“Okay,” Peyton said. “Everyone get a good sniff inside the car so you have Ken and Nami’s scents fresh in your nose. Start here and work out slowly. Any scent trails you find, ours or the Segura guys, holler and stop where you are so we can check it out.”
It took ten minutes for Joaquin to find Ken’s scent, up on a tree, where it looked like he’d placed his hand to brace himself. While Dewi and Beck and Badger frantically circled for more scents, someone else let out a shout that they’d found the Segura men’s trail heading downhill and away from Ken and Nami’s trail.
“Ken’s fucking smart,” Beck said, sounding triumphant as he swatted Dewi’s shoulder in glee. “I bet he tossed that cup down there deliberately to distract and mislead them while he kept him and Nami moving this way.”
“It could have come out in the wreck,” Dewi wearily said.
“No, I don’t think so,” Badger countered. “There’s coffee all over the back seat, and the windows aren’t busted out. Someone had to take that cup out of the car, and it’s only got Ken’s scent on it.”
“That means they’re alive,” Beck said.
Dewi didn’t want to get her hopes up too soon. “No, it means they were alive when they left here. That’s been over eight hours now.”
“Keep yer hopes up, girlie,” Badger said.
Peyton called for everyone’s attention. “Joaquin, you take at least six guys and go after Segura’s men. After you question them to find out if there’s any new information, or if they did anything to Nami and Ken, terminate them all, unless you…” He glanced at Beck and Dewi. “Unless you need to keep one alive to take you back and show you something. Do not shift. I want everyone armed at all times.”
“What about their bodies?” Joaquin asked.
“They’re four drug cartel guys who are not on our land. I could give a shit. Take their phones, wallets, jewelry, everything on them. If you’re close enough to the river when you kill them, strip them and dump the bodies there. If they’re ever found and identified, people will likely think it was a drug-related murder and not associated with us.”
“Roger roger.” Joaquin picked his men and headed downhill.
“Web, you and the others head back to town and sound a cautious all clear. Pass the word about what happened and to keep an eye out for Ben’s truck. If they find the last guy, who’s probably Manuel Segura, shoot to kill. No one runs tonight unless they’re on patrol. No one goes out alone, either. I want our people on the front entrance all night, as well as patrolling the campgrounds and residential areas. Set up a schedule. Have Gillian and Asia help you with the schedule and getting the word out, if necessary.”
Web nodded and scrambled up the slope with the remainder of the men.
Peyton turned to Trent, Dewi, Beck, and Badger. “Let’s go.”
“Finally,” Dewi muttered as she headed back up toward where they’d scented Ken.
Chapter Thirty-Two
The wolf returned about an hour later, much to Ken’s relief.
Ken also felt like an idiot. He was fond of watching all sorts of survival shows on cable since meeting Dewi, everything from people eking out homesteads in the wilds of Alaska, to crazy guys dropped into remote locations and forced to survive on nothing but their wits, bugs, and a knife that did everything but stroke your cock for you.
Yet he couldn’t recall a single damn thing about how to start a fire without matches, a lighter, or a special fire starter.
Despite the risk of being discovered, he knew if they didn’t have a fire, between the cold and the damp, they’d be dead by morning. Finding shelter had helped, but it wasn’t getting them warmed up.
Huddled in the shelter of the rocky outcropping with Nami, he pulled out his phone, even though he knew it was dumb.
No signal, of course.
Before he put it away, a sudden hunch hit him. He swiped to the photo albums, a group family photo taken the evening before, before dinner.
“Why you wastin’ your battery?” she numbly asked.
He stared at the screen, the glow illuminating Nami’s face with an eerie light. A few yards away the wolf sat, intently watching them. The light from his phone reflected off its eyes.
“Wishful thinking,” he said. Then he stared at the wolf and held his phone out toward it as a wild-ass hunch hit him.
“That’s our family,” he said. “Our pack. My mate and fiancée, Dewi Bleacke. And Nami’s mate and fiancé, Beck. Dawson Beckett. And Dewi’s brothers, Peyton and Trent Bleacke, and their mates and childr—”
The wolf shifted.
Nami let out a shriek that she cut off by clapping a hand over her mouth. She grabbed Ken and shrank back against the rock, behind him.
Ken fought the urge to let out a triumphant crow of his own. His wild-ass hunch had been right.
The man sitting before them had long, stringy, shaggy dark brown or black hair with some grey in it. A long, thick, unkempt beard and mustache covered his face. In the dark, his brown eyes looked black as well, surrounded by all that hair.
Hell, even in human mode the man looked more like a wolf than he did a human.
As he leaned forward, shock on his face, he stared at the phone’s screen with wide eyes.
“Bleacke,” Ken said. The man flinched. “Peyton and Trent and Dewi Bleacke. The three children of Charles and Chelsea Bleacke.”
The man’s lips moved like he was trying out the words before actually speaking them. “Dewi? They…they said…Chelsea’d have…no more pups.” The man’s voice sounded hoarse, thick, gravelly, as if he wasn’t used to speaking.
Then again, maybe he wasn’t.
“They were wrong, and she did,” Ken said. “One more. Dellis Tadewi Bleacke. Dewi. My mate. She was their miracle baby. She’s a Prime Alpha. They think it’s because she was attacked when she was only six months old, when her parents were murdered.”
The man’s eyes widened even farther, his lips silently forming the word before he was able to speak it. “Murdered?”
Ken nodded, feeling more than a little like a dick, but needing proof. “Chelsea and Charles Bleacke were murdered.”
The man’s eyes grew bright in the light from the phone, apparently near tears.
“Dewi’s twenty-five,” Ken pressed. “Badger Williams raised her. Hopefully they’re all out looking for us right now.”
“Those men…following you. The Mexicans. Why?” His eyes remained focused on the screen, entranced.
Ken noticed the screen starting to auto-fade, so he touched it again and leaned forward, closer to the man. Nami kept Ken between her and the stranger, another soft squeak of fear escaping her.
Ken ignored her, intent on their survival.
“You want to know about the ones following us?” Ken asked.
The shifter nodded.
“They’re bad guys from a Mexican drug cartel,” Ken said. “They want one of Dewi’s Enforcers. Tracked him here, to the pack compound, because he killed one of theirs in Mexico. He’s an Enforcer there and had to take blood because the asshole he killed kidnapped, raped, and murdered the fifteen-year-old daughter of one of our pack.”
More silent forming of words before he spoke. “Dewi’s Enforcers?”
“She’s Head Enforcer for the Targhee pack. Has been since she was twelve…Duncan.”
Nami and the man both gasped.
Ken realized this might be their only chance for survival. “Duncan Lister. I’m right, aren’t I?”
The man slowly nodded, tears filling his eyes.
“Please, Duncan. I’m sorry I have to be the bearer of bad news. But I’m begging you, help us. As your packmates.”
He slumped back onto his ass. “I’m not…of the pack…anymore. I…haven’t been…years.”
“Yes, you are. Peyton is the pack Alpha now. You’re their grandfather. Please, you have to help us. If those men catch up to us, they’re going to kill us. As your grandson-in-law, I’m begging you. Dewi and I are supposed to get mar
ried Saturday, on the solstice. Nami and Beck are getting married, too. Wouldn’t it be nice if you were there to walk Dewi down the aisle instead of Peyton? She’s spent most of her life with only Badger and Beck and her brothers and packmates. It’d be nice for her to find out she has more family.”
Duncan’s jaw worked, as if he was still trying to remember how to make his mouth form additional words.
Ken pressed harder, not wanting to lose the advantage. “I’ve only been Dewi’s mate for a couple of months, but she told me something. She said mates are sacrosanct. That it’s every wolf’s duty in the pack to protect the mates at all costs, especially when they’re human. Duncan, please. I’m begging you. Nami and I are human, not wolves. You can smell that. If not for me, at least help me protect Nami. I swore to Beck that I’d help protect her. She’s his mate.”
Duncan took the phone from him, still staring at the family photo. “How…long?” he asked.
“How long what?” Ken asked, genuinely confused.
“How long…since I…left?”
“You mean since you faked your own death?”
Ken realized after he’d said it that it might have come off sounding more than a little snarky. When Nami made a soft tsking noise behind him, Ken confirmed he might need to dial back his tone just a hair. Nami had apparently swung through the pendulum of emotions from fear to family bonding now that she knew this wasn’t just a random wild man who’d stumbled across them.
“I…I was following…the wind,” Duncan said. “I was following her. Her voice in the wind. I heard her…in the wind…and wanted to join her.”
“Who?”
Duncan’s heavy sigh nearly bowled Ken over. “My precious Louisa.”
Ken realized how grief-stricken the wolf still felt and tried to shove away thoughts of how grief-stricken Dewi would be if he didn’t make it out alive. How grief-stricken Beck would be.
It didn’t help that he’d just dropped the bomb that one of Duncan’s daughters and sons-in-law were also dead.
“Well, Peyton’s forty-eight. He was, what, about a year old?”
Duncan nodded.
“So do the math. Forty-seven years, your family needed you. Dewi still needs you.”
“She’s a…Prime Alpha?”
“Yeah.” Ken tried not to let his anger get the better of him. “And I’d really like a chance to see what kind of pups the two of us could raise together. So if you could help us out here, that’d be greeeaat.”
He belatedly realized the wolf would have no clue what the snarky reference to Office Space meant.
Man, I’m turning into a real dick.
As the screen’s auto-fade kicked in again, Duncan finally saw the phone itself and turned it around in his hands, studying it with an expression of wonder.
“It’s a cell phone,” Ken said, reaching for it. “We’re out of signal range right now, so it’s pretty much the world’s most expensive watch, photo album, and compass. There’s literally a whole new world out there since you opted out of life. Remember the TV show Star Trek? No, you wouldn’t, that was after you left. Buck Rogers movies. Half that shit looks like old-school antiques compared to new and existing technology. Now, cars talk more than they should, and people don’t always talk enough. Time to nut up, buttercup. Your pack needs you. We need you. Right now, we need a fire, or we’re going to freeze to death out here before our pack can track us.”
The man shifted into wolf form and took off.
Nami snorted in disgust. “Well, that worked. What’s your next plan, genius? Think you should insult his manhood, or his horrific family relationship skills? Or you could talk about his hygiene, I guess.”
“Dammit,” Ken muttered, crawling back to where Nami huddled in the outcropping. “I thought that was going to work.”
“Appealing to a grief-crazy dude’s better instincts isn’t usually a sure bet.” She gentled her tone. “But it was a good try.” An snort escaped her. “I can’t believe you figured that out. Who he was, I mean. That was amazing. Hope we live long enough to tell everyone about this. How’d you know?”
“I didn’t. It was just a hunch. Why else would there be a lone wolf shifter out here and not back at the pack compound, one who wasn’t aware of who we were, and who didn’t expose his identity to us sooner? Unless he had a reason to be out here alone, staying concealed, and with no knowledge of who we were?”
A few minutes later, a noise in the dark had Ken brandishing the tire iron again, but the shape of the wolf emerged from the gathering gloom. Duncan carried something in his mouth and spit it out before he shifted and held out a hand for the tire iron.
Ken reluctantly passed it over. If the guy had meant to hurt them, he would and could have done it long before now.
Duncan picked up the object he’d spit out, which Ken realized was a rock. Looking around, Duncan pointed at Nami’s purse. “Paper?”
Ken realized what he was looking for. “Tinder?”
Duncan nodded.
Nami pulled the strap over her head and rooted through her purse, producing the wedding notebook. She ripped several blank pages from it and handed them over.
“Need more,” Duncan said. “Dry.” He looked around and pointed to a nearby deadfall. “Check underside for bark. Leaves. Needles. Moss. Twigs. Anything dry. Kindling.”
Ken scrambled to do it while Nami ripped several more pages from the notebook and passed them to Duncan. He crumpled the paper and started striking the rock against the tire iron.
At first, Ken thought Duncan was trying to get them killed making noise…until Ken spotted the sparks. Obviously, the rock must be flint.
Ken was returning with an armful of moss and bark when he spotted the small flame catch and flicker. Duncan dropped the rock and the tire iron and protected the fragile flame with his cupped hands as Ken sank to his knees next to the man and unloaded the armful of leaves and bark.
In a few minutes, Duncan had a small, steady flame going, one strong enough to start catching the smaller twigs and branches Ken was bringing back. The wolf dragged several large rocks over, placing them around it, forming a half-circle with the flames open toward the outcropping, helping reflect the warmth toward them and protecting the fire from the wind at the same time.
Nami huddled close, her hands outstretched. “Duncan, thank you so much.”
“They’re not close,” he said, his voice still sounding gravelly, but not quite as strained. “When I left earlier…tailed them for a while to make sure…waited until they stopped for the night. They’re not close enough to spot the fire. I’ll stand watch while you two rest. Be ready to move if I awaken you.”
Ken reached out and caught the man’s arm. He looked down at Ken’s hand, then his gaze slowly traveled up to meet Ken’s.
“Thank you, Duncan,” Ken said. He hoped if he kept using the wolf’s name that it would help anchor Duncan to them as packmates and he wouldn’t disappear into the woods again.
Duncan let out a deep sigh before laying his hand over Ken’s and gently squeezing. As with Dewi, Ken sensed the wolf holding back, perhaps afraid to harm him. “Thank you, grandson.”
* * * *
Duncan shifted into wolf form and positioned himself between Ken and Nami so they could use him for additional warmth. It still felt miserably cold and damp, but at least with the fire, and with Duncan’s warm fur, Ken knew they would survive the night now.
Nami fell asleep almost immediately, stress and exhaustion allowing her to do what Ken couldn’t.
Duncan was a Prime.
Let’s see if it works like it does with Badger.
Ken sent a thought to Duncan. “Can you lead us to safety?”
There was a long, silent moment where Ken thought maybe the wolf either hadn’t heard him, or wouldn’t reply.
“She needs sleep or she won’t be able to move at all and we could get caught in a far less defensible position. We have to set a trap in the morning. Make a stand here.”
&nbs
p; “They have guns.”
“Doesn’t matter.” Duncan sent a mental image to Ken, of a deadfall trap. Primitive, but effective.
“I can’t build that by myself,” Ken told him.
“You won’t have to. Get some sleep.”
Ken didn’t know—and didn’t care—if it was renewed hope that finally allowed him to rest, or if it was a Prime suggestion to him to do so.
* * * *
After an hour of desperately slow going, Peyton finally stopped them and had Dewi and Beck strip and shift, making it easier for them to cover more ground and more easily follow the faint scent trails. She and Beck balled their clothes into Dewi’s overshirt and tied the sleeves around the bundle to keep it together. Badger carried it for them while Trent and Peyton carried their guns and phones.
Dewi and Beck raced along, zig-zagging back and forth to find the scent, moving slowly enough Trent, Badger, and Peyton could keep up on two legs. She couldn’t sense Ken close by with her mind.
Please, please let them be safe!
She’d never forgive herself if something had happened to him, or Nami.
Especially since she’d been the one to send them to Spokane in the first place. The pain of losing Ken would kill her, but the guilt of Nami dying would destroy her.
It would seem Ken had gotten them safely out of the wreck and on the run, because they kept scenting both humans, and no blood at all. The snow shower had complicated the tracking, though, slowing them down, but they were tenacious.
They continued for another couple of hours when Beck pulled up short. Dewi plowed into his hindquarters and actually tripped and went rolling tail over teacup a few yards down the slope.
She shifted back and bounced to her feet, stalking back. “Dude, what the fuck?”
He shifted back as Peyton, Trent, and Badger caught up. “Ken took another piss right here. And something else.”
She sniffed. “Okay, it means he was still alive.”
A Bleacke Wind (Bleacke Shifters Book 3) Page 29
