The B Team: A Dark Leopards MC Novella

by Christine Michelle

  Despite the fact that I was concentrating on driving us away from the town without arousing suspicion, it was still obvious when Betina turned to stare out the back window for a moment. Her distress over Bomber putting himself out there, however ill-placed, spoke volumes to the kind of person she was.

  “He’ll be fine. This is far from Bomber’s first rodeo.”

  Betina nodded and for a few moments we were both content to just let the time pass in comfortable silence as I drove us further from the man we were both worried about. Her short black hair, which was cropped into almost a long bob cut, was blowing just slightly in the breeze created by the air conditioned vents in the truck. The scent that blew my way as a result was a sweet mixture of berries and sage, a smell that was almost too intoxicating, knowing we were on an important mission.

  “Do you ever wonder what it would be like?” She asked, jarring me out of my near hypnotized state.

  “What is this ‘it’ that you speak of?”

  “You know. A real mated pairing,” she confirmed what I had assumed. With a shrug of my shoulders, I tried to blow off her question. That wasn’t something she was going to allow to pass though. “Seriously, I’ve wondered ever since…” She let the last few words just drift off because we both knew what ‘ever since’ meant to her. Since she was forced to mate that rat bastard of a Claw leader. “How did you know that your potential mate was gone?”

  There was no holding back the weighted sigh that escaped me. “A day came and went where things went from hopeful prospects on the horizon to this feeling of complete loss. I couldn’t understand why that feeling persisted. For two days, it drove me completely insane. Then, I saw her in a newspaper. I had gone for a ride to clear my head and ended up in Indiana. The only reason I had stopped was because I knew I needed to eat. It had been at least a day. The man who got up from the diner’s bar just before I sat down left the paper he’d been reading. The minute I turned it over, I knew.” I glanced up to see the pity in Betina’s eyes.

  “She was one of the women who had been taken, abused, and left dead in a ditch on the side of the road.”

  “Pelt thieves?”

  I shook my head. “Don’t think so. I looked into it. She had been a panther shifter and part of a decent claw who had reported her as missing. It took five days for someone to find her body, but judging by when I felt the loss, whoever had her must have taken their time and they knew she was a shifter.”

  “Otherwise, whatever they did to her wouldn’t have killed her?”

  “Not physically anyway.”

  “I really am sorry, Brace. That’s horrible.”

  “Do you ever wonder if your true mate is out there waiting for you?”

  Betina shook her head. “No. I would imagine that he would have felt something similar to the loss you experienced the day you lost yours.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her shoulders go up and down as she remained silent for a few more minutes. “Otherwise, he would have come to save me, right?”

  Damn. What could I say to that?

  “That’s what you did for your mate without knowing it,” she whispered. You went to find her, to make sure, to…” She cut herself off. “I just can’t imagine my true mate allowing that to happen if he was still out there somewhere. Maybe I was defective from the start and my mate never existed. Who knows?”

  “I bet if he was out there, he was trying to get to you,” I told her so that she would feel reassured. The more I got to understand the underbelly of our society and how the council had let it go to rot, the more I wondered how true that was. There was something more going on with the council than they had let on. There wasn’t a bone in my body that believed Raven was working alone in his nefarious schemes to get to the shadow cats that were in the world. I imagined that the rest of the council had a say in that too, and that they were pretty pissed off when they didn’t get their prized possessions after all.

  “If they were able to breed shadow cats,” I mumbled as the thought process became a real possibility the more scenarios that played out in my mind.

  “What was that?”

  “Nothing,” I told Betina. “Sorry, just thinking out loud about something.”

  “The council,” she hummed. The sound was almost a purr of words. “I thought the same thing, but just figured I was being paranoid, given my past.”

  “It’s just a theory, but plausible. I’ll bring it up to Knox and Gray when we get back to the clubhouse eventually.”

  “Do you think that the council will cause any further problems for the club before we get back?”

  “No, I don’t. They know their days are numbered. It wouldn’t surprise me if I got back to find some, if not all, of them packed up and moving to greener pastures somewhere. Not that I’ll allow that to happen. We can’t take the chance of them moving and then trying to come after the girls again, or hunt down another set of shadow cat triplets. To be sure, there have to be more out there than just the three we’ve come into contact with.”

  “You’ll probably never know since they try to stay separated and hidden as best they can. It’s survival for them. Too bad Charisma’s Uncle turned out to be a horrible man. I think it warped her too much and that’s why she turned out to be the way she was.”

  “You had just as horrible a story and you didn’t let it warp you,” I growled out.

  “We’re all different and handle things according to how we’re able to process them. I managed, Charisma didn’t. It’s as simple as that. I won’t fault her for being a victim. I won’t allow her to turn the tables and create more victims either though.”

  “Did you have to make any special deals with Raven, or the rest of the council, in order to get the witch’s protection spell cast upon you?”

  “No. They helped me and never asked for a thing. I made myself useful around the council, cooking, cleaning, and the like. They never required more of me.”

  “Do you think they should be spared then?”

  She laughed. “Do I think that means they weren’t all bad?” She shrugged her delicate shoulders once more. “I know that’s not the case. While I appreciated the fact that they were hiding me, you could almost smell the rot in the council.” She wrinkled her nose cutely, and then smiled over at me. “Not literally, but there was just something off. Do you know what I mean?”

  I nodded my agreement. “We are nothing without our instincts. If that’s how you felt about it, then you were probably right.”

  “What do you think will happen with the council now?”

  “I think that my club is going to make sure the old regime finds their way out while bringing in fresh blood.”

  “I guess that’s good then.”

  Quiet settled into the cab of the truck again as the normal sounds of the road and sporadic traffic passed us by now and again. Betina was checking the mirrors just as much as I was, if not more. “Do you think he’ll really be okay out there?”

  “I do. He’ll probably be in contact soon to let us know what’s up.”

  “How long have you both been with the Dark Leopards MC?”

  “A while. Bomber and I hit it off immediately when he showed up.”

  “Did you both know before, that you were into men?”

  I almost laughed at her. “We both knew we were hedonistic animals at heart and out for a good time, all the time. Sexual preference has little to do with anything. As weird as it may be for our kind, I’ve never cared about male or female. So long as I felt good, nothing was off the table.

  “The problem with most shifters and issues they have with sexual preferences is that they’re thinking only about the survival of the species and reproduction. They tend to forget that for some of us, that will never happen anyway. There are those of us who lost mates, are sterile for whatever reason, or are being cautious while waiting for their mate. Some may settle down and try to make a go of an atypical relationship. Neither Bomber or I have a mate. What we do doesn’t affect anyone else, so
it’s just ours.”

  “What about the guys at the club? Do you think they’d care?”

  “Nah. I’m pretty sure most of them know. Especially since Chantal showed up and sort of spilled the beans about us.” I did laugh then remembering when she accidentally outed us by the way she questioned her man about our ‘friendship’. The men may not have acknowledged her faux pas, but they heard her. There were only a couple that we received weird glances from after that. For the most part, everyone just left us to our own thing. Most knew our stories anyway. We were without proper mates for the rest of our lives, I don’t think they wanted to begrudge us anything that might bring a bit of happiness in the dark fucking times ahead.

  We managed another two hours into our trip before an explosion rocked the ground not far behind us. “Oh my word!” Betina’s squeal was followed up by a repeated chant she made. “Please, please please, don’t that be him.” Her mumbled repetition was an echo of my own thoughts right up until I felt the surge in the air around us. An updraft rocked the truck a second before and impact was made with the bed. I quickly glanced into the rearview mirror while wrestling to maintain control of the truck.

  “It’s Bomber,” I explained to a panicked Betina. He crashed down as a dragon, but had to immediately shift to his human body due to lack of space in the truck bed.

  “Down under the seat is a change of clothes. Can you toss those to Bomber?” I asked Betina as I continued to scan both the horizon in front of us and the empty road behind. “We may have to jump off this road and find an alternative route for a bit. It’ll seem a little suspect if we’re the only vehicle that got through that blast zone.”

  Once we pulled off the main highway, and put a few miles between us and the blast, Bomber slid into the front seat, gently moving Betina over to the middle of the tan bench seat.

  “You read to debrief?” I asked. I didn’t miss the way his eyes moved to Betina, judging if she could handle the truth.

  “Panthers, for sure. Nasty, no-shower having, hairy beasts that put those dirty, mongrel werewolves to shame,” he huffed out his description like the accusation it was. “Most of them were stupid. There was one that escaped my notice for far too long. I was already on my way back to you after losing the others,” he admitted. The defeat was thick in his voice.

  “He had to be slick to slip past you. Don’t beat yourself up, Bomb. Where did you leave your bike? We can send someone to make a run to grab it, if the fucking panthers haven’t found it and fucked with it.”

  A rough, animal laugh bellowed out of Bomber’s chest. “Did you see the big explosion back there?” He asked me.

  “Of course we did,” I encouraged.

  “Well, my beautiful purple hell machine was used as a sacrificial lamb when I couldn’t shake that motherfuckin’ pussy-cat.”

  “Your bike? Son of a bitch!” I groaned. Bomber loved that bike so much that it was one ride away from being added to his treasure hoard instead of being ridden with the club.

  “I’m so sorry,” Betina quietly cooed.

  “Don’t worry about it, Little Precious,” he told her. “I can replace the bike. We can’t get another you though.”

  I smiled as I watched Bomber tuck Betina into his side and hold her. It was plain to see his initial animosity toward her was waning. I wondered for a moment how the dragon was going to deal with two cats in his lair permanently. Nothing had been said, but in my heart, I’d claimed them both as mine. We all belonged together. Three misfit beings with no hope of a future mate - we needed on another - more importantly, we all deserved one another too.

  6

  I’d never been to Colorado before, and while this trip may not have happened for the best reasons, I was at least enjoying the scenery along the way.

  Summer was coming to an end, and colder weather was descending upon the Rocky Mountains, evidenced by the yellow and orange tones starting to dot the foliage across the mountain tops. Bomber had been keeping me entertained with cute anecdotes from his last trip to Colorado with Brace. They’d come out to Denver on a run for the MC, and he was telling me about one of his favorite memories from before they headed back to Michigan, which included a beautiful hike and a few tokes of some of that legal Devil’s lettuce. Colorado was the only place producing a shifter-friendly variety that didn’t burn up with our too-quick metabolic burn.

  Hearing more about their relationship together was endearing even as it sparked that hint of jealousy that resided in the back of my mind. They were a force to be reckoned with, and the way that they spoke about each other was beautiful. It was hard not to picture myself being a part of something that seemed so pure and full of life, but what did it mean to be a part of something that already existed before me? Not only could I not see them walking away from each other just for me, but I was also at a point where I couldn’t tell which man I liked more. They were both attracting me for different reasons, while simultaneously catching my attention as a unit. What the fuck was wrong with me?

  The witch we were searching for resided on the southwestern side of the state, near Sunshine Mountain. I hoped that the name of the area would be indicative of the kind of witch that lived there. None of us were really in the mood to have driven all of this way just to be greeted by another evil brat of a woman who would have us all under some curse in seconds, without so much as lifting a finger. If our intel was good, she was a witch who believed in justice over any loyalties. She was neither good nor bad, but she was fair, and that was all we needed. We hoped she’d be willing to help us, especially being that I was forced into my bond as a child. In what world would that be considered fair to anyone?

  “In one mile, your destination will be on your right.” The robotic voice of Bomber’s GPS announced, cutting through all of my mixed emotions that were swirling around in my head, only to bring me even more. What if Fynn was already there waiting for me, using the witch to conceal him until the last second? What if she wasn’t even there anymore, and we’d wasted the entire trip? Either sensing my concern, or seeing it etched into the worry lines on my face, Bomber decided to halt my inner downward spiral.

  “It’s going to be okay, B. She’s going to be there, and she is going to want to help. I know you’re worried, but even if shit goes south, Brace and I are here to make sure nothing too crazy happens. Let’s try to stay positive for now.”

  “Your destination is on your right,” the GPS chimed. I’d just have to hope that Bomber was right because apparently we’d arrived. Bomb and I hopped out of the cab quickly and walked to catch up with Brace, who turned off his bike a little further up the long driveway so that he was out of the way of the truck if we needed to make a quick getaway. If he needed to, he’d leave his bike behind in a hurry, but I prayed it wouldn’t come to that.

  “I just sent a text to the guys letting them know we were here. They’ll expect another check-in in fifteen.” Brace stated, shoving his burner phone back into his pocket. “Let’s do this,” he said with a light, encouraging squeeze to my shoulder. I held my breath as he walked past me and up to the door, landing a solid knock on the hardwood. A few moments went by with no response. Another knock, and still nothing. I shifted my weight nervously back and forth on the balls of my feet, growing more anxious with each passing second that the witch’s door remained unanswered.

  Bomber walked around the house, which appeared both modest and adorable from the outside, and peered into each window, looking for signs that the witch could be home. Brace stood on the front porch step with me, just in case someone eventually came to answer it.

  “I don’t see anyone inside, she might just not be home,” Bomber announced.

  “Do you hear anything?” Brace asked.

  “I am but a humble dragon, a badass shifter whose animal did not come with superior listening-in abilities. That’s for the pussies of the group, so you tell me.” Bomber taunted with a sly wink in Brace’s direction. Knowing that he didn’t have a funny enough retort, Brace just l
aughed and flipped him the bird before putting his ear up to the door.

  “I don’t hear anything. I don’t think she’s here.”