by Selena Scott
“The preliminary testing for the medical program they’re enrolled in?” Ida said slowly, like she couldn’t believe Diana would have forgotten something so monumental.
Diana rose from behind the desk. “Who is “they”?”
Ida’s brow smashed down. “The Wolfs.”
Something skied off a cliff in Diana’s stomach. She didn’t understand, not yet, but she knew something was terribly, grossly off-base about this. Her phones were all dead, her center was a wreck and the Wolfs were apparently headlong into something she had been harboring misgivings for. This wasn’t a coincidence. None of it was.
“Ida,” Diana said, skidding around the desk and toward the door, but the rest of the sentence was cut off when the door of her office was nearly broken off its hinges by a very familiar grizzly bear.
“Quill!” Diana shouted, hopping back on a reflex. Even though she knew this particular bear by name, it wasn’t every day that a woman found herself face to face with a thousand pounds of menacing growl. Both she and Ida stumbled backward as the bear advanced on them.
“Quill,” Ida said in an admirably clear voice. “What the hell is going on?”
The bear crowded them back into Diana’s office. A moment later Diana felt the doorjamb of her open closet door at her back. She stopped retreating. The bear growled and advanced again. Soon, Diana and Ida were both completely standing in Diana’s dark closet. A blur of light and sound and the stretch of muscle and then there in front of them was Quill in his human form, standing in a shaft of light, staring at them with that handsome face, an inscrutable expression there.
Diana knew what was going to happen before it did.
“Quill—“ she started, wanting to tell him that he didn’t have to do this. That whatever he’d gotten himself into she’d help him get out of it. That he hadn’t done anything irrevocable yet.
But the door slammed in their faces, the lock clicked and half a second later, the scrape of her desk being laid in front accosted their ears.
“Hey!” Ida shouted, slamming her hand against the wood. “What the hell! Quill, what the hell are you doing! Let us out of here!”
The office door slammed and then there was silence.
“Help!” Diana shouted as loud as she could, realizing already that their only hope was for someone else to hear their voices. Because Quill wasn’t coming back. She’d seen the look in his eye right before he’d slammed the door. It was resignation.
The two women shouted and slammed against the door for a solid five minutes before Ida turned her back to the wood and slid down to the ground.
“Diana,” she rasped, “Do you have any clue what the hell is going on here?”
“Unfortunately, I have a pretty good idea.” She sank down to the ground next to Ida. “I think Quill sold out the Wolfs.”
“What?” Ida was up on her feet again, her eyes frantic, her hands clawing at her hair. “What do you mean?”
“There’s pretty good odds that that government program that sounded too good to be true is complete bullshit. I don’t know what it is a cover for. Maybe it really is medical research of some kind? Some shady non-FDA-approved mess? I don’t know. But I’m willing to bet someone paid Quill a lot of money to get the Wolfs somewhere at some time and all he had to do to make it happen was convince them to go there and make sure that we didn’t follow.”
“No,” Ida whispered. “He wouldn’t do that. He’s my friend. He’s Phoenix’s friend. Shit, the man’s half in love with Dawn.”
“You think?” Diana asked tonelessly, her hands going numb with panic, her skin alternating between hot and cold. “I couldn’t quite tell what was going on there.”
Ida didn’t bother answering. “What are we going to do?”
“Tell me you have your phone on you.”
Ida shook her head. “Quill stepped on it this morning.” She hissed air through her teeth. “At the time I thought it was an accident. But that was before I knew he was a two-timing piece of shit!” She shouted the last part into the dim air of the closet.
“Okay,” Diana said logically, willing herself to remain calm and pinching her eyes closed. “We can’t call anyone to help. Which means we have to get the hell out of this closet. Somehow.”
There was only a thin strip of light penetrating the closet from the crack at the bottom of the door so Diana had to use her memory as she groped along the shelves for the toolbox she kept there.
“Score!” She found its cold metal corners with her fingers and slid it open, groping around for the hammer. “Okay. Hope this works.”
Raising the hammer, Diana smashed against the door right above the handle. It was made of stronger material than she’d anticipated and the blow reverberated up her arm. But she didn’t stop. Somewhere Orion was in danger and Diana was not going to let one lousy closet door stop her from getting to him. She hammered and hammered at the door until light broke through, and she didn’t stop then. She managed to make a three inch hole in the wood. It was just big enough to squeeze her hand through so that she could reach down and flip the lock on the door.
She stepped back and swung it open.
“Diana, you’re such a badass!” Ida called over her shoulder as she scrambled over the top of the desk and into Diana’s office. Diana was fast on her heels.
It was clear as they skidded out into the center that somehow Quill had closed up shop, gotten everyone to go home. The center was dark and locked up.
“Phone! We need a freaking working phone!” Ida shouted in frustration as she galloped from desk to desk, picking up the office phones one by one and finding them all dead.
“Screw the phones, we just need to get to wherever they are. Any chance you knew the address?”
“Yes, they were out by the Goodwill, by the river.”
“Let’s go.” The two women sprinted out of the center but came up short when they saw their cars.
Identical slashed tires greeted them on both vehicles.
“Motherfucker,” Diana shouted at the sky, finally losing her cool.
“Car trouble?” a deep voice asked them from behind.
Diana and Ida whirled and Diana squinted at a face she dimly recognized. Ah, it was the bouncer from the club the other night. The polar bear.
“Hi,” he said, scratching at the back of his neck and looking uncomfortable and bashful. “I -uh- thought I might come check out your center that you told me about. The one with services for -uh- shifters? But it looks like I came at a bad time?”
Diana could have kissed him. “You’re a lifesaver! Is that your jeep? Tell me you have a cell phone. Let’s go!”
If there was anything that could be said for polar bear man, he certainly knew how to roll with the punches, because about twenty seconds later, the three of them were tearing down the road, while Diana called the cops on his phone.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Orion batted away the handgun from the man’s shaking hand as if it were a flyswatter. He advanced on him, a growl low in his throat, his teeth bared.
Apparently this dude was super scared of wolves. Which boded well for Orion, considering he’d just shifted. He didn’t have a ton of a plan except for disarming the complete douche who’d just shot him in the back leg -the bullet had just skimmed his skin, lodging in the side of the truck. The man backed up and shouted into a radio, begging for help. Orion continued to back him up until the guy’s back was flat against the front of the truck. He scrabbled at the small window above that separated the cab of the truck from the body of it.
“Pull over!” the man shouted to the driver. “He shifted! He shifted! Pull over!”
“Pull over?” the driver shouted back. “Are you nuts? Sorry, buddy, but you heard the Director’s orders.”
The window slammed closed and Orion lunged. The man screamed and lost his footing as Orion’s paws slammed into his chest, shoving him to the ground. His head bounced against the floor of the truck and he went still. Orion bent over him and
watched the man’s chest rise and fall. Good. He wasn’t dead. But Orion hoped he’d have a hell of a headache when he woke up.
He shifted back into his human form and grimaced at the window. It was just barely wide enough for him to slip through. Glancing around, he located another pair of scrubs on a shelf and slipped the pants on. They were tight, but anything was better than trying to squeeze himself through a tiny window butt ass naked.
The driver, so unsympathetic to his compatriot’s plight, screamed like a little girl when Orion tumbled through the window and onto the front seat, going for the element of surprise and socking the driver in the side of the head as he fell. The two men wrestled with the steering wheel for a moment before Orion opened the side door and booted the guy out onto the side of what appeared to be a service road cutting through the mountains. They were the only vehicles in sight.
The other two trucks were in front of him, driving in a neat little line. Orion growled low in his throat and stepped on the gas. He’d never driven a car before and right now he was going to have to figure out how to stop the other two cars without causing an accident that might injure his siblings. Piece of cake.
He roared down the highway, gaining on the other two trucks and swerving into the opposite lane to pass them. They honked and swerved as he passed them, obviously aware that his truck had been hijacked, but he didn’t let that stop him. When he was far enough in front of them, he slammed on the brakes, swearing when the truck started fishtailing on the pavement. He had not planned on that.
The truck skidded and executed a full one-eighty, somehow facing the oncoming trucks now. Orion swore, and grabbed at the stick shift. He knew that one of the letters meant R for reverse, but he couldn’t read any of them. The other trucks bore down on him as he tried one setting and it merely made the engine rev. He tried another and the car lurched forward. He tried the last and sure enough, the truck zoomed backward, ten feet, twenty feet, fifty. Just enough that the other two trucks, honking and skidding, didn’t reduce Orion to a smear on the pavement.
All three trucks skidded to a stop nearly at once. The other two drivers swung out of the cabs of their trucks, shouting and gesticulating. The back door of one of the trucks banged open, hanging drunkenly on one hinge as Phoenix’s wolf exploded out, looking pissed as hell.
“Phoenix!” Orion shouted, trying to get his brother’s attention. They needed to stick together and stick close to the one truck that had been neatly divested of its driver. It was their only ride home.
Phoenix’s wolf swung his head to look in Orion’s direction but turned toward the other truck. He slammed his body against the truck doors, trying to get to Dawn.
Yeah. That was a good point.
The driver of that truck cocked what looked like a stun gun and rounded the side of the truck, trying to get to Phoenix.
Nope.
Orion hadn’t spent the last fifteen years of his life hunting and tracking for his brother and sister, providing for them, protecting them, only to fail now. He barreled into the driver, slamming him into the side of the truck and wrestling him to the ground. He wrested the stun gun from the driver’s hand and pointed it at him.
“No! No!” The man shouted.
How complicated could this contraption really be? Orion pulled the trigger and, yup, not so complicated at all. The man shouted and writhed beneath the jolt of electricity and scrambled away from Orion, no longer a threat.
He bounded around to where Phoenix was still trying to break the lock on the back of the truck with his meaty paws.
One more hit and the lock was broken, Orion reached up and flung the doors open, only to find Dawn’s wolf growling down at the orderly who’d been assigned to her. The man, splayed on the ground, cowered and inched back from her, his hands raised in surrender.
Dawn looked up, murder in her eyes and bloody rags from the man’s shirt clutched in her jaws.
“Good work,” Orion said, impressed with his usually shy sister’s killer instinct.
She dropped the rag from her jaws and hopped out of the truck.
“Can you shift back and drive us home?” Orion asked her. “I don’t know what the hell is going on, but—“
He cut off abruptly as a distant and heart-droppingly familiar noise kicked up around them.
“Oh, crap.” And then he was the one who was shifting instead of them. Because if he and his siblings had to outrun a helicopter, they weren’t going to do it as humans in a humongous target of a truck. Nope. They were going to do it as wolves who melted into the forest around them.
The three wolves took off together, shoulder to shoulder, toward the nearest copse of trees.
They were almost there, ten feet away from cover when the ground exploded in front of them.
The helicopter was shooting at them! Not to kill, he was sure, but to keep them from going any further.
The wolves skidded to a stop and Orion wheeled around to look up at the helicopter. A man leaned out of the open side door and cocked a gun. There were four more men just like him all lined up neatly in the helicopter. The visual was disheartening, as was the sudden appearance of the chopper. It made it seem like no matter how hard they fought to get away, there were going to be more and more of whoever these people were.
The wolves tried to sprint to the other side, but the ground exploded again in that direction. They were being herded and Orion let out a gruesome howl, angry beyond belief. One of the soldiers in the chopper pulled out a different looking gun and this time he aimed it directly at Orion.
Orion dodged at the last second and in the ground, right where he’d just been standing, sat a dart of some kind. Surely something that would have tranquilized him.
Again, the wolves attempted to flee, this time in three different directions, but there were too many guns in the chopper and all escape routes were abruptly beheaded. They were completely hemmed in.
Another round of darts came their way and they, all three, avoided being clipped, but Orion knew it was only a matter of time. They were not going to be able to avoid getting dosed at this rate. Panic filled his heart as he watched one of the guns be pointed directly at Dawn. He lunged forward, intending to take the hit, but didn’t quite make it. The dart lodged itself in her back leg.
She howled in pain and curled in on herself, yanking the dart out with her teeth before it was able to fully unload into her blood stream. The helicopter lowered down, sensing weakness, and made to land.
Orion rushed to her side but startled when an almighty roar shook the trees, momentarily drowning out the sound of the helicopter. A bear, irate and roaring, burst onto the road, charging the low-flying helicopter. The helicopter tried to regain altitude, but not quickly enough. The bear bashed into the skies on the bottom of the craft, clipping it just enough to send it flagging sideways into the trees. It crashed awkwardly, sending the men skittering out of it, trying to get clear before it exploded.
Orion turned back to Dawn’s wolf. She was having trouble getting back to her four feet, the medicine obviously taking affect. The bear stood between the wolves and the soldiers from the helicopter when a wall of heat and sound knocked them all off their feet.
The helicopter smoked and flamed and smoldered where it had crashed into the trees.
“Orion!”
Through the smoke came an image that Orion would never forget as long as he lived. Diana running alongside a gigantic polar bear, skirting one of the trucks and jogging around the scattered soldiers who were still trying to get back to their feet.
She skidded to the ground beside Orion’s wolf, scraping her knees and coming to rest beside Dawn. “We followed you. The cops are coming,” she told him. “They’ll be here any second.”
Her eyes arrowed in on Dawn’s wolf.
“Oh, God,” Diana whispered. “Dawn, you need to shift while you still can. Shift back to human form if you can.”
Phoenix and Orion followed Diana’s advice, but Dawn merely strained, it was almos
t as if she was too weak to shift.
“She was hit with a dart in her back leg,” Orion informed Diana. He found the dart in the dirt and handed it over.
“A tranquilizer. We have these in the center, only for the direst of circumstances if someone loses control. She’ll be all right after a few hours.”
Diana looked up at approaching sirens and her face was awash in red and blue. Moments later cops came streaming past the trucks, tossing the soldiers in handcuffs, casting wide circles around the polar bear shifter and the two naked men crouched around the unconscious wolf.
It wasn’t until an ambulance arrived and he and Phoenix helped load their sister into the back that Orion realized the grizzly that had come to their aid had disappeared in all the hubbub.
“Where did Quill go?” he turned and asked Diana.
Her eyes narrowed. “Quill was here?”
“He protected us from the soldiers. Kept us from getting shot.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.” She frowned. “He was the one who sold you out. He arranged this entire thing.”
“If you want to go with her, it’s now or never,” one of the paramedics sitting alongside Dawn called down to Orion.
Phoenix had already peeled off to go find Ida. Orion felt himself torn. The protector inside of him needed to go with his sister, unconscious and still in her wolf form. But that would mean leaving Diana in this smoking, hectic place, crawling with cops.
She quirked a smile at him, as if she could read his mind. “I’ll be fine, Orion. You go with her. I’ll meet you there.”
He stepped into the ambulance and blinked down at the woman he loved. And he knew, he just knew, that she would be all right. She knew how to take care of herself. She didn’t need him to take care of her. In fact, she did everything she could to take care of him.
And what a feeling that was. It was something he hadn’t truly felt since before his parents had died. She’d figured out he was in danger. She’d come for him. She would always come for him.
