Autumn's War (The Spirit Shifters Book 4) (8 page)

Chapter Thirteen

AUTUMN RODE IN the truck with Chogan, the new woman and her boy sitting in the back. They skirted the outskirts of Minneapolis, and then left the city far behind.

The hours passed, but the atmosphere remained tense, awkward. Chogan had explained how they’d rescued the woman and boy from the rogue shifters who were tormenting them, but she couldn’t help feeling like she was missing something. She felt like she was the outsider, and not this new woman.

“We’re heading into danger,” she said to Chogan when she noticed the boy had finally fallen asleep, and the mother had closed her eyes, her cheek rested on her son’s head. “Don’t you think we should drop them off somewhere?”

“Where?” he challenged. “They have nowhere else to go.”

“They’re not our problem, Chogan. We need to focus on Blake and Tala, and putting an end to this whole thing.”

His dark eyes blazed at her. “So you think it’s wrong for me to abandon Blake, but it’s okay for me to abandon a helpless woman and child?”

“I never said you were wrong for leaving him. And anyway, Blake is your cousin. They are strangers.”

“Why should that matter? A life is a life.”

Autumn gritted her teeth. She thought she preferred Chogan when he was just looking out for himself. She wondered if Chogan would have been so keen on helping the woman, Madison, if she’d been five feet tall and two hundred pounds, instead of the raven haired beauty that she was.

Jealous, are you?
A little voice spoke in her head. No, she wasn’t jealous. That was ridiculous. Blake might still be alive, and he was where her heart lay. But perhaps she needed to be honest with herself. Just because she was in love with Blake, didn’t mean she didn’t enjoy and wasn’t flattered by the adoration she’d seen in Chogan’s eyes, in the way he touched her, the way he’d kissed her. Now, with this new woman along for the ride, something had changed.

Finally, Thorne and David signaled that they were leaving the freeway.

The facility wouldn’t be far now.

They would need to park a sensible distance from the facility—near enough that they could escape back to their vehicles if needed, but far enough away not to get noticed. The not getting noticed part would be the hardest. There were so many of them, at least a hundred vehicles—a mixture of cars, trucks, and motorbikes—and at least two people per mode of transport. Some shifters were also traveling by their spirit guide; massive hawks and owls flew overhead and large predators ran through the outskirts of the forest that ran parallel to the freeway.

Heading off the main road, they took the smaller roads toward the hidden location of the facility.

Autumn’s heartbeat grew harder and she exchanged a glance with Chogan. He gave her a reassuring smile, but they both knew this was dangerous. Yes, they might find Blake and Tala, but they could lose people as well.

She started to recognize the road as being the same one where Peter and David had picked her and Thorne up.

They parked, hiding the cars between trees as best they could, hoping the foliage would hide them from anyone scanning from above. Autumn still wasn’t sure how good Vivian Winters’ surveillance was. If she was using satellite rather than regular cameras, they might be spotted.

Autumn climbed from the car.

Chogan instructed the boy and woman. “Stay where you are. The keys are in the ignition if something happens. If this goes wrong, just get yourself and Billy out of here.”

Madison nodded.

Autumn gathered with Chogan, Peter and Mia, Lakota, Calvin Thorne, and David. Sahale and Nadie, together with a number of other shifters they’d turned, moved into hearing distance as well.

“We have two reasons for being here,” Autumn said, addressing them all. “Firstly, we want to find Blake and Tala Wolfcollar.” She used their last names so everyone knew she was talking about Lakota’s son and daughter. “Secondly, we want to stop the operation they are running here. The woman who runs things, Vivian Winters, is at the head of this all. Take her out, and the rest will fall apart. They are holding a number of people captive on the first floor. They’re in separate chambers with reinforced glass doors. Many of them have been there a long time, and I don’t know how they’re going to react to us letting them out, assuming we get that far.” She turned her attention to her best friend. “Mia, because of your experience dealing with people who have been in traumatic situations, I’d like for you to lead that part of the operation.”

Mia’s back straightened, pulling herself up to her full five foot two height. “No problem.”

“Chogan and Peter, you can go with her.” She looked to the two men who used to work at the facility. “Thorne and David, I want you to get me down to the lower levels to find Vivian.”

Chogan stepped forward. “Uh, no way are you going. You’re the most important person we have. If something happens to you, the rest of us are lost.”

Angrily, she turned to him. “No, you’re not! I’ve turned enough shifters to put an end to this. If something happens to me, you continue with the plan.”

“It’s not about how many people we’ve turned. It’s about what you’re giving to everyone who is left.”

“What am I giving them?” she said, baffled.

“Hope, you’re giving them hope.”

She hesitated. “You can’t expect me to hide out in the car,” she said, deliberately referring to Madison and her child.

“I don’t.”

“Yes, you do. After what Vivian did to me, I’m owed the right to take her out.”

He cocked an eyebrow. “You’re going to kill her? And how are you planning on doing that, Autumn?”

“I don’t know. A knife, a gun? Whatever comes to hand.” She hadn’t given much thought to the actual process of taking the woman’s life. Could she really do it? Then she thought back to everything she’d been through, to watching Vivian inject the soldier with her blood, to Vivian ordering the slaughter of the young people in the city. Killing someone wasn’t supposed to be easy. If she thought she could do it
without
it making her nauseated, then she thought she should be worried.

“Also,” Chogan continued, “I want to be there when Blake and Tala are found. I want them to know I didn’t give up on them.”

She didn’t like Chogan challenging her in front of everyone, but he had a point. She wanted to be there when Blake was found, too. “Okay, we all stick together then. We find Blake and Tala, and release the other captives, then Mia and Peter can bring them back up here while the rest of us move to the lower levels.”

Everyone nodded their agreement.

They had both stealth and numbers on their side. When she’d been in the facility, she’d only ever seen a handful of people in one place at one time, and a number of those people were scientists who wouldn’t be armed. The biggest congregation of Vivian’s team was in the control center.

“Do we shift now or later?” Sahale asked her.

“Stay human for the moment. We don’t know what we’re going to come up against yet.” She turned to Thorne and David. “So how do we get back into this place?”

David turned and began to walk in the direction of the facility. Everyone hurried close behind. He talked as he walked. “There’s a back way in. There always is for these places. Even secret government facilities need to comply with fire regulations.” He moved at a quick pace, skirting around trees, staying away from the road. A small clearing revealed a man-made structure.

The entrance was a double metal door embedded in a brick surround—like a large access to a storm shelter. The only thing giving away the fact it was something more were the security cameras positioned either side of the doors, and the electronic pad embedded into the bricks.

Thorne put out a hand to stop everyone. “Hang on.” He took off his jacket and tore the material down the seam, splitting the item in two. He hurried over to the cameras, and threw one side of his jacket over one camera, and then repeated the process with the other.

With the cameras covered, Thorne pushed past David. “We might as well try the easy way first.” He tapped a number into the key pad and pressed his thumb to the pad. The light flashed red. He glanced back over his shoulder to where Autumn and the others stood, waiting. “I guess they were prepared for the possibility I would come back.”

David stepped up. “It’s not a problem. I can override it.” From his pocket he pulled a couple of small items. Autumn stepped closer to see what he was using, but they were hidden in his palm.

“What have you got there?” she asked.

He opened his palm to reveal a hair grip and a magnet.

“Seriously?”

He shrugged. “I know some codes, too. But these will come in handy.”

David’s body shadowed the keypad as he got to work. Autumn waited, anxiously chewing on the side of her thumbnail. How long would it be before someone noticed the cameras had been blacked out?

Within a minute, the light flashed green and something inside the door buzzed. He reached out and pushed the door. It swung open revealing a dimly lit stairwell.

“Good job,” said Chogan, pushing past him to enter first.

Thorne followed close behind. Autumn and Mia stayed together, Peter right behind them, together with Sahale, Nadie, Tocho, and several of the other shifters. David brought up the rear, pulling the set of doors closed behind them.

The staircase was windowless and narrow, leading downward into the earth. Autumn wondered where it would come out, remembering she’d not seen any sign of a stairwell when she’d been kept on the first floor.

Bizarrely, the staircase opened out onto what appeared to be the back of a janitor’s closet. Autumn almost tripped over a broom, banging against a bucket. The metal clang reverberated, and she clutched at Chogan’s back to stop herself falling while he looked over his shoulder and glared at her.

“Sorry,” she whispered. Her cheeks heated with embarrassment.

He put out a hand to silence her.

A door was situated in the wall in front of them. They paused for a moment, listening hard for any movement outside. None came.

Cautiously, Chogan edged open the door.

A movement came from the right. A figure in army fatigues noticed the other group and pulled a firearm, but Chogan lunged, taking the man’s legs out from under him. The soldier slammed against the floor, his weapon falling from his grip and skittering across the flooring. Chogan sat up and wrapped an arm around the man’s neck and pulled tight. The soldier gave a strangled choke, battering at Chogan’s arm.

Thorne bent down and picked up the weapon. He seemed more complete, somehow, now he held a gun. Autumn was just pleased the soldier hadn’t had a chance to fire it. They couldn’t afford to have the gun go off and alert everyone else in the building to their presence, though she felt sure they’d be noticed soon enough. But for the moment, there didn’t appear to be anyone else around.

The rest of the group exited into the corridor.

Autumn glanced both ways. “David, Sahale, Nadie, you go that way. We’ll go this way.”

They were in a long corridor with rooms leading off. The room she’d been kept in was down one end, the elevator down the other. Doors with windows embedded in them for observation were at regular intervals along one wall.

Autumn ran along the length of the corridor, pressing her hands and face against each of the windows, checking the occupant inside, before running onto the next. They were all as she remembered them—women and a young man, all curled up in defensive poses, sitting on the floor with their backs to the windows, or lying on the cots in the fetal position.

There was no sign of Blake or Tala.

“David,” Autumn called. “Can you get the doors open?”

The older man looked to her and nodded.

He started down one end, entering numbers into the keypads, doing whatever he had done with the magnet and hair clip to get the doors open.

A girl inhabited the first room, young, eighteen years old at the most. She cowered at the intrusion, her arms raised over her face. Her skinny body trembled violently.

Mia entered first, moving slowly. “Hey, it’s okay. Don’t be afraid. We’re here to help you.”

At the different voice, the girl peeped out from under her arm.

Mia smiled. “You’re safe now. We’re here to take you home.”

The girl unfurled and sniffed, her lower lip pouting.

Autumn realized she seemed so much younger than she looked; a child trapped in an adult’s body. Her dark hair was cut in a harsh bob with short, uneven bangs. Her skin was so pale, it was almost fluorescent. Autumn imagined she could make out the faint rivers of her veins and capillaries running beneath. The girl was the epitome of vulnerable, her blue eyes wide and terrified, taking in the big men surrounding them.

Mia reached a hand forward. “It’s okay. We’re the good guys. You can come with us.”

Autumn prayed the shifters wouldn’t need to change while the girl was still being coaxed from her cell. If anything was going to terrify the life from her, a group of people turning into animals would send her scurrying back into her corner.

But Mia’s calm nature, gentle, coaxing, almost hypnotic way of speaking, got her out. Mia put an arm around her, and the girl cowered at the contact.