Shifted Scars: A Wolves of Forest Grove Novel

by Lawson, Elena

  “And Layla isn’t answering her phone,” Charity added, tossing her dreadlocks over her shoulder with a frown.

  “I’m trying Seth now.”

  Clay’s warm hands folded around my arms, lending me some strength. He leaned in to my side and whispered breathily against my cheek. “Breathe, Allie.”

  I pressed the screen to call him and waited, vibrating more and more with unease as each ring went unanswered.

  “He isn’t answering,” I hissed, my voice trembling.

  “Here,” Clay said and held out his hand for the phone. I passed it to him and he listened for a second before hanging up and placing another call. “If she doesn’t answer then—”

  “Charity?” I could hear Layla’s voice connect on the other end of the call and snatched the phone back from Clay.

  He flinched as I put it to my ear. “Where are you?”

  “Allie?”

  “Are you guys all right?”

  “Yeah,” Layla replied, some trepidation in her voice. “We just stopped at the barrens to stargaze. Don’t worry, we packed the meat with tons of ice so it’ll be fine—”

  “I don’t care about the fucking meat,” I snapped, unable to help myself as my entire body sagged with relief and a muscle below my eye began to twitch. “Why weren’t you answering your phones?”

  “It was on silent.”

  “And Seth’s?”

  “Can’t find the damn thing anywhere,” I heard him call in reply.

  “Just...get back here, okay? Now, please.”

  “On our way,” she said, and the line went dead.

  “I’m losing my fucking mind,” I muttered to myself, forgetting there was an audience surrounding Clay and me. Ugh.

  Charity stepped in and rubbed my back. “Girl, I think you need some sleep.”

  She wasn’t wrong. I nodded numbly, and let Clay guide me into his side, relishing in the comfort of his body pressed along the side of mine.

  “Wait,” I said on a breath. “Luke still isn’t back.”

  Clay stiffened against me but grunted that he understood. “Charity and I will take care of it,” he said and then turned back to face her and the others. “Just let me get her back to bed and then we’ll track him.”

  “We’re coming, too,” Sara and Archer piped up. “Meet you at the fire ring?”

  Clay grunted his agreement again and even though I knew what the answer would be, I tipped my head up to him as he guided me away and asked anyway. “I won’t be able to sleep, maybe I should just go with—”

  “Not a chance. You’re having a stiff whiskey and then going to bed. You’re fucking shaking, baby.” He pulled me in tighter, and I let him, needing him to hold me together for just another second before I put myself back together.

  The door opened before we could even make it to the front porch, and Jared stepped out, all sleep rumpled hair and downturned eyes. “Allie? Clay? It’s like four in the morning, what are you guys—”

  “Luke still isn’t back,” Clay interrupted him, helping me up the steps to place me into Jared’s arms. I shuddered against his heat.

  “She hasn’t slept. Give her a whiskey and put her to bed, yeah?”

  “Allie,” Jared chastised, “You should have woken me up if you couldn’t sleep.”

  I sent a glare to Clay who only shrugged innocently, as though he didn’t just ensure that I would be babied until I finally forced myself to sleep. No, not babied, that wasn’t the right word. Taken care of, I supposed, but he knew I hated anyone doting on me. He knew because he was the exact same damn way.

  I’d take the whiskey, though, if only to calm my nerves.

  “Careful out there,” I warned Clay, giving him a meaningful look as I saw the others gathering around the fire ring to head out for the search. “And I want you back before breakfast.”

  He raised a brow. “That an order?”

  “You’re damn right it is,” I barked back, though I didn’t bother lacing the command with the power of my alpha status to strong-arm him into complying. I rarely did. He just better fucking listen or he wouldn’t get any nookie for a goddamned month.

  He smirked, but leaned in and brushed his lips over my forehead, eyeing Jared, who surprisingly didn’t show any discomfort at the gesture. “Don’t worry, babe. Everything’ll shake out all right. You’ll see.”

  9

  Don’t worry.

  Don’t fucking worry?

  Well, how about now?

  “We need to find them,” I snarled, my breaths coming in pants as I struggled to maintain a solid hold on my inner wolf. She’d been restless ever since Charity had barged into the cabin to tell me Trey and Todd still hadn’t been found.

  They’d been here since the start and were a mated pair. They welcomed me into the Forest Grove pack with open arms when the vast majority had shunned me because of Ryland’s distaste for me. And now they were gone, without a trace.

  We’d tried calling. Texting. Tracing their phones. The patrol teams on each ring had been notified and were keeping an eye out, but their scent seemed to just vanish somewhere to the east.

  Charity followed me outside into the rain, and I breathed in the heady scent of petrichor, letting it soothe me. Letting the cool water running down my face and body shock me into mental clarity.

  “They can’t have gotten too far,” I said over the roar of the downpour. We’d just seen them at dinner last night.

  We all pretended not to know how they liked to go out past the third ring some nights to rut in their wolf forms and that was exactly what they’d done. They’d snuck past third ring patrol and Charity pretended not to notice just like she always did. Except they hadn’t come back.

  Worse, Luke still hadn’t returned either, and it’d been two days since we sent out the first search party for him. We’d sent four more since then but came up empty handed each time.

  Not even Clay’s tracking skills were good enough to find him. His trail went stone cold not far outside the third ring.

  And of course now it was fucking raining. Any trace of Luke’s scent that may have remained was now gone, and if we didn’t move quickly, any trace of Trey’s and Todd’s would be gone, too. There wasn’t any time to waste.

  My phone buzzed in my pocket, and I swiped water off the cracked screen to read a text from Clay.

  Clay: Trey and Todd back yet?

  He’d had to go to Grove’s End to deal with a few things this morning and still hadn’t returned. I didn’t realize I’d been worried about him, too, until I saw his message.

  When Luke went missing, it wasn’t shocking. In fact, there were a few who even believed he may have deserted us, fed up with pack life. More built for life as a lone wolf. But now…

  Trey and Todd would never leave us. Especially not without saying something.

  Allie: No. I need you. We’re going out to search before the rain washes away their scent.

  Clay: Coming now. Don’t go anywhere without me, got it?

  I didn’t bother answering. If he wasn’t back in the next fifteen fucking minutes, I was leaving.

  “What do you want to do, Allie?” Charity asked, antsy on her feet as she awaited my orders. Charity had known Trey and Todd much longer than I had, and I could see the worry etched into her stare and the knot between her brows.

  I blinked away the rainwater leaking into my eyes, trying to focus through the noise of panic in my skull. Over the rumbling in my stomach that was becoming more and more difficult to ignore. Thank the stars Seth was going to pick up the massive meat order from the butcher in Portland the day after tomorrow. We could stretch what we had until then, but it would make searching that much harder.

  How far could we run, for how long, without proper fuel?

  “Clay is on his way back. You, me, him and Viv will take point. We’ll search to the east, where patrol said they lost their scent. Between the four of us, we should be able to pick something up and track where they went.”

  �
��The guys from the crew helping Sal took a rain day. Want me to beef up patrol in case we can pick up anything?”

  I should’ve thought of that. “Good idea. Double each ring and give them something of Trey’s or Todd’s to scent.”

  She nodded. “’Kay.”

  “And Seth,” I added. “Wake him up. I need him to keep an eye on things for me here while we’re gone.”

  Charity vanished a moment later, rushing through the mud to do as I asked as I stood there, useless in the rain. I pressed a hand to my rumbling stomach, but even if we had anything that would sate my hunger, there was no way I could eat right now.

  Not even Hazel’s cookies, which she’d been baking nonstop to try to make up for the fact that we had barely enough meat to get through another day.

  I squinted, senses piquing as I heard running footsteps approach. It wasn’t Charity, she’d gone the other way. And it wasn’t Clay, I’d have been able to feel him.

  Unable to contain my wolf any longer with all riot of emotions rattling the cage of my bones, I tossed my cell back onto the porch and removed my clothes in one fluid motion, letting the shift take me.

  I shuddered as the rain wet my fur a moment later, bristling against the momentary shock of pain as my body broke and reformed. I scented the air, catching her scent before I saw her coming.

  It was Sam.

  What is it? I demanded, shoving the question into her skull. I could sense her panic. The smell of it tainted her natural juniper smell.

  The quarry, her panicked voice came into my mind. Jared sent me for—

  Jared.

  I launched past her, gone before she could finish.

  Allie, wait! Her voice echoed inside my skull, but I couldn’t hear it over the agonizing whine of my wolf as our lungs collapsed even as they were filling with air, pushing us forward.

  Sam fell behind, and through the pandemonium in my head I managed to bark out an order for her to stay at camp. Being sure to lace it with the power of my status so she wouldn’t follow me. We didn’t need something happening to her right now. Clay was already on the verge of snapping.

  I was already on the verge of snapping.

  I plowed through the foliage, sliding in the muck but not caring even as I came up coated in dirt and debris with each skid of my paws over the earth.

  A vivid image of my mate in my mind kept me going. If anything happened to him…

  If he were hurt…

  If he were gone…

  I’d tear this world apart to find him, and I didn’t care who had to get hurt in the process. The logical part of my mind warred against that thought, but my wolf wanted blood.

  I veered around a tall oak and skidded through second ring patrol, turning heads as I flew down the sloping terrain toward the quarry.

  Relief flooded me like a sedative injected into my veins as my wolf recognized the feel of Jared’s soul nearing ours. Not gone, then. And I’d feel it now if he were hurt. I picked up on a feeling of unease from him, but nothing more.

  I shifted as I made it to the portable where his office was, rushing through the rain and up the steps to the front door on human feet. Steam lifted from my heated flesh as I brushed hair out of my face and stepped inside.

  Jared’s amber eyes snapped to me in the dark, his wolf glimmering just beneath the surface. “Allie, what are you doing here?”

  I blinked, confused as to why he was sitting in the dark until I flipped the light switch and found that the overhead light didn’t illuminate. “Sam said…” I trailed off, panting a little from the long run.

  Jared rounded his desk and came to me, tugging off his t-shirt with one arm and pulling it down over my head.

  What had Sam said? I supposed I left before she could really say anything at all.

  “She seemed panicked. I just...I just ran.”

  Jared pushed my wet silver hair back from my face and sighed just as I sensed Clay approaching. I twisted just in time to see him barge in the door, ass naked with his eyes full of malice. “What the fuck happened?”

  His glare cut to me. “Patrol said you flew by like a bat out of hell.”

  “The power lines were cut,” Jared said, drawing my attention back from Clay. “We thought it might’ve just been a fluke, but I went and checked it out myself. The cuts were clean.”

  “Show me,” Clay barked, already turning to go back out into the rain with Jared and me on his heels.

  “You don’t have any clients here today, right?” Clay checked before shifting. Something I should have done before waltzing into the portable office in my birthday suit, but I wasn’t thinking straight.

  We ran on foot through the quarry, only shifting once we were clear of the main operations area, where members of our pack—the employees of the quarry—huddled beneath the covered lunch area, waiting out the rain.

  We followed the power lines almost all the way out to the main road before Jared slowed, veering into the trees and shifting back to his human form. Clay and I followed suit, and Clay went to inspect a mess of wires Jared was pointing out to him while I kept an eye on the surrounding woods.

  Cars passed in the distance on the main road and the pelting of rain on leaves drowned out most everything else. I shifted back, letting my wolf takeover again as a familiar scent filled my nose. There was no denying, it was Sam’s scent. I circled the entire area, searching for any other scents in the shrubbery or clinging to the waterlogged earth, but finding none.

  “Why was Sam here?” I asked Jared as I shifted back, shivering.

  Clay’s eyes narrowed at Jared. “Sam was here?”

  “Yeah, she was passing by on her run when she noticed the power was out. She came with me to check the lines.”

  That explained why her scent was all over the place, but it didn’t explain why she was out running this way in the rain while there were a million other places for her to run.

  Jared’s eyes flickered to mine for an instant before falling away, and I could tell he was thinking the same guilty thought I was. It was clear from the clean cuts that this wasn’t an accident, but who would want to do this to us? And why?

  I could think of only two potential culprits. Sam or the witch, Gregory.

  “You think it’s that witch fucking with us because you didn’t do what he wanted?” Clay asked, water dripping in a steady stream from his chin.

  “You don’t think he would mess with our pack, too, do you?”

  He picked up on what I was referring to. There had to be a reason Trey and Todd were missing. What if Gregory snatched them up to use as leverage to get me to do what he wanted? To meet with the asshole he works for. One of the twelve Arcane Council delegates.

  “There’s only one way to find out,” Clay said in a low, dangerous voice that made my skin crawl and my toes curl all at once. “How much you want to bet he’s still stalking Forest Grove waiting to corner you again?”

  Jared frowned, seeing where this was going and clearly disagreeing with this angle. But I saw the sense in it.

  “This could’ve been a local,” Jared tried to argue, but Clay and I were beyond listening, and Jared would see that this was the easiest, and fastest way to rule out the witch.

  We needed to get searching for Trey and Todd before their scent began to disintegrate, but after that, we needed to come up with a plan to catch us a witch.

  “Do you know how to neutralize a witch, by chance?”

  Clay grinned. “Hell yeah, babe.”

  10

  “He’s coming to,” Jared informed me, his face placid as an early morning lake, even though I could sense how he truly felt.

  It was how we were all feeling. It’d now been almost forty-eight hours since Trey and Todd vanished without a trace. Luke was still missing. It was going to take days if not longer for the power company to come out and restore the lines, effectively pausing all operations at the quarry and putting our finances in a chokehold. Not to mention we were all fucking starving.

  Se
th would be leaving in about an hour to go pick up our order from the butcher in the city, though, so there was that at least.

  “Clay used the bindstone on him like we were taught, but I’ve never actually seen it work before so just...be careful, all right?”

  I inhaled deeply, unclenching my fists as I rose from the kitchen island where I’d been sitting with Layla and Vivian.

  “Want me to go with you?” Layla offered as I got up, but I shook my head. “You need to go with Seth. I don’t want anyone going anywhere alone right now. He’ll be leaving soon.”

  Layla hopped down from her stool and came around to pull me into a jasmine scented hug. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to.

  “I’m staying actually,” she said as she pulled away. “We wanted to be here for you.”

  Viv offered me a sad smile. “Destiny offered to go with him for the pickup. Sara is manning the bar tonight at the pub for her and you know how my girl is a night owl.”

  I smirked. That she was. Their pick up time was later in the evening so they likely wouldn’t be back until after dark. I debated sending a third body with them just in case, but then it was possible the meat order wouldn’t fit in the Jeep. They’d need all the space they could get.

  They didn’t push me on coming with, and I was grateful. They didn’t need to see this. Hell, I didn’t even want to see this, but this was my job now. I was the alpha, and I needed to keep my pack—my family—safe.

  “Thanks, you guys,” I muttered, leaving them behind in the kitchen as I let Jared lead me out to the moon chamber where we were keeping Gregory.

  It’d been relatively easy to grab him. Just like Clay thought, he’d been loitering outside Jacqueline’s shop earlier today. Waiting to ambush me again when I left with this week’s book order. But it was him who was ambushed. One good clock to the back of his skull by Clay and we had him in the back of the Jeep.

  The pack kept a small store of bindstone in the safe in Ry’s old office. It didn’t look like much except a hunk of rock, but apparently if worn around a witch’s neck, it prevented them from accessing their powers. Blocked their ability to draw energy from the earth. I wouldn’t pretend to understand how it worked, but I was grateful it did.