by Mason Sabre
“They always think it’s Other,” remarked Gemma. “They could see a Human do something and still we’d take the shit for it.” Cade had to agree with her there.
“Well, yeah ... but this time it is,” Cade said. “And that Other is in my car.”
Both Gemma and Stephen stared at Cade as they took the words in.
“Say that again?” Stephen said after a minute. “The what is in your car?”
“It’s a kid. A boy,” Cade frowned. “Maybe like Evie’s age. “
“What’s he doing in your car?”
“I was running. I found him out in Denby Woods. He was out of it.”
Gemma glanced around. “Where’s your car.”
“I parked it down the lane.”
Stephen cocked his head to the side and narrowed his gaze. “What are you not saying?”
Cade met his stare levelly. “He’s a half-breed. He has the hunger.”
Chapter Six
A pin. That was all that needed to drop and it wouldn’t matter where, because the silence that had suddenly filled the air was that thick. That was what came to Cade’s mind—a pin. He watched Gemma and Stephen’s faces, could see the countless thoughts going on behind both sets of green eyes.
“He’s just a kid,” Cade said in defence, holding his hands out to the side with a shrug at the words that hadn't been spoken, but he knew were there. “I couldn’t just leave him. They’d have beaten the shit out of him. Someone already did.”
He ground his teeth and glanced from Stephen to Gemma, willing them to say something. Anything.
No response at all.
“Fine,” he said. “Both of you, standing there and judging me. What would you have done? Left him? I could have dumped him somewhere. I could—and then they could find him and then they’d ...” Cade stopped, took a deep breath. “Forget it. It doesn’t matter. Sorry,” he said after neither of them had said a word for a full two minutes. “Shit. This was a mistake. Forget I came here. Just go back to … whatever it was before.” He turned away, hurt that Stephen didn’t seem to be willing to help, but more than that, it was the disappointed look on Gemma’s face that speared right through him.
He didn’t get very far. Gemma ran after him and caught his arm. “Cade. Wait,” she cried. He shrugged her off and carried on walking, feeling incredibly wounded by the lack of an immediate offer of help. Every step heavy with foreboding—he’d have to deal with this on his own.
“Cade … please stop.” Gemma begged him. “You saved him?”
Cade stopped, his back to her. “I thought that’s what I was doing.” Underlying frustration coated every word. “I couldn’t just leave him there.”
“He’s killed a Human?” said Stephen, who had come to stand with them. Cade turned to face him. “Because that’s what’s going on with them in there,” he continued, pointing back in the direction of his house.
“I think so. I saw the body. It was pretty torn up, but it’s … it’s just …” Cade tried to find the right words. “This kid’s face … he … someone knocked ten bells of shit out of him. Maybe he was just defending himself.”
“His hunger has started?” asked Gemma.
“It has. I gave him rabbit. And I calmed him down.” He lowered his voice. “I had to reach him to do it.”
Stephen’s face said it all in that instant—shock, horror and a mixture of bloody hell to add to it for good measure. “You joined his mind? You went in and joined?”
No reply.
Gemma tugged at Cade’s arm so he would look at her. She looked him straight in the eyes, searching for answers before she asked the question. “You’re bound to him, aren’t you?” she whispered in shock.
“You went and bound yourself?” Stephen’s voice was thick with disbelief.
“He needed to calm down. There wasn’t any time for anything else.”
“Shit,” he finally breathed. “Fucking shit. You couldn’t find another way?”
“I couldn’t leave the kid there. They brought Urobachs in. They torched the entire woods. All of it gone.”
“They’ve torched all the ones around it, too,” Stephen added. “It’s a whole shit storm going on for one dead Human. That’s what my dad is dealing with right now. He’s going insane in there.”
“If you’d have got caught, too,” Gemma said softly, “they’d have killed you.”
Cade shrugged. “Probably.” He glanced at Stephen, who had started to pace up and down. “Shit, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to come here with this. I just … they’ve blocked the roads off and I thought … Hell, I don’t know what I thought. I shouldn’t have come here. I shouldn’t have got either of you involved. This is my mess.” He turned to stride off, regretting that he might have just put his friends in a very dangerous position.
“We’re not letting you do this alone,” Gemma shouted, running to catch up to him.
“You really think you’re going to have all the fun without me?” Stephen drawled on the other side of him.
Relief swamped Cade. He knew he should refuse their help, deal with it on his own and protect his friends from getting into any trouble. But he didn’t. He needed their help. He had no idea how to get the boy to safety as fast as possible. “Thank you,” he said hoarsely, looking from one to the other.
Gemma reached up and wrapped her arms around his neck, her luscious breasts pressing against his chest. He went completely motionless, his mind threatening to blank. He was already in the balance, trying to hold onto the boy mentally, trying to hold his own hunger down, and then trying to fight this crazy attraction to Gemma. She invaded his senses, his mind, making the wolf inside pace in restless urgency as it demanded to be given what it wanted. But he couldn’t. There were so many reasons why what he wanted was wrong. His arms came around her as if of their own volition, holding onto her a bit too tightly. He took a deep breath and made himself back away, putting a safe distance between them both before his mind was lost to it all.
He didn’t know what had come over him lately. He didn’t know what it was or what to do with it. He’d known Gemma since she was a child. She was practically his sister. But when she was near him, it was as if his wolf couldn’t see that she was a tiger, or that it simply didn’t care. The need inside him rose high and demanded that he grab hold of her and never let go. The wolf wanted to make her his in every way possible.
“I’ll meet you at the car,” Stephen said. “I’m just going to tell the parents that we’re going out. You go ahead.”
“Malcolm isn’t going to let you leave.”
“That’s why I’ll be telling my mother,” Stephen winked and then ran off in the direction of the house.
The first thing Cade did when they got to the car was check to see if the boy was still out of it—that he wasn’t raging and ready to leap and rip out their throats as soon as he opened the door.
“If the Humans get the boy, you’re going to die, too,” Gemma said softly from behind him, her voice trembling. “You’re bound to him. He’s going to take you down with him.”
Cade faced her once more, wishing he trusted himself enough to take her in his arms and soothe her fears. “He’s a half-breed.” He smiled reassuringly and reached out to tuck a loose strand of hair behind her ear, risking that small measure of contact because, quite simply, he just needed it. “Maybe it doesn’t work that way.”
Cade hoped to hell that was true. He had never bound himself to anyone before. He knew that people could die from it if one of the dyad died, especially if the bond was strong. But would it be strong with something that wasn’t pure? The boy certainly couldn’t bind himself back. Perhaps if anything happened, Cade could sever the link? He hoped he could, but even more than that, he hoped nothing happened to the boy.
They waited by the car for Stephen to come back. Cade was reluctant to open the door while it was just him and Gemma. He knew the boy wouldn’t hurt them—not on purpose but he wasn’t confident that the boy could be anywhere nea
r rational if his hunger struck again.
“He’s in there?” Stephen asked as he approached them.
“Yes,” said Cade. “He’s calm. I fed him before.”
“You make him sound like a pet.”
“A hungry were is a dangerous were,” replied Cade with a frown.
“He isn’t a were,” shot Stephen. “He isn’t one of us.”
“Don’t be a jerk. That’s just semantics. Whatever you want to call him, he is one of us now. He has the blood of the wolf surging through his veins. You of all people know what the hunger is like when you haven’t fed.”
Stephen glared at him and Cade knew he had hit that nerve. But he needed to. Arguing about what the boy was now, wasn’t going to help them. Stephen had suffered the hunger. It was a cheap shot, and maybe Cade would regret the hurtful words later. The best punishment the Society ever came up with was ‘the cage.’ A cage where they put Others who needed to be punished. They stayed there through the full moon. The full moon theory was true—kind of. A were could resist, but it would take everything they had not to answer the call of the Luna cycle. In the cage, the hunger would rise in them, but they couldn’t shift. The cage was entwined with silver. As the full moon rose in the sky, like a mother calling its child home, the child could only whimper and cry like a baby gull in the wind, and no one would answer. No one could last in the cage. Weres had gone mad in there. Some had died. Some literally clawed their own skin from their bodies in a bid to free the animal inside—but it wouldn’t matter. All they had done was free themselves from their lives.
Stephen had gone into the cage once. Once was enough. He had screamed and yelled for his father to let him out. But Malcolm had told him that he was teaching him respect. Stephen had undermined his father’s authority in front of the Preternatural Council. Disobedience like that could have meant death, but being son of the alpha had saved him. Any were who had been in the cage, knew to respect it and to fear it. However, Stephen had got out. No one knew how, and he wouldn’t say, but they had found him days later. Something inside him had changed. The boy, who had been locked in the cage, was not the same man who had come out. Cade had tried to ask once. How he got out and what had happened. Stephen had walked away and refused to talk about it. Later, he had told Cade never to mention it again. But this time it was different. This time, Cade needed to make Stephen see what this boy was going through and not cast him aside as everyone else would.
He watched as Stephen exhaled heavily, and then, just like that, relaxed and bent to the car to peer in through the glass as if nothing had been said. “He’s young,” Stephen remarked.
“Yes,” Cade agreed with a sigh, “but I don’t know how young. His wolf is young.”
“You saw his wolf when you bound with him?”
“Yes.”
“Did you claim it?”
Cade thought back to the moment he had leant into the boy—to when he had comforted him with touch. It was what wolves needed. They needed the touch and the closeness. Stephen would not understand that. He was tiger. They did not have the same need for touch.
“I was just doing what felt right,” he said. “I couldn’t just leave him.”
They all froze at the sound of a vehicle. Cade’s heart jumped into his throat as he waited. But whatever it was drove past the end of the lane.
“We need to move him. Before they come and before my dad brings the Society here.” Stephen was already moving, looking around as if the answer to their problem lay somewhere there.
“What are you thinking?” asked Gemma.
“”I haven’t a fucking clue,” he said, shaking his head. “Fly? Teleport? It seems about the only thing we can do.”
“All the roads are blocked,” Cade said. “We can't get past the Thatched … they have a blockade there.
“They’ll have roadblocks everywhere.” Stephen stared up at the dark sky and you could almost see his mind working. “We can't go back into the woods. It’s all gone.”
“They’ll have it all swept and contained by now.” Cade knew that they would be doing it like someone popping a bubble and hoping the boy would erupt from the pinch point.
“We could go around the Shovels,” Gemma suggested. “I know it’s a Human place, but they’re …”
“Too stupid to block that off,” Stephen finished off for her. “Because they think we’d not go there.”
“Exactly,” she said.
“It’s a risk, though,” said Cade. “If there are Humans there.”
“We can go down the side, through the car park. It’s too dark and cold for their precious little arses. We can get to the estuary. Get over that and then to your place.”
“You’re talking about swimming over?” Cade had to admit it wasn’t such a bad plan as long as the tide wasn’t in. They’d be screwed if it was high. “How do we get the boy over?”
“You make him,” said Stephen. “You go in his mind and you make him shift, and then you take control and get his arse over to the other bank with you.”
“That means binding deeper?” Gemma’s features were etched with worry.
He could bind to the boy more. Would it matter so much? He couldn’t turn him over to the Humans now. They were already tied. But if he bound more, his life would hang in the boy’s hands. Cade knew they’d be connected for life if he went in too deeply. “What if I bind and he doesn’t make it through his first shift?”
“You're son of an alpha, Cade. The most that will happen is that you get sick for a while. You have pure blood in your veins. You can take it. We’ll be right here with you.”
“And if I can't?”
“Then you’re gonna haunt my arse for a while.”
“There isn’t another way?” Gemma asked. “We have to risk his life?”
“If you can think of one, I'm all ears,” Stephen replied grimly.
Suddenly, headlights came into view. Only these ones didn’t go past. They turned onto the lane and Cade, Gemma and Stephen all ducked behind Cade’s car.
“Doesn’t look like we have a choice,” muttered Cade. “We’re screwed either way.”
“Do you really think it can work?” Gemma glanced from Cade to Stephen. “Do you really think we can get them both to the other side?”
“Well what else can we do? The kid’s here. Cade’s here. His house is over the water. And sure as shit that boy he found isn’t Jesus. We can’t walk on water today.”
Chapter Seven
Stephen held his hand out to Cade for the car keys. “You’re bound to the boy. You can ride in the back. If he wakes up, you calm his shit down.” Cade stared at him, clearly displeased with the idea of not being the one to drive. “Don’t look at me like that. You offered yourself up for this sacrifice. Give me the keys before your dad and everyone turns up and we all end up exiled together.”
“You’re banned from driving, remember?” Gemma said to her brother, her face stern with admonishment.
“Just because I am banned, doesn’t mean I can't drive.” Stephen’s face lit up with the same expression of mischief that used to so often cross his features as a child. He’d been so good at convincing Cade to take part in his next brilliant plan, which always inevitably led them into trouble.
“If you drive like an idiot, you’ll get us caught.”
“Good job I'm not an idiot then, isn’t it?” Stephen’s unrepentant grin had Gemma rolling her eyes in exasperation. “Keys?”
What Stephen was saying made sense. It did. But that didn’t stop Cade’s reluctance. He trusted Stephen. He trusted him with anything—well, almost anything. He had got them into more trouble than he could recall. But getting them away from there? Stephen was a one-man band. He went into fights hard. There was a reason he was a Society Fighter. He was fast and bold and, sometimes, reckless. Cade was the exact opposite—calm and level-headed. Exactly what this drive needed right now. It needed calculation, keeping an eye out for any threat and not driving them into a trap.
“If his hunger wakes and it’s me or Gem,” Stephen said, pointing between himself and his sister, “he’ll rip us to shit before we have time to do anything. You know he will.” He paused, looking Cade square in the eye. “I’m not scared of the kid, but if it’s me in the back and he turns, I’ll take him down.”
“And this is why I worry about you driving. Because if you see a block in the road, you’ll take that down, too.”
“What choice do we have?”
Gemma touched Cade’s arm lightly. “We’re doing what’s best for the boy,” she offered gently.
“If anything happens to …” He wanted to say to you, but he finished with a hanging, “… us ...”
“Nothing will happen,” Stephen said, not budging.
Cade glanced at the boy through the window. He was awake but not alert. Nothing more than a frightened child in that moment. He had curled into the corner, hugging his knees to his chest. One dirty, bloody hand clutched the top of his bag. Cade wasn’t sure how conscious the boy actually was. His eyes were bright and no longer Human. They held a tint of blue to them, and Cade knew that he could turn at any minute.
“Fine,” he said eventually, pulling his keys from his pocket and slapping them into Stephens’s hand. “You damn well better drive slowly. Lights off. They have the whole place lit up like it’s fucking Christmas. They can’t see us before we see them.”
“They won’t see us at all,” Stephen promised.
Before Stephen got into the driver’s seat, he peered into the back. The boy’s eyes had shut now, his head still down on his knees.
“He’s just a kid,” Gemma murmured. “Someone’s kid. Maybe his family is looking for him?”
“We’ll check the radio when we get to my place. But he can't go back. Not like this.” Cade set his jaw in determination. It pained him to see the concern on Gemma’s face. He hated to see anything other than light in her eyes. Except … except … He shut his mind down and refused to go there. “Let’s do this.”
