Lifting his head, he gave an abrupt nod. He would see where this path led. His wolf would realize, when they came to the end of the path, that whatever he felt was not their true-mate. Using the same tree he had used to lower himself to the ground, he pulled himself up and started walking. The van he had driven from the motel was some distance behind him already, parked just in the edge of the woods he had found. He had expected to take a brief walk around, listening for people and sniffing the air for humans before returning to the motel for his pack members if he found the area safe enough. He wasn’t sure how close the female was, and he had felt no marked territory line, but he knew she couldn’t be far, not if his wolf could feel her. The lack of territory line wasn’t a complete surprise. Some Alpha’s didn’t mark their territory well, and some were so weak his spirit didn’t feel the boundary. The only exception being when the Alpha had sworn a bond to the High Council. He could feel those Alpha’s even if they were weak in spirit. He reasoned he had, at some point, crossed a territory line and his wolf could feel their mate. He stopped his thinking there; he had to stop thinking of the female as a mate. Clearing his thoughts, he evaluated the situation again.
He had crossed a territory line and his wolf had felt something. The Alpha wasn’t bonded to the High Council because he did not feel the warning twang against his senses. It was possible the Alpha was out of the loop or slightly rogue. He wondered for a moment if the Alpha was strong enough to have told the High Council to get lost, but almost immediately abandoned that train of thought. He was strong, and he had originally told the High Council to get lost. But no Alpha could cross his territory line and not feel him. He was, he understood, an uncomfortable Alpha to be around. His spirit buzzed against any male who had any claim to strength.
He had seen the hairs raise on the necks of every council member before they had his oath, so he wasn’t surprised when he could not feel a weaker Alpha. The council was comprised of some of the strongest Alpha spirits alive, and they barely made him uncomfortable. But to not feel the territory at all spoke of a careless Alpha who had not bothered to secure his people inside of his protection or a weak one who could never protect his people. Unless, here Gammon’s thoughts took another turn, and he paused in his walk, so surprised by the thought.
The last few males he had added to his pack were loners. Was it possible there was a female roaming around with no pack? Without realizing it, he had resumed walking and his stride had increased at the thought of a lone female out with so many rogues roaming the world. He hadn’t walked far when the faint sounds of fighting reached his ears. Slowing he tilted his head trying to understand what he was hearing. Bringing his wolf forward a little, he leaned his body toward the sounds. He stopped completely and looked around. He was a giant of a man and could take another male in a one-on-one fight without question. He could take two and three males in a fight, but the sounds ahead of him spoke of many males. Too many voices to distinguish and he wasn’t certain, yet, what he would walk into if he continued. The piercing scream of a female decided his course and the rage of his wolf settled in his mind who had screamed. Had he any doubts before, and he had plenty, that his wolf was mistaken about the female he was tracking being their mate, the rage he felt settled them.
When he broke through the woods and into a clearing, he found himself behind some homes. The fighting wasn’t hard to follow, and as he drew closer, he had to dodge a few boulders. Rounding the back of one home, he saw a small clearing in front of him. Several males were fighting, but the cause wasn’t clear. What was clear was the single female standing in front of a little boy who couldn’t have been over five or six. One cheek was red, and a trickle of blood ran from her nose. The shifter standing in front of her stepped forward, but before he could grab her, two things happened.
She whirled and grabbed the boy and took off running at the same time Gammon roared his rage at the sight of another male so close to his mate. The shifter was screaming vile threats against the boy and promises against what the future would be for the female. As Gammon raced in the direction his mate had taken, he saw the other raise a hand. He took small note of the pistol in the hand, but he didn’t have time to take care of the male yet. He had to secure the safety of his female. He didn’t know the area; he didn’t know the shifters, so his only thought was to get to the female and get her to safety.
He saw the female dodge a few small rocks in her rush to put some distance between herself and the shifter screaming threats. He had almost reached her when he saw her foot turn on a loose rock. He tried to catch her as she stumbled, but he wasn’t close enough. The boy flew from her arms when she fell. She was looking at Gammon as she landed and her scream wasn’t for herself or for him, her scream was for the boy.
“Save him!”
His mate had spoken. He turned toward where the boy was picking himself up from the ground, intent on picking up the boy, grabbing his mate, and hauling ass to safety. From the corner of his eye he saw the other male approaching, pistol in hand. As the male again lifted the pistol Gammon realized the target was the small boy. The boy his mate had told him to save. Without a second thought, he launched himself toward the boy as the other pulled the trigger. The bullet sped toward the child, but Gammon’s body was already air born and though the bullet landed, it wasn’t the boy’s flesh that felt the impact. It was not the boy’s blood that spilled upon the rocks that day.
In a small motel, miles from their Alpha, four pack members grunted with shared pain. Too far away to talk to him but not so far they couldn’t feel something had gone terribly wrong. In Alaska, thousands of miles away, dozens of pack members, the strongest of the ones left behind, felt something, but only three pack members felt the impact of a bullet striking flesh. Three men, tied to Gammon by more than the bonds of pack, felt his pain. One, huddled in a cabin at the edge of the territory, called for the two men he knew would come. The two men he knew his son by mating had left to guard the pack and the only two who would feel the loss as keenly as he if their Alpha did not survive. As the pack continued about their day, Nikita and Dimitri raced for the cabin Jutoh called home. Their former Alpha needed them, and they needed him if the pain they felt meant Gammon wouldn’t be coming home again.
Back in the lower states, unaware of how serious the wound was and how much his pack could feel, Gammon sucked in a breath at the impact of the bullet. Between one thought and the next, he shifted to his wolf. His wolf, with a bare whimper as the hole closed around the bullet, lunged for the throat of their attacker. Within seconds the man lay bleeding out on the rocks, his head barely attached to his body, such was the ferocity of the attack.
The wolf gave one last look at the man on the ground before turning to face the direction the man had come from, the direction his mate had run from. He heard a slight hiccup from the child, as though the child were trying not to cry. He heard his mate call to the boy. He saw a brief flash of movement and knew the boy and his mate were retreating into a small cave in the rock face behind him. He listened to their whispers and would have smiled if he hadn’t been in wolf form. The female knew they were mates and had told the little boy he could protect them best if they gave the rest of the pack only one direction to come at them. She seemed determined to protect the child and if she felt the need to protect the child, then he would protect the child along with her.
“The pack has gone crazy and they will be crazier now that you killed the Alpha. My name is Amelia, but I prefer Mia. This little one is Hendrix. The pack wants him dead because Gillion wanted him dead. Gillion was barely holding the pack together before today. You have a bit of frothy blood coming from your nose. I think you have been lung shot; your breathing is too labored. We need to get you out of here and somewhere safe where we can get that bullet out. I don’t think you are in any shape to fight, although you certainly have the size to take on most of the pack. Do you think, if I lifted Hendrix on your back, and I shifted to my wolf, do you think you could run, and do you
have a place we could go?”
Gammon shifted from his wolf form and moved closer to the edge of the small cave, more of an indentation than a cave, but it protected the two from three sides. With the shift came pain, blazing white pain. A cough brought up some frothy blood, and he realized the female was most probably correct. The bullet had gone into his chest and the blood indicated the bullet had lodged in his lung. His body would have a hard time healing, even with shifting as each shift changed his internal organs and shifted the bullet. He kept his back to the two and watched for the rest of the pack while he evaluated his situation. He could make it some distance with one lung, he could possibly survive if he didn’t shift to his wolf and back much as each shift moved the bullet, tearing into his lung each time. He was not sure if his body would heal around the bullet and close off the injury if he stayed in one form.
He wiped his upper lip with the back of his hand. The dripping blood turned his chest bright red, but the blood loss didn’t appear too much. The actual danger would be the loss of blood occurring inside his body as the blood filled his chest cavity.
“Where does your pack go for injuries?” His voice was gruff. He was put out that the first words his mate heard from him was a request for medical care.
“There is a doctor with a small practice a few miles from here. He is friendly to our kind, and he doesn’t ask many questions. I don’t know if you will make it that far though. I can feel a bit of what you feel, a shadowy feeling. I think, if I can feel it and us not bonded, then it must be bad. I am sorry I ask you to carry Hendrix. The others don’t seem to have noticed what happened yet. If we take it slow, we could probably make it to your car. I mean, I felt you cross the territory line, and you were moving kinda fast, then, not so fast, so I am assuming you left your car behind?” Her voice pitched upwards at the last, making the statement more of a question.
Gammon nodded and turned his head to look at Mia. “Breathing is difficult, but not as difficult as a moment ago. I think we need to go fast. Movement will shift the bullet and keep shifting it, so I will be down to one lung and losing blood fast. We move fast, we get to the van, I lay down and you get us to your doctor friend. If your former pack comes after me in this shape I won’t last long.” Giving one last look toward the direction of the fighting, he turned and held out his arms for the boy.
He started to squat to reach the child, but Mia held her hands up. “Let me carry him as far as I can. I may not be as big as you, but I am not weak.” She picked up Hendrix as she spoke, but Gammon could see she wasn’t steady on the foot she had turned, and he saw the grimace that crossed her face.
“Hand him to me. You can’t run on that foot and I don’t think I can carry both of you. Be warned, if they chase us, I will pick you up.”
Mia snorted. “Aren’t we a pair? First meeting and we both need a doctor. Running for our lives.” She handed the child to Gammon and took a couple of wobbly steps. “I can’t go fast but we have to go. You know this kind of thing is the perfect setting for the most ridiculous soap opera. This is not how I envisioned meeting my mate.”
Gammon gripped her elbow with his hand to help her but was surprised when she yanked away. “You may be the biggest man I have ever seen and I am as certain as I can be that, in the future, I will gladly dump all my problems on your shoulders and let you battle the world for me, but as big as you are I am the less injured of the two of us. What kind of mate would I be to lean on you when we don’t even know if you will make it? And you better make it cause I didn’t spend my life waiting on you to lose you now. We work together.” She picked her way through the rocky terrain, limping heavily while resting one hand on his back.
An eternity later they were nearing the van when they heard the baying of wolves in the distance. Gammon’s breathing was labored and the blood from his nose and mouth had increased to the point it covered the boy in his arms. His stride, slow to compensate for the small stride of his mate plus her injury, seemed almost too great to manage.
Mia had an intense look of concentration on her face when she turned to him. “Let me put him down. We are close enough he can run. That is your car I can see through the trees, isn’t it?”
At Gammon’s nod she lifted her arms up and took Hendrix, placing him on the ground she told him, “Run to the car up there and get the doors open. Then get in the back. Hurry.”
As the boy darted away Gammon murmured, “It’s a van. Keys above the sun visor.”
“That’s fine. As long as he can get the doors open. The pack is getting closer, I don’t think we will make it, come on.” She grabbed his hand, and they stumbled toward the van.
The boy had heard Gammon’s comments to Mia and had not only opened both the driver and passenger doors but had gotten the keys from above the visor and placed them in the ignition switch. When Mia and Gammon reached the front of the van, she let go of him. He headed for the passenger seat while she used the van to support her weight and headed for the driver’s side. The first wolf came into view just as Mia turned the key. The purring of the motor was a welcome sound, but the van was positioned in such a way the wolf in the lead hit the side of the van as Mia was trying to back it onto the highway. By the time she turned the van around it was surrounded by wolves.
She put it into drive as the sobbing cries of the boy echoed through the van. Pressing her foot to the pedal, the van almost red-lined as the tires squealed in protest. It took almost half a mile before the van gained enough speed to outrun the pursuing wolves.
Mia meanwhile was making small comforting sounds directed at the boy in the back while sending worried glances toward the absolute giant of a man in the passenger seat.
“They will have smelled the blood and it won’t take them long to get back to their vehicles. Where you parked is about 10 minutes closer to the town. The dens are on a separate road than this one. If you had come in the other way, we could have been long gone. As it is, they will know where to find us. Lung blood is different and don’t think someone won’t notice it and realize you aren’t healing right. Is your pack nearby? Your territory? Or do you roam the land alone like so many others? No, you can’t, I smell too many others in here.” The last was more of a mutter, but Gammon understood.
He leaned the seat back as he told her where his pack members were, room number and motel.
“They, my pack I mean, may not come into town, but as crazy as things have been lately, I don’t think we can count on them trying to stay out of the public eye. I know what hotel they are in. It is only a few blocks from the doctor’s house. He has a small operating theater behind his house. Our pack funded it so getting in won’t be a problem. What might be is the doc’s house is on a dead-end street and they could come in behind it. When we get close can you call your people?”
“As soon as we are in range. Where do they need to go? They don’t have a car.”
“They could jog over. How many?”
“Three worthy males, but I have a vulnerable female. Is your pack rogue?”
“I don’t know. They have been getting worse over the last few years. Gillion has been, had been I guess I should say, holding them together with an iron fist. Lately though even he was having problems controlling his temper and the pack. He told me a week ago or so I would have to choose a mate from the pack. He said he was done, well, you don’t need to know what he said. It doesn’t matter anymore. Today was it though. Hendrix lost his daddy earlier; I am not sure exactly what happened, but Gillion swore the family was cursed and they were the reason for our problems. He was going to mate me, by force if need be, to his Beta and I did not agree. When Chance died, that is, was Hendrix’s dad, this morning, well, he just lost it. Gillion that is. He went for the boy. I got him to back off for a bit, but things simmered and just before you showed up, they exploded. The other males in the pack didn’t think it fair he was giving me to his Beta.”
“Where are the other females? Are you the only one?”
“No. Kendra w
as killed a few days ago when another male went after her mate to get her and Lilly is being hidden by her brother and dad up in the hills. We have a couple of other females past their prime for mating, so they haven’t been bothered, yet. The others split and ran over the last few weeks. I didn’t have anywhere to go and no money to get there. I only have one sister but all I know is she is probably somewhere in Georgia and that is far from here. I was going to try to find her, but her last letter said she was on the run with her mate and his family, so I didn’t have much hope of finding them. She never sent a letter from the same area twice in a row but some of them are repeats so she must have been traveling from the same area every time. Now though, I don’t know. The pack she was in went a little insane also and started trying to kill her mate, and I think they changed packs. She told me I needed to find a place of safety if I was still unmated. I have been sending letters to general delivery in Hinesville, Georgia for the last few years but the last letter from her gave the indication they were running and she wouldn’t be able to check the post office there any time soon.”
“My pack mates need to know which direction to go from the motel.” Gammon forced the words out. Blood trickled from his mouth and he ended the sentence on a wheezing cough.
Mia gave directions and by the time they pulled up to the doctor’s house and she drove around back four figures were running toward the house. While Mia banged on the back door of the house the figures approached the van. Gammon could feel the horror and fear radiating from them. By the time the doctor came outside Bradford and Caleb were supporting Gammon while Jessica climbed in the van to hold the child. Johnny stood watch.
The doctor didn’t need to be told the situation was critical and it was only moments before everyone was crowding into the small building behind the house. The pack members, appraised of the situation via the pack bond, pulled together to help how they could with Johnny taking over the little one while Jessica asked for the location of something to wrap Mia’s ankle with. It was Caleb, just as the doctor was set to put Gammon as under as a shifter could go via drugs who made the startling claim.
Blood of the Wolf (Safe Haven Wolves Short Stories Book 1) Page 7
