Chapter 26
Chapter twenty-six
Jen
We make it out of the site in seventeen minutes total. Three minutes faster than the math said we had.
The trucks roll north on the logging road, lights off, engines low, the orange of Site Theresa shrinking in the rearview until the trees swallow it.
Dean is at the wheel of the work truck. Thaw in the passenger seat.
Harek, Fen and I in the back. Crull is in the prisoner truck with Daron at the wheel and the two retrieval agents in the cargo box on the wrong side of the mesh, where they will ride out the trip back to the canyon and have whatever conversation Crull decides to have with them about who they thought they were retrieving.
The pack is silent for the first twenty minutes.
I look at my hands in the dashboard light.
The claws are smaller.
The horns have not retracted.
I reach up.
Thaw has turned half in the passenger seat. His gold eyes are on me. The bond is wide open and what it is carrying is — careful. Not afraid.
"Jen."
"Yes."
"How are you?"
"I'm okay. The patch is quiet. The claws are back. The horns are still on. I don't know how to put the voice away yet but I'm not going to use it on you so it doesn't matter."
His mouth twitches a fraction. "Thank you."
"How are you?"
He thinks about it.
"I am — proud," he says, slowly. "I am proud and I am terrified and the two are not at war. The proud is for what you did. The terrified is because I have known your body for weeks and I do not know your body anymore."
"You will. We will figure it out."
"Yes."
Fen is at my left. His hand has not left mine since the cold-storage room. The not-yet-thread is full. He has not spoken since he knelt. He has been present — his hand on mine, his weight against my shoulder, his eyes awake — but he has not opened his mouth, and I have not pushed him to.
I lean forward in the back seat.
"Dean."
"Yeah."
"You are too quiet."
"I am driving."
"You have been driving for twenty minutes and you have not looked at me once."
His eyes find mine in the rearview.
"I am giving you a minute," Dean says. "I have been around shifters my whole life. I do not have questions for what you just did. I will. But not yet."
"Okay."
He looks at the rearview a beat longer. Then back at the road.
We are forty minutes out from the third cache when Dean's radio lights up.
He goes still at the wheel. Thaw turns.
"What?" Thaw says.
"Daron is on a frequency we monitor," Dean says. Slow. "Syndicate internal. They are talking to each other in real time. He is recording."
"What are they saying?"
Dean lifts a finger. He is listening.
His face goes blank.
"Pull off," Thaw says.
"There is no pull-off for two miles."
"At the two miles, pull off."
Dean drives the two miles.
The truck rolls into a forest-service spur and Dean kills the engine and the silence of the canyon comes up around us. Crull's truck pulls in behind us. The radio is on Dean's belt. Daron is in the cab of the other truck with his own radio, and the two wolves are listening to the same frequency.
Dean unclips his radio. He turns the volume up. He hands it across the cab to Thaw. Thaw puts it to his ear.
His face does not change.
He listens for thirty seconds.
He hands the radio back to Dean.
He looks at me.
"Jen," he says. Quiet. The careful is gone. What is in his voice now is the alpha making sure I am sitting down before he says the next thing. "There are two transmissions. They are talking to each other across networks. I want you to hear both of them. In order."
"Okay."
Dean reroutes the audio through the truck's small speaker.
The volume is low. The canyon outside is silent.
The pack is silent. The audio-feed comes through the cab in a man's flat voice, the kind of voice a comms officer uses, and what it says is a Syndicate internal message broadcast on a frequency the twins have apparently been monitoring for a year:
All regional teams stand by. Phase Two has been authorized. Acquisition windows on the following names are open as of zero-four-hundred local. Begin retrieval operations on all listed candidates. Twenty-three names. Pacific Northwest priority. End transmission.
The cab is silent.
I do not have to ask. I know what the twenty-three names are.
The twenty-three other ACTIVE women on the registry.
The Syndicate has just authorized the mass retrieval of every other compatible woman they have on file, and they have authorized it as of four o'clock this morning, which is — I do the math — twenty minutes after we burned Site Theresa to the ground.
We hit them. They responded by accelerating the program.
"Twenty-three women," I say. My voice is flat.
"They have already started grabbing them.”
I close my eyes.
The patch on my chest is cold now.
"What is the second transmission?" I say.
Dean cues the audio-feed forward. The second transmission comes through the cab speaker. A different voice this time. Higher up. The flat clipped tone of a senior officer giving a directive across a secure network.
The voice says:
Subject Forty-Seven has activated. Bio-signature exceeds projected ceiling. All pursuit assets converge on the Cascade theater. Bring her in.
The transmission ends.
The cab is silent.
I look at Thaw.
"They want to take me back."
"Yes."
"They do not get to do that."
"No."
The audio-feed hisses with carrier-static. Dean is reaching to turn it off when it crackles again.
He stops with his hand on the dial.
A third voice comes through. Different frequency. Cross-channel bleed. Quieter than the first two, the way a signal sounds when it is not on the same network as the one you are tapped to and you are getting it through a wall.
A man, mid-sentence:
— transport confirmed. Subject Hollens, M., secured. Crossing into Cascade theater inbound. ETA six hours.
Dean's hand goes still on the dial.
Thaw closes his eyes.
The cab goes silent in a different way.
The file of M. Hollens is on my lap. I have been holding it.
She is being moved.
Right now. Six hours from where I am sitting. The Syndicate has moved her in response to my activation signal.
The patch on my chest does not pulse.
It spikes.
Not heat. Not pull. Direction. A hard violent absolute aim, due south of where I am sitting.
I turn in the seat.
I am facing south. My body has rotated me. I did not think about it. The patch wanted south and my body delivered south.
Harek's hand on mine goes still.
Fen's hand on my other hand goes hot.
Thaw is watching me.
The patch is not pulling toward a person. It is pulling toward the parts of me the Syndicate took.
The pack reads what is happening through every line at once. They have gone very still in two trucks.
"Jen."
Thaw's voice.
"Yes."
"You turned south."
"The patch is reading what they took out of me. Some of it is in her."
Thaw goes quiet.
The pack has not moved.
They are waiting for my decision.
Somewhere along the way, I stopped being the person they were protecting and became the person they were following.
I look up.
Thaw's gold eyes are on me.
"South," I say.
He nods. Just once.
“Let’s go get her.”
Can Jen and her mates find the woman carrying their baby and defeat Syndicate once and for all? Find out in Monster Queen Rising, the final book in the Spring Equinox Mates Series.