Chapter Six #2
Gun oil. Sweat. Cheap menthol cigarettes. And under all of it, threaded through like a wire pulled tight, the sour reek I’d caught in my own lot yesterday afternoon. The one that hadn’t said a single word while Hammer ran his mouth, just stared with those flat, dead eyes and watched.
Silent Moe.
My wolf snarled, paws digging into the soft earth, and I cut hard to the right where the scent thickened. Branches whipped at my flanks. Somewhere behind me a fourth shot cracked off, then a fifth, the muzzle flash painting the trunks white for half a second before the dark slammed back down.
The shots weren’t aimed at the woods. They were aimed at the house.
Something in my chest went absolutely still.
I picked up speed. Soil turned to leaf litter, leaf litter turned to a carpet of pine needles that muffled my paws to nothing, and the scent kept pulling me forward like a rope around my throat.
He was moving. Moe was running, not toward the road but parallel to it, cutting through the pines like he knew the layout.
That part stopped me cold for half a stride.
He shouldn’t have known it.
Crowbar’s voice carried somewhere off to my left, low and clipped, calling a direction.
Drift answered him, further back. Good. They’d box him toward the creek.
My wolf knew that creek the way I knew my own hands—bank too steep on the far side for a man to climb too fast, the water cold enough this time of year to suck the speed right out of his legs.
The brush opened up into a small clearing, moonlight pouring down through the gap in the canopy, and there he was.
Forty yards out, moving in a low crouch, rifle slung across his back and a handgun in his fist.
Black jacket, black knit cap pulled low.
He was favoring his right leg, just slightly, like he’d caught a root somewhere back in the dark.
I didn’t growl. Growling was for warning when you wanted them to stop. I wanted him to keep running.
Breaking into a flat sprint, body low to the ground, I closed the distance in a handful of heartbeats.
He never heard me. The wind was wrong for him and right for me, his own breathing too loud in his ears, and by the time he registered the shadow coming up on his flank, it was already too late to bring the pistol around.
I struck him at the hip.
The impact took us both off our feet, and I felt the snap of something giving way under my shoulder—rib, maybe collarbone—before we tumbled into the brush in a tangle of limbs.
The pistol went flying. He got out half a sound, something between a curse and a yelp, and then my jaws were on his forearm, locked down hard enough to feel bone but not hard enough to take the arm off.
Not yet. I needed answers first. My wolf wanted the throat, but the man underneath was still running the show by the thinnest margin.
Moe thrashed under me. He was strong, I’d give him that, and he had a knife in his free hand by the time I registered the flash of steel. The blade caught me across the shoulder, a hot line of pain that my wolf shrugged off. I shifted my weight, pinning that arm to the ground with one massive paw.
His eyes went wide.
In the moonlight, looking up at the wrong end of a wolf the size of a small horse, Silent Moe finally lived up to the first half of his name. His mouth worked. Nothing came out. Just a wet, shocked sound, and the smell of piss bloomed sharp and immediate underneath us.
I bared my canines right above his face.
“Prez.”
Crowbar’s voice, close now, rifle held casually in both hands as he stepped into the clearing. Drift came in behind him, eyes flicking from me to the man under my paws and back again. The other wolves emerged, forming a circle around us, muzzles pulled back.
“Got him,” Crowbar said, like he was confirming a delivery. “You good, Prez?”
I huffed once through my nose. The cut on my shoulder was bleeding, but Moe wasn’t going anywhere with my full weight on his chest.
But there had been more than one set of footsteps. I’d heard them from the deck before I’d shifted. Two shooters at least, maybe three.
I lifted my head and tested the air.
Nothing.
That was the part that crawled up my spine. Not nothing as in empty. Nothing as in scrubbed. Whoever else had been out here had pulled back fast and clean, and the breeze was already starting to pull what was left of their scent west, toward the road.
A vehicle door slammed somewhere out past the property line. An engine turned over. Tires on gravel, then on asphalt, and then the sound was fading. The entire pack turned their heads, coming to the same conclusion as I had. Whoever the second man had been, he was gone.
I dropped my muzzle back to Moe’s face, breath fogging across his cheek, and watched him try very hard not to move.
“Want me to drag him in, Prez?” Drift asked.
I stepped off Moe’s chest, my wolf reluctant to give up the kill.
Crowbar already had the man’s wrists wrenched behind his back, zip tie biting into the skin.
Drift hauled him to his feet by the collar, and Moe’s good leg gave halfway up.
He hung there, half off the ground, head lolling, and I could smell the fear coming off him.
My wolf turned toward the house.
The trees thinned. Through the gaps I could see the back deck, the string lights still burning above the empty chairs, the fire pit untended, Drift’s last log smoking unattended.
The steel shutters were down over every window on the rear of the building, dark slabs where panes of glass had been ten minutes ago.
Trent was inside the fortress.
I picked up the pace into a lope then a run. Behind me I could hear Crowbar barking something at Moe, the sound of a body hitting the ground when a leg refused to cooperate, the scrape of being dragged.
I broke the tree line and didn’t slow down.
Riot was at the back door, shotgun ready, the heavy steel reinforced door braced open with his shoulder. He saw me coming and stepped aside, let me clear the threshold at a run.
The shutters had turned the common room into a bunker. Low light. Pool table cleared. My pack entered then had every visible exit covered, not a stitch of clothes on their bodies. And in the center of it, sitting on the leather couch, with my leather draped over his shoulders, was Trent.
He was holding the jacket closed at his throat with both hands, eyes huge.
Looking directly at me.
At my wolf.
For one suspended second the room held its breath as my wolf, traitorous bastard, padded forward two more steps before my brain caught up with my paws.
Trent’s jaw dropped.
“That—” His voice came out cracked. “That is a really, really big dog!”
Riot, behind me, made a sound like he was choking on his own tongue.
Right there in the middle of the common room, I lowered my body, trying to make myself smaller so Trent wouldn’t freak out. Pain shot through me, my ribs, my shoulder. Still, I didn’t move, because keeping Trent calm was my only priority right now, even if I knew that was a pipe dream.