What would he do if it came to that? His only choice would be to go on the run with her to protect her, or let her be killed.
That second possibility made his hackles rise, and he had to fight to keep his inner wolf down. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t let anyone hurt her.
God help him, what a hopeless dilemma.
She pulled her cell phone from her purse and rather than hand it to him, slammed it on the oak floor. It shattered into pieces.
“Show me to my room, or rather, my cell,” she snapped. “I don’t want to talk to you.”
“Roxanne-” he saw the look on her face. It was hopeless. “Fine. Are you hungry?”
“No,” she bit out. He led her down the hallway to his guest bedroom.
She walked in and slammed the door shut. He felt that slam reverberating through his body. He stood there for a long moment, wanting to call out to her, to say something that would fix all of this, but there was nothing.
So he went back to the kitchen, scooped up the pieces of the broken phone, and then made a phone call to the Silver Forest pack in Montana, the ones who had sent the shaman to erase Roxanne’s memory.
He was put on hold for a minute, and then they connected him to the Alpha, a man named Cullen.
“This is Steele Battle, of Timber Valley,” he said. “When I was in your area a year ago from this past June, I called on your shaman to erase a human’s memory.”
“Yes?” the Alpha growled. His tone was defensive and unfriendly, and Steele felt his hackles rising.
“There are problems arising. What’s the story with this shaman? Is he competent?”
“Are you questioning the abilities of my pack shaman?” the Alpha snarled. The fact that he was already on the defensive set up a million red flags for Steele.
He felt fur rippling under his skin, and his fangs briefly descended. He forced them back in; he needed to be able to talk.
“God damn straight I am,” he said. “I’ll come out there and say it to your face if you like.”
There was a moment of silence on the other end of the phone. Steele was an Alpha too, and he’d partaken in several Death Challenges. He had the scars to prove it. He had chosen not to have a pack, but like most Alphas, he was a born leader and had become sheriff of Timber Valley because of it.
He was a large, imposing man, and his wolf was nothing to be trifled with.
The silence on the other end of the line stretched and stretched.
“Are you still there, or did you decide to run away?” he snapped.
“Those are Death Challenge words.” Cullen’s voice rolled out in a low growl. “I don’t run away from anything.”
“Name the time and place. I’ll call the Elders right now and notify them,” Steele said coldly. “Also, you might want to start making final arrangements, and notify your next of kin. I won’t be taking over your pack, but I may send one of my relatives out there to manage it.”
The Council of Elders supervised all Death Challenges, with the Wardens standing by to ensure that all rules were observed.
More dead silence.
Then, just as Steele was tipping over from pissed off to furious enough to rend flesh, he heard Cullen clear his throat.
“I may have spoken a little hastily,” he said.
“Do you submit?”
Cullen spoke in a low voice. “There are other people in the room.”
“Not my problem. I don’t give a damn if you’re not man enough, or wolf enough, to keep the respect of your pack. I suspect that if you’re this weak, you won’t have your position much longer anyway. You’ve got five seconds to say that you submit, or I hang up and call the Elders. Five, four-”
“I submit!” Cullen barked angrily. “Damn it, you can’t blame me for sticking up for a member of my pack.”
Steele felt his temper rising again. “Actually, I can. Here in Timber Valley, we expect our people to perform their duties properly. If they cannot perform adequately, they step down. Now, if I have to ask you again I’m going to make a trip up there to do it personally – what the hell is going on with your shaman?”
“We may have been having some issues with his abilities. Our old shaman died before he could fully train the new one, and we’re not near any other packs, so we, ah, just tried to make do.”
“And you didn’t think to tell me about this before you let that jackass monkey around with a human being’s mind? If I’d known, I would have waited until we could get a competent shaman. He totally screwed it up!” Steele roared with fury. “She’s remembering!”
“What?” Now Cullen sounded scared. “Okay, let me see. Bring her back here and we’ll do it again. It should take the second time. I think.”
“You’re never getting near her again, and I’m reporting this to the Elders immediately,” Steele gritted out. “Your shaman will step down at once. If I ever hear of him attempting to do a mind-wipe again, I will personally come out there and lay open his aorta, and then I’ll do the same for you.” He hung up without waiting for an answer.
He immediately called Cody, and told him what was happening.
“Jesus, that is very bad news,” Cody said. “I can’t get back before Monday. Can you hang in there until then?”
“I’ll have to,” Steele said. “Is there anyone else you would trust to fix this?”
“In all honesty, no,” Cody said. “I’m not bragging, but I do not know of anyone else whose abilities are up to par with mine, and this is tricky stuff. I have to repair the damage that he’s done, and then erase her memories properly this time.”
“In addition to remembering things, she says she’s having hallucinations. She keeps remembering being held in some kind of facility, and an older man telling her to go get help.”
“I’ve never heard of that happening before, but then I’ve never seen a shaman screw up like this, either. I won’t be able to tell what’s going on until I get back.”
“All right,” Steele said.
After he hung up, he called his office to have them search arrest records and see what they could find. There was no record of her having been arrested. She hadn’t been held in a prison anywhere. Her name didn’t come up at all in police records.
The car she’d been driving did, however. It had been reported missing yesterday, from Lonesome Pine, Montana.
Why would she steal a car when she had her own?
His phone rang, and he saw that it was the office of the Chief Elder, a man named Jordan Fleetfoot. He was newly elected, a member of a Wisconsin pack.
“Steele,” he said. “Do I hear right? Do you have a human at your house – one who knows about us?”
Chapter Eight
Clara Winter stood facing her cell wall, tracing numbers on the concrete with her finger. Since they’d taken her books away, she spent her time practicing algebra problems in her head. Not that she thought she’d survive this place and get to go back to college, but hey, it kept her from going crazy with boredom in between trips to the lab.
Those trips were pretty frequent these days. She could hear boot steps clomping down the hallway towards her; it was that time of morning already.
The solid metal door yanked open, and four armed mercenary soldiers stood there, semi-automatic rifles pointed at her. They were wearing heavy body armor, and helmets with face shields, which made her smile to herself. They remembered what she’d done to them last time.
She turned to face them, not moving from where she stood. Her cell was small, the walls concrete and windowless, and she had only a mattress, a metal toilet and a sink.
Two of them were familiar to her – Evan Petrowski and Tony Richards. There were two soldiers who she hadn’t seen before, Brice Ramsey and Donavan Lewis, but all four of the men looked the same. Hostile, contemptuous, trying not to let her see how much she terrified them.
“What do you dirtbags want?” she asked.
Evan, whose right cheek she’d clawed open the week before, glowered at
her. “You know why we’re here, so don’t give us a hard time. Time to go the lab.” He gestured towards the door with his rifle.
She flashed a poisonously sweet smile. “That face wound isn’t healing up too well. If you only had a healer who was willing to help you.” Clara was a healer, which was why they’d kidnapped her from the forest in Wisconsin close to two years ago, when she’d been out for a run by herself.
“Get going, bitch,” he snapped, gesturing out the door. “And if you try anything, I’ll put a bullet in your gut and watch you die.”
“Oh, I doubt that very much,” Clara said coolly. “We all know what happened the last time that one of you scumholes did that.”
The mere thought of it made her fur bristle under her skin. One of the other healers had attacked the soldiers the week before, killing one of them, and the soldiers had gunned him down. The soldiers who did that had been executed; she knew because, when she’d been in wolf form, her hearing was super sensitive and she’d heard the guards talking about it. She and the other prisoners were extremely valuable to whoever the hell was in charge of this operation, and the soldiers were ordered to keep them alive at all costs.
Still, it was pointless to resist, she knew from past experience. They’d shoot her with tranquilizer darts or Taze her if she refused to go with them. She followed them out into the hall and let them lead her towards the lab.
“What did you tell your new girlfriend about your face?” she taunted, as they walked.
She was pleased by the startled look on his face. “How did you…”
“I can smell her on you. She smells different than your last girlfriend. Her perfume is cheaper. I can smell your wife, too.”
“Shut up!” he bellowed, frustrated. He desperately wanted to hurt her, but he’d face terrible consequences if he did; she was the most powerful healer that they had captured.
Angry, he jabbed at her with his rifle.
She stopped, half shifted, and swung on him with a snarl.
All four men panicked, leaping back, pointing their rifles at her. “Change back! Change back!” Tony screamed in a high pitched voice.
“I’ll kill you!” Evan shrieked.
“Don’t! Don’t! If you kill her, you know what he’ll do to us!” Tony yelled. “I’ll fucking shoot you if you do!”
She drew the moment out, growling, snarling, eyes glowing. Then she slowly melted back into her human form.
“You scream like a girl,” she told Tony.
“I swear to God…” his hands were shaking as if he were about to have a seizure.
“Somebody peed themselves,” she announced, tipping her head back and sniffing the air. “Again. Was it you this time, Evan? It was. Loser.”
Evan’s round face turned red with humiliation and rage. “You freak. You stinking dog.”
“Get a grip on your gun,” she added, lip curling in disgust. “You’re pathetic, the way you hide behind your weapons. Any one of our people could take all four of you out in a fair fight. Hell, I could do it myself.”
Unfortunately, lost in a maze of underground tunnels as they were, she’d never be able to find her way out of there if she did. There were dozens of guards working down there; she’d never get past them, and if she did actually kill all four guards, there would be consequences. They wouldn’t kill her, but they’d torture her.
“Some day, bitch, we’ll get the go ahead to kill you, and we’ll do it very slowly,” Petrowski said as they rounded a corner.
“Keep dreaming,” Clara said, although it was quite possible that someday they would indeed get permission to kill her. They’d killed other prisoners, and dissected them. They’d done it to a bear shifter last week, and made her look at the body in an attempt to intimidate her into behaving. It didn’t have the effect on her that they were hoping for. She wasn’t any more afraid of them, but she was significantly more pissed off, and greatly looking forward to the time that she’d decide not to take it any more, unleashed her wolf, and killed as many of them as possible before they took her out.
She no longer expected that she’d ever escape. She knew she’d never see the sun again. Some of the other shifters had recently tried to stage an escape, and it had failed. Now security was tighter than ever.
That didn’t mean she had to accept her fate quietly, though. She passed the time by making her guards’ lives miserable, and vowed to go down fighting when the time came.
They reached the laboratory.
Dr. Jonas, the man who did all of the experiments, was waiting for her there, with his lab assistant Dillard. The room was white and sterile, with several metal tables in the center of the room. The tables had thick straps on them. Usually Dr. Jonas only had one shifter at a time in there, because they tried as much as possible to keep the shifters separate, but sometimes, they had two or even three at a time, depending on what the experiment was.
When the shifters were locked in their cells, though, they did communicate – by howling and roaring when they shifted to animal form. In shifter form, they could hear the sound, even if faintly, through the thick walls. The humans didn’t know it, but they could understand each other, and they were making plans. They had a partial map of the place, and a general idea of how many men were there at any one time.
One day, the imprisoned shifters would take action.
Petrowski couldn’t resist jabbing her with his gun again as she was led towards the table where they would strap her down, take more blood, and probably inject her with things while they scanned her brainwaves.
She did the partial shift again, lunging at him and making him scream.
“Stop that at once!” Dr. Jonas yelled at the soldiers. “If this continues, I will have you removed.”
“She won’t cooperate!” Lewis whined at him. “She threatens us, and we never know when she’s going to shift all the way and attack!”
“Scared, are you?” Dr. Jonas said coldly. “Are you sure you’re fit for this job?”
Clara permitted herself a small, triumphant smile. Setting them all against each other was her favorite hobby.
Dr. Jonas turned back to Clara. He plastered on a calm, reasonable look on his face and spoke in soothing tones. “You could make this all so much easier on yourself,” he said. “We could give you back your books. There are a lot of things we could to make your life easier, if you would just cooperate.”
She climbed onto the table; if she resisted, she knew from experience they’d just shoot her with a tranquilizer dart and make things really unpleasant. That’s why she relied on psychological warfare instead.
“How much would you cooperate if you were kidnapped and taken to a secret lab and experimented on by a bunch of demented, pathetic Nazis?” she snarled as he strapped her in.
He winced at that. He hated in when she compared him to a Nazi, so she did it often.
“Our work here is highly valuable, and necessary to the security of the human race.”
She met his eyes. “I just want you to think about what it’s going to feel like to drown in your own blood, Dr. Jonas.”
He swallowed hard, and she saw a slight tremor in his hand as he reached for a hypodermic needle.
Chapter Nine
The smell of delicious cooking seeped under the door, and Roxanne’s stomach growled. She heard the rap of knuckles on her door.
“What?” she snapped.
“I was hoping you would come out and join me for dinner. I made venison stew, and apple pie for dessert,” Steele called out through the door.
“Like I have a choice,” she grumbled.
“I could bring it to you here in your room, if you prefer, but I’d enjoy your company,” he said.
She sighed. She was getting bored just sitting there glowering at the walls, so she might as well, she thought.
She followed him into the dining room. The décor was definitely masculine and rustic, with beautifully crafted wood furniture, and paintings of hunting scenes on the walls.
The table was already set for two. There was a long burlap runner down the center, and the dishes were glazed earthenware in tones of cinnamon and butterscotch and sunny yellow. The stew was in a cast-iron pot that sat on an iron trivot on the table. There was a bowl of fresh biscuits, a little pot of butter, and apple pie sitting under a covered glass dish.
“The tableware is lovely,” she said.
“My aunt and uncle make these,” he said, ladling stew into a bowl and setting it in front of her.
“Do your parents live near here too?”
“They live a few hours north of here. My father is the Alpha of a pack up there.”
“What brought you here to Timber Valley?”
“I used to spend a lot of my summers here with my aunt and uncle. They own most of the property around here. Once I got to be in my twenties, I couldn’t live in the same territory as my father, you know how it is.”
She stared at him. “No, actually I don’t.” She ate a spoonful of stew. It was rich and salty and delicious.
He winced. “Sorry, I forgot that you’re human.”
She laughed at that. What a bizarre conversation. “Ah…thanks?”
“I’ll try to explain how things work with us. You know how with wolf packs, there’s one wolf that’s the dominant male? An Alpha?”
“Yes, I do know that much about wolves.”
“It’s similar with us. Each pack is led by an Alpha wolf, who sets all the rules and makes the major decisions for the pack, approves marriages within the pack or between members of another pack, and so on. Usually the Alpha will father at least one son that’s an Alpha, and some members of the pack may also give birth to Alphas. Once the younger Alpha has fully matured, by their early to mid-twenties, they generally get married, move away, and start their own pack. It happened just recently with our pack. My Uncle Vince’s son Max is an Alpha, and he’s still living on the pack’s property, but a decent distance from where my uncle lives.”
Hard As Steele (A BBW Paranormal Romance) (Timber Valley Pack) Page 6
