by Selena Scott
He’d never forgive her if she didn’t call him. It would kill him. It might even ruin everything they’d worked to build together.
She looked back over her shoulder and saw that the cars of her family were almost upon them, like some sort of reckoning. Kaya had unintentionally put Jackson’s entire family within a few square miles of a man who’d tried to trap and kill them before. If she didn’t call him now, she’d be preventing him from doing the thing he’d been born to do—protect those he loved.
“They’re hours away, aren’t they?”
She looked at her watch. “There’s a chance they could get here before the full moon rises. And if they can, they’ll be able to help control and protect the other shifters. They’re in control of their shifts. They can even understand English in their animal forms.” For the most part.
“God. Maybe you’re right. We don’t have any other allies. I can’t exactly call up my buddies on the force and explain about the farm.”
“I’m calling him.”
She strode away and took out her phone, making a phone call that would change her life forever.
***
Jackson knew there’d been a reason he’d had the inclination to be such a fast driver his entire life. It was for this moment. Right here.
He took the two-lane highway at an easy 100 mph, eating up the road and praying that no highway patrolmen decided to do their jobs right then. His brothers sat in the back seat and Bauer sat shotgun. All of them were currently silent, which was eerie after the twenty minutes of mad scramble on Jackson’s part to explain Kaya’s phone call to them and then urging them to get their asses in the car.
“I’m going with or without you,” he’d told his brothers, but he needn’t have bothered, they’d beat him to the car. Bauer as well.
Now, they were driving warp speed toward Ben and Shelly’s farm, still miles and miles away, and trying to beat time in more ways than one. They needed to get to the farm before Race made any sort of move on the farmhouse. They also needed to get to the farm before the moon rose and they were all forced to shift. It wasn’t looking good. Even at a hundred miles per hour they still needed half an hour to get there. The moon was rising in twenty-five minutes.
Jackson’s foot went a little more leaden on the gas pedal. He swerved around two different cars, riding the rumble strip on the right side of the highway and kicking up dust as they went.
His brothers tipped to the side in the back seat as he swerved.
“I still don’t understand why Kaya called you,” Seth said after he’d righted himself, breaking the tense silence. “Why wouldn’t she have called me or Raph?”
It was a reasonable question to ask considering that as far as Seth knew, there was no love lost between Kaya and Jackson. Whereas she’d been Seth and Raph’s good friend for more than a decade.
Jackson caught Raphael’s eye in the back seat. Raph had been the first person to ever directly address Jackson’s feelings for Kaya. He’d been kind and honest, telling him that loving her didn’t have to be the worst thing to happen to Jackson. He even sort of encouraged things. But they’d only talked about it once, over a year ago. It was strange to Jackson that even though his brothers had been the two most important people in his life for so many years, of the people in this car, Bauer was the only one who knew the whole story.
Jackson knew then, at that moment, that it wasn’t coincidence that he’d confided in Bauer. It was because he’d followed an instinct that told him his secret would be safe with the old man. That he was safe with the old man.
Jackson took a breath. It would be great, as they were pretty much driving into battle right now, to tell his brothers the whole truth. But he and Kaya had decided that Natalie should be told, by Kaya, before anyone else was told. And he’d promised Kaya that. He wasn’t about to break that promise now. Breaking a promise to the woman he loved at a moment like this seemed like a very bad omen.
“Because…” Jackson paused, choosing his words carefully so as not to lie but also not reveal too much. “Because she knows how I feel about her. She knows that I would literally do anything to keep her safe. And it’s not that you two wouldn’t do that for her. But she knows that the way I feel about her is… different.”
Raphael grinned, Bauer eyed him, and Seth’s mouth dropped open. Seth looked around at the car. “Am I an idiot for not realizing this was really a thing? I mean, I always thought that you probably had a thing for her, thought she was cute, but I didn’t know you were like, ready to die for her.”
Jackson shrugged, hitting the gas pedal even harder.
“How did she find out?” Raphael asked. “Did she figure it out on her own?”
Again, Jackson weighed his words with care so as to keep his promise to her. “I told her. Last month.”
“AND?!” Raphael punched the back of Jackson’s headrest. “Jesus, dude. Details! Give me something to take my mind off this fucked-up situation! Tell me the damn story!”
Jackson couldn’t help but chuckle, even through the fear for Kaya that was clogging his throat. “I went to her apartment and told her how I felt. Couldn’t take it anymore.”
“Wow,” Seth muttered. “And what’d she do?”
Jackson left out the kiss. “She told me I was being a ridiculous, overbearing wolf and kicked me out.”
Raphael laughed. “Glad you finally listened to somebody on that point.”
Jackson grinned but the smile slid off his face when he looked at the time again. It was already dark out but the moon had yet to rise. Barely. “We’re not going to make it driving. Unless, Bauer, can you hold off your shift long enough to drive us there?”
Bauer was the only one in the car who could reliably resist the shift at the full moon, at least for a few minutes. But he shook his head. “Not well enough to drive a car. Especially not a car with three shifted wolves in the back seat. Besides, I haven’t been behind the wheel in forty years. I’ll probably crash.”
Jackson nodded grimly. “Then I’ll get us as close as we can and we’ll ditch the car.”
He inched his Jeep up to 110 mph. The vehicle started to shake.
“Fuck!” Seth suddenly growled from the back seat. “Why can’t he just leave us in peace?”
There were only three minutes until the moon rose and the hairs had started raising on Jackson’s arms. They were only a few miles out from the farm but they weren’t going to make it. They’d have to run the last mile or so.
“Let’s do it,” Jackson said, pulling the car off the side of the road and jumping out, stripping his clothes down. They’d turned off the main road, but still, at any moment a car could pass them and see the men shifting. But he didn’t care. This was a far cry from shifting in his basement out of the line of sight of a single soul. But Kaya needed him. His family needed him. All those innocent shifters needed him.
They ripped off their clothes and came to stand shoulder to shoulder. All three brothers, panting, ready, their faces turned toward the sky.
***
There was no sign of the wolves yet and Race couldn’t help but be disappointed. He’d thought for sure that if he let the girl know he was tracking her and then left his truck where she would see it, she’d call in the cavalry. And then he’d be able to take down the safehouse and the Durants on the same night. But it looked like the Durant brothers were cowardly and he’d have to settle for destroying the safehouse tonight and the Durants next month.
The moon had just risen, gorgeously round, and from his perch in the tree at the edge of the clearing around the farmhouse, Race could hear telltale noises from inside the farmhouse.
There was roaring and bleating. The sounds of furniture crashing. It was certain that there was a hell of a lot of shifting going on. And even those that were already shifted would be feeling extra jolts of energy and intensity from the full moon. He grinned in a grotesque way when he thought of the shifters tearing one another apart inside the house.
See? This
was why shifters needed to be tagged and imprisoned. Because they couldn’t control their instincts. They were a danger to themselves, their kind, and humans.
The irony of this statement was lost on Race, even as he sat in a deer blind with a tranquilizer gun in one hand and a shotgun strapped to his back, ready to kill for his ideals.
He heard the distinct sound of glass breaking within the house and once again he grinned as he looked over the driveway of the house. He’d seen each one of the Durant women arrive and enter the house. It gave him a sick sense of satisfaction to know that they were indoors in the mayhem that was surely happening. He tightened his grip on the tranquilizer gun and decided to up the ante just a touch.
He reached into the pack next to him and pulled out a dog whistle. He blew into it as hard as he could. He couldn’t hear it, but he could feel the way it strained his breath and knew it was working. Seconds later, he heard the husky howling from inside the house. Perfect. Next came the hawk whistle. And after that he blew a various assortment of animal sounds, pulling each instrument out of his bag and laying them carefully on the platform next to him, blowing them each in turn again. It was on his next go around that it finally happened. The front door of the farmhouse burst off its hinges and fell in pieces to the front porch. A mid-sized black bear ambled out into the yard, making a distressed, yowling noise and searching the area for the source of the aggravating sounds.
Immediately after the black bear came the redheaded man. He tried to get in front of the bear, his hands up in surrender, making low, soothing sounds. He whipped around and scanned the woods, obviously looking for Race.
Race knew he was next to invisible in his camouflaged place in the trees. He wanted to take a tranq shot at the bear, but the man was in the line of fire. And as much as Race hated shifter sympathizers, the fact that he’d been arrested for accosting Natalie Chalk last year had given him a grudging respect for human life. He wouldn’t hurt any humans tonight. Only the shifters. The humans, well, he’d make sure they got arrested, but he wouldn’t cause them harm.
Next out the door came a pretty little lynx. He knew by the way the lynx threaded through the redheaded man’s legs and rubbed itself against the bear that the animal was a shifter. A human’s logic was the only thing that could have those two different species interacting.
He had a clean shot on the lynx but he couldn’t bring himself to take it. The lynx was sleek and blunt at the same time and he swallowed away a tightness in his throat as he thought, as he so often did, of Michelle. She might be the reason he was out here tonight, taking revenge on all of shifter-kind, but she was also the reason he couldn’t bring himself to shoot a lynx, even with a tranq.
Didn’t end up mattering, though, because seconds later, the husky bolted through the broken front door, as sleek as a blinding white shadow. Race blew the dog whistle once more and the husky almost made it to the edge of the woods before the tranquilizer hit his flank, bringing him down.
“NO!” a voice screamed from the porch and Race saw immediately that it was Elizabeth, the mother of the Durant boys. She looked furious and regal as she bounded down the steps of the porch toward the husky, who was whining in pain even as synthetic sleep overtook him.
“Elizabeth, no!” Kaya came bolting down the stairs and yanked Elizabeth back. “It’s not safe. He can see us but we can’t see him.”
Damn right.
“We have to keep the animals inside.”
But it was too late. The door was open and the shifters, in their full moon-induced madness, were fleeing the house in panic.
Kaya tried to whirl and catch a large hare, but it was too big and too slippery, bounding off the porch. That was the next animal to get tranqed.
“No!” That was Sarah who screamed and jumped down to help the hare.
Next was some kind of waterfowl. Either a goose or a swan, Race couldn’t tell from where he sat. And after that was a small fox attempting to slink away around the house. It was almost too easy as he picked them off with tranquilizer after tranquilizer.
A stick cracked behind him and Race whirled around just in time to feel a steel trap clamp down on his hip. He caught a flash of red-brown fur and then he was being dragged backward off the six-foot blind he’d been perched upon. He fell hard onto the ground and rolled away. His tools scattered but he had his tranquilizer gun in his hands and his shotgun on his back.
On instinct, he reared back and slammed the butt of the gun into the wolf’s face. He almost shouted in glee as the wolf yelped and fell in a pile onto the forest floor. He whirled and faced the clearing again, seeing new flashes of the red and gray and white fur in the clearing with the shifters and the humans.
The Durants were here.
***
Jackson had never run so fast in his life. Not in his human form and certainly not in his wolf form. If he hadn’t been so scared for the lives of those he loved, he probably would have reveled in the instinctual race of the forest past him. The way his body just seemed to know where each tree and root would be next. His four legs propelled him in a seamless grace that he knew he couldn’t keep up forever, but he pushed and pushed and pushed, Kaya’s face ever present in his mind. His brothers ran in formation behind him, because Jackson was faster, but also because they were twins, enforcers, in sync with each other’s every move.
His whole life Jackson had done everything he could to keep his brothers out of harm’s way. But here he was, leading them straight into battle, and for some reason, it felt like exactly the same thing.
He saw glints of the farmhouse in the distance and kicked up his pace. He was tiring but he pushed. And that’s when he caught it. The scent of Kaya on the wind. And more than just her body. He caught the scent of her panic and her fear.
The rest was just a blur to him. The forest beat past him with every sprinted step, his fur moving through the wind like an underwater organism. His body sliced the air in a shape as old as time. His mate needed him.
As the trio of wolves exploded into the clearing, Seth veered, having seen something on the edge. Raphael and Jackson ran immediately to the aid of the group in the clearing.
“Jacks,” Kaya gasped, falling to her knees and clutching him around his neck. “You came.”
Later, he’d think about how perfectly he understood her. How safe she was with him, even though she was burying her face in his wild fur. How much he loved his mate. But in those moments, there was only the thought of protecting her in his head.
He heard Seth yelp from the edge of the woods and whirled around, a low growl in his throat.
There, at the edge of the clearing, Jackson caught the blurred sight of a man in camouflage.
Race.
Seth’s low whine hit Jackson and he sprinted as fast as he could in that direction. His wolf heart froze in his chest when he tore into the forest, watching in horror as Race stood over Seth’s wolf, dazed on the ground. In Race’s hands was a shiny silver shotgun, pointed right at his brother. Jackson charged.
He tore a chunk out of Race’s thigh before Race had bear mace out, spraying it into the air. Jackson scrambled back from the noxious cloud, his eyes stinging. But the mace had an effect on Race as well and the man stumbled away from the two wolves, his eyes red, and into the clearing. Raphael was there, nudging at Seth, who shook his head and stood up, still looking dazed as he limped away from the maced area.
Jackson bounded after Race and into the clearing. His eyes took in the glint off the firearm in his hands, the crazed look in the hunter’s eye as he limped on his bloody leg toward the shifters.
Jackson could see the tranquilizer darts sticking out of many of the fallen animals, smell the drugs on the air, but he knew that the gun in Race’s hand was meant to kill. The man had gone off the deep end.
There was a black bear in front of Race, woozy from the sedatives but awake. He roared at Race and tried to charge. Race lifted his gun and fired. The bear stuttered in his steps and fell to the ground.
“Drop your weapon!” Ben shouted from the porch, his own firearm drawn. “Drop your weapon or I will fire on you!”
Race looked undecided and his shotgun sagged down as if he couldn’t decide between dropping it or finishing off the bear that lay dying on the ground in front of him.
“No!” Kaya screamed, lunging forward out of the dark night, throwing her body in between Race and the bear, tears streaming down her face.
But Jackson saw what was happening in slow motion. He wasn’t scared, he was nothing. He knew, without a doubt, that the world would not be so cruel as to take Kaya from him. He knew that he would be able to make it to her in time.
And sure enough, just as Race’s shotgun rose up, just as Ben’s shot from the porch cracked out into the night, Jackson was a pure-white jet across the lawn. He registered Kaya’s scent and body against one side of him just as he also registered a blunt hot spew impact against his other side.
He couldn’t help but fall on her.
“NO!” Kaya screamed again, pushing to her feet and standing over Jackson. Jackson saw that Race was on the ground now, but he was lifting his gun again, pointing it at Jackson’s head.
But then Kaya was discharging the mace that Jackson had bought for her, directly into Race’s face.
The man screamed and coughed, spittle and vomit coming up onto the lawn.
“Call 911!”
“Get the shifters back inside!”
There was more shouting and then there was pressure on Jackson’s side. He felt dizzy with pain and adrenaline. He tried to stand and couldn’t.
“No, no. Just lay still, baby.” That was Kaya against him, her tropical eyes so big in her face.
Jackson’s vision went black for a moment and when he opened his eyes, he saw that he was lifting a hand to her face. He had shifted without realizing it.
