by Terry Spear
He prayed that Anna wouldn’t need the troops. That he and Bjornolf would save her before it was too late.
Chapter 17
Shit.
Anna hated shopping, but as soon as she’d spied her favorite dark chocolate mints—the sole thing that made her take notice of the holidays—she felt a gun poke her ribs.
With a quick twist of her head, she’d looked up into the mottled red face of one very angry Everton.
She couldn’t register why he had targeted her in the drugstore. Why he had a gun. Why he acted like he wanted to kill her.
“You’re one of them, aren’t you?” he growled softly in her ear.
“One of whom?” she asked, honestly not knowing what he meant. Her first thought was that he knew she was a wolf. He couldn’t know that unless he was also a lupus garou, but he wasn’t.
Did he think she was DEA? Hell. That’s probably what he thought. That she was investigating the other agents’ murders and also was one. Which meant? A death sentence for her. It also had to mean he was involved in the men’s killings or the cover-up, or both.
She wanted to use her martial arts on him. But because she was in such close proximity to two ladies picking out vitamins and four elderly customers looking at other kinds of health remedies, she was certain his gun would go off, and he’d hit somebody. If not her.
She couldn’t risk it.
With a gloved hand shackled to her arm, he pulled her through the store and into a short hallway that housed an employee bathroom. His target was the employees’ back door. She quickly noted the fire exit sign and the statement that opening the door would set off the alarm, which gave her hope. With their enhanced wolf hearing, Bjornolf and Nathan would be alerted.
Apparently the warning sign was just for show because when he opened the door, nothing could be heard except the creaking sound of rusty hinges. She was on her own.
Once she was outside, she went all ninja she-wolf warrior on him for a few seconds. She slammed her fist into the bridge of his nose, using the bottom part of her hand like a hammer, breaking the cartilage. It twisted and made a loud crunch. Blood gushed forth, and he howled in pain.
In the next instant, she kneed him in the thigh with a sharp jab, missing the more vital groin area because he jerked to the side when she broke his nose. He cursed and clamped something over her face.
She struggled, kicking his shins, and scratching a gloved hand that held a damp cloth over her nose and mouth. The odor from the cloth was pleasant, nonirritating, and sweet smelling. Chloroform, her brain instantly registered. Trying to fight harder, to break loose, she felt herself drifting like a footloose cloud away from all the others bunched together in the sky. Snowflakes collected on her eyelashes as she stared up at the blood gushing from Everton’s crooked nose.
The red blood, his red splotchy face, the black ski cap stretched across his big head, and even the white snowflakes faded to gray, and then to black.
The next thing she was aware of was bouncing around in the trunk of a vehicle. She was wrapped up in a scratchy wool blanket, standard army issue. Every bump in the road bruised her as the roar of the tires rolling over the snowy pavement filled her ears. Icy cold air circulated around the top of her head. The uninsulated space was freezing. Worse, she couldn’t recall how she had gotten into the trunk of a vehicle or why.
Car fumes and the smell of the old musty, moldy blanket and a rubber tire nearly asphyxiated her.
Then bits and pieces of memories floated into her sluggish brain—she was looking for pregnancy tests in the drugstore. No, the dark chocolate thin mints had caught her attention first, and she hadn’t even made it to the aisle where the pregnancy tests were shelved. Then Everton had grabbed her.
For a moment, she focused on an image in her mind’s eye of Nathan and Bjornolf, waiting patiently while she ran into the store. No way was she going to admit to them—if she got out of this mess alive—that she’d been thwarted by a display of her favorite chocolate mints.
Her cell phone vibrated against her hip. She moved her hand to reach her jacket pocket and realized her wrists weren’t bound. Thank God for small miracles! She tried to move her hand to her jacket pocket but couldn’t concentrate enough to get her fingers into it. Ready to scream with frustration, she tried again, missing the pocket over and over.
The phone stopped pulsating. No!
The vehicle continued driving, and she wondered where Everton intended to finish her off. The tree farm? Somewhere else? Woods abounded in the area so it would be easy to dump her anywhere, and she might be lost forever.
She still kept trying to reach her phone. Why couldn’t her brain make her hand do what it was supposed to do?
Her heart lurched when the annoying buzzing from her phone started up again.
She shoved at her pocket and this time managed to get her hand inside and grasped her phone. Don’t stop buzzing. By the time she got her cell out, the call had ended. She barely had time to be frustrated and upset before the phone started vibrating again as if the caller wasn’t quitting until he got through to her. God, she loved whoever it was.
She peered at the caller ID, having difficulty fixing on the name as it blurred. Hunter.
“Yeah.” Anna held the phone against her ear, straining to be heard. She thought she sounded as though she’d just woken from a hundred-year nap.
“Anna, thank God. Where are you?” Hunter’s voice was frantic.
“Trunk… car… driving,” Anna said. Her words were slurred and annoyingly took their time to come out of her mouth.
“Anna,” Hunter said, his voice gruff, commanding, as if he was going to tell her to get her act together.
“I’m… here.” She tried to sound as forceful as Hunter, more… in charge of her situation, but her voice was whispery soft without any real body or bite.
“Drugged?” Hunter asked.
“Chlor—form.”
“Okay, listen up. The whole pack is searching for every vehicle that the Everton family and their workers drive.”
“Everton,” she breathed out, trying to reveal his name so they wouldn’t be looking for the wrong man.
“Yeah, Roger Everton. Actually, Everton is just the name of the business. He changed his name to that when his father didn’t leave him anything in his will.”
“Great.” So Everton probably thought she and Bjornolf were DEA and trying to get his adopted daughter away from him by inviting her over to dinner that night. Then they’d interrogate Jessica for all she knew about her dad’s involvement in the murders.
“Bjornolf and Nathan are going to the tree farm. They suspect he might be headed there,” Hunter said.
She didn’t say anything as she wondered how the other men had been killed. She was almost certain Everton had buried them somewhere on the five hundred acres of the tree farm. He probably intended to bury her somewhere nearby, if not in the same spot.
“Anna?” Hunter said.
When she didn’t say anything, Hunter ordered, “Don’t go to sleep! And don’t hang up on me! Keep talking.”
“Tri… angu… lating?” she asked, attempting to shake free of the grogginess, but the harder she tried, the more she felt like she was going to pass out again. Then she realized her mistake. She had a phone with GPS. “Ping… ing?” she got out before Hunter responded.
“You bet. Finn’s on it.”
“Tell… him…to…” A rough bump in the road shook her, and she nearly lost the phone.
“Tell him what, Anna?”
“Put… a… rush…”
“A rush on it. You got that, Finn?”
She could almost see the two men smiling at each other as if they didn’t know that she was in kind of a hurry here. She smiled, too. Then they’d be serious again and so was she.
After that last thought, she blacked out until she felt her body draped over a hard shoulder that dug into her ribs. She heard the impatient footsteps of her kidnapper as he headed somewhere, his boots crunching on the crusted-over snow. She realized then that the army blanket didn’t smell just musty and like wool and the great outdoors, but like the two DEA agents who had died.
That meant her senses were returning little by little. The fog still cloaked her brain in a numbing sort of way, but she was coming to the conclusion that she might have a little fight left in her—if she could remain awake long enough.
Then he tossed her and she felt for a moment like she was sailing through the air. She landed hard on something metal. Despite the blanket padding her head, it banged against the heavy steel, and at impact, a sharp pain shot through her skull. Not enough to knock her out. Instead, it shook her from her drugged stupor a little.
Her heart began skipping beats when she thought she was in a coffin. An engine roared to life, and whatever she was in vibrated. She guessed the vehicle was some kind of earth-moving machine. She wondered if he intended to bury her alive.
Her blood turned to ice. She fumbled under her jacket for her holster. Why hadn’t she thought of the gun before now? Her fingers touched the metal, and she let out a tentative sigh of relief. He hadn’t checked her for weapons.
Thank God the vehicle he was driving was slow moving. She hoped he was going to go a long way before he dumped her body. Maybe she could wake up enough to aim the gun accurately before he attempted to kill her.
She tried to reach her phone to tell Hunter where she was and realized it had been in her hand when she passed out the last time.
Now… it wasn’t.
Chapter 18
They were nearly at the tree farm when Bjornolf got a call from Hunter.
“She’s alive, Bjornolf,” Hunter assured him. “She’s groggy from the effects of chloroform, but she was speaking on her phone with us only moments earlier.”
Guardedly relieved, Bjornolf couldn’t say anything for a minute as he wheeled into the farm’s snow-covered gravel parking lot. His emotions were so raw that he couldn’t believe he—who was always in control of them on any mission, no matter the circumstances—could be so full of anger and, at the same time, so terrified he might lose Anna.
“According to Everton’s daughter, Jessica, he just drove up in a car and parked it outside his home,” Bjornolf said, trying to keep his breathing steady when he felt sick to his stomach. “He’s taken Anna in a backhoe somewhere on the farm. The girl has shifted and hidden in the woods, proving she’s one of us.”
Hunter let out his breath. “Finn has just confirmed that Anna is at the farm. Her digital cell phone was pinged, and he’s determined its latitude and longitude via GPS, so we’ve got our police officers headed in that direction. They should be there in a couple of minutes.”
Bjornolf screeched the Land Rover to a halt. “We just arrived,” he told Hunter.
He opened his door but before he could bolt in the direction that he heard the backhoe moving, Nathan, in wolf form, squeezed between the steering wheel and Bjornolf’s chest and leaped out.
Bjornolf with gun in hand—and Nathan with canines readied—raced after the backhoe.
Somewhere in the distance in the woods, the backhoe stopped.
So did Bjornolf’s heart. He wasn’t close enough yet. If Everton dumped her in an open hole, he could have her buried before Bjornolf reached her.
Gunshots rang out. He prayed the man was a lousy shot.
Vehicles started to pull into the gravel parking lot behind him. The army had arrived. Were they already too late?
No more shots rang out. The vehicle wasn’t moving, though. The engine was running, but the backhoe was standing still.
Bjornolf raced through the trees and didn’t think he’d ever make it in time. The stillness was what killed him the most. No sounds of a woman crying out in pain. No more gunshots exploding. Just the sound of birds twittering in the trees and the backhoe engine rumbling.
He bolted out of a stand of blue spruce and saw a new section where seedlings were being planted. The backhoe rested at the edge of a huge pit. Nathan was bounding around the backhoe, smelling the scents on the vehicle and tracing them to the pit.
There was no sign of Everton. Or Anna. Hell. Had Everton heard Bjornolf coming and run?
Where was Anna? Everton couldn’t have run off with her, not in the drugged state she was in. What about the shots? She had to be wounded, if not dead.
Bjornolf bolted for the backhoe, believing then he might see Anna rolled up in the blanket in the digger. Shot.
She wasn’t there. Dirt and chipped yellow paint. The digger was empty. He stared at it as if thinking that if he looked long enough, she’d materialize.
A groan from the pit had him pivoting and shifting his attention down into the hole. Nathan barked and dug at the edge of the pit.
“Anna!” She was standing in the mud in the middle of the eight-foot-deep hole, which was covered by an undisturbed light layer of snow in patches. She held a gun in her hand, pointed at a body nearby, a blanket on the muddy earth beside her feet.
Everton was lying on his back, clutching his bloodied chest. Blood was also leaking down his crooked, swollen, and discolored nose. His eyes closed as he groaned again.
“Anna!” Bjornolf said again, not believing she wasn’t even wounded as he fell to his knees and reached down for her.
Nathan bounced around him, whimpering and not helping in the least, his tail wagging, just as grateful to see her alive. Then he lifted his muzzle and howled. A she-wolf howled back.
“Jessica,” Anna whispered.
“Go to Jessica,” Bjornolf said to Nathan.
Anna pocketed the gun, then reached up to Bjornolf. “You’re not rescuing me,” she said, sounding incredibly tired. Still, she was forceful enough in the pronouncement, and he had to smile. “You’re not,” she reiterated vehemently. “You’re just giving me a hand up.”
“For the second time,” he said, reminded of having to help her in the jungle not all that long ago. “That’s your gun.” He was surprised as he pulled her up against the muddy wall, her white jacket and sweater and jeans soaking up the wet earth. He couldn’t believe Everton hadn’t disarmed her first.
She sighed, leaning against Bjornolf as if the last bit of energy she’d mustered had been to stand and shoot Everton. “We’re a mess and we have a dinner party to throw shortly for Jessica and Nathan,” she whispered against Bjornolf’s chest.
As if that was happening. She had to be distraught about everything that had happened, yet she was concerned about the dinner with Jessica. He loved Anna.
He remembered Hunter then. He yanked out his phone, hit autodial, and said, “She’s alive, Hunter. Everton’s in a pit, bullet in the chest.”
“Thank God,” Hunter said and Bjornolf knew he wasn’t just relieved that they’d caught Everton and that Anna was safe. This had become something personal. “Is she all right?”
“She’s great,” Bjornolf said, not about to tell him that she was a little woozy from the drug. She wouldn’t appreciate it. And he didn’t tell Hunter that he was the one who was feeling shaken to the core.
“I’ve got paramedics on the way. And I’m talking to the feds. Making arrangements for new parents for Jessica also, pronto. See you in a sec.”
“Okay,” Bjornolf said. He pocketed his phone but couldn’t quit thinking about how she hadn’t been disarmed. “He didn’t remove your gun?”
She shook her head. “He must have thought the chloroform would knock me out for good. He didn’t use enough to kill me, or he just wanted to incapacitate me. Either that or our lupus garou healing genetics helped me to overcome it better than a human would. I thought he intended to bury me alive.” She shuddere
d.
“God, Anna.” The thought gave him heart palpitations.
“But after he dumped me into the pit, he got off the backhoe and came around to the trench and aimed a gun at me.” It had taken Everton a moment to realize Anna was standing, blanket tossed aside, gun in hand, ready for him. Before he could overcome his surprise, she fired first and hit him in the chest. “I recovered his weapon and it’s in my jacket pocket,” Anna said.
Bjornolf was still tense. He couldn’t shake the fear that he could have lost her. He realized then just how much Anna meant to him.
They heard sirens and Anna pressed harder against him as if she was ready to collapse. The drug hadn’t quite worn off. “The police and the feds will take it from here,” he said, lifting her off her feet and carrying her away from the pit and into a section of Douglas firs.
Three police officers hurried in their direction: Wes Caruthers and his mate, Greta, and Allan Smith, all wolves from Portland but now residing with Hunter’s pack on the Oregon coast. Caruthers had been a Texas Ranger when the unit first started out. Most of their kind had to change occupations or locations, or find a way to “die” and be “reborn,” to keep up appearances for living so long. Often, they continued to work in the kind of jobs they’d been trained for and just updated their skills as needed.
The three Portland wolves had all joined Hunter’s pack when he desperately needed loyal police officers to keep his pack members out of trouble.
Allan, with his salt-and-pepper hair, round and jovial cheeks, and green eyes, looked more like the fatherly type than a cop. But he was all business when he was doing his job.
His sandy hair graying at the temples, Caruthers said, “Finn and Hunter will be here pronto.” He looked Anna over, concern etched in his face. “You okay?”
She nodded.
He looked at Bjornolf as if getting a second opinion, probably knowing Anna wouldn’t admit she was hurt.
“She’ll be fine. Everton’s in a pit, gunshot wound to the chest, about three hundred yards that way.”
