No Werewolves Allowed

by Cheyenne McCray

  As she looked back at me, I cocked my head as I stared at her, thoughts churning in my mind. “There are countless beings that exist on earth and in Otherworlds and Underworlds that norms aren’t aware of. I suppose there could be alien life too, on other planets in earth’s galaxy.”

  She reached out a hand. I took it and let her help me stand again. “I hope not,” she said. “It’s bad enough trying to keep track of all of you paranorms.”

  “No kidding.” I shrugged, dismissing the possibility that aliens were stealing Werewolves. That idea just didn’t feel right. Something else was going on.

  It was even colder now, our breath coming out in puffs of fog. I studied Olivia. She was the only human on the case, and despite her coat, the cold had to be getting to her.

  I was glad to see she’d put on a pair of leather gloves and secured her insulated coat rather than leaving it open. She probably had pocketed her Sig first, of course, to make sure she could get to it as fast as possible. Still, her face was unprotected.

  Olivia’s skin was dark, so it was hard to tell if her nose was turning blue. I put my hands on my hips. “Put on your balaclava now or I’m going to have to hurt you.”

  “Try it,” she said. But Olivia must have been really cold because for once she didn’t argue. She unzipped her jacket a bit and jerked her facemask out of her inside pocket, then pulled the balaclava over her head before zipping her jacket closed again. The facemask covered everything but her eyes. “I’ll kick your ass if you don’t watch it,” she said, but the words came out muffled.

  I grinned. “Bonus points for making it harder for you to mouth off.”

  Olivia narrowed her exotic eyes, but I walked over to Beketov. Olivia was probably wishing for ammunition on hand stronger than rubber bands and erasers. If I wasn’t careful, she might come up with the idea of using rubber bullets. Knowing her, she would do it if she thought of it. I certainly wasn’t going to help her in that department.

  “Haven’t come up with a thing yet,” I said to Beketov when I reached him, then explained about the solid bedrock that had stopped my magic from searching any deeper. “I’d like to take a look at that rock pile now,” I said when I finished telling him of my non-discovery. “If it’s not solid, and there’s something behind it, I might be able to tell.”

  He nodded, his lips thin, and his expression looked like he was trying to decide if it had been worth bringing us in on this case. A layer of irritation coated my skin. I’d already proven myself by finding the location and the emitter—even if I had gotten myself knocked out.

  I concentrated my anger against whatever took the female and her pup while I moved toward the base of the rock wall. “Maybe the scraping sound was made here.” I frowned again as I looked over my shoulder. “Even though it sounded more like it came from the location the emitter is at.”

  “That thing could have blocked the real direction of the noise and thrown you off.” Olivia came up beside me and I was tempted to grin again at the sound of her muffled voice. “Maybe there’s a cavern behind these rocks where there wasn’t one below.”

  “Let’s find out.” I shook my limbs, easing some of the tension that still gripped my body from the electrical charge. “I’ll blow the place apart if I have to.”

  “Don’t bring down the whole damned mountain with whatever it is you do with your earth magic.” Olivia stopped me before I reached the pile of rocks at the base of the cliff. “And try to avoid ruining any clues.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I’ve been a PI for over two years now.”

  “That thing over there could have fried your brains.” She crossed her arms over her large breasts. “I’ll be keeping an eye on you.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” I strode the couple of steps to the rock face.

  Three Werewolves in human form were at my destination. Neff was examining the leaves at the base of the rocks. “Nothing.” She shook her head and looked up at me. “No imprint, no scents. How could they disappear like that?” She gestured to the rocks. “We haven’t had any luck there, either.”

  Another Were glanced at me with wide blue eyes that were red from crying. “I am Radka Noemi Cermak. Kveta is my sister, Petra my niece. We must find them.”

  Radka’s words compounded the hot anger that had been with me ever since it was discovered who was missing. This made it all the more real. All the more personal.

  “Let me see what I can do.” I tried to look reassuring and gestured to the three Weres to move back.

  When they were out of my way, I focused my earth elemental magic on the rock face. I closed my eyes and searched for something, anything, that would give me a clue to where the missing Were and her pup had disappeared.

  Weakness from using so much of my earth magic earlier made it harder to try to reach the earth behind the rocks with my power. I swayed and had to bring some of my concentration back to my physical body to steady myself.

  I could do this. I had to do this. Again I pushed at my earth elemental power and reached between the rock, sliding my magic over the boulders, through the crevices, until I finally reached earth.

  My breathing came easier and the earth strengthened me for now. There wasn’t much earth to use before rock blocked me from reaching out with my magic any further. It was almost like running into a steel barrier, but it was simply more blessed rock.

  Tingles ran up and down my physical body. The sensation was distant and I was surprised to realize that so much time had passed since I first sensed the missing Were and her pup being taken. The sun was about to rise and I had to find someplace private to shift.

  I gathered up what strength I had left and returned to my physical self. Exhaustion seeped through every pore and I was grateful to find Olivia holding me by one arm when I opened my eyes.

  “Find anything?” she asked from behind her balaclava as she steadied me. I shook my head and she added, “Then what good are you?”

  I smiled but the tingling grew stronger and she released me as I drew my arm from her hold. I hated having to hurry into a bunch of bushes to avoid being watched when I shifted. I glanced up at the sky.

  “Be right back,” I said as I turned toward the dense forest.

  “No way.” Olivia jogged and caught up with my longer strides. “I’ve seen you change, baby, so you know you are comfortable around me. Not to mention you aren’t going anywhere alone after tonight.”

  “Since it’s you, all right.” I dodged around a bush while Olivia waved off a couple of Weres.

  “Pee break,” she called out, but two male Weres followed as far as the edge of the treeline.

  The shift didn’t hurt but added to my exhaustion, something that had never happened before. The entire time I leaned back against a tree with my eyes closed.

  “That charge must have really gotten to you.” Olivia’s voice didn’t sound muffled anymore and I opened my eyes to see she’d taken off the balaclava. “I’ve never seen you like this.”

  I shrugged, which in itself was tiring. “Must have been that electrical charge and using my elements.” I was used to long days and nights since I worked as a PI by day, Tracker by night. So it was unusual for me to just want to crawl into bed. “I could use a really long nap.”

  “Let’s get your purple ass back to camp,” Olivia said, but when I pointed to my now pale arm, she added “Correction. Your white ass.”

  “This white ass is going to bed.” I pushed away from the tree. “And sleeping for hours.”

  Ice, Joshua, and Olivia were all snoring like cars at a drag race when I woke. We were in the tent we’d been sent to when we arrived and I was snuggled into a warm sleeping bag, lying on my side and facing Olivia. I still wore my leather fighting suit since I’d crashed as soon as we got back to camp this morning.

  “Unconsciously I think they’re having a competition to see who can snore the loudest.” Angel’s amused voice came from my left and I rolled onto my back and pushed myself up so that I was sitting and facing her. “Th
ey’ve been going at it for hours.” Angel looked as beautiful as she had the first time I saw her, with perfect corkscrew curls and blue eyes clear of any traces of exhaustion.

  “How do you look so perfect first thing when you wake up?” I yawned and imagined my black hair was a total mess and an imprint of my sleeping bag had made a red mark on my cheek.

  “That’s the nice thing about being a Doppler.” She twisted one of her curls around her finger. “All I have to do is shift into a squirrel and then shift back.”

  “I need a comb.” I ran my hand through my hair and snagged my fingers in a snarl. “Not to mention a toothbrush and paste.” I made a face as I reached for my backpack. “Yuck. Morning breath.”

  Angel reached into a brown backpack and dug out her own toothbrush and paste. “I’ll go with you.” She scooted to her knees, then moved up and unzipped the tent flap with her free hand.

  I glanced at the still snoring Joshua and Ice, who had backpacks near them, too. I followed Angel out of the tent where she paused and took a deep breath.

  She stretched her arms over her head, her scoop-neck white T-shirt rising up to expose a strip of her tiny, flat waist. She looked so perky, petite, and beautiful in the T-shirt and jeans she wore. Her small bare feet were even cute, with bright pink polish on her toenails.

  Angel gave each of our Werewolf guards a brilliant smile. I swear the males salivated as they stared at her. Or rather they were staring at her breasts. Joshua had been crude last night, but right, about how the Werewolf males would respond to the sight of her cleavage.

  I cleared my throat, barely holding back a grin at the males who appeared almost incapacitated with lust. “How did you and the guys get your stuff here?”

  Angel turned her attention to me as she lowered her arms and the T-shirt slipped down over her waist. “Rodán had our backpacks sent ahead so that we could travel in our natural forms.”

  “Don’t let Olivia know that little fact because we had to carry ours.” We turned away from the guards and I waved one of the males off when he started to follow us. “We’re not going anywhere and there are two of us,” I said to him.

  But the male whistled to someone across the camp. “Lukas.”

  I glanced over my shoulder as I walked away. “Oh goody, company.”

  “Let’s lose him.” Laughter was in Angel’s voice.

  I grinned at her. “Shouldn’t be too hard.”

  She took three steps and shifted into a blond squirrel as she moved, her plastic bag with her toothbrush and paste dropping to the ground.

  Dopplers are amazingly fast when it comes to transformations. It’s equally amazing how their bodies can shift into animals far smaller than their human forms.

  Angel the squirrel scurried up the closest tree trunk and disappeared among the branches. I dropped my own toothbrush and paste and I laughed as I bolted from the camp and into the forest. Elves are faster than almost any being, and even in my human form I possess the same speed as I do in my Drow form.

  Werewolves are quick, but didn’t stand a chance against Angel and me, especially with the head start we had.

  Shouts behind me only made me smile more. Angel kept pace with me as she scampered from one tree to the next. My long black hair whipped around my face and the cool morning breeze brushed my bare midriff. The morning dew wet my bare feet.

  The air smelled delicious—of pine and loam, as well as the clean scent of last night’s rainfall. I was so glad to be able to smell again. How bizarre was that? Something was being used to mask smell and inhibit one’s sense of smell.

  Angel and I made no sounds and didn’t even startle wildlife as we kept our distance from a whitetail doe and her fawn, a flock of wild turkeys, and even a lone black male bear.

  I hadn’t consciously planned on returning to the site of the Were kidnappings last night, but that’s exactly where we ended up. I pushed my hair away from my eyes as I came to a stop in the middle of the clearing. Angel walked out of the forest and joined me, wearing her T-shirt and jeans again.

  Every paranorm being has magic, no matter how little, and all types of beings that can shift have the gift of being able to transform completely back to the form they were in to begin with. That is magic that I certainly don’t have.

  Angel slipped her hands into the back pockets of her jeans and surveyed the area along with me. “There can only be a logical explanation for these kidnappings.”

  My attention was on the place where the noise emitter had been last night. It was gone. “Who managed to take that thing?”

  “I did.” Angel was digging her bare toes into the leaves and pine needles where she was standing. “I isolated the electrical frequency with rubber.”

  Surprise flickered through me. “Rubber. Of course.”

  “I had a couple of Weres return to camp and bring back a spare tire from one of their older SUVs.” She spoke about it casually as if coming up with the idea had been the logical thing to do. “I used the tire tube to contain the emitter and the tire itself to serve as transport by having it rolled back to camp.”

  I tried to picture how she’d managed it. “How did you get the emitter into the tube?”

  “Cut it open, made a sort of chute on one end, then used the excess strip to scoop and push into the opening of the tube.” She shrugged. “I only had it put into the tire as an extra precaution.”

  “Fantastic.” I grinned. “I was going to shoot it to put it out of our misery, but unfortunately that wasn’t the rational thing to do. That, and Olivia wouldn’t let me.”

  Angel laughed. “Olivia is one tough female.”

  “You have no idea.” I turned my gaze to stare at the rock wall. “Even though I didn’t find anything with my earth element I can’t help but think there’s something behind all of those rocks.” I frowned as I met Angel’s eyes. “Or beneath the bedrock. Where else could the Weres have been taken?”

  She looked thoughtful. “A geologist who’s familiar with this area could give us some information.”

  “The geologist might be able to tell us if it’s even possible that something could be here.” I stretched my arms and my legs while I spoke, trying to limber up. I’d missed not stretching into my changes last night and this morning, and my muscles felt a little tight. “Any other ideas?”

  “I heard Olivia’s ‘Beam me up, Scotty’ comment,” Angel said with one of her brilliant smiles. “Considering I interned with NASA, you’d think I would consider life out among the stars.” She stared up into the sky. “People on earth are alone in this galaxy.” She returned her gaze to me. “But they do have us paranorms, they just don’t know it.”

  “Olivia was kidding about the Star Trek reference. I think.” I winked at Angel before walking over to the rock wall and putting my hands on my hips. “Nothing makes sense but something being behind here or below ground.”

  “Or both,” Angel said.

  “Or both.” I was almost absent-minded as I repeated her words and reached out to run my fingers over one of the smoother stones at the base of the wall. “They kidnapped another child, Angel,” I said even though she already knew that information. “And a pregnant female. Pregnant with three babies.”

  Anger surged through me, somehow hotter and harsher than it had before. How in the Underworlds could the mother and her pup have disappeared like that, with me not far away?

  I gathered my earth magic, ready to release it and use the earth at our feet to move aside some of the rocks.

  Shock bolted through me. Remnants of the electrical charge were still in my body, as if they had been hiding, wrapped around my spine. But now they were free and I fought to control something I had no idea what to do with.

  Too much anger, too much magic was inside me to release my elemental magic. I shook with the power of my earth elemental.

  Have to stop, have to stop it!

  Everything went crazy, as if the world was spinning. My air power joined with the earth magic that had twined wit
h the electrical charge and magnified.

  My power slammed into the pile of rocks at the base of the cliff.

  The ground trembled and shifted beneath my feet as if an earthquake had struck. I almost lost my footing and stumbled to the side. The pile of rocks started flying away from the base of the cliff—

  And the wall started to come down on Angel and me.

  TEN

  My entire body shook and the earth seemed to act against me. I anchored my feet like steel had clamped them deep into the ground.

  “Nyx!” Angel dove for me as I was nearly deafened by the rumbling and crashing of boulders shooting down the side of the mountain.

  She body-slammed me from behind, forcing me to the left of the landslide. Her surprising strength sent us both tumbling into the forest.

  “Up!” Angel grasped my hand and jerked me to my feet before I had a chance to get my bearings on my own. “Dammit, Nyx, run!”

  Her words jolted my brain. Just as a boulder the size of my kitchen rumbled toward us at amazing speed, I found my wits and ran. Angel jumped to the right, landing in her squirrel form and scampering up a tree. I flung myself to the left, twisted in the air, and back-flipped six times through the trees and bushes before I came to a stop.

  It was like a knife fight where the moment seemed like it lasted forever but was over within a couple of minutes. My breaths were harsh, but not from exerting myself. It was from surprise and fear.

  Dust clouded the air and filled my nostrils. My head swam with remnants of the magic that had left my body in such an overwhelming, almost devastating rush.

  “Angel!” What if a boulder had slammed into her tree? Or what if she’d been injured even as she saved me? “Are you all right?”

  A blond squirrel skittered down a nearby tree, and then Angel stood in the squirrel’s place just a few yards from me.

  I wasn’t sure if it was anger or concern in her blue eyes. Maybe both. “Damn, Nyx.” Angel gestured in the direction of the rock wall, and when she spoke her lips were thin. “What were you thinking?” Apparently it was mostly anger she felt right now.