by Ava Benton
“I’m totally ready to leave whenever you give the word,” I reminded them.
“Don’t sweat it,” Layla said with a scowl.
There was so much tension flying back and forth between them, I would’ve sworn I saw actual sparks.
I wondered what her idea was and would’ve bet just about anything that it had to do with Montana. Following Jordan and his family there. It made sense—and Jordan had offered—but no way would Lance do that unless he really had to. I would’ve bet anything on that, too.
“Okay. So. When are we pulling out?” I asked, still trying to keep things light. It was getting harder and harder and I was starting to feel ridiculous.
“Hmm? Oh. Four days?”
“Sounds good. I’ll make sure everybody’s aware.”
“Great. Thanks.”
It was time to go. There was a fight brewing. A great big fight that I’d probably be able to hear from my tent if I listened hard. I didn’t intend on listening hard. I intended to get the hell out of there and pretend not to notice that the two of them were ready to get into it.
Just as my hand touched the doorknob, it turned. I jumped back.
Karl stuck his head in. “Sorry to bother you, but there are two guys here. They’re looking for somebody they lost a while back and think he might have been one of the prisoners back at the lab.”
Lance shot up off the bed. “They seem trustworthy?” he asked.
“They’re like us,” he said. “I could smell it on them right off. The story makes sense.”
“Send them in,” he said, shooting Layla a warning look. He wanted to make sure she was safe, just in case the shifters weren’t trustworthy. She got up and stood behind him.
In walked two men. I could smell the animal in them, too, but the sight of them was enough to convince me. They were bigger than the average human in every way—tall, impossibly wide shoulders, muscles bulging everywhere. One of them had a thick mane of blond hair which just about begged for fingers to comb through it.
Jeez. Clearly, I hadn’t had sex in way too long.
“How can we help you?” Lance asked, standing with his feet shoulder-width apart and his hands clasped behind his back. All business.
“My name is Jace Everglade,” the blond said. “This is my cousin, Cord.”
Both of them had golden eyes, almost supernaturally golden. Beautiful.
“Maybe you’ve heard of our clan,” Cord said.
I frowned and glanced over at Lance.
He nodded firmly. “Sure. Some friends of ours did a little work for your clan not long ago, down in Florida.”
“That’s right,” Jace said with a slight smile. “My father hired them to protect a human. And we’re looking for one of our own.”
“Wait a minute.” Lance looked at Cord, then back at Jace. “Are you telling me we have a Everglade here?”
Cord held up his large, rough hands. “We’re here in hopes the person we’re looking for is with you.”
“As far as we know, he disappeared outside Chicago,” Jace explained. “At the time, things were pretty tense within the clan—we were at war with another clan and my father didn’t want him traveling. Too risky, you know. But he insisted because he said he wanted to help somehow, make sure our Midwest branch was in a strong enough position to send extra bodies our way. Dad let him go. And we haven’t seen him since.”
“We know it’s a long shot,” Cord added, “but it was something we had to follow up on. News got out about your group destroying that lab and setting the prisoners free—good work, by the way.”
“Yeah, great job,” Jace agreed.
“We thought it was worth checking out. Maybe he was there. I mean, yeah, the lab was in Washington and he was last seen in Chicago…” Cord trailed off with a shrug.
I felt sorry for the both of them. They wanted their friend back and were grasping at straws.
Layla smiled, but it was a sad smile. “Nobody released from the lab claimed they were affiliated with your clan. I’m sorry.”
“We figured. It was worth a shot.” Jace’s hands found his hips as he blew out a long, depressed sigh. “This was our last chance that Grant was out there somewhere. We had to try.”
“Grant?” Layla’s head snapped around as she glared at me.
“Wait, Grant? We have a Grant here,” Lance said. “I mean, not to get your hopes up or anything, but there’s a man here by that name. Blonde, blue eyes, girls are always drooling over him. Wolf shifter.”
Cord and Jace both winced. “Close,” Jace said. “Grant was a tiger.”
And for some reason, that was a relief. I didn’t know how to feel about how relieved that made me. Grant wouldn’t leave with them, because he wasn’t who they were looking for.
Lance shook his head. “I’m sorry. No tigers here.”
“I guess we should’ve cleared that up first,” Cord chuckled darkly. “Thanks anyway. We’re sorry we wasted your time.”
“Not at all,” Layla said as she stood. “We’re going to have a barbecue tonight. You’re welcome to stay.” Lance nodded in agreement.
“That sounds good,” Jace said, shrugging. Cord grinned.
“Well, we’re not flying back out until tomorrow,” he said. “And I could seriously go for some barbecue.”
“And we could seriously use more hands to help set up the fire pits,” Layla laughed.
I laughed, too, even though I felt sorry for them. The relief of knowing Grant wasn’t leaving overshadowed my sympathy. That wasn’t like me at all.
There were voices outside the cabin—probably the rest of the group getting the fire pit set up for the barbecue—and they grew louder when I opened the door. I had to shield my eyes against the light from the late afternoon sun streaming down.
Grant was out there, helping.
I waved.
He smiled.
Until he saw who was behind me.
“Holy shit!” Cord hissed. “It’s him!”
“I don’t believe this. Oh, my God!” Jace jumped down the rickety stairs and practically sprinted over to where Grant was standing.
Cord, too.
They nearly tackled Grant in their excitement.
“Wait a second,” Layla said, holding her hands to her head like she didn’t believe what she was seeing.
“They said they were looking for a tiger,” Lance muttered, shaking his head. “I don’t get it. He’s definitely not a tiger. Right?”
“Right,” I whispered.
But just the same, the two Everglades practically pissed their jeans when they saw him. “What are the odds that he has a doppelgänger?”
“I need to figure this out.” Lance went to them—everybody was watching at that point, and he had to elbow his way through the onlookers.
Layla came to me, putting a gentle hand on my arm.
“It doesn’t make any sense, but they believe it’s him,” she said. “Only he doesn’t look half as happy as they are.”
“No. He looks like they killed his dog.”
“But he knew them,” she whispered. “He saw them and he knew them.”
“I know,” I said with a sinking heart.
He knew them and he was devastated when he saw them.
I wished I knew why.
5
GRANT
“I can’t believe it’s you, man! I’m so goddamn happy to see you!” Jace gave me another fierce bro hug and I forced another smile. He wanted me to smile, of course.
He and Cord both did.
“Yeah, man. Me too.” I couldn’t breathe. I felt sick.
How did they find me? And were they really happy? Or did they already know what I had done? They could—they might. Bradford could’ve told them. He would, too, the bastard. He would stab me in the back. I watched their faces, their body language. Nothing they did made it seem like they were anything but glad to have found me.
“Why didn’t you come right home when you got out?” Cord asked.
> Jace nodded as he gave me a playful shove that would’ve knocked a full-grown human male on his ass. “Yeah, or at least let us know you were still alive. We’ve been looking for you on and off for, like, a year.”
That crashed through the fog of panic in my brain. “Wait. What? A year?”
Cord’s smile faded. “You didn’t know?”
“A year?” I was about to throw up. I took a couple of steps back, away from them. I didn’t know what I was trying to accomplish. I just had to put a little space between us.
A year. I had lost an entire year.
“Man, you all right?” Jace was frowning, exchanging worried looks with Cord.
I fought to find the breath to answer him. “Sorry, bro, but…” I put a hand on my chest and forced myself to take a deep breath to the count of four, then hold it for another count of four.
One of the tricks I had picked up in the lab to keep from losing my shit—especially when they had wanted me to lose my shit. Holding onto control had been the only little way I could fight back.
“But what?” Jace put his hands on my shoulders, sought out my eyes. “Hey. Look at me. But what?”
“But… I didn’t know until now how long I was there.”
A year. I was a year older. I had missed everything. Football season, baseball season, the holidays. All of it.
“You didn’t know? How could you not know?”
They looked at each other like I had just started speaking in tongues or something.
“They… wouldn’t let me know what day it was, what month. What year. Fuck it, I didn’t even know what time it was. Ever.” My voice sounded dead.
“Wow, buddy. I’m sorry. I didn’t know.” Cord rubbed a hand over the back of his neck, grimacing. “That sounds like hell.”
“Yeah, well, that’s just for starters,” I chuckled without any humor. It wasn’t a funny situation. “You gotta give me a minute to catch up in my head. A year. Fuck me.”
Jace looked around and pointed to a picnic table with a long bench on either side. “Here. Let’s sit.” I thought he might help me walk over there, like I was a cripple all of a sudden. I made it a point to wave them off and walked there on my own.
I didn’t know where to start, and neither did they. I saw it written all over their faces. They hadn’t expected me to drop that on them—well, good, because I hadn’t expected them to show up and ruin everything I had been planning. Planning was probably the wrong word. It implied steps and a process. Hoping was more like it.
“You don’t know anything that’s happened to the clan in the last year?” Cord asked, sitting across from me.
“No. I don’t know anything that’s happened anywhere. To anybody.”
“Whoa.” He looked at Jace, who cleared his throat.
“Hang on. First of all, how are you feeling now? Like, are you okay? Wait a minute.” He looked at Cord, then back at me. “They said there weren’t any tigers here. Just wolves. What the hell did that mean?”
I took a deep breath. They wouldn’t understand. “It’s something I’m still trying to get a handle on. Not being a tiger anymore.”
“I don’t understand. How is that possible? We don’t just randomly change.” Cord’s eyes widened. “Do we?”
“No, we don’t,” I said, shaking my head.
“So?”
“They were doing tests on you,” Jace murmured, staring at me. Talking more to himself than he was to either of us. “They fucked with your DNA. Or whatever it is that makes us who we are.”
“I guess so. Not like they ever told me what they were doing. But it’s as good an explanation as any. They were always injecting me with stuff.” I looked at them, but through them at the same time. To the past. I was back in the lab. The lights were so bright. They hurt my eyes. It was cold most of the time. I was almost always cold.
“Jesus Christ.” Cord sounded sick.
“They wanted to find out if they could change us from one species to another,” Jace muttered. He sounded murderous.
“Well, surprise. They can.”
Instead of looking sorry for me, Jace said, “Where did we go for your twenty-first birthday?”
I rolled my eyes. He was testing me. That made sense—I would want to test me, too. “That awful strip club on the Florida-Georgia border. With those poor, tired girls who had to ask for money for the jukebox so they could have something to dance to.”
He chuckled with a shake of his head. “That was such a shitty night.”
“The least sexy experience of my whole life,” I decided.
His smile faded. “Hey. You understand I needed to know.”
“Yeah. I do.” I couldn’t hold it against him.
“How come you didn’t get in touch with us?” Cord asked.
Ah. The big question.
I was waiting for that one, too. I had to tread carefully.
“It’s been a lot to go through, man. Know what I mean? They gave me so many drugs—obviously.” I laughed out loud, surprising myself. “Son of a bitch, it never even occurred to me to ask for the date. Not once. And I’ve been out for two weeks. What’s that tell you?”
“I was wondering how you didn’t find out until now how long it’s been since you went missing,” Jace admitted.
“I understand if it doesn’t make sense. Really, I do. When they first broke me out of there—I mean, it wasn’t exactly a fun experience, first off. It was bloody and nasty. And confusing. I didn’t know what was happening, whether the people freeing us were the good guys or just more bad guys. So that took a little time to get over. Being around other people was an adjustment, too—I still don’t like being too close to anybody for very long.”
The two of them looked painfully uncomfortable. They hadn’t expected to hear me say things like that.
“It’s not like it is in movies, is it?” I asked with a grin. “Somebody gets rescued from a shitty situation, like they were captive someplace for a long time, and it cuts to them being happy and, like, well-adjusted. And normal. But when it happens in real life, nothing turns out that way. It took the first week for me to feel like the drugs were finally out of my system.”
“Shouldn’t you see a doctor?” Cord asked.
I couldn’t help shaking my head. “Yeah. I’ll tell him I was held for a year in an underground lab which a bunch of shapeshifters destroyed after slaughtering everybody inside.”
“Oh. Good point.”
“I’m starting to feel much more like myself,” I added, which was true. “So I’m a dire wolf instead of a tiger now. I can live with that, so long as I don’t have to live in that lab anymore.”
“I can’t imagine what it must’ve been like for you,” Jace muttered. “We never thought you’d end up so far away. Not like we would’ve known where to look, anyway—we never knew about this research experimental group. They didn’t advertise online, know what I mean?”
“Yeah, I guess not. Did you hear all about them, down in Florida?”
“It’s tough to tell what’s a rumor and what’s real,” Cord said.
“Believe me—whatever you hear, no matter how crazy it sounds, it’s probably true. They were like something out of a science fiction movie. Or a horror flick.”
“It’s all over now,” Jace reminded me. “Even if it doesn’t seem like it is, it is. You can come home and take your time getting over it—and you can see one of our doctors, too. You won’t have to make anything up for them.”
“You sure that’s okay?” Cold fingers squeezed my heart.
“Are you kidding? Dad will insist,” he grinned. “Don’t tell me you forgot how impossible it is to turn him down.”
“No. I haven’t forgotten that.” Or how impossible it was to get through to him. Or how unforgiving he was. What a hardass he could be.
“He’s mellowed, now that the war is over,” Cord observed.
My ears pricked up. “What? It’s over?”
“Oh, shit! I totally forgot! Yeah, it�
�s over, man. It’s been over for months.”
“Tell me we won, at least.”
“We did,” Cord said, pounding his palm on the table. “We kicked ass. The Eastwings are pretty much a disgusting memory now.”
I almost didn’t dare hope it was true. “What about Bradford? Where is he?”
“Dead.” Jace’s voice didn’t leave much room for doubt.
“He’s dead.” I couldn’t believe it. I had to say it out loud so it would feel real. He was dead. Gone. I didn’t have to worry about him anymore. The world spun around me. I couldn’t get a hold of any one thought, they all raced through my head so fast.
“Yeah, you missed a lot of action. We could’ve used you down there,” Cord said.
“I’m sorry I missed it.”
“Hey—you couldn’t help it,” Jace said. “I wish we could’ve gotten you out of that place. You’re a better man than me, living through that and not going completely insane.”
“Yeah. It wasn’t easy.” I was barely paying attention to what either of them were saying. He was dead. He couldn’t hold anything over my head anymore. I could go home. Couldn’t I?
“Time will take care of everything.” Jace grinned as they both stood. “Hey, we got an invite to this barbecue tonight. We were supposed to help set up the fire pits.”
“Oh, yeah. I’m sure the guys could use your help.” I rose too, and was surprised when my legs shook. “I need to gather some more wood.”
“You want help with that?” Cord offered.
I waved them off—their company was what I needed to get away from. I had to think on my own, without them talking in my ears. Bradford was dead. His clan was practically finished.
Nobody had to know what I did.
I barely paid attention to where my feet landed as I walked deeper into the woods. The thick branches overhead blocked out most of the light—my animal senses made up for the darkness. I might never have stopped walking if I hadn’t heard footsteps behind me.
Just like that, I whirled around and was a breath away from shifting to attack.
“Wait, wait!” Daniela held up her hands, palm out. “I’m not trying to hurt you! I just wanted to check on you.”
I took a step back and a deep breath. “Christ. Thanks for freaking me out.”
