Protecting Ally

by Tianna Xander

  “Come on, you two. Don’t start bickering here. We need to search the room.”

  Randy snorted at Bastien’s comment. “We rarely bicker with each other. We share that for our younger brothers and Dimitri.” He bared his teeth in a large grin. “We can’t help it. It’s fun. He’s so easily baited.”

  From what Kalen had seen, it was also easy to bait the MacDonald brothers. At least, Randy was easy. All one had to do to raise his ire was to call him Junior. What he had against that was anyone’s guess.

  Bastien was already digging around in the drawers of the bureau, opening and closing each one. He waved back toward the bed without looking. “We need to get this woman out of here before she wakes up and starts screaming.” He took a moment to look at Kalen. “Take care of her while we continue our search. She’s going to have questions, lots of them, and we need to know how much she knows.” He shoved his fingers through his hair, obviously agitated. “And what the good doctor gave her. If she’s had the serum, we’ll have to take her with us, and she’s most likely not going to take kindly to our basically kidnapping her.”

  Of course, she wouldn’t, but they couldn’t have the woman running off to the police screaming that there were werewolves in her city, and thanks to some mad scientist, she was now one of them.

  He glanced out through the still-opened door and into the parking lot of the cheap motel with a frown. It didn’t matter that this was a small town. Otherwise sane people screaming werewolf usually raised eyebrows no matter how small the community might be.

  Kalen knelt on the bed. Reaching out, he took the woman by the shoulder and rolled her over. Pain and terror-filled violet eyes stared up at him for a split second before she grabbed his forearm and sank her newly formed lycan canines into his wrist.

  It was obvious she was in mid-shift and filled with horror at what was happening to her. The smock she wore that identified her as one of the hotel maids barely had time to register in his mind before her assault. He growled with pain as he grasped her chin and inserted ever-growing pressure on the hinges of her jaw to release himself.

  He didn’t want to harm her, but damn, she had a hell of a bite force. She’d hit bone if he wasn’t mistaken.

  “Shit! She’s biting me. Sonofabitch, it hurts like hell!” The woman had a good grip on him, too. Low growling sounds came from her throat as he continued to exert pressure on her jaw until she finally let go. He watched, horrified as she screamed and begged them to kill her to stop the pain.

  “Cover her mouth, for fuck’s sake,” Randy hissed as he ran to close the door. “We’ll be lucky if no one heard that.”

  Hell, they were already lucky. The woman had jaws like a steel trap. He looked down at the deep puncture wounds on his wrist, cocked his brow and gave the others a half grin. “She’s still mostly human—does this mean I’ll become one of them now?”

  A muffled scream drew his attention. Cameron was trying to hold her mouth shut while her beautiful face elongated into a muzzle. Kalen wasn’t sure he would have had the courage to try that. But then, he knew how hard she could bite.

  She continued a mixture of screams and howls as she jerked around on the bed, her body trembling with exertion. Her organs shifted and her bones popped and cracked as she changed shape into that of a beautiful and large sable wolf.

  Kalen knew from experience the change was always painful the first several times. The pain was so intense, one fought it. He supposed he should have tried to get into her mind and help her, but he’d just been so startled that she’d bitten him, not to mention worrying about what fresh hell her screams might bring to the door.

  He laid a soothing hand on her head and looked down into her beautiful violet eyes. “It’s okay. You’re okay.” He smiled. “I know you’ll probably think I’m crazy, but believe me, everything will be all right. We’ll tell you what happened, and we’ll help you to the best of our ability.”

  He continued to look down into her beautiful violet stare that drew him in. Kalen was aware of nothing going on about them as he met those startling eyes. It was almost as though everything in the world stopped and it was just the two of them in this room.

  “Is she okay now?”

  Cameron’s words brought him out of the strange trance she had lured him into, and Kalen moved away with a frown.

  “Yeah, she seems okay for now. At least the change seems to have startled her into calming down. It’ll be some time before she changes back. We should probably get her into one of the vans and head back to Walker with her.” He shrugged. “At least, if we take her out of here now, no one is going to call the cops and say we’re kidnapping a local.”

  Randy yanked her clothes from around her and rolled them up into a ball. “It wouldn’t do to have someone see you carrying what they’re going to think is a dog dressed in jeans and a t-shirt out to the vehicles.”

  “Yeah,” he agreed, “especially one wearing a hotel apron.” He shook his head. “How many more people has that lunatic turned?” What if they’d missed someone in their frantic search to find the asshole? What if there were dozens of people out there turning into God knows what all over the place?

  The implications were just too horrific to contemplate. They were shifters. They shared what they had, and they helped their kind with everything. Just the thought that there were others out there who needed their help and didn’t know to find them and ask for it was enough to make him growl.

  Kalen leaned down and scooped the woman-turned-wolf up off the bed and carried her to the van. “Take her back to Loup-Tech headquarters and don’t let her get away. That lunatic, Thornton, injected her with his serum. She can’t know what’s happening to her. Make sure she gets the help she needs.”

  Two of the men gave him a quick jerk of the head in response, shut the doors and climbed into the front seat.

  Cameron ran out and handed them the wad of clothes through the window. “Take her clothes. Since we know nothing about her, this is all she has for now. Toss them in the back in case she changes again.”

  Leave it to the retired Army Ranger to think of the woman’s comfort. Kalen would have just expected her to lay back there naked. Being naked in front of others was a fact of life for their kind. The unfortunate detail of her former humanity hadn’t even crossed his mind.

  He slapped the side of the van. “Get going. The faster you get her out of town, the better.” It was only a matter of time before someone came looking for her. Eventually, someone was going to wonder why she wasn’t cleaning the rooms.

  Kalen watched while the van pulled around to the driveway, the right blinker flashing bright amber as the driver made the turn that took them back the way they had come. His stomach clenched as the van moved away. Something told him he should have been in there with the woman.

  Shaking his head, he took a deep, cleansing breath and headed back to the motel room. He needed to convince Bastien to get moving. God only knew how many others the crazy scientist would inject before this was all over.

  The image of terrified violet eyes flashed through his mind and he sighed. Kalen swallowed around the lump of sorrow in his throat and looked down at his shaking fingers. What was getting into him? Why should he give a damn about some strange woman-turned-wolf that he’d just met?

  Chapter Three

  Ally lay in the back of the van, terrified. What was happening? How could she have changed into a dog? People didn’t do that. They couldn’t do that! Her heart slammed against her ribs, and her breath came in short, panicked pants. She’d just been kidnapped! Worse yet, she had changed into a dog before the new men in the room shoved her into the back of this van. And no one had witnessed her abduction. If they had, they would have seen a dognapping, not a maid-napping. What other bizarre twist would her life take today?

  Her clothes, that someone had thrown into the back of the vehicle with her sat in a rolled-up pile nearby. Reaching out, she pulled them closer with a claw-tipped paw, before resting her head on them
with a dejected sigh.

  What was she supposed to do now? Nothing came to mind as she closed her eyes and tried not to panic. With luck, maybe she’d go to sleep and when she woke, this nightmare would be over, and she’d be human again.

  One thing was certain. She was an idiot. Because after everything that had happened to her, she couldn’t believe that she was relieved she’d splurged and worn one of her three matching bra and panty sets today. Why should she give a damn what these lunatics thought about her underwear? She curled her lip and it amazed her how easy it was to do while in a dog’s body, wearing a dog’s face.

  Remembering the man that she’d bitten was probably what had made her go all girly and think about what underwear she’d worn at a time like this. What kind of idiot found herself attracted to her kidnapper? Her. She was that kind of idiot.

  Ally didn’t look at the man before she bit him. All she could think of at the precise moment he’d touched her was that she was in pain.

  For some reason Ally couldn’t comprehend, she’d struck out and sunk her teeth into the first person she could reach. She still didn’t know why she’d done it. She’d never bitten a person before in her life. Apparently, excruciating pain made her violent. Who knew?

  Still, at the time, the agony ripping through her had been so intense, it had driven her to wanting to hurt someone—anyone—around her. It was some strange and wild impulse she had never experienced before.

  Closing her eyes, she stifled a groan when she thought about it. She’d bitten the poor guy hard, too. His blood on her tongue had been a mixture of copper and honey and for some strange reason, a part of her had liked it. Ally gagged when she thought back on it. How could she like the taste of human blood?

  Then, it wasn’t until after he’d pried her teeth from his wrist that she’d gotten a good look at him. He had the body of a pro athlete, all muscles and hard planes. It was a body any woman would love to run her fingers over.

  He was tall, but how tall, she wasn’t sure. She could tell he was taller than she was by the way he loomed over the bed after he stood up straight and stared at her with an unreadable expression while he held his bloody wrist. She’d half expected him to strike her for biting him, but he hadn’t.

  His gray eyes had seemed to bore right into hers with a look of...what? She tilted her head, thinking. Sorrow, perhaps. Sorrow mixed with anger and a touch of something else that, for a split second, she’d hoped was attraction.

  Ally had done little more than stare at his dark hair, before her gaze moved to his startling light-gray eyes set deep in a handsome face. His high cheekbones gave way to a strong, masculine jaw. His muscled neck blended seamlessly into broad shoulders, wide chest, and well-formed biceps that were all clearly visible beneath the too-small t-shirt he wore. Heck, with his low-riding jeans, she could even see his eight-pack beneath the tightly stretched cotton.

  And it was an eight-pack, because his utter male presence had stunned her enough that she’d counted every well-defined ridge with a yearning she wouldn’t admit to out loud to anyone—even her sixty-eight-year-old neighbor, Milly, and she told her almost everything.

  The handsome stranger’s wide, muscular chest tapered down to a narrow waist just above an impressive bulge that made her face burn when she finally looked back up and met his cynical expression.

  It was then that their conversation registered, and she’d regained her senses. The man was nuts. They all were. Shapeshifters didn’t exist—they couldn’t exist.

  There wasn’t some vile serum out there to change people into animals, either. She was having a particularly terrifying nightmare. That was the only explanation that made sense. If she could just go to sleep in this horrible dream, she would wake up and find her alarm going off on her bedside table and she would get up and call in sick. One thing was sure. She wasn’t going to work after this crazy subconscious scenario.

  Still, the strange, silvery gray eyes of the man she’d bitten haunted her. On a normal day, she would have thought his eyes were beautiful, but not today. She shook her head. Nope. Today, those gray eyes meant imprisonment, perhaps death. They certainly meant kidnapper. She frowned—or was it dog-napper? She was a dog now, after all.

  Whatever term she laid at his door, it certainly wasn’t drop-dead gorgeous, built like a linebacker on steroids hottie either. Really, it wasn’t.

  Ally sighed and watched the two in the front who remained silent as the van bumped over the rough Michigan roads.

  Occasionally, the guy in the passenger seat would look back at her as though he expected her to disappear...or do tricks. Well, he could just forget it. She wasn’t rolling over and spreading her legs for anyone. Ally supposed she could escape if she could just get the door opened. How she would manage that without hands, though, was beyond her scope of understanding for the time being.

  Too many things kept swimming around in the befuddled pudding she called a brain, and few of them had to do with thoughts of escape. In fact, most of them had to do with the man the others had called Kalen.

  She thought back on his dark hair and tall, good looks wondering if she could stay attracted to a man like that in real life. She gave another sigh, deciding she could. The man was very well put together, not to mention handsome enough to be on a magazine cover, or in the movies.

  It wasn’t every day a girl ran into a man who looked like that, who wasn’t on TV or trying to make it there. Besides, he didn’t even seem to realize how attractive he was. That trait was even harder to find in a male. They usually thought they were God’s gift to women, even if they were bald with a potbelly and had warts on their face.

  Resting her head on her paws, she whined. Didn’t that just sound pathetic? Leave it to her to find herself attracted to a man who didn’t exist. She knew he didn’t. He couldn’t. This was a nightmare, after all. It had to be. She just needed to find a way to wake herself up. She kept telling herself that, but deep down, she didn’t believe it.

  After what seemed like hours, the van slowed, and they turned right and drew to a stop.

  “You get the gas and I’ll run in and get us some snacks,” the passenger said to the driver. He turned back to Ally. “Stay here and I’ll get you something to eat.” He looked back at the other man. “I hope she likes hamburgers.”

  Ally sat still in the van for a few minutes before she picked up her clothes in her mouth and made her way to the front of the van.

  The passenger side window was down! Ally didn’t even think about it. She jumped, losing her jeans when a belt loop hooked on the door lock on the way out. A shout from behind her spurred her on without them. At least she still had her t-shirt and underwear grasped tightly in her teeth.

  Besides, if this really was a dream, what did it matter if she didn’t have clothes? She would wake up soon anyway, wouldn’t she?

  Everything would have been okay if it hadn’t been for some little annoying voice in her head that kept asking, If you really believe this is a dream, Ally, why are you running?

  Chapter Four

  Kalen had just climbed into the van when his phone rang. He pulled it from his pocket on the third ring. It was Merrick, one of the men sent to take the woman to their headquarters in Walker.

  She’s gone. She just jumped through the passenger-side window and ran.”

  “Then follow her.” How hard was that to figure out? Kalen shook his head. Some of these guys could be so dense.

  “I can’t.” He paused and lowered his voice. “There are too many people hanging around. They’d notice me changing or disappearing into the woods and not coming back. There would be no way to explain why or how I disappeared after I made it into the brush. Besides, there are too many people in the woods. Some good Samaritans have already run after my dog.”

  “Dammit!”

  “What is it?” Bastien asked from the back seat. His mate, Carly, practically sat on his lap, as usual. There wasn’t a minute in the day that the newly mated pair weren’t touching if
they were together.

  “The woman has escaped.”

  Kalen turned his attention back to his phone. “How long ago did she get away?”

  “Only a few minutes.” The other man cursed. “We stopped to fuel up. Alexander was pumping gas while I went in to get something to eat.”

  There was a loud metallic thump over the line, as though the other man had punched the side of the van. He probably had.

  “I forgot and left the damned window down when I got out of the van. It was a rookie mistake. She jumped out and ran, leaving her jeans behind. At least she still had her t-shirt and underwear the last time we saw her.”

  “Shit!” He turned to Bastien. “The woman is loose in wolf form with nothing more than a t-shirt and those skimpy excuses for underwear to wear if she changes back.” He wasn’t really complaining about her underwear, she’d looked hot in it. It was just that, well, she had looked hot in it. She’d be running around in the woods half naked wearing little more than sexy underwear if she shifted back to her human form.

  When she changed back was more like it. As a new shifter, she would be like one of their kind during adolescence. Unpredictable, the change could come upon her at any time. Hell, she could already be in her human form again. Cold and alone, she wouldn’t know where to go, or who she could trust.

  That was just what they needed. After nearly a week, hot on the trail of Dr. Richard Thornton, they were too close to give up now. They had to keep going in search of the madman responsible for injecting so many with his serum. They had to stop him at all costs.

  Sighing, Kalen knew what he must do. Since he had been the one to move her and carry her to the van, he must be the one who went back for her. With luck, she would at least recognize him as the man she’d sunk her teeth into. She should recognize him anyway. They had a bite bond now.

  “Get Alexander to drop you off in a deserted location and go after her. Her instincts will bring her back this way. I’ll leave here and head out to intercept her. Have Alexander give you a pack for your phone and clothes. Keep her jeans with you. You’ll need them if you find her.”