Chapter 13
Rex
She’s been gone for almost twelve hours. The bedroom has been utterly destroyed. The mattress and blankets are ripped and torn, stuffing and feathers coat the scene, mixed with shattered glass. I can smell her here, still. I can smell her, and her fear.
I have come back to the place I made the mistake with the idea I might somehow be able to understand what’s happening now, but I don’t get it.
We have seen a great many wolves through their transformations, and while they are often messy, and usually clumsy, I have never seen anyone react the way she did.
The power, the intensity, the drive. She was not confused for a moment.
She did not shift and whine, and when I took my form, she did not lick at my jaws in eager submission.
She did not give out signals of softness, or look to me for the lead.
She attacked me, and she ran. She had precisely the same reaction in her wolf shape as she did in her human one, but she was much more able to act on her wild impulses. I was the one who wanted the shift so bad. She wanted to avoid it. She was trying to warn me, but I wouldn’t listen.
Obviously the full weight of our resources has been deployed. A web of surveillance, human and mechanical is covering a three-hundred-mile radius. She will be found. I know it.
And yet, I am deeply afraid that somehow we might miss her. She escaped my custody as if this place is as porous as a sieve. This, the fortress and home of the Regent pack was escaped from in minutes.
I remind myself that this is not a prison.
It is not designed to keep those who do not want to be here in.
I don’t know why she ran. She must have been absolutely furious with me.
I must have neglected her so much she could not share a single thought with me that mattered.
I came to her with an offer of chocolate ice cream, but by that time the damage had already been done.
I should have been courting her from the beginning.
Taking her to dinner, ensuring I spent as much time with her as possible.
But instead of any of that, I played the power game.
I waited her out until her awoken hormones had her almost entirely out of control.
And then I punished her. Confined her. And now she is gone, and there is something inside me telling me that no matter how I get her back, I won’t be getting the same person.
Not completely. I changed her with my arrogance and negligence.
I went to meetings instead of meeting her where she needed me, and I thought it was all okay because I was the alpha of the Regent pack and she was a little nobody.
I thought she’d come to me, break for me, give me everything I wanted and I would never have to do more than breed her.
Now everything has fallen apart.
“Sir,” Fescue says, getting my attention. I did not hear him come in. I am too busy being locked in a reverie of the very particular misery that comes from missing the one I love.
I turn toward him for the update I know he must be here to give.
“We might have found a sign of her,” Fescue says. “A truck driver around sixty miles from here was found dead inside his cab. Reports say it looks like he was savaged, and partially consumed by a wolf.”
“Where do they get wolf from?”
“They have forensics, sir. And, naturally, our contacts follow wolf attacks, in case…”
“In case,” I say. From time to time, a shifter will turn feral. They will start to kill, and perhaps even eat human flesh. It’s frowned upon, because it can become a compulsion. In my pack, it is strictly forbidden.
“There’s a decent chance it was her,” Fescue says. “So I took the liberty of deploying trackers, sir. They are already on their way.”
I start walking. I am not going to be left out of or behind on this one. I want to be the one to find my mate. I want to be the one to save her from whatever troubles she has gotten herself into.
A dead man. Someone tried to hurt her.
“You think she ate a man?”
“Let’s not leap to conclusions,” Fescue says while nodding.
“But she only just learned to shift. A wolf who just learned to shift is not going to eat a man.”
“She could have been caught in a compromising situation. She might have felt cornered. She might have killed. And, upon having killed, she might have found herself ravenous. She has not eaten properly since she shifted.”
I look at Fescue gravely. “The official story will be that she has not killed, and she has certainly not eaten.”
“Yes. Of course,” he says. He pauses for a moment, and I feel the weight of something I do not want to hear about to emerge from him.
“Would now be a bad time to tell you that we’ve traced her father? His name is Raymond Love, and he is currently wanted in several dozen states for murder and cannibalism.”
“It would be a bad time. It would be a very, very bad time,” I say. “Did you find him?”
“Nobody has found him. Several packs have kill-on-sight orders for him. He has a reputation that is, well, fearsome, sir. There is a report on the desk that you might want to familiarize yourself with.”
“I’m going to go out with the team. I want to bring my mate back.”
I want to hunt Nicky, because I do not want to think about the file, or what is in it, or what it’s going to mean if she ate a truck driver.
I want to take my wolf form and I want to bring her down and I want to claim her and bring her back here and…
fuck if I don’t want to lock her up in my den and never let her go again.
“Of course, sir. The helicopter is on standby.”
“We should have known this earlier,” I say as I start to jog toward the helipad.
* * *
Nicky
When I leave the truck, the windows are tainted with sanguine essence and my stomach is no longer growling.
I pad through the undergrowth, heading off into the forest. I will make my own way back to the city.
Once I am in the city, I will find human clothes, take my human form, return to my pack home. I will have a shower.
Even in this animal state, I have nothing but reverence for a hot shower. The human trapped inside me wants to wash all that has happened from me. I want to forget the sights and the sounds of the dispatching of a man who very much needed to die.
I am starting to become much more comfortable in this animal state. The way I can move on four paws, lope along at a pace that is far faster than any human gait feels like freedom of a kind I can hardly believe I tried to deny myself.
As I make my way through the forest, I catch a scent. It’s familiar. Very distant, but familiar.
For a moment, I cannot place it. Memory is hard to access in this state, but I know what is important, and what is not. This smell matters. It takes a few moments for my mind to catch up to the reason why.
Our pack mates are still missing. I’ve not heard anything from anyone that suggests they’ve been found, or that even a lead has come up in the meantime.
But I just caught scent of one of them. At least one.
I instinctively move toward it, the desire to protect and reclaim my pack the most powerful drive I have in this moment. I have destroyed one evil thing, and if I am to survive to destroy more evil things, I will need my family around me.
I move faster, turning away from the city and toward the thick forest around the base of the mountains. I can smell a lot of human activity out here too. Sweat and electrolytes and trail mix. Chocolate bars and regret.
I skirt around the people, hearing their chatter. One of them is playing tinny music from the speakers of their phone. I feel a brief instinct to savage them for that sin, but I pull back. I am not that hungry.
The scent draws me far from the human tracks that wind up the mountains, and instead pulls me deeper into the goat tracks and animal paths that wind into dense natural bush.
The scent continues to become stronger as I get closer. I smell animals. I smell wolves. I smell blood. Suffering. Pain. I smell captivity.
The closer I get, the more certain I am that my lost pack members are being held out here. Of course we never found them. They were being held outside the city. I didn’t even think about extending the perimeter this far from the borders of the city.
Suddenly, there is a new scent. This one comes to me suddenly, because the source of it remained downwind of me right up until the moment it wanted to emerge. This is a scent that knows how to hide itself, and how to appear.
I stop dead, my paws digging into the soil.
Another wolf is in front of me. He is gray, but appears reddish because of the rust discoloration around his jaws, chest, and front paws. He has followed me, I realize. Followed, then swung out and around and cut me off.
I back away a step. He follows.
The scent behind him remains. My pack.
My hackles are raised, my lips curled up to display my canines. I am willing to hurt him. At least, that is what my display says. But I am not truly ready to fight again so soon. There is something very particular about the wolf in front of me that drains away any belief that I would win.
This animal in front of me smells like death. Old death, new death, fresh kills, old kills. The way the creature’s eyes burn into me makes me want to whimper and crouch, but I resist that urge as well. I am frozen, trapped between competing instincts, unable to move until he does.
What he does is shift.
In the place of the wolf is a man in his late forties. He is rugged, muscular, and scarred. His hair is down to his shoulders, black underneath but well marked with gray.
“Hello, Nicola.”
My father says my name for the first time in many years, and I find myself unable to respond because a wolf’s tongue cannot speak, and it is for the best that it cannot.
My hackles are still raised. My teeth are still bared. I still want to run, but I can’t. I’ve missed him. Some part of me has missed him every single day since he drove away at that gas station and left me in a mire of blood and bodies.