Half Wolf (Alpha Underground Book 1) (16 page)

When I dragged my dirty, battered, and exhausted body back through the hotel-room door that afternoon, all I wanted was a shower. Hot water, fluffy towels, clean sheets—the promised trio sounded near miraculous after five hours of heavy sparring and the momentous pleasure that had come before.

But the expressions on my pack mates’ faces proved that the comforts of home would have to wait. Flicking my attention from shifter to shifter, I traced their displeasure, anger, and worry back to its source.

At the epicenter of the discontent, I wasn’t at all surprised to find Ginger holding her cell phone out toward me while shooting virtual daggers at my companion. Yep, our ill-fated vote yesterday hadn’t done pack cohesion any favors.

When I saw the image on the trouble twin’s small screen, though, I swallowed hard and stopped worrying about the two warring shifters’ incompatibility. Because Ginger had found a photo of Lia, but the girl no longer looked like the happy, fresh-faced kid who had piled into our car as recently as yesterday morning. No, this Lia resembled a Holocaust survivor with a bloodied face, mussed hair, and haunted eyes. This Lia looked broken.

I fell backwards into a chair, unable to hold myself erect when faced with the reality of my own failure to protect my fellow shifters.
At least she’s alive
, I reminded myself. Or Lia
had
been alive when the photo was taken. I averted my eyes from the phone, unable to meet the girl’s eyes for a second longer.

“Push play,” Ginger demanded. Only then did I notice what would have been obvious to anyone even a bit more tech savvy than I was. A little arrow within a circle smack dab in the center of the image proved that I was actually looking at the landing page for a video rather than at a still photo. Unfortunately, based on the heavy tension in the air around me, I didn’t think I’d like what I was about to see any better than I’d liked the preview.

With trembling fingers, I tapped the play icon even as Hunter stepped up beside me. One warm hand fell onto my shoulder, but this time I had a feeling the uber-alpha was seeking support as much as giving it. And as we watched the young shifter on screen suck in a gasp that was almost a sob, Hunter’s breathing turned similarly erratic beside me.

“Here you go, Talon. What do you think? An acceptable sacrifice?”

We couldn’t see anyone other than Lia on screen, and the muffled male voice was digitally altered to hide the speaker’s identity. Lia’s captor could have been anyone.

Still, his words shot through me like fire.
Talon
. The exact same name Crew had mentioned as his sponsor within the SSS.

Now we know who we need to kill
, my wolf growled deep within our shared belly. And I didn’t even consider slapping her down. If this Talon was responsible for both Lia’s kidnapping and for Crew’s descent to the dark side, then my animal nature could be as bloodthirsty as she wanted in defense of our pack. We’d find out who Talon was, and together we’d take him down.

Then my blood ran cold because Lia spoke at last. And the single word that emerged from the girl’s split lips wasn’t one that I’d expected to hear in a million years.
“Hunter,”
she moaned.

I shook my head, trying to dislodge the sound from my brain. No, I must have picked that up wrong. It wasn’t possible.

As my stomach sank into my boots, I stared up at the shifter standing inches away from me. The shifter who’d made love to me today with—I’d thought—powerful feelings that matched my own. The shifter who’d fought by Lia’s side at the campground yesterday morning and who had seemed honestly concerned about Cinnamon’s fate a few hours later.

Over and over again, I’d given the uber-alpha the benefit of the doubt despite the evidence stacking up against him. As Ginger had pointed out so acerbically, Hunter had repeatedly shown up at decidedly suspicious moments. He’d admitted to seeing no point in a pack, and yet he’d stuck around to ingratiate himself into the good graces of both the halfies within our little group—me and Lia—while roundly ignoring everyone else. He’d even cast me out of my old clan, for crying out loud, ensuring that I had no way to protect myself from his machinations.

And what had I done in response? I’d bent over backwards to make up excuses for the uber-alpha’s behavior. He was a bloodling, I told myself, and not especially socially adroit. He was employed by the Tribunal to hunt down the SSS, so of course he’d be poking around in the land of the missing halfies.

He had a good heart.

That’s gotta be my weakest effort at voluntary stupidity to date
, I berated myself. After all, hadn’t I only begun trusting Hunter after he used the four-letter M word? Was I really so desperate that I’d accepted the first psychopath who gave me the time of day?

Yep. Yep, apparently I was.

Or at least, I
had
been. Now, I pushed myself out of the chair so violently that it fell over, one hard wooden leg banging against Hunter’s bruised shins in the process. My companion winced, but remained standing tall and firm, waiting for me to draw the inevitable conclusion from the evidence placed before me.

I opened my mouth, but found I was unable to speak. Instead, my body vibrated with pain as if Hunter were biting into me once again, just as he’d done to catch my attention in the forest earlier that day. Only this time around, his sharp lupine teeth seemed to move up and settle around my chest, pushing all air out of my lungs and spearing my heart.

I wanted to wail and moan at the agony, but instead I pierced the uber-alpha with an angry gaze. For some crazy reason, Hunter had his head cocked to one side in a gesture of hopeful expectation. As if he was waiting for me to denounce the evidence I’d heard with my own two ears.

Do you really think I can forgive
this
?
I roared silently. And Hunter took a step backwards as if struck. But he still made no move to leave.

We might have stood there frozen in our silent battle forever if Ginger hadn’t intervened. Her words cut through the emotions that hung like foul smoke in the hotel-room air. And as she spoke, I finally found myself able to take in one shuddering breath after another. “Now do you finally understand what I’ve been trying to tell you?” my pack mate demanded.

“Yes,” I replied simply, not taking my eyes off the uber-alpha. It was his strength that had attracted me to him in the first place, I decided. The uber-alpha was so absurdly powerful that I’d trusted my untrustworthy wolf and accepted the comfort of his protection. In the process, I’d closed my eyes to the truth, had believed Hunter’s lies, and had lost a pack mate in the process.

Not lost
, my wolf whispered.
We’ll find Lia
.

I hoped so, but couldn’t really see how. Not when the uber-alpha before us was implicated in her kidnapping and had been privy to every stage of our recovery plan to date.

For a moment, I considered ordering my pack to pile on, to take Hunter down and force Lia’s location out of him. But we didn’t stand a chance against the uber-alpha’s root-beer dominance. He’d bark out a single command and we’d all wither away to nothing, starving to death within arm’s reach of a mini fridge chock full of caloric leftovers.

In fact, I realized now that I was well and truly stuck. The best I could hope for was to squash my wolf in an effort to make myself immune to Hunter’s incalculable dominance then mow the uber-alpha down with the sword that was still belted at my hip. The strategy wouldn’t help us find Lia, but it
would
prevent the traitor from actively working against us as we continued our efforts to free our pack’s youngest member.

No!
My wolf rebelled, but it took only a blink of an eye to thrust her down into the dark recesses of my mind, deeper than I’d ever sent her before. Let the inner beast battle those monsters of loneliness, lack of belonging, and back-stabbing mates for a while. Maybe she’d do some good and my nightmares would become a little less frequent in the future.

Then I whipped my weapon out of its scabbard, glad that I’d pulled the so-called condom off the blade during the ride back to the hotel.
And why didn’t Hunter simply take me hostage then when we were alone if he’s just trying to up his halfie count?
I wondered.
Why flirt with me and train me and fuck me senseless?

The issue was irrelevant. Lia had spoken as if Hunter was present in her prison cell, and I had to trust information from our pack’s youngest member over the yearnings of my own heart.

Still, with my back to the other shifters in the room, I mouthed the word “Go” at my opponent. Even now, I didn’t want to use the killing strokes he’d taught me in order to skewer a man who I’d caressed with such wild abandon mere hours earlier. Some traitorous part of my mind still wanted to believe that I was wrong in my re-analysis of my mate.

My mate.
I closed my eyes for a split second to regather my composure. And when I pried my lids back up, Hunter’s clothes lay in a puddle on the carpeted floor.

But the uber-alpha himself was gone.

Twenty-four hours of relentless scrabbling for another solution turned up no new leads, so we arrived at the farmer’s field the next afternoon with very little hope but with an outsized dose of determination. Surely Hunter would have simply moved the ceremony to another location after being busted for complicity. Or perhaps he was busy setting up a trap to reel us back in and would be thrilled when we stupidly showed our faces right where he expected us to be.

But the online front for the SSS that Ginger had tracked down the day before was sketchy at best, suggesting that perhaps the uber-alpha didn’t have a direct line of communication with his underlings after all. Perhaps the loose-knit group of shifters hadn’t learned how to build a phone tree and thus had no way of getting in touch with each other save turning up every Friday evening to howl together at the moon. And perhaps Hunter, like us, would simply be forced to arrive and hope he’d be able to take down as many halfies as possible in the face of our clan’s moderate show of offensive strength.

Perhaps I’ll start answering to the name Pollyanna too
, I thought uncomfortably as I stepped out of our clan’s car. I couldn’t quite believe that I was leading my pack mates into danger with my eyes wide open to the stupidity of the endeavor. But I also couldn’t imagine staying home and ignoring the chance—no matter how slender—that Lia would be gutted tonight on this very field. No, as stupid as it was to show up, it would be stupider to stay away.

“I’m coming in with you,” Cinnamon said as the other three shifters joined me outside the vehicle’s metal walls. As directed, the male trouble twin had parked down a narrow lane that was nearly invisible from the main road but that was only a short jaunt upwind from the location Quill had scouted out the day before. This was the moment of truth, ten minutes before sunset...and already my pack was rebelling.

“You’re our getaway driver,” I reminded Cinnamon, but the male trouble twin—who was usually gentle and humorous—just growled a rejection of my reiteration of his role. He wanted to be part of the strike force and he didn’t seem willing to take no for an answer.

The truth was that Ginger’s brother
was
doing better after two days of forced rest. He’d healed enough that sitting upright was no longer a struggle, and his wounds had stopped oozing every time he moved an arm or a leg funny. Still, everyone but Cinnamon himself knew that the male trouble twin would be a liability rather than an asset on the mission ahead.

So I elaborated, trying to smooth the shifter’s ruffled fur. “You have an important job to do,” I reminded him. “If we can tear Lia and Savannah away from the SSS and get them to you, then at least we’ll know the two innocents are safe. The rest of us can take care of ourselves. But you saw the video—Lia might not be able to walk. She
needs
you to be ready to spirit her out of the line of fire.”

“I can do that and still come in with you,” Cinnamon argued. But he hadn’t risen from the driver’s seat yet, clear evidence that the male was still too weak to join us on the battleground.

I sighed, preparing to muster a little alpha dominance and force the malleable shifter to toe the line. But Ginger took her brother in hand before I could speak up again.

“Do I have to handcuff you to the steering wheel?” the female demanded, dangling the restraints that we’d brought along for an entirely different purpose through her brother’s open window. The young woman was revved up and ready to rumble, and her wolf was so rampant that I could almost see its image superimposed over her human skin as she spoke. Neither Cinnamon nor I doubted that she really would cuff her brother to the wheel if he didn’t toe the line.

So I didn’t have to expend my weak powers to get Cinnamon to play it safe after all. “No, ma’am,” the male trouble twin said, eyes submissively trained on our feet as he backed down. Then he muttered, “Be careful.”

“Always am and nothing bad’s happened to me yet,” Ginger agreed. She shed clothes as she spoke, and then the female trouble twin fell onto paws with a speed that nearly rivaled the traitorous uber-alpha’s. Beside her, Glen’s wolf form caught my eye and then nudged his current partner to get her moving away from the car. The pair curved into the trees as a unit, moving into place as planned so they’d be ready when the enemy shifters arrived.

Quill, Cinnamon, and I, on the other hand, remained resolutely human. It was hard for me to wait two-legged even though my weak wolf would provide little additional offensive power, but she and I both knew this was an integral part of our plan.

So I forced myself to unclasp the sword belt from around my waist and hand the weapon into the car to Cinnamon for safekeeping. In for a penny, in for a pound.

And now I’m both unarmed and thin-skinned.
I shivered, knowing the unvarnished assessment of my current state was far too true. Without the aid of my katana, I had no chance of fighting free if the enemy saw through our little charade.

Focus
. The word breathed from wolf to human mind and back to animal again. Inhaling deeply, we calmed our pounding pulse together. Then, through the trees, we heard the first car door slam.

One door, then another. A crunch of tires on gravel, then more metal on metal.
Two vehicles
, I thought.
One for Lia and one for Savannah.

I reached toward my wolf, hoping to borrow her nose to gather a little additional olfactory feedback. It would be handy to know how many enemies we faced and whether both of the kidnapped halfies were present before I donned the handcuffs that Ginger had threatened her brother with a few minutes earlier.

“Only two enemies,” Cinnamon murmured. “Lia’s there, and one other female—young, weak, probably Savannah. We could take them down with a frontal assault if you
’
d let me help....”

My pack mate’s words trailed off as I shook my head and turned around so my back was facing Quill. “We can’t risk Lia getting injured before we reach them,” I disagreed, mouth muffled against the side of the car.

Then, allowing the cowboy shifter to fasten hard metal handcuffs around my unresisting wrists, my own partner and I strode together toward the meeting grounds of the enemy who held our pack mate
’
s life in their unyielding hands.