THE REJECTS PACK
The Rejects Pack of Greece has few friends and a host of enemies. Led by wolf-shifter Alekos Ash, and comprised of lone wolves and one human – they’re on a mission to find the Nazi ship that caused the Night of 1000 Deaths. But as pack members search the globe for answers, they find more danger, love, and mysteries than they bargained for.
HUDSON (Book 1)
Sent to Germany by his pack to research the last known location Nazi boat that caused the Night of 1000 Deaths, Shifter-wolf Hudson Knox, discovers that Neo-Nazi warlocks and a brilliant Egyptology grad student, Yazmin Hunter-Blake, are looking for the same files, but for very different reasons. Forced to team up, Yazmin and Hudson trace the path of Sir Barnabas—the first warlock and Crusader knight—through Germany to his final resting place. But with warlocks on their trail, Hudson and Yazmin might end up sharing the knight’s tomb unless they can figure out the ancient secrets that activate the magic within.
If you like action-packed romances, angry Egyptologists, shifter wolves, and ancient booby-trapped tombs, then you’ll love Hudson, book 1 of the Rejects Pack.
THE REJECTS PACK
The Rejects Pack of Greece has few friends and a host of enemies. Led by wolf-shifter Alekos Ash, and comprised of lone wolves and one human – they’re on a mission to find the Nazi ship that caused the Night of 1000 Deaths. But as pack members search the globe for answers, they find more danger, love, and mysteries than they bargained for.
HUDSON (Book 1)
Sent to Germany by his pack to research the last known location Nazi boat that caused the Night of 1000 Deaths, Shifter-wolf Hudson Knox, discovers that Neo-Nazi warlocks and a brilliant Egyptology grad student, Yazmin Hunter-Blake, are looking for the same files, but for very different reasons. Forced to team up, Yazmin and Hudson trace the path of Sir Barnabas—the first warlock and Crusader knight—through Germany to his final resting place. But with warlocks on their trail, Hudson and Yazmin might end up sharing the knight’s tomb unless they can figure out the ancient secrets that activate the magic within.
If you like action-packed romances, angry Egyptologists, shifter wolves, and ancient booby-trapped tombs, then you’ll love Hudson, book 1 of the Rejects Pack.
Yazmin Hunter-Blake was going to commit murder. She stomped up the cement and tile stairs of the Arolsen Archives as if she were punishing each one—academic rage boiling out of every pore. This last file had been the final straw. Yazmin was going to hunt down Hudson Knox and beat his stupid handsome face in with… with nothing. She had no weapons, and, if his videos were anything to judge by, the man appeared to be incredibly handy with multiple types of blunt instruments and swords. All right. New plan: she would expose him as the thief that he was, and then she would get him stripped of his YouTube Awards and have him booted off the internet entirely. She would triumph, and he would slink away in utter humiliation.
Yazmin stopped at the top of the third-floor stairs to adjust her face mask and breathe in oxygen and the idea of victory. She had spent two weeks in the required pandemic isolation and the next two in the Arolsen Archives – Germany’s Nazi archive repository – only to find that every file she requested was delayed or was already out on loan. After flirting with one of the junior archivists, Yazmin discovered that Dr. Caelan Bard, the venerable head of the weapons archive section, was personally blocking all of her file requests to send those same files to Hudson Knox. She was mere weeks away from completing her dissertation in Egyptology, and she needed those files.
She was a Ph.D. student with a groundbreaking theory. Hudson Knox was an internet nobody. He didn’t even have a degree. All he had was a square jaw and a set of twelve-pack abs. He didn’t do anything except wander around shirtless while hand-forging period-accurate weaponry.
What was he even doing at the Arolsen Archives? And why was he looking into Sir Barnabas? Was he aware of her theory? Yazmin shook her head. It didn’t matter. After finally being allowed access to files she’d requested two weeks ago, it was as plain as day that several of the files were incomplete—and the manuscript she needed most was almost entirely missing. And since Hudson was the last person to have it, then he was the one who had absconded with half the pages. Maybe someone who didn’t read Egyptian hieroglyphs wouldn’t have noticed the missing mimeographed pages of the ancient manuscript. Or perhaps someone who didn’t have a degree wouldn’t have thought they’d get caught. But unfortunately for Hudson Knox, she had been taught to read Latin and Egyptian hieroglyphs practically at birth, and, more importantly, she wasn’t an idiot.
Yazmin stormed down the hall toward Dr. Bard’s office. One more time, some sexist prick had assumed she hadn’t worked her ass off to get where she was. Well, she would put that old man in his misogynistic place! A few choice words would point out that he was not only an ass for running his department on favors and sexism but also an idiot—his prized internet friend had ripped him off. Then she would find Hudson Knox and retrieve those pages—by force if necessary.
She was almost to the office door when it exploded off its hinges and flew across the hall, shattering against the opposite wall. Yazmin was too shocked to even scream. But as a noxious black smoke filled the air, Yazmin ran forward, hoping that Dr. Bard hadn’t been in his office during what surely must have been a gas leak. She might want to slap the stupid off of Dr. Bard, but she certainly didn’t want him dead. As she reached the office, she could hear a guttural voice chanting in a strange cadence. It took her a moment to realize the words were in Latin.
Bring down the night.
Call in the dark.
Raise up the shadows.
Yazmin’s brain automatically translated, but even as she heard the words, she was filled with profound dread. She skidded to a stop outside the office. Inside, she saw Dr. Bard pinned on his desk as he struggled with two men in black cloaks. Another man in a cloak, his arms raised, stood near the door, chanting. The black smoke seemed to be emanating from his hands.
Yazmin yelled in surprise and shock, but none of the combatants looked in her direction. What the devil was happening? This was not appropriate behavior for an institute of research. They were desecrating an educational venue! Furious, she raised her own hands and shouted the first thing that came into her head—a hymn to the sun god Ra in Egyptian. She’d seen the incantation before—most recently scrawled in the margins of the remaining manuscript pages in the file from Dr. Bard that she had just left downstairs. It seemed the opposite of what the man in the cloak was shouting, and somehow that felt right.
O thou beautiful Being,
thou dost renew thyself in thy season
in the form of the Disk.
There was a boom and an enormous flash of light. The men in cloaks were flung off their feet, but Dr. Bard stood and staggered into the hall, blood flowing from his nose and temple.
“Miss Hunter-Blake?” he gasped, seemingly surprised by her presence. He looked around the hallway and then back at Yazmin. “What did you do?”
“I don’t know!” She honestly didn’t. The men in cloaks were on the floor in the office. She looked at her hands. Had she done that? Dr. Bard took another step and then sagged back against the wall, clutching his ribs. There was an angry howl from inside the office.
“Come on,” said Yazmin. “We have to go!” She tried to pull him toward the front stairs, but he shook his head.
“Down the back, to the park.”
“The park? No, there’s a security guard….”
But Dr. Bard was already moving down the hall toward a brown, painted door. He was a tall, lanky man with long white hair that he usually wore pulled back into a ponytail. But tonight, his hair was streaked with blood from a cut on his temple. She wasn’t sure what the hell had just happened, but she knew she didn’t want to stick around to face men who would beat up a hapless archivist. There was a shout from the office, and Yazmin saw one of the men enter the hall. She grabbed Dr. Bard’s arm and put it over her shoulder. She pulled him through the door, and they limped down the stairs together.
“What other magic do you know?” asked Dr. Bard.
“I don’t know any magic!” she barked. “Stop talking and get moving.”
“That wasn’t me back there,” he said, panting. He was still clutching his ribs with his other arm. “It was you. What did you say? What spell was that?”
“It was just a hymn or prayer to Ra. But I’ve read loads of incantations before, and there has never been a giant flash of light with any of those.”
She stopped talking and concentrated on the stairs. Climbing three stories up in a mask had been hard, but somehow going down was even worse. She yanked the mask off her face, panting. Pandemic be damned. She heard the door above them slam and the sound of hurrying feet.
“We should have gone to the front desk,” she said, trying to pull the old man faster down the stairs. Her shoes were slipping on the worn and slick 1970s cement, and she worried that if she went any faster, they would both fall.
“I need to get to the trees,” he said. They reached the bottom floor, and Yazmin looked for the exit. “Down there,” he said, pointing. “You’ll need another spell once we get outside.”
“Magic isn’t real,” protested Yazmin. But there was a scorching sizzle from above them, and a black cloud slammed into the wall beside them. It left a burn mark. Maybe magic was real? Yazmin gulped, trying to stop herself from panicking, and pushed Dr. Bard into a run. They moved like drunken partners in a three-legged race down the tiled hallway, passing the vaulted archive rooms.
“This way,” said Dr. Bard, pulling her down a side corridor and through a door. Out on a cement path, the two hurried toward the dim shadow of trees ahead, dark in the pale light from the park lamps.
“When we get to the trees, you must place me on the ground and defend me for a few minutes,” said Dr. Bard.
“Defend?” gasped Yazmin. “How?”
“You will need the spell I’m about to teach you.”
Yazmin wanted to shout and scream that magic wasn’t real, but it seemed a bit late for that.
“Da mihi fortitudinem brachium eius
iustum adiutorium meum cor meum.
Repeat it.”
“Give my arm strength. Make my heart my shield. Yes, thank you. I do speak Latin. Now, how does it work?”
“You must picture a shield,” he said. “Picture it as clearly as possible.”
They made it onto the grass of the park, and Dr. Bard seemed to gather strength and speed as soon as they stepped off the path.
“To the trees!”
Yazmin did as he said, and as soon as they reached the broad oak trees, he dropped to his knees and embraced one with a deep sigh of relief.
“They’re just trees—” She heard the beginning of a chant behind her, and she spun around to see the three men in cloaks. They stood on the path as if afraid to leave the cement. They raised their hands, and clouds of inky blackness began to form above them.
“Da mihi fortitudinem brachium eius
iustum adiutorium meum cor meum!” yelled Yazmin.
In her head, she pictured the curved, rectangular Roman scutum shield that hung above the family fireplace back home. Her eyes widened as a black cloud hurtled toward her, but to her surprise, a sparkling blue shield blocked the cloud. However, the first strike was just that… the first. A second and a third drove her backward, her feet digging into the grass and soil. She could feel each hit like a hammer strike. Her shield seemed to blackout at each strike and then only reappear when she willed it. She was sweating rivulets that hung in her eyelashes, and she felt like she was holding a lead weight with her arms. The shield might be magic, but it was still heavy.
The men in cloaks now stepped onto the grass, their arms raised. A final hit struck her to the ground. Her shield sparked and fritzed. It wasn’t going to hold. For the first time, terror settled into her bones. She was going to die. By magic. And she wasn’t even going to be able to author a paper on the fact that magic was real.
A roar split the air, and Yazmin watched in disbelief as a red-gold blur of fur snatched first one of the men and then the others, tearing at them, knocking them across the grass like conkers. Yazmin noticed that, whatever kind of monster it was, it appeared to be wearing jeans. Before Yazmin could ponder the peculiarity of that, the cloaked men attempted a final burst of magic. A black cloud buzzed around the tall, jeans-wearing, fur-covered creature, but he shook it off with a terrifying roar. The men sprinted away, and he moved as if to go after them, but then his wolf-like head swung back in their direction. Yazmin’s heart was in her mouth.
The creature approached them, changing as he walked. Yazmin watched in disbelief as the large triangular ears shrank, tucking neatly into ocean-bleached blonde hair. The muzzle and long teeth receded into a strong, square chin and well-defined nose. The intense blue eyes remained the same even as the rest of him shifted into a sun-browned head and body familiar to over 200,000 subscribers.
“Dr. Bard,” said Yazmin, her voice shaking, “I think Hudson Knox has been turned into a werewolf.”
“Don’t be insulting,” said Dr. Bard. “He was born that way.”
She turned around to look at the archivist and realized that not only was the cut on his temple now healed, but his ears had also suddenly become pointed at the tips, and he had lost at least thirty years. Everything had gone completely bonkers, and she’d had enough.
“Dr. Bard,” said Yazmin, drawing herself up and attempting to look dignified despite the hair falling in her face and the grass and dirt all over her, “I believe you have some explaining to do.”
“So do you,” he said, stretching his hand toward her face. “Codladh!”
“I don’t really think—” began Yazmin, but then the world wavered, and it was as though her knees gave out. The last thing she remembered was the blurry but concerned face of Hudson Knox leaning over her. It really was a handsome face.
Hudson is a shifter - a wolf who is sometimes human (but not a werewolf). He's part of the Rejects Pack, with his birth pack having ostracised him for his little oddities. Yazmin is a brilliant archeologist and Egyptologist and is studying hard for her PhD. She's a British lady, and her parents - Lord and Lady Hunter-Blake - are also esteemed archeologists and academics. For her doctoral theses, Yazmin is researching a certain Sir Barnabas - and is incensed when she finds out that Hudson has been granted access to the files she had specifically requested. So incensed that she storms to the head of the Aroslen Archives to demand that she be given access; except she walks in on something that she simply can not explain. Several men wearing hooded robes are chanting in Latin and holding the head of the archives over his desk. It's as though they're performing magic - but that can't be right, can it? Magic doesn't actually exist, does it? Yazmin soon finds out that magic does exist, and that her research is key to solving a decades old mystery. She's inadvertently become embroiled in a battle for the very survival of magical and supernatural beings against Neo-Nazis in modern-day Germany. And accompanying her on this ride is the infuriatingly handsome Hudson; who she's inexplicably drawn to - against her, usually better, judgement.
So, although the synopsis sounds somewhat bonkers, it was actually something that was beautifully thought out. Magic was wiped out of certain areas of Europe after a Nazi ship had sank in the Aegean Sea - and the resulting conspiracy which came from it. A beautiful archeologist with latent magical powers and a handsome shifter racing through rural Germany, being chased by a group of Neo-Nazi Warlocks. Add on the romance, and well. You've got something that could have been one of those 1980's adventure films.
Except, parts of Hudson just aren't great. There's parts of the book where Hudson and Yazmin are supposedly running for their lives, and yet they both become fixated on their budding romance. In an underground, booby-trapped tomb, they bicker about their chances of lasting in a relationship (bearing in mind, they've only known each other a handful of days at this point). Hudson spends more time worrying about the mechanisms of their partnership than he does on actually solving the real problem at hand (as in, saving the Supernatural population of Europe from the Neo-Nazis). It's not just the inappropriate timing of his musings which is problematic, either. Our first meeting with Yazmin signals her staunch hatred of Hudson - mainly because he's uneducated and getting the files she needs. And yet, she's kissing him mere hours after they've met (bear in mind; she's been kidnapped and coerced into joining the fight for being in the wrong place at the wrong time), and simply puts it down to his irresistible good looks.
Yazmine's characteristic of being an aristocratic British Lady is somewhat clichéd too. It's almost as though Maines has simply googled all the stereotypes of Britishness and then wrapped them up in Yazmine. Her character is full of sarcasm (which is almost as much a part of her personal DNA as her appearance), craving's for tea, ridiculously privileged upbringing, stiff-upper lip standoffishness and humorous British swear words, insults and slang. She's a walking, talking contradiction. Her use of specific British slang is completely at odds with her societal and class standing - for example; Yazmine asks 'Warlocks are the pillocks in the knock-off Harry Potter robes?' I admit, I snorted a laugh - pillock being one of my favourite insults. However, as a British woman, I have never heard someone of the upper-classes (which Yazmine most definitely is) use the term pillock. This happens throughout Hudson, with Yazmine reverting to phrases which don't fit her properly.
S. A.