14. Chapter 14
The Cedar Junction pharmacy sat at the north end of a two-acre lot outside town, a low building with a gravel turnaround and a loading bay at its back where the bulk-rural orders came in.
Declan pulled the SUV nose-first into a slot near the front door, cut the engine, and put his keys in his pocket.
“Two minutes,” he said. “Three on the outside. No camera on the front counter. I walked it once a week ago. If this goes sideways we can be ourselves.”
“Go,” Kira said.
He went.
Maren watched him cross the lot. He was moving the way a wolf moved when he was pretending not to be a wolf, relaxed at the shoulders, eyes that weren't relaxed working the lot under the brim of his cap. He pushed the door open and was inside.
The lot was the lot. Two other cars parked by the front, an older work pickup by the fence. Frost on the gravel. A sign that said RANCH ACCOUNTS, PLEASE USE BACK ENTRANCE. The sky was the gray that came in behind the dawn.
Kira was in the shotgun seat, phone ready. Had been since they'd pulled into the lot. Not looking at the phone. Looking at the lot through the windshield, phone steady.
Brennan was in the back seat beside Maren. He'd done the five-hour-drive version of this a dozen times on patrols. He had his eyes on the loading bay door because that was the angle Kira wasn't covering. His coat was still on. His fists were in his pockets.
The heater was on. Maren's breath was white anyway.
“He's good at this,” Kira said without turning her head. “He'll be out in two minutes.”
“I know. I'm not worried.” It was mostly true.
Maren had Jace's coat on over her own. The tire iron was across her thighs. Her feet weren't cold.
Seconds went. A full minute. Another.
Kira opened her door.
Her phone buzzed in her hand as she stepped down onto the gravel.
“It's a trap.”
“What?”
“Maren, stay in the car.” Kira turned and yelled toward the pharmacy door. “Declan, we’ve got to move. Now!”
Before Kira could finish getting the words out, the Thornwood men were already attacking.
Around the corner of the building, out of the trees east of the lot, over the fence line, out of the loading bay. A tide of them. No weapons. Shifter strength didn’t need weapons against a woman and two pack wolves on a gravel lot at dawn.
Brennan was out the rear door on his side of the SUV in the same beat.
They were completely outnumbered.
Maren saw that inside the first breath. Saw it before Kira could shut her door, before Declan had come out of the pharmacy, before any of them had moved on anybody. The math of the lot was the math. Three of her pack against more of theirs than the pack had planned for.
The door at the back of the pharmacy loading bay opened and Declan came through it at a sprint, a brown paper package tucked under his left arm.
Two Thornwood men broke off toward him. Declan took the first one at the throat and put him down.
The second one he threw into the loading bay wall. A third came up behind him.
Kira was halfway across the lot by then.
She hit the man coming around the corner of the building and the two of them went into the gravel together hard enough to jar dust up off the lot.
He wasn't getting up after. Another came in behind her.
She turned into him, took his arm at the wrist and rolled him over her shoulder into the gravel the way a woman taught other women to fight men who didn't expect to be thrown.
A third came at her. She caught him under the chin with the heel of her palm, head snapped back, down on his heels.
Punishing them. Punishing them methodically, the way a contracted combat trainer for a wolf pack punished men who came at her one at a time when they should have been coming four at a time.
Brennan hit the fence line at the back of the lot and cut off two Thornwood who were coming in hot from the trees.
He took the first one on the jaw with an elbow that sent the man half a turn before he went down.
The second one he took at the belt and threw sideways into the chain-link.
Two down in three seconds. Brennan was good. She hadn't known how good.
Maren had never seen shifter combat before.
It wasn't what hand-to-hand looked like between humans.
It was shorter. It was more efficient. A lot of the air had been taken out of the motion.
There was no throwing punches. There was arriving at a position where the other person couldn't. Kira was arriving at every position she could.
So were Declan and Brennan. None of them was failing the fight on technique. They were failing on arithmetic.
Maren wasn't in the driver's seat.
She scrambled over the console to the driver's seat.
Out the windshield Kira was battling four of them. She had one on the gravel not moving. Another she was throwing at a third as Maren watched. She was making them pay for every inch. She was also losing ground.
Brennan was twenty feet off, surrounded by three of them.
One caught him at the face with an elbow and his head snapped back, blood out of his nose already, and by the time his eyes were forward again a second of them had put a fist into his face from the other side.
Brennan's knees went. He went down on the gravel face-up with his arms coming up defensive.
Declan was the furthest, pinned against the bay wall by two.
Her fingers went to the ignition column. The keys weren't here. Declan had put them in his pocket. Her fingers went to the visor. Empty. Her fingers went to the console next to Kira's phone.
Empty.
She couldn't drive out.
Her other option was running.
She opened the door.
The cold hit her face. The gravel crunched under her boot. She was around the back of the SUV with the tire iron in her grip. The coat on her shoulders still. Two coats. Jace's coat heavy on her arms, slowing her.
She was going for the tree line east of the lot. Thirty feet of open gravel. Frozen ruts. A strip of ice where the gravel sloped down to a culvert.
Ten feet.
Her boot hit the ice.
The ice did what ice did.
She went down hard on her right side. Her hip hit first. Her elbow hit next. The tire iron flew from her grip and slid six feet further than she did and stopped against the culvert pipe.
She didn't lose consciousness. She lost the next second.
A hand closed on the back of her coat and lifted her.
“Shut up.”
She hadn't made a sound.
He said it anyway.
She twisted her head to see him. The coat came up over the back of her neck where he'd grabbed it.
The cold stripe of air on her skin was the same cold stripe she'd felt when Jace had brushed her hair off her neck in the yard yesterday, and her brain made the connection and made it so fast she hated her brain for doing it.
The man holding her was younger than she'd have guessed. Pack-born, she could see it in the jaw. Thornwood. The same line of mouth as the man who'd stood across the stone marker from Jace. A nephew's face on an uncle's face.
“Cliff! Van’s open!” The second man, the one who’d been working the zip ties, shouted it across the lot. Cliff. So that was his name.
He hauled her up.
Cliff wasn't looking at her. He was looking across the lot. She turned her head to see what he was seeing.
A swarm. Kira still fighting. Declan still fighting. Both of them losing ground the way fighters lost ground when they were outnumbered more than two to one and both of them knew it.
A van came around the back of the building while she'd been watching the fight.
Unmarked. Panel sides. The back doors were open.
She could see dark inside. The dumpster broke the sightline from the front of the lot.
From inside Kira's SUV, no view. From the pharmacy door, none either.
An open lane to load her without anybody on her side seeing the load until the doors closed.
Cliff walked her across the gravel at the pace a man walked a woman in zip ties when there was no resistance left.
She was trying.
Twisting her shoulder against his grip to see. Cliff. The second man who'd worked the tie, now beside Cliff. The driver she couldn't see yet inside the van. Three of them coming with her.
The van was already idling.
She reached for the bond with her chest because she'd never done it before and didn't know if it would do anything.
Jace.
Nothing came back in words.
Something came back in her ribs. The thing under her sternum opened and reached for something the same size reaching back, and for a second of gray morning on frozen gravel she felt his rage the way you felt weather coming over a ridge.
He knew.
He didn't know what yet. But the bond had told his wolf, and his wolf had told him, and whatever he was ten miles north of here was coming back at speed.
The cold edge of the van doorframe was against the back of her head.
She was the evidence he’d been told to deliver.
Maren had one second with her face a foot from the open door. She turned her head so she could see across the lot.
Kira with blood in her hair. Still swinging. Pinned and still swinging.
Brennan on the gravel on his back, face a mess of blood, one leg twisted under him at an angle that wasn’t the angle a leg went, one man’s boot on his shoulder pinning him. He was still trying to get up. He wasn’t getting up.
Declan down on a knee with Thornwood men around him. He turned his head at the van.
I see you.
Declan's face changed. He was going to try. She could see him measuring whether he could close the distance to the van before the men on him put him back down.
They put him back down.
The van doors pulled closed.
Lot gone. Gray gone. Cold gone.
Dark.
She felt Jace's rage again, farther now, coming.
Nothing came after that but the van's engine starting under her. A turn she felt in her shoulder. Tires going from gravel to pavement to a hard directional west. The inside of a van that smelled like men, oil, and something else she didn't have a name for that she would have later.
Her cheek was on the van's floor. The zip tie was so tight that her hands were going to go numb before her shoulders did.
Her right hip was the hip that had hit the gravel and it was going to bruise the width of her palm.
Jace's coat was still around her shoulders, pushed up her back where Cliff had grabbed it, warm against the small of her back where the van's metal wasn't.
Maren reached for the bond again and this time she didn't call his name.
She sent the shape of what had happened. The lot. A swarm of Thornwood. Kira outnumbered and still swinging. Brennan on the ground. Declan down on one knee and getting back up and going back down. Cliff's face. The west direction of the road. Not words. Feelings.
On the far end of it something opened and took the shape of what she'd sent and held it.
Ten miles north of Cedar Junction on the road running up toward the ridge, Jace was in the back seat of the bait SUV.
Rhys was at the wheel. Freya beside him in the back with a blond wig pinned neat under the hood of her coat.
The pavement ran two-lane and black past the windows.
The bond going clean quiet since Maren had fallen asleep under a sheet in her cabin with him on top of it two nights ago.
A sleeping person's quiet on the other end of a shared line.
A quiet he'd started to take for granted in the last three days.
The quiet went off like a flare.
Rage. Fear. The shape of a van going west. Her whole self coming through his sternum at once.
He didn't say a word out loud. Didn't need to. Rhys didn't need to ask. Tires hit the rumble strip as Rhys came around in the road hard enough to skip the shoulder.
Freya pulled the wig off in one motion and stuffed it into the pocket of her coat.
The alpha was going south.
In the van going west Maren felt him turn.
Not words. A shape. A direction changing in her chest. The ridge-weather that had been coming at her from ten miles away was coming now from a closer ridge and at a speed the weather didn't have until the wolf in it had decided it was going to catch her.
She breathed into the floor of the van.
Her eyes shut so the dark of the van's inside was her dark and not the dark Thornwood had chosen for her.
She stopped bracing against it.