Undercover Wolf

by Paige Tyler

  He turned right, following the path on the map that he’d committed to memory and that he knew led to the larger rooms in the maze, since they assumed that’s where the bad guys and their captives would likely be. He braced himself, expecting to run into one or more of those aforementioned bad guys at any moment, but after not seeing anyone—or even picking up a fresh scent—in a few minutes, Sawyer knew something was wrong. It was too quiet. Too easy.

  On the radio, Jake announced his group was in the tunnels now, coming in from the entrance to the north. They didn’t run into any immediate resistance, either.

  Three rooms and a long corridor later, Sawyer finally picked up a familiar scent. He started to announce it when he realized he couldn’t, not with Erin there. He threw a quick glance over his shoulder at Harley and Caleb, assuming they’d smelled the same thing he had, but apparently not, as neither of them said anything.

  “Vamp ahead,” he whispered softly after slowing at one of the intersections in the hallway to let Erin pass him. He gave Harley a pointed look, tapping his nose. Fortunately, she seemed to get what he was saying, giving him a nod before turning to sniff the air. A moment later, she announced that the vampire was somewhere ahead of them.

  “What does the thing smell like?” Erin asked, glancing over her shoulder at Harley, the question coming out as a mixture of curiosity and embarrassment.

  Harley took another sniff before making a face. “Mud and blood. But old blood. Like it’s drying out and starting to go rancid.”

  “Okay,” Erin said before looking away. “Probably a little more than I needed to know, so thanks for that.”

  They’d barely made it a few more steps before Erin turned and gave Caleb a suspicious look. “Why didn’t you say anything about smelling the vampire? You trying to hold out on us?”

  Caleb kept walking, not even bothering to look back. “I’m an omega werewolf. I didn’t say anything about smelling the thing because I didn’t. My nose doesn’t work as well as Harley’s.”

  Erin looked baffled at that. Sawyer had to admit he was, too. The truth was, he didn’t know a whole hell of a lot about werewolves, even though he was one. Sawyer knew he was an alpha, but that was because the only other werewolf he’d ever met—a beta—had told him so. The guy had only talked to him for a few minutes and had never mentioned anything about omegas.

  “What the hell does that mean?” Erin asked. “Are you telling me you’re some kind of junior version of the real thing? Like the B-team werewolf or something?”

  Sawyer cursed under his breath. They didn’t have time for this right now, but Erin never could pass up an opportunity to insult someone. It was like her superpower. Sarcasm and snark at the worst possible time.

  But it didn’t seem as if the jab got through to Caleb, at least not based on the grin he gave her.

  “Wow. You’re good.” He stopped and turned to face Erin. “You got it right off the bat. Omegas are definitely second-class citizens when compared to alphas like Harley…and other werewolves.”

  Caleb glanced at Sawyer as he said that last part, then turned his attention back to Erin, eyes glowing with the slightest hint of blue instead of the usual gold.

  “My nose isn’t that good compared to theirs,” Caleb continued. “My hearing isn’t so great, either. Same with eyesight. I definitely can’t see as far. Claws and fangs are a bit lacking, too, I guess. But of course, the big difference is control. Alphas are all over that control shit, while omegas like me have absolutely none.”

  As he spoke, Caleb moved closer to Erin until he was only a foot away and gazing down at her with an expression that had suddenly lost all its humor.

  “You might want to think about that the next time you decide to rag on me like we’re friends or something. I’ve been known to bite during my less-lucid moments.” Turning, Caleb strode down the hallway. “We aren’t gonna find that vampire by standing around talking, so let’s go. I feel like shooting something.”

  Sawyer let his gaze travel back and forth between Harley and Erin before heading after Caleb. “Well, that could have gone better. Pissing off the guy you hope will be watching your back in the next few minutes isn’t the way I would have approached the situation, but whatever.”

  Erin didn’t say anything as she and Harley caught up to him, but he hadn’t expected her to. Erin was good at burning bridges. She wasn’t so good at building them. Hopefully, her lack of social talent wouldn’t come back to bite them all in the arse.

  As they moved through several more rooms and connecting corridors, the vampire’s scent didn’t get any stronger, which worried Sawyer. They should have encountered someone by now. But other than Long Hair and the vamp, it didn’t seem like anyone had been here in a few days. That made his inner wolf wary. There was definitely something wrong.

  “Sawyer, do you have something on your side yet?” Jake asked over the radio. “We can’t be more than a few blocks from your location and haven’t seen anything.”

  Before Sawyer could answer, he was interrupted by Adriana’s panicked voice.

  “What’s wrong?” she demanded. “Do you think Kristoff is okay? If he was hurt, they wouldn’t kill him, would they?”

  Sawyer tried to tune the girl out, happy to let Jake deal with this one. Adriana had wanted to come on the raid with them, insisting she could help. While it’d be nice to have her supernatural abilities the next time they ran into the vampire, he and Jake had vetoed that, refusing to back down no matter how much the girl had begged. Jake told her she could listen in on the radio along with the members of both support teams. Based on the current outburst over the radio, she’d also gotten her hands on a microphone. Hopefully, she hadn’t zapped all of the support agents.

  “I heard something up ahead,” Harley said suddenly, jerking Sawyer away from the radio drama.

  He listened, trying to pick up on whatever she’d heard. “It sounds like someone moaning.”

  “I agree,” Harley said softly, her eyes intent on the far end of the hallway, like she was afraid she’d lose track of the sound.

  They moved forward slowly, Sawyer interrupting the conversation between Adriana and Jake, telling them to stand by, they may have found something. The whimpering got louder as they approached an arched doorway up ahead on the right. The room beyond was as poorly lit as the rest of the maze. Sawyer caught Harley’s eye, covertly holding out two fingers before tapping his nose again.

  She nodded. “I smell two people, but I don’t know if they’re bad guys or not, so watch yourselves. This feels really funny.”

  Sawyer agreed. They’d been wandering around down here for nearly twenty minutes without coming across anything. Now, out of the blue, whimpering draws them toward a specific room. If Sawyer had been trying to set up an ambush, this was exactly how he’d do it.

  They approached the room carefully, Harley and Erin in the lead, Caleb covering the rear, while Sawyer stayed focused on the corridor ahead of them. If someone was going to attack them, it could come from anywhere.

  Harley gasped as she stepped through the doorway. Sawyer quickly followed her and Erin in to find a long narrow room lined with a series of holding cells along both walls. Thick bars ran from floor to ceiling of each, more than twice what you’d expect to find in a normal prison. The lock plate on each door looked equally strong.

  The place was intended to hold some extremely powerful prisoners.

  Harley ran past the cells that were empty, stopping when she reached the very last one at the far end of the room. Sawyer kept his attention focused on the pitch-black hallway beyond the cell as Erin followed, more leery of an ambush than ever. Caleb was still out there keeping watch as well.

  “Bollocks,” Erin muttered, looking through the bars of a cell across the way from the one Harley stood in front of, eyes wide. “There’s a little kid in here. She barely looks alive.”

 
Another pitiful groan filled the room.

  “There’s a boy in this one who can’t be more then twelve years old,” Harley said, not taking her eyes off the cell. “He’s hurt.”

  Shit.

  Sawyer’s heart thumped even faster as he sniffed the air urgently. Two kids left behind in locked cells, injured, weak, and in pain. They were bait.

  This was a trap.

  It had to be.

  “Jake, we have two injured captives on our end—both kids,” he said into the radio as Harley, Caleb, and Erin frantically searched the room for keys to the cell doors. “It’s possible they were too much trouble to deal with and were left behind, but I don’t think so.”

  Sawyer was waiting for a reply when the floor and walls started shaking around them, almost knocking him off his feet. He hadn’t even recovered from that when a low rumbling sound echoed in the air, the scent of smoke and dust filling his nose.

  “What the bloody hell was that?” Erin shouted, her handgun out and swinging in different directions as she tried to figure out where the threat was coming from.

  Sawyer didn’t answer. He was too busy trying to interpret the shouts and loud noises coming through his earbud.

  “They blew a section of the ceiling!” Jake shouted, only to be interrupted by the sounds of gunfire. “They damn near brought it down on our heads, then opened up on us with automatic weapons before we even knew what was happening. Another second or two and we would have been under the rubble instead of trapped on this side of it. We’ll deal with them and find another way to get to you. I think they dropped the ceiling to separate us, so watch yourselves.”

  Sawyer bit his tongue to keep from asking Jake how that was possible. There wasn’t time for talk right now, but the American werewolf had to know the only way the bad guys could have gotten the explosive charges in the ceiling placed properly for something like this was if they’d known exactly when MI6 and STAT were coming and which route they’d be taking. And for those bad guys to purposely split up the teams meant they would have had to know there’d be two groups to start with. The only way they could have gotten that kind of information was if they’d sat through the joint MI6 and STAT mission briefing a couple of hours ago.

  The implications of that were so stunning, Sawyer nearly missed it when Erin spoke. “Jake’s right, Sawyer.”

  She was frantically digging through a desk by the wall, searching for keys she almost certainly wasn’t going to find. If these two kids had been left behind as bait, there’d be no reason to make it easy to get them out. And those bars looked thick enough to need explosives to get through.

  Explosives they didn’t have.

  “We need to get the hell out of here,” she added. “This room is a completely crappy place to try and defend.”

  He opened his mouth to agree when he picked up the combined scents of a large group of people heading their way, along with one he couldn’t identify. Jake was right. The shit had hit the fan.

  “Company’s coming,” Sawyer shouted, turning to head back toward the door, both so he could deal with the bad guys and avoid the questioning look he’d be sure to find in Erin’s eyes as she wondered how the hell he knew someone was coming. “Get those kids out of there. Now!”

  “There aren’t any keys,” Erin snapped, ripping a drawer out of the filing cabinet near the desk and emptying the contents on the floor. “How are we supposed to get them out?”

  Sawyer would have suggested trying to pick the locks, but right then a group of heavily armed men came around the corner into the hallway from the direction they’d just come and started shooting. Cursing, Sawyer ducked back into the room, then quickly leaned out to lay down suppressive fire with his MP5. He wasn’t as concerned with hitting them as he was with making them reconsider an all-out assault.

  Harley was at his side in a moment, dropping to one knee and peeking around the door with her handgun to start picking off whoever was dumb enough to expose themselves. But there were a lot more bad guys behind those who went down. Definitely way more than he wanted to deal with.

  “Anytime you get those kids out of there would be good,” he called over his shoulder. “We need to leave.”

  But instead of a snarky answer from his teammate, all he got was a loud growl in return.

  Sawyer snapped a quick look over his shoulder to see Caleb striding toward the little girl’s cell, claws and fangs fully extended, eyes glowing so blue they nearly lit up the darkness around them, muscles twisting and spasming along his arms and shoulders. With another growl, he grabbed the bars of the cell door and yanked like a man possessed.

  Erin stood there, eyes wide in disbelief as Caleb lost it, snarling so loud it echoed off the concrete walls. Sawyer couldn’t imagine what the werewolf thought he could accomplish until he saw the bars start to bend. A split second later, the concrete along the ceiling and floor began to crack and crumble.

  “We got trouble!” Harley shouted, drawing his attention back to the crowd of trigger pullers in the hallway.

  Sawyer didn’t even have to ask what kind of trouble. There was no way to miss the mountain of a man coming their way. Well over seven feet tall, he had to be as wide as a sodding doorway. But it wasn’t the size and muscles that worried Sawyer. Or even the earthy, reptile scent coming off him. It was the fact that the guy had brownish-green, scaly skin, which the bullets from Harley’s handgun were bouncing off at the moment.

  “Bloody hell,” he muttered.

  Stepping out from the doorway, he unloaded the remainder of the magazine from his MP5 straight into the thing’s chest. While the hail of gunfire shoved the creature back at least ten feet, it mostly seemed to piss him off.

  Sawyer heard Harley shouting into the radio as he reloaded, saying they’d run into another supernatural—a shifter maybe—who was big, green, mean, and apparently impervious to gunfire.

  Sawyer barely got his MP5 reloaded and ready before the shifter came at them again. He fired slower this time, aiming at different weak points—or at least what he hoped were weak points. It was hard to tell when all the thing did was grunt occasionally.

  Harley joined in with her handgun, sometimes aiming for the shifter, other times focusing on the human attackers who weren’t as bulletproof. But even after seeing men go down and not get up and forcing the shifter back across the floor again and again, Sawyer knew they couldn’t keep this up forever. He’d brought a lot of ammo, but not that much.

  “We need help here!” he shouted over his shoulder in time to see Caleb rip the second cell door completely off its hinges, chunks of the lock plate bouncing off the walls.

  Before Sawyer could even rationalize how that was possible, Caleb charged past him, one of the twisted bars from the cell door in his clawed hands, snarls reverberating from his throat. The omega werewolf didn’t slow as he rounded the corner of the doorway Sawyer and Harley were taking cover behind, but ran straight into the middle of the group of bad guys like a runaway truck, the metal bar swinging left and right like an oversized mace.

  The scaly shifter went down under the onslaught—along with several other men—but Caleb continued to smash anyone within reach. When the bar got embedded in one of the bodies and dragged out of his grip, the omega didn’t slow. He simply scooped up an abandoned assault rifle from the floor and used it like a club.

  The big shifter got back on his feet and crashed into Caleb, almost crushing him through the concrete wall, but the omega shoved right back, trying to rip the thing’s throat out with his claws.

  Sawyer had never seen anything like it. The two supernaturals were fighting without hesitation or thought, like feral animals. The shifter was insanely strong, but Caleb was like a berserker.

  Sawyer stepped out into the hallway, closer to the fight, ready to shoot. Harley was right there with him, trying to get an angle that would help Caleb, but he and the shifter were movi
ng too fast. An errant shot was as likely to hit Caleb as the creature. The best he and Harley could do was keep the human bad guys from getting involved.

  Caleb and the creature were bleeding heavily now. Bullets might not penetrate that brownish-green skin, but werewolf claws obviously did. It was hard to watch as they continued to slash and punch at each other, but harder to look away. Sawyer was about to say the hell with it, launch himself into the middle of the battle, and hope for the best when Erin appeared at his side.

  She grabbed his shoulder. “You and Harley get the kids out of here. I’ll take care of Wacko Wolf and slow these guys down until you get away.” When Sawyer looked at her doubtfully, she gave him a shove. “Go. You know I’m not good with kids. I’ve got this.”

  Before Sawyer could point out that she was full of crap, Erin was running toward the fight. Screaming like a banshee, she threw herself on the creature’s back. Sawyer had enough time to see her shove the barrel of her pistol in the thing’s ear hole before Harley yanked him away.

  “Let’s go!” she shouted, disappearing back into the room with the cells and the kids he knew wouldn’t survive if they didn’t get them out of there fast.

  Chapter 7

  Harley holstered her Glock and ran into the cell on the left, bending down to scoop up the blond girl from the ratty mattress she lay on. She stifled a cry of dismay when she realized the little girl couldn’t be more than fifty pounds. Her arms were thin and pale, spotted here and there with bruises and scratches from rough treatment. She didn’t even stir as Harley picked her up, and if it wasn’t for the slight fluttering pulse along the girl’s throat and the unsteady heartbeat at the threshold of her werewolf hearing, Harley would have thought the child was dead.

  Forcing those macabre thoughts aside, Harley focused on moving as fast as she could out of the cell without jostling the girl more than necessary.