The forces ahead of them were standing in front of the porch, their tranq guns at the ready.
He lowered the bullhorn. “Well, let’s give them a minute.”
“Shouldn’t we be waiting for Cole to kill Jimmy?”
Avery sighed. “Dana… look, you need to understand the SF’s position on Randall.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“The SF was never supposed to be used for punishment, only for rehabilitation. So—”
“Brooks?” Earl’s voice crackled, cutting Avery off.
Avery switched on his walkie. “Brooks here.”
“They’re not moving right?”
“Nope.”
“All right,” said Lowell. There was a pause, and then they could hear the faint echo of Lowell’s voice coming through all of the walkie talkies ahead of them as well. “Let’s move up on the porch and start busting out the windows. You see any wolves inside, you shoot.”
The SF forces started to move.
“We’re breaking windows?” said Dana.
Avery gave her a troubled look. “I don’t know what’s going on either.”
She pointed. “What’s that?”
He turned to look. There was a stream of more SF men coming down from the west side of the house.
Avery switched on his walkie. “Lowell, why is there another group coming in?”
“That’s the reinforcements I asked for,” said Lowell.
Dana touched Avery’s shoulder. “Brooks, I don’t think those guns they’re carrying are tranq guns.”
* * *
Cole cleared a hill and looked down on the south field.
But Jimmy wasn’t there.
Instead, four or five of Jimmy’s guards stood with their arms crossed, glaring at him.
The first one stepped forward, shifting into wolf form.
It was an ambush. Dana had been right. Jimmy had never meant to meet him, only to have these others jump and kill him.
Cole couldn’t believe it. He’d been sure his father would want the chance to personally teach Cole a lesson.
The first wolf lunged for him.
Cole snarled, facing him down.
A gunshot.
Loud, echoing against the stars.
The wolf yelped and fell to the ground.
Where is that coming from? Cole sniffed the air.
There. On top of the hill. A man with a gun.
Another shot, this one taking down another of Jimmy’s guards.
Cole didn’t waste time watching. He started for the gunman.
* * *
A gunshot in the distance. Dana turned alarmed eyes on Avery. “What was that?”
Avery wouldn’t look at her.
But then there were more gunshots, a volley from Earl’s new men, who were firing into the house.
Dana’s eyes widened. “What are they doing?”
Avery switched on the walkie. “Lowell? Are those real guns?”
“Just escalating the threat level, Brooks,” said Lowell. “They haven’t hit anything yet, so don’t get your panties in a bunch.”
Avery switched off the walkie. “It’s fine, Gray.”
“I don’t know if I trust Lowell,” she said.
Avery’s brow furrowed. “He’s actually not one for being truthful, is he?”
“We have to do something.”
“What?” he said.
Avery’s walkie crackled again.
“Lowell, it’s Briggs. Randall just jumped me, and I couldn’t get off a clear shot. I got the other wolves but not him. He took my pants and my gun, and he’s headed back for the house.”
“Uh, Briggs, you got Brooks here, not Lowell,” said Avery.
“Shit. Wrong channel.”
Dana drew back. “What does he mean shoot Randall? Was that the gunshot I heard?”
Avery’s jaw twitched. “Look, Gray, I wanted you to be free of him.”
“By killing him?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Cole tugged open the doors to the basement. Luckily, they were in the back of the house, and the SF was concentrated in the front.
He could smell smoke, but he chalked it up to the discharge of gunfire in the air.
He hurried down into the basement.
The darkness swallowed him up.
He was going to find Jimmy. The SF may have double-crossed him, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t have his showdown with his father.
He was owed that, wasn’t he?
After all the things that the man had done to him, he was owed a chance to make Jimmy pay.
He moved blindly through the darkness.
Vaguely, he wondered if the smoke smell was worse down here.
* * *
“The house is on fire!” Dana shrieked, pointing to a tongue of bright flame that was licking up the side of the building.
Avery saw it. He grabbed his walkie from his waist. “Lowell? Did you order your men to start a fire?”
“What?” said Lowell. “No.”
“Well, the house is on fire.”
“Is it bad?” A pause. “Oh, I see it. Shit.”
“How the hell did that happen?”
“I don’t know. Maybe those bastards started it themselves. Maybe they’re committing group suicide.” Lowell’s voice shifted again, and his orders went out to everyone, and it was strained. “Listen, get as close as you can and bust out the windows. Brooks, tell them to come out in wolf form or human form we don’t care. Just get them the hell out of there.”
Avery raised the bullhorn. “Now is the time to exit the building. We will not fire on anyone who comes out. Please leave now before the fire worsens. Now is the time—”
He broke off because Dana wasn’t next to him.
“Gray?”
She was sprinting across the lawn. “Cole’s in there. They said he was going back to the farmhouse.”
“So what? You’re going to risk your life for him?”
“He’s my mate, Brooks. You can’t even imagine what it feels like to know he’s in danger. I have to go.” She yanked her shirt over her head, shifting into wolf form.
“Gray!” he yelled. Damn it all to hell.
He dropped the bullhorn. So, she was mated to him, huh?
Well, he could fix that.
He shifted as well.
He bounded after her, catching up to her in wolf form.
She barely seemed to notice him.
He leaped onto her, catching her neck with his teeth, stopped her movement.
She whined.
And soon he wasn’t only holding her in place with his teeth.
* * *
Cole felt it go through him, a jolting sense of absence. Dana.
What had happened to Dana?
She wasn’t mated to him anymore.
He stumbled in the darkness, and then he saw the bright glow of flame.
The stairs were on fire.
He righted himself, taking in the large room in the basement.
All of the members of the Pack were crowded down here, standing in a tight circle, looking down at something.
“Hey!” he yelled at them. “The house is on fire. It’s time to get the fuck out of here.”
They turned to look at him, the flames lighting up the hollows of their faces. They looked ominous and solemn, orange-glow reflecting off of their skin.
None of them spoke.
What the hell were they all looking at anyway?
He sprang forward and pushed through them to the center of the circle.
There, spread eagle, lay Jimmy.
He was dead.
Cole could see it because his skin was waxy, no longer quite attached to his bones.
Jimmy had been dead for days.
Cole looked around at the others in the circle. “What?”
“Cole,” said a voice.
He looked up to see his mother. She was holding her arms out to him. “You came back.”
; “Why didn’t anyone tell us he was dead?” He looked back at the body. “What happened?” He was getting choked up, but that was because of smoke inhalation. It had to be. He wouldn’t cry over this man.
“The wound was too much for him,” said Rhoda. “We weren’t sure what to do, but the moon has provided an answer.” She gestured to the burning stairs.
“What?” Cole was confused.
“We can’t go on without Jimmy,” said Rhoda. “Who would we be without him? He made us something special. And there’s nothing without him.”
Jimmy was dead. Cole stared at his body, numb with shock.
Rhoda was still reaching for him. “Come, Cole. Come back into the Pack, and all will be forgiven.”
He shook his head. He looked around at the members of the Pack, the people he’d grown up, his brothers and sisters, and the other women. “Why are you staying here if he’s dead?”
Rhoda’s face changed. “You won’t, will you? You won’t come back to us?”
Cole coughed. The smoke was overpowering. He didn’t know how they were all managing to stand here. “We all need to get out of here, or we’re going to die.”
She lifted her chin. “You don’t understand. You refused to understand. You brought us so low. You betrayed Jimmy. And because of you, that woman came here, and now we are destroyed. Our deaths are on your head.”
Cole backed away, shaking his head. His eyes were filling with tears, but that was because of the smoke. “We need to leave.”
“We are connected to Jimmy,” said Rhoda. “As he goes, so do we.”
Cole searched the faces. “Gail? Rebecca? All of you, have you gone insane?”
They regarded him stonily, but none of them spoke.
He coughed again.
He staggered away from them, and they parted to let him through.
The fire was raging even higher now. The heat was blistering.
Cole took a fumbling step and then went down on one knee.
Rhoda’s voice rang out. “We come to the moon, sisters and brothers. We merge with the light.”
Cole struggled to stand. He had to get out, even if they wouldn’t follow him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
two months later…
“How did the fire start?” asked the lawyer. Dana thought her name was Patton. Melody Patton? Margerie Patton? She was wearing a navy suit, and her hair was in a sleek bun. She fixed Dana with a glare.
“We don’t know how it started,” said Dana. She was at an internal hearing of the SF. She and Avery had been on paid leave since the incident at Hunter’s Moon Farm, and this was the culmination of the investigation against them.
“You didn’t start the fire, then? Not to try to get the rogue wolves to leave or perhaps to kill them?”
“No,” said Dana.
“There is evidence that the wolves were killed, though, isn’t there? With bullets?”
“You’d have to talk to Lowell about that,” she said. Earl Lowell’s hearing was separate from hers and Avery’s. “I had no knowledge of any use of deadly weapons.”
“But your partner, Mr. Brooks, just testified that Earl Lowell had informed him that the SF board had authorized him to kill both James Hadley and Cole Randall, something that the board denies.”
“But I didn’t know about that. Brooks kept it from me.”
“And why did he do that?”
“At the time I was mated to Cole Randall, and they both believed that I would warn him if I knew what was about to happen to him.”
“Mated, right.” Patton turned to the gathered group of SF officials. “If you’re unaware, there’s an addendum in Packet C that describes werewolf mating in detail.” She turned back to Dana. “So, you and Randall were lovers?”
Dana swallowed. She took a deep breath. “We were involved sexually.”
“And that’s your defense, to be clear? You’re saying you would not have conspired to kill Randall and the others at Hunter’s Moon Farm, because of your feelings for him?”
“There was no conspiracy,” said Dana. “They wouldn’t come out. And when we tried to get them out—”
“Mr. Randall was also the man who kept you captive and tried to kill you, is that correct?”
She nodded. “Yes.”
“Now, the mating sort of overrides your own natural sexual attraction, right?”
“Not exactly,” said Dana.
“But you were compelled by this werewolf bond to want Mr. Randall sexually.”
“Yes.”
“And how would you describe your attitude towards the bond?”
“Well, I wasn’t exactly happy about it,” she said.
“If Mr. Randall was killed, then it would break the bond, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes, but that doesn’t mean that I wanted him dead, because I didn’t. Anyway, we don’t even know if he is dead, because they haven’t made a positive identification of most of the bodies on the farm. They were too badly damaged by fire.”
“Well, you aren’t bonded to him, anymore, are you?” said Patton. “Wouldn’t that indicate he was dead?”
Dana fidgeted. The truth was that Avery had mated with her on the field in front of the burning house. That was what had severed her tie to Cole. But she and Avery had decided there was no need to go broadcasting that information to the SF. The organization was inherently mistrustful of wolf bonds, and they might think that it affected their ability to do their jobs.
Considering the events at Hunter’s Moon Farm already had them on shaky ground, subject to internal hearings investigating their behavior, telling everyone that she was bonded to Avery probably wouldn’t cast them in a great light.
Never mind the fact that Avery had done it to save her life, or that the two of them had never been happier together.
“Ms. Gray?” said Patton. “Are you bonded to Mr. Randall anymore?”
“No,” said Dana quietly.
“Then it stands to reason that he perished in the fire, doesn’t it?”
“I suppose.” Dana licked her lips. “Look, I didn’t want any of those people to be dead. I founded the Pack Liaison Branch at the SF to reach out to genetic werewolves and werewolf packs. I wanted to work with them, not to hurt them. None of us wanted to hurt them.”
Patton spread her hands. “So you say, Ms. Gray.”
“Because it’s the truth.” Dana turned to the gathered group of officials, pleading with them. “We never meant for it to get so out of hand.”
* * *
She waited until she got out of the room, onto the steps outside the building to hug Avery in relief and celebration. He squeezed her tightly, kissing her.
She opened her mouth to him, the bond between the two of them strengthened by the fact that their wolves were mated as well. It was all-encompassing and wonderful.
Dana loved being mated to Avery, had loved it from the second it washed over her months ago. In front of her, the main house on the farm had been burning to the ground, probably with Cole inside it. One second, she was terrified for Cole’s life, racing into the fire, racing to her own probable death. The next second, she was Avery’s, and a sweet sense of rightness and calm had settled over her.
They should have done it a long time ago, she thought, a sentiment that Avery echoed. Now that they were together, he said he couldn’t understand why he’d resisted it for so long.
He broke the kiss, resting his forehead against hers. “Didn’t I tell you it would go okay?”
“Oh come on, don’t tell me you weren’t nervous. That Patton woman was tough.”
“But in the end, they reinstated us, they gave more funding to the Pack Liaison Branch, and everything turned out perfectly.”
She grinned. The hearing had been nerve-wracking, but everything was okay now.
He leaned close, his mouth at her ear. “And when we get home,” he growled, “I am going to fuck you senseless.”
She giggled. Their love life was fairly adventurous these days as
well. Avery had surprised her by being open to her fantasies, even her more, er, deviant ones. He was rather adept at acting them out, as well. In some ways, it was good that they’d been suspended from work for so long, because they’d been fairly busy in the bedroom.
“Brooks!” called Max Jones, one of the other trackers from their branch.
Avery let go of her and turned, grinning. “How about it, huh?”
“Glad to have you back, buddy,” he said, offering Avery his hand.
Dana’s cell phone rang. She’d only turned it on a minute ago. She picked it up. “Hello?”
“Hello, Dana.”
Her stomach turned over. She knew that voice. She held up a finger at Avery. “I need to take this.”
He waved her away, turning back to talk to Max.
Dana walked down the steps, clutching the phone. “Cole? Where are you?”
“You think I’m stupid? I’m not going to tell you that. I’ve been watching the news, and I know that there was no deal with Lowell. He was playing me. He wanted me dead. You wanted me dead, too.”
“No, Cole, I didn’t. I swear I had no idea.”
“Oh, you’ve admitted you knew the deal with Lowell was bogus. I saw that on the news too. So don’t even try to wriggle out of that one.”
“It’s been months. I thought you were dead.”
“Oh, I thought that was what you wanted.” His voice was aloof and amused. The old Cole. Not the vulnerable Cole, who’d told her about the way his father had abused him, who’d promised her he could change.
“I’m telling you, that’s not true. I would never want you dead.”
He chuckled. “You’re very convincing, Dana. I always believed everything you said to me.”
“Cole—”
“I only called to say congratulations. I see that they’ve reinstated you at the SF. You won’t be punished for the role you played in killing my family.”
“I didn’t—”
“No, you’re right,” he said. “It’s not your fault. It’s mine. I should never have saved you in that gymnasium. You complicate my life in very bad ways.”
Her heart sank. “Don’t say that.”
“What do you care? You and Brooks seem to be happy. How’d that happen, anyway?”
“He… mated with me to stop me from going into the house after you.”
“So, he raped you.”
Bad Moon Rising (Cole and Dana) Page 29
