Alpha Curves (Paranormal BBW Shifter Romance): Wolf Clan Book 3 (16 page)

"Thank you," Iris whispered to the latent, uncertain how Leah knew that touching her would have made things worse instead of better.

Gently capturing Iris's hand, Esme pushed more magic into the she-wolf. It layered on top of Iris's energy, sank into her bones and into her blood, where her heart circulated it through the rest of her body. She relaxed further into Cade, her mind sensing Esme's commands more than she heard them.

Slowly they worked through the final days that Iris could remember. Camille's visit, Hank's growing animosity after the witch's departure, the old man finding her tucked under a tree, her nose in a book.

A new detail emerged from those that had always chased Iris through her nightmares. Blood stained Hank's shirt. He spoke, the words unintelligible but something about Cade. He kept pulling at his crimson splattered shirt, his eyes wide with panic until she finally realized that Cade was hurt and Hank wanted her to go with him.

Her mind only half in the shed with Cade and the women, Iris told them what she saw, her voice as dull and lifeless as Hank's had been erratic and distressed.

It was a ruse, of course, but she sensed his trickery too late. Another wolf waited by his truck, someone she didn't know, so an outsider to the clan. She caught the flash at his open collar of a small pendant on a chain, both pieces made of silver.

"He reeks, like bad magic," she said. "And he's wearing silver jewelry."

She pawed the air, describing the pendant to Cade and the women. A claw mark, a wolf's scratch. The stranger's arm flashed in front of her, a fat streak of silver as he hit her hard in the temple with a heavy baton. She fell silent, unconscious in her memory.

And then she screamed, vibrations shaking the walls of the small shed as Iris found herself reliving the nightmare that had jolted her awake the morning of Oscar's interview.

A second wolf she didn't know, the same necklace and pendant as the other man wore hanging from his neck. His stink clogged her nose. Hank forced one knee against her back to keep her pinned stomach first to the ground, his pants down as he clawed at her clothes.

She tensed against Cade, her soft whimpers dotting the air while he wrapped his wolf protectively around her and Leah pushed more calming magic through him.

"You're doing great, baby," he whispered into her ear.

Iris felt love pouring from him, into her. Love, not disgust. His shirt grew wet beneath her tears but he kept holding her, whispering encouragement as she pushed past Hank stabbing her in the chest. Cade's wolf ran alongside her as she escaped, her body shifting to her were state for the first time as she breached the clearing and heard the explosion. Somewhere behind her, Hank howled in pain and rage.

She kept running, her legs twitching along the ottoman in memory like a fox chasing a rabbit in its dreams. She followed Hank's scent and the reeking trail of the other men to a turnout on the side of the rode. She knew the location from her few trips off clan lands. A plain black sedan waited parked next to Hank's familiar truck.

The windows were down on Hank's old Ford, but Iris couldn't bring herself to approach it. She smashed one of the sedan's back passenger windows and rummaged for the key. She found it in the jacket shoved down on the floor.

Keeping one eye on the woods, she started the car and rolled the rear passenger windows down to hide the broken glass. Hearing the infuriated snarl of a shifter, his feet pounding the forest floor as his arms broke low hanging branches to clear his path, Iris pealed out of the turnout. The back end of the car fishtailed from the sudden acceleration and loose gravel. The vehicle bounced over the low concrete divide that separated the parking area from the road. Her head slammed against the driver-side window, the pain clamoring against the other agonies that tortured her healing flesh.

Pure instinct pushed her in the direction opposite the clan's lands. Only Cade and her grandmother would believe Iris. She had a long history of being an outcast among the wolves, her magic hidden so that she had less utility to the clan than the witches and healers who served them. And Hank would make good on his threat, at least with her grandmother. Even though he bore the same good looks as his son, the man was pure ugly on the inside.

Better to let him think he had scared her away, or that she'd died from her injuries. Surely, she had left enough of her blood on the ground to make him doubt her survival. A few months and she could sneak back, find Cade and get her grandmother out.

A car passed on the road, the driver's shocked expression and the surprised jerk of his vehicle reminding Iris that her clothes were tattered and stained red. Her attention divided between the rode ahead of her and the rearview mirror, she reached into the back of the cabin and retrieved the jacket. Clumsily, she put it on, her mind turning over her future plans.

Could she really ask her grandmother and Cade to give up their entire lives for her? Her grandmother, maybe. She had been old when she birthed Iris's mother and Iris had been the only successful pregnancy in a long line of her mother's miscarriages, aside from the woman dying in the birthing room.

Andra North had maybe a decade of life left and defending her strange granddaughter had made her almost as much of an outcast among the wolves as Iris was. But Cade would be risking his life and giving up his family and friends. She couldn't begin to understand his den instinct and what hardship it would be for him to live away from the clan.

She wasn't a wolf, how could she?

Still dreaming the past, Iris felt Cade's arms tighten around her in Esme's little shed. His voice rumbled in his throat, no words necessary to remind Iris that she was a wolf, had shifted in front of him the day before and during her escape from Hank. His fear reached into her memory, begging her not to forget her true form.

You are a wolf, love. My mate, baby. Come back to me.

Iris squirmed in Cade's arms as she fought the urge to follow his energy back to the present. She had scratched just the surface of the lost time and need to remember so much more, something that would help her, the cubs and the sweet witch guiding her over the rough terrain of a nightmarish past.

"I will," she promised in a whisper against his chest.

Her old self forgot about the shift, forgot about most of the attack, the other men, the silver blade that had pierced her chest. She remembered only the threat of death if she returned -- hers, Cade's, her grandmother's. For two weeks, Iris moved further from the clan, pawning everything of value that had been in the vehicle, stripping out the radio, and salvaging the tires and rims to sell them before she set the sedan on fire.

Hitching a ride with a trucker and going as far as a small town some fifty miles from the outskirts of Columbus, Iris kept only a small bag of the larger man's clothes and a lockbox. It took another week before she opened the lockbox. She could have smashed it open before that, but the box carried the same smell of decay and rot as the two men who had helped Hank kidnap, and almost kill, her. Only desperation for more items to pawn had forced Iris to look inside.

She found more silver that she quickly sold, crystals and dowels that turned her stomach queasy but were worth a few bucks regardless, and a thick sheath of paper covered with pictures and a language she couldn't read. Some of the images were the wards she would later carve into her flesh, her mind subconsciously recognizing their purpose but the knowledge remaining buried until she had absently scratched one into her arm and the would took a week to heal.

"What happened to the papers?" Esme asked, the question almost lost as it bounced and echoed from present to past.

"I had to leave them behind," Iris answered, her mind slowly resurfacing in Esme's shed. "But I hid them."

Leah, the only one in the room who had experienced none of Iris's memories during the regression, shook her head in confusion. "But why leave them?"

"Simple." Iris pressed closer to Cade as she answered. Relief eased the burn in her tense muscles when he tightened his hold and kissed the corner of her jaw.

"Hunters found me."

Chapter Seventeen

Sitting next to Cade in Dana's office, Iris listened quietly to her memories being dissected by those gathered. The only relatively new face was Oram, the West Virginia clan leader and Cade's direct boss. Sixteen years older than Iris, but from the same grouping of wolves, only time had made Oram a stranger to her.

"You're saying Hunters have charms to pass as wolves," Oram started and pointed at Iris. "And only she can sense them?"

Esme shook her head. "I'm suggesting that's the case. The two men assisting Hank were definitely charmed and I don't know of anyone other than Iris, wolf or witch, who can smell magic on someone."

The witch smiled, her magic pushing moral support in the she-wolf's direction. Turning back to Oram, Esme's expression turned professorial.

"There are two things we can draw from the shape of the silver pendants they wore, and the conclusions are exclusive of one another." She paused, waiting for Oram to indicate he followed her line of reasoning. "One is that a claw or wolf charm is used to control wolves. Making wolves that were strangers to Iris and not part of the clan assist Hank in trying to kill her."

Oram's brows knitted, much as Dana's and Cade's had done when Esme presented her argument to them before the arrival of the West Virginia clan leader. Unfortunately, Dana and Cade had far greater respect for Esme's intelligence than Oram appeared to have. Iris felt that it would be a long meeting before the man was convinced.

"The other, opposing, hypothesis is that the charm is used so that Hunters can pass as wolves. This hypothesis is bolstered, if not proven, by the artifacts found in the car. The two men, whether wolves or Hunters, acted as couriers for high-level material. While I believe that some of the glyphs Iris described seeing in that material could be crucial to neutralizing or extracting the crystals from the cubs, I'm certain the glyphs are those used by Hunters. Why would wolves have them in their possession?"

Dana watched the exchange between his mate and the other clan leader. His overly relaxed posture suggested to Iris that he was bored, but she'd spent two weeks watching the man in action and knew better. The gingery wolf was a deep thinker but also a consummate predator. When it came to disagreeing with Dana's mate and removing the threat of the crystals, both those in Oscar and in Esme, Oram was an adversary...prey, even. Far from bored, the wolf in Dana merely waited for the right moment to snap its jaws around the other man's neck.

It didn't take long -- just another dismissive pass of Oram's hand at Esme's insistence that the papers Iris had found must be recovered if at all possible. Dana leaned forward, his hands resting lightly on the surface of his massive desk, and stared at Oram. The battle was silent and quick, wolf parrying with wolf, but Iris felt each blow exchanged. From the tension running through Cade and Esme, they felt it, too.

Oram began to redden, the challenge from such a newly installed clan leader a high breach of wolf protocol. But there was no protocol higher among the wolves than leadership by the strongest among them. Iris could only imagine a handful of shifters as strong as the witch's mate, and one of them had his hand curled around hers.

In the end, it was Cade who broke the silence, looking at Dana as he spoke. "I'll take my team and retrieve the papers."

The witch inhaled sharply, her surprise the only physical acknowledgement of what Cade had just done. He had broken from his clan leader as surely as if he had stood up, crossed the room and punched Oram in the face.

And he had dragged his team along with him.

Giving Cade's hand a little squeeze, Iris drew his attention to her. "Just remember that you get 'mate' when you rearrange 'team.'"

His lips parted and she knew an objection waited at the tip of his tongue. She silenced him with a smile and another squeeze. "I haven't told anyone exactly where I hid them. And having a half-witch, who just so happens to be a homicide detective, on your team will improve the chance of success."

The room's energy changed, the air pressure plummeting. Both Iris and Dana, their faces growing pale, looked at the cause -- Esme.

"A witch and a half," she whispered, her hands and lips trembling. "I'm going with you."

"The hell you are." Rising from his chair, Dana closed the short distance between him and his mate. He pulled her up with a fierce tenderness. The dark glittering of his topaz gaze threatened to physically restrain her if she made any attempt to go on the mission.

Esme, her eyes misting like a fog rolling in from the sea, placed her palms against her mate's chest. She didn't push for release, just gently reminded him of the crystals in her. "Other than the cubs, who has the most to gain from retrieving the papers?"

"Then I'm going, too."

This time she did push, her head shaking violently as she rejected the idea. "You're too important to the clan."

"You're too important to me." He cinched Esme to him, his hands interlocking behind her back. "The clan means nothing."

Across the desk, Oram squirmed uncomfortably in his chair. Iris looked at her hand as Cade gave it a discreet squeeze, the gesture and push of his wolf telling Iris that Cade felt the same as Dana. His mate's safety came before the clan, before his status within it, before his very life.