36. Caleb
K eller swung his car into the hotel parking spot faster than was normal, but I couldn’t care less. I practically ripped his truck’s door off its hinges as I exited and rushed towards the man waiting by a side entrance. A lot had happened while we were driving, including one of the scouts being sent to comb the area and finding something “we had to see.”
“Report,” Keller said with a commanding military tone as we approached the young man. I didn’t recognize him, and he glanced uncertainly at me.
“I just got off shift when I got the message to come here and search for the scent of a new shifter,” he said. “I thought I caught a whiff of it around the skating rink and followed it here. I managed to break the lock to get inside, and I’d put money that our new shifter went through their entire transformation in here.”
“What makes you say that?” I asked, though I barely felt capable of speech. I was too busy itching to get past them, like I was going to crawl out of my own skin with agitation.
Because if the scout was right, it was possible I was about to find evidence that Emily was alive. Whatever connection we’d had was severed, but that was fine if she was still breathing.
It did mean I’d missed her first shift, and the thought that she was stuck going through it all alone made me sick to my stomach. But it was still so much better than the alternative.
“Go in for yourself, sir,” the scout replied. “I believe you’ll come to the same conclusion.”
That was all the info I needed. I pushed past Keller and practically slammed through the door, coming into a basement-like storage space smelling so strongly of laundry that for a moment, it was all I could pick up.
But then everything else hit me, and I fell to my knees. There was so much, and all of it was Emily.
She was alive! Somehow, some way, she was alive! She’d managed to find herself someplace safe to go through her first shift and stopped fighting it.
My celebration got cut short, however, when all the other scents slammed into my nose. My brain sorted them out, connecting dots and drawing conclusions.
“This is something,” Keller murmured, coming up behind me. “She managed to find a place with an actual cage? That’s some luck.”
“It’s not luck,” I said firmly with a rumbling growl.
“What do you mean?”
“Someone brought her here.”
“You sure?”
I nodded, stepping closer to the cage that dominated one corner of the space. It looked like it was used for storing valuable tools, but the pile of linens on the floor told a different story.
“Someone brought her here when her ketones were incredibly high. Borderline lethal, I’d say, but still human.” I tried to steel my voice, but it was difficult. I could practically picture it in my mind. “I think… I think they were a shifter, but I can’t say for certain.”
“Can you tell the gender?”
“Between the laundry and the length of time they’ve been gone, no, but there was someone else here, too.”
“A third person?”
“Yes,” I nodded, breathing deeply through my nose and out through my mouth. “They didn’t come in—their scent is by the door—but they brought in some food. A deer?”
“Emily fed?”
“In her wolf form, I’m guessing, based on the blood.” I pointed to the dry patch of brown at the side of the linens. Not for the first time, I was incredibly grateful my nose was so keen, as most people would’ve assumed the worst. I could tell the mess didn’t belong to a shifter at all.
“Anything else?”
“Emily was able to shift back.”
“Are you sure?”
I nodded. The journey of my charge’s scent was poignant, tearing through my soul with its implications. She’d come into the room as a dying human, fed as a full wolf, then exited as a tried-and-true shifter.
Emily had done it.
She was the strongest person I knew. The odds were stacked against her, yet she always persevered. Whether it was Gray or the Black Hawks who’d delayed me, she’d still pulled through.
I couldn’t wait to find her and tell her how incredibly proud I was, because now that I knew she was alive, I’d find her, even if I had to relentlessly search day and night until we reunited. I didn’t care. The only thing that mattered was being together again.
“We need to get a move on if I’m going to follow her scent,” I said, already marching towards the door I could tell Emily had exited from.
But my best friend caught my arm, gripping it with his shifter strength.
I growled, an automatic alpha reaction when restrained. Keller rolled his eyes—the downside of having a calm beta as a friend.
“Can it. Zach is on his way, and you’re not about to book it for the third time. You know what they say: fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me three times, and our head alpha might rip your head off himself.”
“I haven’t heard it put exactly like that before.”
“Then that’s why you keep making bone-headed decisions. You’re gonna fully investigate each inch of this room and prepare a full report in your mind for when Zach gets here. Then, if he’s in a charitable mood, you can request permission to hunt for your errant charge. I know you two have a lot of history,” Keller added, “but he’s not a bad guy. He’ll want you to find her.”
I grunted. One of the reasons I wanted to keep Emily away from Zach was because his history with lone shifters wasn’t the best. Often, it involved just absconding with them to camp, then giving them the ultimatum: join the pack, or get out of the territory. I didn’t like the idea of anybody pressuring Emily, and I was incredibly frustrated that it was out of my hands.
“Fine,” I said, wresting my arm away. As obstinate as I could be, I knew there were some matters I shouldn’t push. Besides, there was a lot of information I could glean from the room. I just had to put my nose to it.
“So, what’s going on here?” Zach said, entering with his usual calm demeanor. But I knew his soft-spoken, easygoing nature was a ruse. There was a deep power beneath Zach’s surface, and years of battle experience that made him quite a dangerous foe. He wasn’t my foe, but he wasn’t my friend , either .
I stepped forward and gave him a thorough report of everything I’d found. It wasn’t much beyond what I’d already told Keller, except that I knew whoever had helped Emily into the room had also given her off-brand bottled water from the closest store. This meant it wasn’t pre-planned, as they’d grabbed anything convenient.
If Zach was upset I was the one telling him this, he didn’t show it. His dark eyes remained steady as he listened.
Carl, however, who was just behind him, had no problem glaring me down. Nevertheless, not even the disapproval of what was supposed to be my pack could bring me down from this high. Emily was alive.
I was worried about his response: whether he’d order me to Maplewood, which I’d have to disobey, or to give up looking for Emily entirely, as she could be in the hands of either Gray’s men or the Black Hawk Pack, or for him to execute me right then and there. Such things weren’t usually Zach’s style, yet I recognized that I was an outlier of an outlier. A lone wolf, in the worst possible sense.
What I didn’t expect was for him to look at me with those endless black eyes of his, his voice soft and steady. “You seem quite concerned with this new shifter,” he said. It was a simple statement, yet there was a multitude of implications behind this singular sentence.
“Yes, sir.”
“Carl said you formed a bond, and that you mated?”
That fucking gossip. “Yes, sir.”
“Caleb, I am aware we haven’t interacted in a very long time, but you don’t exactly strike me as the type who can form such an intense connection with a stranger.”
I could see where the conversation was headed, and I didn’t know what to think of it, so I didn’t say anything. I’d underestimated our head alpha during my time away.
“Unless there was already a prior connection between you and this young woman,” Zach mused. “A connection like one between a guardian and a charge.”
I could practically feel the jolt from Carl and saw the chagrin on Keller’s face. Somehow, Zach had figured it out. I’d planned on telling the pack, but I wanted Emily to know more about herself and what she wanted before that happened.
“Kaia is dead, sir,” I said. It wasn’t exactly a lie. More an obfuscation than anything.
“I am acutely aware that we all thought she was, including you, and the fallout from that did immeasurable damage to our community.” Zach took a step towards me, though it wasn’t threatening, more like a father confronting an errant child. But I was thirty years old and had no child. I was protecting Emily!
But I couldn’t do that by lying.
“Can you look me in the eye and tell me this new shifter isn’t the same little girl that was ripped away from us?” Zach asked.
I didn’t answer for a long time, wanting to refuse but knowing I shouldn’t. So instead, I let out a sigh and told the truth. “No, sir, I can’t. Because I do believe that Emily is Kaia, and I know exactly how she ended up with a human family for the past twenty years.”
If the shock was evident before, it was palpable now, from both the head alpha and Carl. Keller tried to pretend, but it was clear to everyone involved that he already knew. Poor guy. He always was a shit liar.
“You’re certain?”
“As certain as can be,” I said. “Traffickers took her, and when they were transporting her over state lines, they got into a lethal car accident. She was the only survivor, but she had no identification. And if I had to guess, her kidnappers had false identities, so the authorities shipped her to an orphanage.”
Zach shook his head, stepping away from me before slowly pacing around the room’s perimeter. “Daniel Garrick was a pillar of our community. His whole family was. I wish we could tell them we’ve found their daughter.”
We didn’t do anything. I did. But I was smart enough not to verbalize as much.
“But I swear to each one of you, we won’t let her slip through the cracks again. She was stolen, and while many blamed you, Caleb, as her guardian, none of that matters now. We will find her.”
Zach took a deep breath, and I got the feeling that he was about to start relaying orders for those of us there to get to searching, but a shrill ring interrupted him.
It might have been funny if it weren’t for the fact that Emily was the one missing. Zach, his face clouded over, pulled the phone from his pocket, and I didn’t miss the way his pupils dilated when he saw who was calling.
Well, that was interesting.
He answered it quickly, and I knew it had to be serious to interrupt proceedings. I listened in, or at least tried to, as did the other shifters in the room. But Zach was already heading out a door, holding a finger up to let everyone know not to interrupt. Not that any of us would, anyway.
Even though he was on the other side of the door, I could hear his side of the conversation.
“Why are you calling me?”
“Given the timing, of course I’m suspicious.”
“Oh, and I suppose you’re doing this out of the goodness of your heart?”
“Right, right, how magnanimous of you.”
“Look, the words coming out of your mouth and the series of strange circumstances that have happened the past couple days are at odds with each other. I’m willing to give you the benefit of the doubt, but I swear to God, if this is some trick, I will rain down hell on you, treaty or not.”
Treaty? There was only one person calling Zach who had the power to affect the admittedly tenuous treaty between the Lincoln and Black Hawk packs. That would be the head alpha of the Black Hawks.
Tayen.
“Right. Send the address, then. My men and I will be there post-haste.”
It was hard not to grind my teeth as I listened, sure that something incredibly important was happening. But I held my tongue and made myself stand in place until Zach returned.
“It seems our gracious rivals have not only recovered our missing packmate but helped her through her first shift.”
Fuck!
It wasn’t the worst scenario in the world, but it wasn’t good, either. However, I was intrigued that they’d tattled on themselves to our head alpha. I’d have expected them to keep it a secret and brainwash Emily into joining them. But who knew? After I fucked up, she wouldn’t need to be brainwashed to ditch our pack. It could’ve been why our connection got severed, too.
“What do they want?” I imagined their demands had to be intense. Regardless, I’d do whatever they wanted. I wasn’t going to let Emily rot or be manipulated because of her vulnerable position. If, in a few months, she decided to join them, it’d break my heart, but I’d never stand in her way. I wanted to protect her choice, no matter what it was.
“They just asked that we come pick her up.”
All of us shared the same skeptical expression.
“That’s it?” Keller scoffed. “The pack that once set up an ambush as a peace meeting is offering to just… hand over a perfectly healthy, brand-new shifter, just like that?”
“Apparently,” Zach answered, but both his scent and face indicated he was just as suspicious. “I don’t believe it, either, but I’m not willing to risk her life. Caleb, Keller, and Carl, I want you with me. We’re heading there right now.”
As thrilled as I was to be getting closer to Emily, to see her face again, I was worried. “Are you sure that’s wise, with you being our head alpha? If this is a trap, do we want to risk putting you in it?”
I knew Zach was more than capable of handling himself, but that was in a fair fight, and as far as we knew, there was no guarantee the Black Hawk wolves would go about things honorably.
“No, we don’t, but Tayen wanted to speak head alpha to head alpha. So, if we want this new Kaia back, I have to go.”
“Emily,” I said. “Her name is Emily now.”
“Noted.” With that, he led us out to his vehicle, and while I was expecting a truck with an extended cab, I was surprised instead by a minivan. When I glanced at it, Zach just gave me an amused shrug.
“The wife said if I wanted another baby, she wanted a ‘mommy vehicle.’ So, happy wife, happy life.” With a wink, he hopped behind the driver’s seat.
I got in the back. It was a strangely humanizing moment. I’d been used to the head alpha having to be the epitome of masculinity and strength, and it was jarring to see one so comfortable driving a Mommy Mobile. In fact, he seemed proud of it, like being a family man was his greatest accomplishment.
More had changed about the pack than I’d thought.