They were driving through the little downtown area now. Lonesome Pine was a tiny town, with one main street that ran through the center. It had been a mining town during the gold rush in the 1800s, but now mostly survived on logging and farming.
Colonel Bradwell had run his secret lab in an old abandoned mine near the town for about two years, experimenting on shifters who’d been kidnapped from all over the country.
“I know Shamans who could help you with your panic attacks,” Dash said to Pyotr.
“My panic attacks are what keeps me safe,” Pyotr said. “If I think I’m safe, I’m dead. Being afraid is what keeps you alive. Never sleep, never trust, never turn your back on anyone. That’s how you stay safe.”
There was no point in trying to argue with him. Dash fell silent. Thomas and Sally had fallen asleep in the back seat, with Isadora sitting between them. Pyotr, next to him in the front seat, kept glancing anxiously out the window.
Steele lived in a blue and white Colonial style A-frame house, at the end of a small street. As they approached Dash saw there were a dozen people sitting on the front porch, some in police uniform, waiting for them. Dash had called to let Steele know he was coming, and that they’d very nearly been ambushed by human mercenaries.
A look of alarm crossed Pyotr’s face as he saw all the people there.
“Stop!” Pyotr yelled. Sally and Thomas jerked awake.
Dash stepped on the brakes, stopping the truck with a jerk, and Pyotr flung open his door and scrambled out. “Too many people!” he shouted, and then he shifted into wolf form, and shot off down the street as if a pack of lions were on his heels.
“Damn it,” Isadora said, watching him run off. “He’s our only chance of identifying Zador! Maybe you should go after him. Or I could.”
“I think he’ll come back,” Dash said. “He came to the Hobo camp looking for you; I don’t think he really wants to be alone. I’m afraid if I grab him right now, I’ll send him into full blown hysteria and he’ll be useless to us. He’s suffering from post-traumatic stress. He might see me as the enemy, freak out and try to attack me, I’d have to subdue him – not the best way to get him to cooperate.”
“You may be right. I don’t want him to end up getting injured.” Isadora didn’t sound too happy about it, though.
Dash pulled up in front of the house and parked. On the front porch, Steele sat next to Roxanne, his wife. Roxanne’s son Flint was curled up on Steele’s lap, in cub form, and Roxanne was stroking his fur.
Sally and Thomas yawned as they climbed out of the truck and followed Dash and Isadora up the flagstone path towards the house.
“Why did Pyotr run away like that?” Sally asked.
“He’s stone cold crazy,” Thomas replied with a shrug.
One of the men with Steele was a tall, lean man who Dash recognized as Mayor Bertelsen. Dash recognized another as Edvin Gund. The Gunds came from a pack that had gotten cut off from the rest of the shifter nation in the 1800s, and had intermarried with humans. He also recognized Edvin’s cousin Axel Gund, who had been kidnapped and held in the laboratory for more than a year.
Axel looked much better than the last time Dash had seen him. That had been right after Dash had helped to free him from the underground lab, and Axel had been pale and so thin he was almost skeletal. Now he’d gotten his color back and he’d put on weight. He managed a smile, but Dash could see the thousand yard stare in his eyes.
“Dash. Isadora. You made it.” Steele handed his son to Roxanne, and stood up, brushing the fur off his jeans. He quickly climbed down the steps and walked over to greet them.
“So, tell me what’s going on,” he said.
“Long story,” Dash said as they climbed up on the porch. “This is Thomas and Sally. A bunch of human mercenaries just raided the camp they were staying at, about two hours from here.”
“Anybody hurt?” Steele asked.
“No, the shifters smelled them coming and took off before they got there. It’s not a good thing that they’re this close to your town, though.”
“No, it isn’t,” Steele said grimly.
Dash tried not to stare at the human cops standing there on the porch. Human cops, working for a shifter police chief. This town was absolutely unique. It was a shame that it couldn’t be like this all over the world. Even though these people represented the best possible outcome of humans discovering the existence of shifters, unfortunately, they’d also encountered the worst possible outcome, in the form of Colonel Bradwell and his men.
Roxanne’ son Flint shifted to human form, turning into a chubby toddler. He ran over to Sally, who picked him up. “Oof. He’s heavy,” she said. She stared at Roxanne, then back at him. “Wait. Are you his mother? How is that possible?”
Flint, laughing, leaped into Roxanne’s arms, and then squirmed to get back to Sally.
“Oh, we’re playing that game, are we?” Roxanne held on to him, ruffling his hair. “It’s a genetic mutation,” she said to Sally. “Some of the humans in this town can have children with wolf shifters.”
Then she glanced worriedly at Sally and Thomas’s skinny frames.
“Not my fault!” Isadora said quickly. “They were living at a Hobo camp.”
“Who wants to help me make cookies?” Roxanne asked. She worked as a short order cook in the town’s diner. “Chocolate chip. You can lick the spoons afterwards.”
Sally’s hand shot up in the air. “We do!”
Thomas shrugged, pretending indifference. “I guess I could help.”
Sally turned to Isadora, grabbing her hand. “Come on, come help us.”
“Go on ahead. I’ll be right there,” Isadora said.
“She’s not coming. She’s going to leave us again,” Thomas said to Sally. “We’ll come out and she’ll be gone. It’s okay. We do okay on our own, don’t we?”
“Oh, for God’s sake. I’m coming,” Isadora said, sounding exasperated as she followed them inside. “And just for that, I may make you take two baths tomorrow.”
“No way! Not fair!” Thomas howled.
“It’s a cruel, cruel world we live in,” Isadora said. “A world filled with regular baths, and I forgot to add in brushing of teeth, with a toothbrush and toothpaste, twice a day, every day.”
“What?” Thomas’ voice was outraged as Isadora shut the door behind them.
“So, what’s going on?” Steele asked.
Dash quickly filled him in on what he knew so far. “The problem is, I can’t call Warden Redthorne for help. I’m about 99 percent positive that he’s not collaborating with the humans, but I can’t ignore the fact that after I revealed where Isadora and I were headed, those mercenaries showed up and tried to ambush us.”
“No, you can’t ignore that,” Steele said.
“We’ve already held a town meeting, advising everyone to be on alert,” Mayor Bertelsen told Dash. “The Gunds are aware. We check in with them hourly. None of them are travelling alone now, and they’re armed. They have radios and cell phones. If anyone attacks them, we’ll be all over it.”
Edvin and Axel both nodded. They wore gun holsters with Glock .40 caliber pistols.
Axel looked around, tipped his head back, sniffed at the air.
“What is it?” Edvin asked him, frowning.
“Something…I don’t know. It’s nothing, I guess. I just thought…nothing.”
“You thought what?” Edvin persisted.
Axel shook his head wearily. “Flashbacks. I get them all the time. Like a horrible déjà vu, like I’m back in the laboratory. It’s all right, really, it’s nothing.”
* * *
An hour’s drive from Lonesome Pine, Chief Warden Redthorne and two dozen Wardens and Pride Patrol members were gathered in a wooded area at the end of a dirt road. Redthorne stood by his truck as the assembled shifters checked their weapons and got ready to move out.
Redthorne called Dash’s cell phone number and listened to Dash’s cell phone go straight to voicema
il for the dozenth time. “Dash. Call me,” he said curtly, and hung up.
Under other circumstances, he’d have been worried that Dash wasn’t returning his calls, but he didn’t think that Dash had been kidnapped or injured. It was much more likely that Dash and Isadora were laying low somewhere, hiding out from the human mercenaries.
The fact that Dash was disobeying his orders was an issue he’d have to deal with when Dash resurfaced, of course.
He saw Warden Marsh walking towards him. “Are we ready to go?” Marsh asked.
“Yep.” He tucked his cell phone back in his pocket and walked back to rejoin the group.
Marsh and everyone else there thought that they were gathering to pounce on Isadora and take her into custody. They were wrong. Redthorne still had no idea where she was.
However, their manhunt for Isadora was a convenient way to flush out the spy or spies in their midst. The mere thought of that level of treachery filled him with a deep, burning anger.
Was it Isadora herself who’d revealed her and Dash’s whereabouts? He still didn’t know, although if she’d been with Dash continuously, then she would have had no way to phone in her exact location to tip off the humans.
Whatever the case, he meant to find out.
He’d announced that he had received a credible tip about Isadora, indicating that she had a rendezvous with a group of humans in a wooded area near Lonesome Pine. He’d kept very careful track of who actually knew the truth – the chief Elder, and his second in command Warden Roderick, who was also his nephew, were among the few who were aware that he was carrying out a sting to flush out the traitors in their midst.
He’d gathered up his Wardens in Timber Valley and they’d flown out to Montana in a private plane. A group of local Wardens had come with him, as well. The location that he’d claimed she would be at was close to the last place that Isadora had been seen.
This time, he’d not only kept careful track of everyone that had been told about their mission, he’d also had his niece in the Warden’s IT department place surveillance devices in their rooms and bugged their phones and computers without their knowledge.
If anyone tried to ambush them today, at the very least he’d confirm that there was a spy, and hopefully they’d be flushed out.
He’d made it very clear how they were going to approach the rendezvous point, along a road that led to an old quarry. He’d told everyone their route, mapped it out deliberately, so that he could control where the mercenaries would lay in ambush for them. Now, he was going to throw a monkey wrench in their scenario.
“Change of plan,” he said to the assembled group. “You’re going to follow me.”
“Which way are we going, sir?” Warden Marsh asked him.
“You’ll see when we get there,” he informed him.
They’d all brought bags to carry their weapons and gear in. They quickly shifted, grabbed their bags in their jaws, and ran through the woods.
Instead of running down to the road, he led them uphill, climbing higher and higher until they reached the top of a ridge overlooking the area where Isadora allegedly would be.
The smell of humans drifted his way. They were about half a mile away, and the scent was getting stronger.
He shifted human form, and everyone else followed suit.
“You smell that?” Marsh growled.
“Hell yes. It stinks of human,” Redthorne said.
At least twenty human soldiers in camouflage gear were headed towards the spot where they thought Isadora would be.
“Do we go after them now, or wait for her to show up?” Marsh said.
“Isadora was never going to show up here. I released that information because I suspected that we had a spy in our midst. It’s clear that someone leaked the information to those humans, who were going to ambush both Isadora and us,” Redthorne said. The information was greeted with a chorus of growls and snarls of anger around him.
“One of us did this? A shifter?” a Pride Patrol bobcat named Bart hissed furiously.
“Wait – they were after us, and also after the lynx shifter? Does that mean that she’s not a traitor?” Warden Roderick asked.
“We won’t know for sure until a Shaman compels her to speak,” Warden Roderick said. “Of course, we’d have to find her first.”
He pulled out his satellite phone and called the Chief Elder to inform him.
“Let’s go find out,” Redthorne said. He gestured everyone to come in close. “New mission. Our goal is to hit them hard, right now.” He looked through his binoculars again. “There are two groups of them, setting up to come at us from two sides. See them? Good. Bart, take the group to the north. Kill as many as you have to, don’t compromise your safety, but try to save at least a couple of them for interrogation. Marsh, everyone else, you come with me.”
They shifted again and raced through the woods, carrying their weapons in their jaws or slung around their necks.
They were right on top of the humans before they were spotted.
Shots rang through the air, followed by screams, and then chaos descended. Redthorne launched himself, flying through the air, and took out a burly human, ripping through his throat and reveling in the taste of his blood. Warden Marsh shifted to human form and, crouched behind a tree, began shooting at the humans, taking out several of them.
Four human soldiers raced through the trees, and sprayed them with bullets. Marsh returned fire, and two of the human soldiers fell.
Then a gunshot cracked through the air, and Marsh gave out a cry and fell to the ground, bleeding from the shoulder. A Pride Patrol mountain lion fell to the ground, dead. His body rippled and shifted back to human form.
“Hands in the air!” A human soldier had his rifle pointed at Loren.
Loren stared at him in, calmly, ignoring the soldier’s command. An Alpha didn’t beg or grovel. “Go ahead and shoot,” he said. He could scent a dozen of his men headed his way. They wouldn’t get there fast enough to save him – but they’d make this soldier pay for declaring war on shifters.
A human soldiers burst through the tree line, and Loren braced himself for the impact of a bullet. To his shock, the soldier shot the mercenary who’d been holding the gun on him. The mercenary’s eyes went wide and his mouth opened, and then he went limp, crumbling to the ground where he lay in a pool of his own blood.
Loren stared at him in confusion. This human, a man in his thirties with close-clipped brown hair, had no scent; he must have doused himself in noscentium. How did he know about it? Why had he shot the mercenary?
“I’ll die before I let you capture me,” Loren told the man.
“My English must be bad. I thought the proper phrase here was ‘Thank you,’ the man said. He spoke in a heavy Eastern European accent. “Now you should go rejoin your people.”
Redthorne’s life had just been saved by a human?
Bewildered, Redthorne turned and began making his way through the woods, half expecting to feel the sting of a bullet in his flesh. Suddenly from behind him, he heard more shouting, and human soldiers clumsily crashing through the underbrush.
He spun around. The human who had saved him was surrounded. There were four soldiers there.
Loren knew what he had to do. Honor demanded it. He had to defend the man who’d rescued him.
He shifted to wolf form and ran back. A shot rang out, and his rescuer crumbled to the ground with a cry of pain, clutching his abdomen.
“You’re going to die nice and slow, Almassy! And I’m going to bring you back to the Colonel in pieces!” one of the soldiers yelled at him. “Or, no, maybe we’ll keep you alive for Horvath.”
Zador Horvath. These men knew where he was.
Loren burst through the bushes and launched himself through the air, knocking one of the soldiers off his feet and tearing open his throat.
He felt a bullet sting his leg, but his rage was greater than his pain. He leaped at another soldier, who fell on his back, rifle firing into
the air as Loren slashed through his jugular with his fangs. He descended into a red haze of rage, slashing, snarling, killing.
Dimly, he realized that he heard howls and snarls all around him now.
The other shifters had come to his rescue, and killed the remaining humans – all except his rescuer. Several wolves stood around the injured human, snarling and snapping at him.
“I can’t believe that I’m doing this,” he muttered to himself.
He shifted back to human form.
“Someone give me a bandage!” he yelled out to the shifters. “This human saved my life, and I need to know why.”
“He’s wearing noscentium, isn’t he?” a coyote shifter asked, handing him a package of gauze from a bag that was slung around his neck. “How did he know about that?”
“Very good question,” Loren said, pressing the gauze against the soldier’s abdomen. “We’ll find out after the healer works on him.”
He got on his satellite phone and called Warden Hopper, who was in charge of logistics. “Have the healers ready for us,” he rasped into the phone. The healers were waiting in a trailer about a mile away, guarded by more Wardens. Loren carried the man in his arms, cradling him and racing through the woods until he reached the trailer, with the Wardens and Pride Patrol jogging along behind him. His injured leg jabbed him with every step, and he felt hot blood running down, but he forced himself to keep running.
As they approached the trailer, the healers were waiting outside. The Wardens had bought half a dozen healers, in case things went very badly.
Loren knelt down and laid the human on the grass. Then he collapsed on the grass next to him with a groan. He couldn’t run any further on his injured leg.
Virginia Battle, a female teenaged healer whose father was the Alpha of Timber Valley, took one look at his leg, cried out in dismay, and rushed over to him. Impatiently, he shook his head and gestured at the human.
“Heal him first. He’s hurt worse than me.” At her questioning gaze, he added “He saved my life. Hurry!”
“He did what? The human saved your life? All right, all right, fine,” Virginia said as Loren shot her an impatient look. The human was growing pale, his jaw slack and his eyes glazed. He’d bleed to death if he wasn’t healed immediately.
Timber Valley Pack: Lynx On The Loose( A Paranormal Romance With Shifters) Page 8
