Anchor

by Jorrie Spencer

  “Uh-huh.” Rory changed the subject. “Jancis says Trey wanted you to wait for him before you went after Davies.”

  Thing is, Angus would vastly prefer to go in with Trey than his son—and Trey knew it, knew Angus would choose the Rory-safe plan over the best possible plan if Rory was involved. The problem with waiting for Trey was that there was no time. It would take hours for Trey to arrive. If Angus was at all serious about trying to save Pamela, he had to be on the road now.

  Not that he admitted all this to Rory, it would piss his son off. “Davies is a lone wolf,” Angus argued. “He can’t have many friends. You know that personality. We probably just got rid of half his recruits.”

  Rory grunted and Angus didn’t push the argument further. He drove on, trying not to imagine Pamela and what he’d find of her at 142 Pinetree Lane.

  “He had to go out of town,” Aileen explained abruptly, as if Mala had been pestering her for information about Angus all morning and she was tired of repeating the same information.

  Something about Aileen’s delivery made Mala uneasy. There was a tension in Aileen’s body that Mala didn’t know how to interpret.

  “Just like that?” Mala gave a shrug. “He…took off?”

  Aileen stared at Mala before toying with the food on her plate. Aileen never toyed with food on her plate. She always ate full throttle. “A lot of demands are made on Angus. And he puts a lot of pressure on himself.” Aileen gave herself a shake. “If he didn’t, I’d still be roaming around northern Manitoba by myself.”

  “I’m glad he befriended you.” Mala assumed that was how Angus had drawn Aileen to Wolf Town, although the face Aileen made had her wondering.

  “He had to kidnap me first.”

  “Oh.” Mala paused, suspicious of these sudden confidences. Aileen had been friendly, sure, but hadn’t said much about herself until today. Mala put down her fork, losing her appetite. “Is Angus in some kind of trouble?”

  “Why would you say that?” Aileen asked quickly.

  “Because you’re not eating your food.”

  Aileen’s gaze jerked up and down, as if she’d been caught out. Then she grabbed her hamburger and took an enormous bite. In fact, she kept eating through her three-meals-in-one so that it was impossible for her to talk while Mala became increasingly dismayed. When Aileen wiped her mouth, she said, “He wouldn’t sleep with you if he didn’t like you.”

  Mala choked on her drink. “He told you that?” She sure as hell didn’t want Angus talking to Aileen about them.

  “He didn’t have to.” At Mala’s nonresponse, Aileen added, “I could smell it.”

  “Fantastic.” But Mala paused again, suspicious of the intensity gripping Aileen. The girl was worried, and trying to keep Mala in the dark. Or perhaps Aileen didn’t know how to cope. Mala leaned forward. “Aileen, tell me, is Angus in danger?”

  A corner of Aileen’s mouth turned down. “Maybe.”

  “John Davies?” Mala asked, and Aileen looked away.

  Suddenly, Mala felt exhausted. Worrying about dream wolves and their fates had always taken their toll, even before she’d known they were real. But worrying about Angus overwhelmed her, especially the thought that he might be up against the man who had terrorized people.

  In her dreams.

  She’d battled Davies in her dreams before—and won. There weren’t all that many things she was skilled at, but this dream-wraith thing, well, she’d accomplished something with that.

  Mala made a decision. It might be difficult, it might be impossible to self-direct when the situation affected her so strongly and so personally. It might be impossible to discover or even identify Angus’s beacon.

  Nevertheless, she was going to attempt to find Angus on that horizon where beacons flared.

  Angus’s wolf allowed him to put down his guard and forsake his protective instincts enough for him to walk away, leaving Rory by himself, to scout out this location on Pinetree. His son was safely hidden, a rifle to defend himself, and Angus hadn’t been able to detect any wolves or people lurking in the woods behind the house where Rory stayed out of sight. Now to determine if there were people in the house or beyond it, towards the road. While a part of him wanted to rush this encounter then get back to Rory and ensure his safety, Angus approached the house with care.

  Because getting himself shot, for example, wouldn’t help Rory at all.

  Whether Davies expected Angus to stroll up as human and knock on the door or not, he didn’t know, but Angus decided against it. He wanted to fully use his wolf senses during this rendezvous.

  The wind was blowing, the lightest swirling of snow in the air and a thick white layer covered the ground. Under the circumstances, it would have been better if he were a white wolf, though they were rare among weres. His gray fur remained visible so he carefully observed the house, trying to pick up sounds and smells.

  The smell of death came to him first and drew him closer. And while there were the scents of those who had been here, both werewolf and human, and they were fresh, the house was silent. Despite the danger of being upwind from the road, Angus felt compelled to identify who had died and the silence called to him. He pulled in a breath, closed his eyes, and leapt through the basement window at the side of the house. Glass shattered around him but his thick coat prevented him from being cut, and he landed effortlessly on the cement basement floor.

  Not much finesse, this break-in, and he preferred to be less obvious during an investigation, but Rory was alive out there and someone was dead in here, so Angus needed answers fast.

  It didn’t take long to find her. He climbed the stairs from the basement and took a right into the kitchen. There was no subtlety in this act. They’d gutted Pamela, left her to bleed out in a painful death, her life’s blood puddled on the linoleum as she curled around herself, a hand over her sliced-open belly, perhaps trying to put herself back together.

  Angus forced himself to observe her body and make sure it was Pamela, make sure he understood exactly how these men had chosen to kill her.

  Make sure he’d have no qualms in killing these men in turn.

  As to when she’d been murdered? He’d guess as soon as they’d hung up on him, over two hours ago, when they’d decided she was no longer any use to them. The smell of death had accumulated in this room.

  She didn’t deserve this fate, her curled-up body on a dirty kitchen floor. Angus wanted to mete out justice, here and now. He lifted his head, trying to clear it from the rage that rolled over him in a wave of fury.

  Rory. He remembered his son then—human and alone. The fur on the back of Angus’s neck rose. He didn’t like Rory to be in the forest, albeit armed, when these monsters had recently killed. Angus shot out of the room, down to the basement and back through the broken, jagged window.

  It was as he regained his footing outside the house that something heavy smashed down on his hindquarters. Through the pain of breaking bone, he swung his body round, snarling, ready to attack. He refused to go down like this.

  But movement from the corner of his eye was his only warning before pain collided with his skull, and his world disappeared into blackness.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “I want you to understand something.” The words came at Angus as if from far away, yet also as if from inside an echo chamber. They blurred together and faded out. Blackness swept over Angus and he knew nothing.

  He came back to the world, and the words returned, similar and different. This time a face went in and out of focus, as well, a mouth moving out of sync with the noises it made.

  Eventually the words coalesced to say— “I am John Davies.”

  Angus’s head hurt, and he knew the situation was bad, but he couldn’t yet recall the specific reasons why. He tried to blink and realized he was in wolf form, felt his wolf’s brow furrow. He needed to shift, he’d been wounded and required healing. But he couldn’t shift if it wasn’t safe to do so.

  Enemy, his muzzy brain told him
, and that sharpened his thinking.

  “You’ve interfered,” Davies continued, his words and then his face becoming clearer for a moment. “Look at me. I want you to see who you’ve been fucking with. Your latest sin was to shoot out the wheel of my men’s car. You don’t get to do that without being punished.”

  Angus breathed in, letting the voice wash over him. His internal clock said he’d been passing in and out of consciousness for over half an hour. He tried to take stock of his situation. They were on the road, in a van, moving forward. The twists and turns suggested a side road, not a highway.

  There was another man in the van, the driver. He was non-wolf and easy to dispose of if it came to that. Angus turned his aching head back to Davies and found himself looking at a middle-aged werewolf with gold-brown eyes and a thick beard.

  “You’re in a cage, Angus,” Davies informed him.

  That explained the metal bars surrounding him. They hadn’t registered past the throbbing in his skull.

  And then he remembered: Rory. Had they got him? Was he dead?

  Some of the new tension in his body must have alerted Davies because he drawled, “Back in the land of the living, MacIntyre? Fully awake? I should warn you, it won’t be for long. We’re just going to the right secluded place so your pack spends precious resources trying, and failing, to find you. But not to worry, we’re mostly on our way to Wolf Town, where I have my son and girlfriend to pick up. You may have met them, Caleb and Sally.”

  Davies hadn’t mentioned Rory. He’d rub it in Angus’s face if he’d gotten his hands on Rory.

  “I also,” he added softly, “want to pick up the new girl in town, a certain Mala. I hear she’s special.”

  He turned a gun this way and that in his right hand, making clear his plans for Mala. Once he tired of listening to the sound of his own voice, Davies was going to shoot Angus in the head and go on to harm the people he cared for.

  This was unacceptable.

  “Do you know how I know Mala is fucking special?” Davies raised one eyebrow in question. “Because she’s been inside me. I can’t decide if I should kill her for that or try to use her abilities in some way. Thing is, I’m pretty sure that’ll be too complicated and I don’t like complicated. I need Mala dead, don’t I?”

  Angus gave up staying quiet. He couldn’t restrain himself, and his wolf raged. So he roared, ignoring his pain and his useless lower half, and leapt with all his forelegs’ strength against the bars. They creaked but did not give, and it took everything in him not to pass out as he fell to the ground.

  Davies laughed, pleased. “You like her, do you? I could try—”

  The shot came out of nowhere, shocking Angus back to clear thinking. It hadn’t been Davies’s gun that fired though, but one from outside. The van skidded and shook with a tire gone flat.

  Rory’s modus operandi.

  The driver swore in alarm while brakes squealed, slowing them to a crawl. At which point a second shot took out the driver himself. Davies made as if to shoot at Angus, but before he could aim the pistol properly, the van hurtled downwards and sideways, and Davies lost his position, was thrown against the side window.

  The van crashed, overturning, the cage with it. The abrupt stop caused Angus’s body to be flung against the bars of the cage, and pain seared through him. Pure willpower kept him conscious. It took Angus a moment of silence to understand that the impact had thrown the cage on top of Davies, who lay trapped beneath it.

  Angus pushed his pain away, refused to go under at this critical juncture. Instead he tore at the human skin that pressed against the bars, searching for a vulnerable artery, and found one in the arm. When his teeth snagged on the forearm, he bit Davies as deeply as possible. Blood spurted, pouring out of the wound.

  Angus tried to find another way to harm his captor, but Davies was fighting for his life, struggling to find his way out from under Angus. Agony ripped through Angus again, and this time his vision started to fade. He barely managed to observe Davies as he crawled out from beneath the cage then tore a piece of cloth off his own shirt and tried to bind his wound before he bled out. The artery was pumping.

  But Davies wasn’t going to shift when under attack. As he wrapped the makeshift bandage, the blood flowing out of his arm slowed. He gritted his teeth and wrapped it tighter. Suddenly, he turned his focus elsewhere, jerking his head up, and through his pain, Angus tried to figure out why. He watched Davies reach over to where his pistol had been thrown, pick it up and fire straight out the side window.

  The bullet went through the glass and came right back, powering directly into Davies’s chest. Blood bloomed like a dangerously red flower opening up in the man’s breast.

  Angus’s sluggish thoughts pieced together that the bullet hadn’t actually come back, that someone else had shot Davies dead. He fiercely held on to consciousness, trying to think things through, trying to identify his next course of action.

  Then the back door of the van was flung open and Rory dragged himself inside, one hand holding his rifle, the other clamped on his shoulder, blood seeping through his fingers.

  Rory yanked the van door shut. “I hope to hell that’s it, Dad, because I’ve got no choice.”

  The rifle clattered on the van floor and Angus had enough wherewithal to realize Rory had no choice but to shift to wolf to heal.

  Angus had to guard his son.

  He was badly wounded and caught in a fucking cage.

  The rage threatened to overwhelm him and his vision grayed. Between the pain and the rage, he was going crazy. He was going under.

  Angus?

  He growled, searching, unable to focus on what he was searching for. His son’s body had slowed the bleeding, the first step in Rory’s transformation from human to wolf. A relief to see that, even if the idea of Rory being wounded assailed Angus, panicking him.

  Oh, Angus. The sadness inside him was puzzling. And this wasn’t how he addressed himself.

  “Where are you?”

  It was then he felt a…presence. Like a part of him, but separate. Feminine.

  His first instinct was to conclude he was hallucinating. He was in too much pain, his pelvis shattered, some brain damage from the blow to his head. He needed to shift and soon, repair himself before any of the damage became permanent.

  “Then, my God, Angus, shift. Don’t wait any longer.” She sounded alarmed, and her presence became suddenly and overwhelmingly familiar.

  He couldn’t believe it and he utterly did believe it. “Mala?”

  “Yes. It’s me.”

  He didn’t recognize her exactly—how could you recognize someone inside yourself?—but he knew it was her and with that knowledge came relief.

  “Angus,” she thought at him. “You must tell me where you are. So we can help you.”

  “I can’t. I don’t know. Rory, Rory will know.” The wound was clotting, as Rory’s human body began to recede. “But I have to protect him.”

  “I’m going to look out through your eyes. Okay?”

  He closed his eyes briefly, not because he didn’t want her to see, but because the sensation of her becoming a part of him relaxed him.

  “It’s not just my presence.” Her voice inside him sounded wry. “I’m taking away some of your pain. I know how to draw away emotions. I don’t know if I ever explained that to you.”

  He supposed that was good. It sounded good. If incomprehensible. Something to think on later.

  “Yes, think about it later. But it is good,” she assured him. “Thank you for welcoming me, Angus. I’ve never been welcomed before. Of course, it would be easier to appreciate if you weren’t in such pain.”

  He didn’t like it either. And then he remembered this was their morning-after reunion. The strangest morning-after he could ever remember.

  “Mine too,” she thought grimly. She seemed to be working, his perception was sensation and feeling, nothing he could see. But when he looked inward, he was able to perceive she was gatherin
g something.

  “This is your pain,” she explained. “It’s too much for you to bear alone. It is harming you.”

  “Don’t you take it on, Mala,” he warned. He didn’t want it in her, didn’t want her to carry it.

  “That’s not how it works. It doesn’t hurt me at all.”

  “It’s mine,” he insisted.

  “Yes,” she agreed. “But I can use it, you see, to harm others.” He could feel her cringe at this admission and decided now was not the time to argue or discuss this.

  “We’ll talk about that later too,” he told her, and felt her smile.

  Then something changed, abruptly, and she grew still within him, the sense of a smile vanishing, and a tension radiated out from her. “Look out, Angus.” Barely able to hold on, he hadn’t been looking out at all, she had been seeing for him. “There is more than one wolf shifting in the van with you. More than Rory. Look at John Davies.”

  Angus forced himself to focus, to process what he observed—Davies beginning to heal. The injury to his chest, while severe, had the potential to close.

  She’d gone quiet and he didn’t know what it meant.

  “Mala?” he asked.

  “Don’t you worry about me, Angus,” she said, and he feared what she was going to do next. “I promise you I’m safe, and I will see you again.”

  “Mala!” he yelled inwardly, but it was too late. She was gone, and with her absence, there came a mental flash, something powerful and bright ghosting through his mind’s eye and leaving him empty. He had the impression of sharp brightness being aimed towards the man who was trying to survive by shifting from man to wolf.

  He watched, but could not see an outward difference in Davies who had been silent and still before Mala had attacked him and remained silent and still afterwards. Movement in the corner of his eye caused him to turn his head.

  “Dad?” said Rory groggily. Somehow, Rory had managed to half-shift and shift back to human, healing enough that he could get by. A good trick they’d practiced from time to time but, till now, had never chosen to use. Rory reached up and undid the lock on Angus’s cage, and Angus wanted to yell at him too. Instead he growled while he looked at Davies.