that made her angry. If he wouldn’t have been stupid enough to open up a public social media account, she would be on a much more fulfilling mission somewhere. Maybe even somewhere tropical. She’d been in Alaska so long, it would’ve been nice to lay on a beach somewhere drinking piña coladas. Yet here she was, because Bootlace whatever-his-last-name-was couldn’t control his urge to update an uncaring world with every move he made. Like this morning, he posted a picture of his cup of coffee. The mug said I love bitches, and a little German Shepherd puppy with one flopped-over ear was sitting there in the background. Rude. Kind of.

  She cocked her head and studied a selfie he’d taken by a waterfall. He was a pretty-boy werewolf. Perfect chiseled jawline, perfect smile with perfectly masculine, full lips. His teeth were straight and white, and his eyes were a stormy blue. She wondered what his wolf eye color was. And what color was his wolf? Probably looked like a perfect lit
tle snowball. Even his hair was gelled crisply into place like he visited a damn barbershop right before this picture. That man couldn’t be real. He couldn’t really be a member of one of the most volatile and once-feared warmongering Packs of werewolves in America. His silly posts and scarless face didn’t match what she’d been told about the Trader pack. Err…Stryker Pack.

  He must’ve been the dumbest member to have opened up a social media account. Didn’t he know his Pack was still being hunted?

  Last week he’d posted a picture of him behind a bar. Just another day livin’ the dream…Come get ya some, his caption read. It was one of those cool portrait-mode pictures with the rows of colorful liquor bottles on rows of shelves behind him. He wore a plain black T-shirt, and his arms were locked against the counter. He sported a crooked, lady-gettin’ smile, and his eyes were lighter by just one shade. The lighting was dim, and the ambiance of the bar looked warm and inviting, the comfortable kind a local could find themself returning to time and time again. He’d tagged his location—Weston’s Bar and Grill.

  He was almost making this too easy.

  The next three posts were pictures of some woodsy mountains with the captions, little escape #1, little escape #2 (with a poop emoji of course, yak), and little escape #3.

  He got a few likes on each picture, and a couple comments here and there, but he never responded to them or even liked the comments. So, what was the point? If he wasn’t trying to build up a following and if he didn’t care about the social media attention, why post anything at all? Did he just like talking to himself? Was this like journaling for him?

  Another picture of a puppy, but this one was a half-grown Shepherd. This beauty will be in training for the next three weeks, the caption read.

  Okay, so maybe he was a dog hoarder, and the Shepherd pups were getting out of control? And they needed to be trained while he was bartending?

  Why was this so interesting to her? Maybe because her life was very boring and routine, and looking at someone else’s life was entertaining. Yep. That was probably it.

  Next picture was of a black-and-white cat on a leash and the caption mysteriously read, Trixie Delight. Okaaay. So, he was a werewolf that liked other animals, but not eating them. Probably.

  Softie. It was a wonder he was still alive.

  He didn’t take many pictures of himself. Why not? He was handsome, and if his bio announced he was single, you’d think he would be using his pretty-boy face to lure the ladies in, but no. Pictures of him were few and far between. Wait, what if he was a catfish? No one had a good description of the members of the Stryker Pack, so what if this Bootlace guy with his obviously fake name was using fake pictures too? Maybe he’d stolen these pictures from some unknowing dude on the internet.

  That would make sense. Thaaaaaat would make perfect sense.

  No one who had survived as many battles as the Stryker Pack had walked around with no scars on them. He was probably a battle-hardened gargoyle in real life.

  That thought lifted chills on her arms, and she looked up quick to make sure no one was watching her.

  The parking lot was empty except for her Jeep and two other cars, and a nice Dodge truck that hadn’t been parked there before she got lost in Bootlace-land. Crap.

  She scanned the parking lot, but all she saw was the back door to Weston’s swinging closed.

  That was probably his truck. Right? He’d posted a picture of a camp chair sitting leaned up against an RV, and he would need a truck to haul an RV, so with her masterfully-honed detective skills she concluded that yes, that was probably Bootlace the Catfish’s pickup truck.

  And that meant one thing.

  It was showtime.

  Danielle pulled down the sun visor and popped open the lighted vanity mirror, applied some peach-flavored lip gloss, then pulled her top down a little lower to expose the top of her cleavage. She’d picked her tightest cream-colored top, and paired it with a pair of skinny jeans and some badass, three-inch heel, cognac-colored boots. She shrugged on a worn, cropped brown leather jacket and hopped out of her car, fluffed her long, newly-highlighted hair, and strode around the side of the building to enter through the front door with the other customers. She could do this. Right? She’d looked at a magazine, picked some hair and an outfit to mimic from a woman that probably had no problem getting men, and now was her time to shine. “Confidence is sexy,” she murmured as a reminder to herself as she swung around the front of the building.

  She barely dodged a kid in a neon-pink, full-body snowsuit, whose harried mom was running after her. “Sorry,” she murmured as she bustled by.

  “It’s fine,” Danielle said, smiling absently at the scene. It was so…normal here.

  An older couple were headed into Weston’s right in front of her, and the husband held the door open for his lady, then gestured for Danielle to go on in as he continued to hold the door.

  Surprised, she gave him a smile and a nod. “Thank you.” It had been a while since she’d really interacted with humans.

  Inside, the lighting was dim, and the warmth of a good heating system hit her chilled cheeks. To the right was a bunch of tables in a dining room that was half full with the lunch rush, and on the left was a bar with a trio of four-seater booths along the back wall.

  And there behind the bar was Bootlace the not Catfish, because he was definitely the handsome man in his pictures.

  Today he wore a maroon beanie and a charcoal gray sweater with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. The beanie was pulled back enough to show the front of his sandy brown hair. The man hadn’t even used one of those face-app filters that smoothed out wrinkles and blemishes. He had perfect glowing skin, and his smile for the couple at the bar was just as white and perfect as his selfies.

  “Single my ass,” she muttered. This man had to have like eight girlfriends.

  She adjusted her purse and made her way to the bar.

  Bootlace was talking animatedly to the couple, and didn’t pay one ounce of attention to her as she took a seat. Good. It bought her time to observe him.

  She hung the strap of her purse on the back of the tall bar chair and studied the man’s profile. He really didn’t have any scars at all. Maybe she’d been fed faulty information. Or perhaps this werewolf had joined the Stryker Pack after the fighting was done. Pretty boys like Bootlace didn’t get into scuffles that would damage their pretty faces.

  His cheekbones belonged on the front page of some magazine.

  Danielle narrowed her eyes. She smelled a rat.

  A dumb rat. A dumb rat who was really good at socializing with the humans around him, and very bad at noticing a werewolf three seats down and across a two-foot bar from him.

  Okay, the Stryker Pack was getting less and less intimidating.

  With a smirk, she pulled out her phone and texted her brother. Here. Send.

  She twisted to put her phone into her purse, but froze when she saw Bootlace standing right in front of her. The smile had fallen from his face and his somber eyes bored a hole right through her. Damn, he was fast and quiet.

  Thawing a little, she cleared her throat and said, “Hello.”

  His eyes narrowed and he pushed off the bar, canted his head at her. “What do you want?”

  A werewolf worth half his weight in salt would be able to sense a lie, so she had to tell only truths until she learned this man. “A job.”

  He canted his head the other way. He was very handsome when he was charismatic and smiling, but there was something about this side of him that drew her werewolf up. She could smell him now over the chaos of scents behind the bar. If she’d questioned whether he was a werewolf before, she didn’t now. Fur and a shocking amount of dominance.

  “Truth,” he said at last. “Would you like a drink?”

  “Water, please. I’ve been driving for a while.”

  There still wasn’t a smile on his face, but he nodded and walked away. Just…left the bar. Okay. She’d thought this would be easy, but he was leaving her a little unsteady already. A minute later, he returned with a plate of nachos for the couple a few chairs down. His smile made an appearance for them, but disappeared again the second he began making a water. He didn’t even bother to add ice. Just warm tap water. He set it in front of her gingerly and studied her again. “Do I know you?”