Spike has come to grips with being bait, but finding out that she is the last of her kind and a swan stands between her and extinction is a bit to swallow.

Spike has grown up as a hedgehog among rabbits. She works for the Shifter Council as professional bait to obtain information and lure wrongdoers into situations that are not in their best interests.

She has finished work for the day and is eager to spend time with her family and friends. The intrusion of a swan into their bunny-day celebrations is not welcome, but the Shifter Council has ordered it.

Hedgehog shifters have nearly been completely destroyed, and now, Spike is the last of her kind. She has never been part of an extinct species before.

Albert is her bodyguard, and he takes her to the safest place the Shifter Council could think of. The Crossroads.

Excerpt:

Sicily paced restlessly. The box she was in was far too small to shift out of, but then, holding her in her shifted form was what her captors had in mind.

Her small toes scrabbled around and she settled for hunching in the corner in her defensive posture. She tucked her head down and pulled her legs in, leaving nothing but a ball of spikes. They were coming back and she needed to be on her guard.

Her captors didn’t bother with delicacy. They gassed her and tumbled her out of the box and into a bag for transport.

Sicily remained in a ball, pretending to be unconscious. They swung the bag around and dropped her on a pile with several others. She could identify a skunk, a badger, a flamingo and a wolf by their energy traces on her spikes.

Her inner clock told her that it was a few minutes from the Shifter Council trackers bursting in. Sicily hoped that they were on time. She had a party to attend and she could only play the victim for so long before she got bitey.

She counted down in her mind and waited for the retrieval. Life as perpetual bait was tedious.

It was two hours later and she had to fake waking on the table they had her on. She snuffled, and when a hand touched her, she pulled in tight.

A chuckle came from a human voice and hands rolled her from one side of the table to the next. “You may as well come out, Jarok. We know who you are.”

She tensed even more when she heard them call her by the name of the only other hedgehog she had ever met. Unfortunately, James Jarok was dead.

He had died months earlier, his body found at the lion compound out in the desert. She had stood next to his wife and daughter during the belated funeral and offered them what comfort she could.

Attraction and repulsion were the hallmarks of a hedgehog. Other shifters couldn’t resist them and they were equipped with enough self-defence techniques to keep themselves safe under normal circumstances.

“Come on, Jarok, unfurl and things will go easier for you.”

Since her body was exposed and they could start poking at any moment, she unfurled and shifted to her human shape.

She looked at the two shifters in their human forms and raised her eyebrows, “My name isn’t Jarok.”

She sat on the bench as daintily as possible; her cascade of ash blonde hair draped over one shoulder.

The men stared at her and they looked at each other. “Who are you, miss?”

It was amazing how acting like a lady turned men into gentlemen, if only for a moment.