by Amelia Jade
His hands were free, and he slowly brought them to his face, helping to pry open the eyelids. Once freed he blinked rapidly, his pupils trying to adjust to the sudden change in visuals as the light he had seen before blinded him.
Glancing around, he suddenly jerked back into his seat as what he was seeing registered in his brain. He was trapped inside a tiny cage, barely larger than the area he was sitting in. The bars of the cage would be no big deal, he knew. It was the sharpened points that were poised mere inches from his face and body, glistening with some unknown substance, that bothered him more. His eyes narrowing, Joel realized they were actually wooden stakes tipped with needles.
If he tried to move, to get rid of one, he would inevitably scratch himself on another. They were just packed too densely. The only opening that he could see was straight ahead, where the sun was shining through and reflecting off the metal instruments designed to keep him restrained. It was so primitive that he couldn’t help but marveling at the design. To escape, he would have to reach the cage bars. But to do that would mean impaling himself on a multitude of needles. Tipping his head back slowly, unsure of how close they were to his neck, Joel realized they were above him as well. He couldn’t even stand up.
“You have got to be kidding me,” he muttered. The stakes didn’t appear overly secure, but he knew that they must be tied or glued to something, otherwise the ones above his head would have fallen down.
If he was going to escape, it would be through the portal ahead of him, the only open space. Unfortunately, he could only maybe fit his head through. The rest of his body would become pricked dozens of times if he tried to go farther. Shifting into his bear form and destroying the cage would work, except he would be knocked out for an unknown amount of time, and it would likely summon his captors as well.
No, if he was going to get out, he would have to use his smarts.
I am so screwed.
Another question came to him just then, followed by a spike of hope.
“Why am I still alive?” he asked aloud, more to himself than to anyone around.
He didn’t particularly care, as his mind was elsewhere. If they had decided to keep him alive, then there was hope that they had kept Courtenay alive as well. He still might have a chance to save her and ensure she escaped.
First, he had to escape. Which might prove tougher than he hoped.
“So you’re awake.” The sneering, disappointed voice brought him back to the present, and he focused at the small opening in the stakes that had been left right at his eye level.
“Some cage you’ve built here,” he replied. Joel was feeling much better now that he had been given a chance to heal up. “I’m flattered that you went through all this effort for little old me.”
A face manifested itself in the opening, presenting him with a leering grin at his comment. “Well, it seemed only fair that we keep you here in comfort until He disposes of you Himself.”
Joel didn’t have to see it written down to realize that this man used the words as a title. The reverence in his voice made it clear. Whoever this person was, he was important to them.
“The True Form is going to visit me himself? Is he going to tell me that if I promise to join him, he’ll spare my life?”
The face at the other end hardened in anger as Joel blasted him with a tone that mocked his precious leader.
“I think he wanted you left alive so that you could witness when he killed the rest of your crew, one by one, while you watch helplessly.”
“You son of a bitch!” Joel roared, trembling in his chair, straining to get at the man, but well aware of his limitations.
“I’ll be back to check on you in an hour,” the other man said with a smile. “Behave until then, okay?”
Joel snorted, eyes still narrowed in anger.
But once he heard the man walk away, his mind began to stir as he contemplated one escape plan after another. There wasn’t much in the way of sound outside his cage, meaning that the presence of others was limited. Either there were few shifters around, or they were far enough away he couldn’t hear them.
Best of all, he had an hour to work.
Reaching forward carefully, he inserted his hand into the opening. Feeling around, he found a grip on one of the stakes, enough to give him some torque. Very careful to keep his arm as still as possible, he used his shifter strength, flexing as hard as he could. The wooden stake resisted at first, but he kept trying to turn it. His arm began to shake, not used to the physical exertion on his forearm alone.
Finally, with a loud splitting sound, he managed to twist the stake in half until it broke off in his hand. The twisting motion combined with the amount of force he had to exert caused his arm to jerk suddenly once the resistance evaporated. Joel hissed in surprise as he managed to arrest his motion just in time, his skin less than an inch from another of the needle-tipped stakes.
“Okay, now what do you do?” he asked himself, unsure of what to do next, as he hadn’t entirely expected the first portion to work.
He pulled the broken stake into his little cleared area as carefully as he could, conscious that one wrong move would end his plans.
It could end your life too. You have no idea if that’s tranquilizer or some sort of poison in those needles.
The open space around him seemed to shrink even more as he contemplated that thought. Looking up at the ceiling, he tried to ignore the stakes festooned with potentially deadly needles.
He could continue breaking off stakes, but there was very little room for him to store them around him.
Then it hit him. “Idiot,” he said, cursing at himself.
Lifting the broken stake up, he put it back into the hole he had removed it from. Then, with a cursory flick of his wrist, he simply tossed it back out the opening. Then he grabbed the next one, carefully snapped it, and sent it to follow the first. In the span of ten minutes, he had managed to clear a path in front of him that got him in range of the cage bars.
The next part was going to be loud, he knew, but there was nothing to be done about it. Placing his hands on the bars, he flexed. They were some sort of metal, possibly steel, and there was about six inches between them. The spaces were packed with the broken ends of the stakes, but without the needles he simply slammed them back with the butt of his hands first. That gave him the room he needed to take two bars in hand and pull. The metal resisted at first, but bit by bit, he felt it begin to go.
His arms shook and the metal moved slightly, but he eventually fell to his knees, gasping with the exertion. Although the wounds received the night before might have closed up, Joel hadn’t eaten at all. That combined with the blood loss left him weaker than normal. But he noticed something as his muscles relaxed. The cage seemed to settle into the ground slightly.
“But I wasn’t pulling upward,” he said. But if he’d been able to move the cage up, even though he was trying to pull out, that meant…
“Oh you’ve got to be shitting me,” he said, grabbing hold of the bars again and lifting. The cage wasn’t secured to the ground in any fashion. Getting down to his hands and knees, Joel grabbed the bar that ran horizontal on the ground, pushing his fingers into the dirt to get under it. Then, flexing his legs, he lifted.
The cage rose easily from the ground. He got it to his shoulders, then rested the entire cage on them, thankful once again for his shifter strength. Then, with ease, he simply bumped it off his shoulder and dove forward out from under the edge, careful to avoid the pile of broken stakes he had tossed outside.
“Unbelievable,” he said aloud. “All that effort, and they didn’t secure it down?”
“That’s because we never meant it to be permanent,” a voice came from behind him.
Shit.
He turned to see one of the attackers from the night before holding a gun pointed in his direction.
“Dammit,” he swore, pissed at himself for thinking it would be that easy.
“Move,” the thug said, ges
turing with the gun toward the door.
Joel looked around. He was in a pre-fabricated metal shelter of some sort. There was nothing else in the single room that composed the shelter, not even a floor besides the dirt.
“Now!” the unknown shifter said again, more forcefully this time.
“All right, all right,” he said, moving carefully toward the door and pushing it open.
Morning sunlight hit him, forcing him to once again adjust his eyes and look around.
“Oh this is rich,” he muttered, instantly recognizing where he was.
“Yeah, you like it?” the other man asked, clearly not caring. “We knew you would be too stupid to come back here and look for us.”
They were standing in the middle of a clearing. Even as Joel watched, another truck rumbled down the gravel road toward them, bearing more crates and boxes. The road hadn’t been gravel the last time he was here; it had been dirt. The clearing, the last he had seen it, had been covered in mud and snow and blood. Lots of blood, dripping from the bodies of another group of shifters who had tried to cross his crew.
“You realize what happened here, right?” he said, turning to face his captor. “This is where the Sapphire crew ceased to exist. We ended them. All of them.” That last part wasn’t precisely true. When the Jade Crew and their allies had gone up against the Sapphires, a crew dealing mind-altering drugs specifically tailored for shifters, several had been spared.
Most had not.
“Your point?”
“We’ll do it to you as well,” he snarled, his voice angry. He took a step toward the other shifter, but the man just held the gun up, pointed directly at Joel’s chest.
“There will be one slight difference,” the man said with arrogance. “This time, you will be up against more of us. And we will have our leader to guide us. With his guidance, we will finally eliminate you and the pesky Jade Crew, freeing the way for us to take control of the valley.”
“And then what?” Joel asked sarcastically. The man seemed prone to rambling. Perhaps he could get some more information out of him by egging him on and giving him a chance to broadcast his superiority.
“Then? Then the True Form will breathe life into his army, and they will begin to return the world to what it was before humans and their technology.” He practically spat the last word, as if the entire concept disgusted him.
Joel barely noticed. A block of ice had formed in his stomach as he realized that their fears were realized. The leader of the fanatics was a dragon, intent on bringing as many other dragons to life as he could. If his fire was used on the Dragon Stones, they would be born with not only a sense of loyalty to him, but also with much of his views about the world.
And thanks to the Dragon Council being out of communication, there were literally hundreds of Dragon Stones sitting in a vault at the LMC headquarters. They would be weak at first, but it wouldn’t take long for them to grow stronger than a bear shifter, to the point where only a dragon could challenge them. If they were allowed to go unchecked, the human population would find itself under attack inside of a generation. Not only that, but Joel knew they wouldn’t be idle either. They would dig for, and retrieve, more dragon stones. At the peak of mining, the crews found three to five stones a week. Each year that was several hundred new dragons.
They had to be stopped.
“What makes your leader, whoever he is, think he’s going to succeed?”
The shifter directed him toward another large metal building. There were a couple of shifters standing around the entrance. Joel looked around, noting that while there was a significant number of shifters here, there was nowhere near the numbers needed to take over the Valley. It must be an advance party, sent to set things up before the rest arrived.
“Are you serious?” The other shifter looked at him, as if he couldn’t believe Joel was that stupid.
“Yes. None of his other schemes have succeeded. Why would this one?”
The other man laughed, as did the two shifters guarding the entrance.
“We’ve eliminated almost four crews’ worth of bears who might otherwise have defended the Valley alongside you. True, it’s cost us more than we expected, but think about it. Opal Crew. Gone. Onyx Crew. Gone. Sapphire Crew. Gone. Diamond Crew. Gone.”
He raised a finger as he named each one, the smile on his face growing larger as Joel began to comprehend the true scope of everything he was saying. The Jade Crew had thought they were hindering the enemy’s plans by eliminating those who sided against them. But it didn’t matter. Either way though, it was a victory for their unknown nemesis.
“That doesn’t mean he’s going to beat us. He doesn’t even know us.”
The men laughed again, and it faded as they entered the building.
“I think you might be surprised at how well he knows you.”
Joel rolled his eyes. “Right. Considering he’s never shown his face because too scared to be seen? I can’t believe that claim.”
The other shifter didn’t laugh this time. Instead, he looked at Joel with eyes that were suddenly serious.
“The True Form has been among you for months. I assure you, you know his face.”
Chapter Eleven
Courtenay
The truck screeched to a halt as she reached the first intersection. The sole road that led up to the cabin had no exits until now. Courtenay hadn’t been paying attention on the way up. Not to the road at least. Then she spotted a sign, illuminated by the headlights that read “Origin” and had an arrow pointing to the left.
“Right. Origin, in town. Okay,” she said.
But her foot never left the brake pedal.
“What are you doing?” she asked herself, trying to force her foot to go. She had passed a van halfway between the cabin and here as it tried to make its way up the road. It had been a near thing, and she was sure there was some more paint damage to the side as it had tried to knock her off the road, but the truck had been bigger and had more inertia. Courtenay had escaped without any damage and left it far behind.
But it would be back, carrying the shifters who had attacked them, and likely Joel as well. Her heart ached as she remembered seeing him go down under the attacks. The last thing she saw of him was his hand stretching toward the truck as she gunned it down the road, abandoning him to his fate.
She had left him far behind, at the mercy of the goons who had tried to surprise them. Courtenay hated the feeling of helplessness. If she had stayed, they both were dead. But by leaving she felt guilty, as if she didn’t deserve to be free while he was captured, or worse. She refused to think about that “else,” however, operating on the assumption that Joel was alive and waiting for her.
“Fuck,” she said, making her decision. The wheel spun to the right and the truck followed the road up to the first bend. She carefully turned the truck around and backed it out of sight, then she turned off the headlights.
The running lights still illuminated the ground in front of the truck. On deserted mountain roads like this, they would have no problem seeing her. Angrily she put it in park and got out, opening the door to the back, looking for something.
“What the hell kind of man doesn’t have any sort of tools in his truck?” she said, shaking her head at the cleanliness in the cab, minus the shattered glass and shifter blood. Slamming the door closed she located a suitable rock on the side of the road and carefully went to work. First she smashed the running lights, then the tail lights, until she was sure no glow would be spotted by whoever had attacked them.
“This is how people get killed,” she muttered to herself, tossing the rock to the ground.
She left the truck running but out of sight, and crept forward until she could see the intersection. There she waited until the lights of the van lit up the sign once again. The van didn’t hesitate, heading left and down the mountain.
Her heart racing as she realized the first part had been a success, Courtenay ran back to the truck and put it in gear, s
lowly creeping down the road. It wound back and forth down the mountain enough that she could afford to stay a short distance away from them. But once they got to the bottom, she would have no choice but to stay closer, hoping that nobody looking in the sideview mirrors would spot her.
She thanked her lucky stars that it was a cargo van without windows on the rear doors. It was another stroke of luck on her side, convincing her even more that this is what she was meant to do. The two of them had been so worried that Joel would have to come rescue her that they hadn’t considered that she would be necessary to rescue him.
And she would ensure he was rescued.
“What are you doing?” she asked herself for the dozenth time in the past hour, shaking her head to bring her back to the present.
Joel had told her to tell Garrett what had happened, and to let the Jade Crew Alpha handle it from there. What he had meant was go to the Ridgeback Lodge and tell Garrett in person.
What Joel most definitely had not meant, was stupidly follow the vehicle that she had passed on her crazy descent down the mountain until it arrived at its destination, and then spend hours trying to figure out a way to contact Garrett to tell him where to come.
Of course, things would have gone smoother if in her terrified panic she hadn’t been blinded to the quickest way to get ahold of him. Courtenay had been so focused on talking to Garrett that she didn’t think about finding a way to talk to someone else who could then talk to Garrett.
Which is why the phone was now ringing, and she was confident that someone was going to pick up.
“Lionshead Mining Consortium,” came the pleasant greeting over the phone.
“Hi, this is Doctor Laurel, can I please be connected to Gabriel?” she asked politely.
