Half Wolf (Alpha Underground Book 1) (20 page)

I had no plan. Just a hope and a promise—a hope that I’d think of something on the fly and a promise to Lia that I wouldn’t let the SSS harm another hair on her head. The combination would have to be enough.

Are we able to shift?
I asked my wolf. I wasn’t sure how much time had passed in wolf body since our last transformation, but I was optimistic that my longer-than-intended nap plus the wolf’s snack might have been enough to recharge the relevant muscles.
I guess my wolf was smart to let me rest after all
, I decided.

Rather than remarking upon my change of heart, the animal obediently relaxed her control over our furry body. And I responded by pushing against the inside of her skin, trying to force my way out.

Slowly, ever so slowly, we lost fur and regained thumbs. The transformation was neither fast nor elegant, and I wound up kneeling on the wet leaves of the forest floor rather than standing on two feet. But it had worked.

“
Fen.
” Quill’s tone was filled with warning now as he called out a second time into the slowly darkening forest. “I’m losing patience.”

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. It wasn’t as if I was dilly-dallying around out here. I was simply trying to ensure that when I walked into the cowboy shifter’s trap—because of course his proposed exchange was actually a trap—that I had every possible factor lined up in my favor.

To that end, I spun in a frantic circle, eyes peeled in hopes a weapon might miraculously appear. What I wouldn’t give for the sword I’d left behind in the clan vehicle the day before and that I’d used in virtual form only hours earlier. Or for a gun like the one I’d noticed bulging beneath the cowboy shifter’s clean, dry shirt when I
’
d peered out between rhododendron leaves with lupine eyes.

Heck, I’d even take a plastic spoon at this point
, I thought, quirking up one side of my mouth as I laughed at my own helplessness. Hunter had been worried I wouldn’t be able to go in for the killing blow when the time was right. But neither one of us had envisioned this scenario—me walking up to three enemy shifters naked and entirely unarmed.

Well, not quite entirely unarmed. The pine tree a few paces behind me had cut off all nutrient flow to its lower limbs when the plant grew so tall that new branches shaded out the first attempts. Some of the resulting dead wood was too spindly to do much good. Other possibilities were too high above my head to reach. But one tantalizing branchlet was about two inches thick and looked both tough and sturdy. I suspected the limb would break to create a sharp, jagged point if I grabbed the far end and yanked.

Of course, the sound of breaking wood would also alert my enemies that I was nearby. But I didn’t think I currently had the element of surprise on my side anyway. Quill knew me well enough to assume that I wouldn’t save my own skin at the expense of my pack.

So I went for it. Edging out from beneath my bush, I leapt up to capture the targeted branch with both hands. And for a moment I dangled a foot above the ground, feet swaying in the air. Just my luck—the limb I’d chosen was stronger than it had initially appeared.

“This is your final warning.” I twitched at the sound of Quill’s voice, then winced as his sentence was followed by a short shriek of pain. The recipient of the cowboy shifter’s wrath had to be Savannah since I knew for a fact Lia would bite through her tongue before she’d emit a sound that she thought would draw me into danger.

Craaaaccck.

I stumbled as I fell, stabbing the sharp end of my new weapon into the tender flesh of my own wrist when stick and arms ended up tangled beneath me in an effort to break my fall. The wound stung and I smiled. This wasn’t a sword, but it would do.

I spared only a single moment for one final thought of my absent mate.
Now would be a good time to show up, Hunter
, I called down the invisible and probably absent pack bond. Then I paced forward to meet my destiny.

One of the SSS males had grunted out a surprised query seconds earlier in response to the sound of cracking wood followed by the thud of bare feet falling onto the forest floor. And now I was the one listening to heavy footfalls as they started toward my place of concealment. My wolf pulled my human lips upward into a lupine sneer. Perhaps this would be easier than I’d thought after all.

Just a little closer
, I begged the outpack male. If a single SSS member set foot within the seclusion of the forest all on his lonesome, I’d soon have two enemies rather than three to deal with. Between the element of surprise, my pointy stick, and the anger that kept my animal half rampant behind my eyes, I didn’t doubt for a moment that I’d be able to make short work of any shifter one-on-one.

But Quill was too smart to allow his party to be split up. “
No
,” he commanded, wasting an alpha compulsion on a compatriot who I suspected would have obeyed a human command just as easily. “Fen will come out on her own. And
quickly
if she doesn’t want me to start carving fingers and toes off little girls.”

His words seemed to turn the air ten degrees colder in an instant and I shivered. The cowboy shifter wasn’t bluffing—instead, I heard gleeful anticipation in his voice.

So I held the branch as loosely as I could, hoping it would look like a walking stick rather than a weapon.

Then I stepped out from amid my leafy cover.

***

While I’d been harvesting a half-assed weapon, the sun had fully set. But the rising moon was already bright enough that I could easily make out the expression on Quill’s face as I emerged from my woodland lair.

He was gloating. His eyes danced with the knowledge that he’d soon capture a halfie pack leader without having to relinquish either young girl from his clutches. And while I’d like to say that pride goeth before a fall...even though I was armed with a pointy stick, the odds were still definitively stacked in the SSS’s favor.

Not that I planned to let my enemy realize I felt that way. “I’m here,” I said firmly, pacing forward slowly in order to give myself time to think. Bluffing came as naturally as breathing, so I continued to keep my shoulders high and my chin raised as I emulated an unbeatable alpha. The playacting probably wouldn’t do any good, but it also couldn’t hurt. “Release the girls and you can do whatever you want with me,” I finished.

Unfortunately, my adversary wasn’t so easily swayed. Ignoring my posturing, he ground out a truncated order. “Drop the...”

But rather than finishing the sentence, Quill paused and took a closer look at the weapon I held loosely in one hand. “Well, I was going to say
sword
,” he finished, laughter now evident in his voice. “But it appears that you’ve come to a gunfight with a stick.” Then his voice hardened. “Still, you can put it down.
Now.
”

The knife that had drifted groundward as his attention focused on me now rose once more to settle against the smooth skin of Lia’s neck. One erratic movement and our aggressor could easily slice through the halfie’s jugular, ending her life before I could so much as scream in disbelief.

He needs to harvest Lia’s heart while it’s still beating
, I reminded myself. But, despite my best efforts at mustering confidence, my fingers loosened involuntarily from around my hard-earned branch. I couldn’t risk a pack mate’s life based only on my judgment of Quill’s character...or lack thereof.

Still, I gave the weapon a little forward momentum as it fell so the stick landed only a few feet away from my enemies’ feet. If I was able to edge just a little closer, then the branch would be there waiting for me to snatch it back up....

Although that first hope was a little far-fetched, my unruly toss had another unintended consequence. Quill lowered his guard in response to what must have appeared a feeble attempt to strike out at him. “Not even close, girl,” he taunted with a short laugh. “Now hold your hands out to your sides and walk over here slowly so Mick can bind them.”

The now-named shifter was the same outpack male who had snapped my granny panties, and he was even more interested in my unclad human form than he had been in lupine lingerie. Mick’s eyes burned into the bare skin of my breasts and crotch, and I had to force myself not to shield my exposed flesh with arms and hands. Or perhaps to lunge forward and smack the guy across his greedy face. Still, the time wasn’t yet ripe for me to strike, so I simply paced obediently toward my future captor.

Except Mick might not earn that label after all. Because I noticed Lia and Savannah sharing a quick glance behind our enemies’ backs, proving that I’d underestimated both girls. Far from the cowed captives they’d at first appeared, they seemed to have cooked up some sort of plan between them.

Savannah, especially, had initially appeared so beaten down that I’d assumed she’d lie back and accept her fate. But that persona had only been an act. Now that the enemies’ eyes were all trained on me, the bound halfie struggled erect. Then, doing her best to keep herself out of her captors’ line of sight, she wriggled toward the edge of her altar stone.

Unfortunately, I had a feeling Quill was too alert to be taken by surprise.
Time for a little evasive action.

“I’ve been wracking my brain all afternoon,” I lied loudly, halting all forward momentum as I snared the enemy males’ attention more fully once again. “The name Faye sounded so familiar to me, and I couldn’t quite figure out why. Then I realized. Wasn’t she that bitch who was caught sleeping around a few All-Packs ago?”

Quill jolted backwards as if he’d been physically struck. Whether the B word or the implications of my lie had done the trick was irrelevant. Regardless, the cowboy shifter was thoroughly knocked off his game by my on-the-fly fairy tale. “She would never...” he spluttered.

I knew my adversary would figure out pretty quickly that I’d neither seen nor heard of Faye before he spoke her name in that VW bus. After all, I couldn’t so much as weave her last name or her hair color into my story—I’d honestly never known the woman existed before Quill dropped his star-crossed history on me.

The question was—would the cowboy shifter see through my bluff before the girls’ plan bore fruit?

Ah, here we go.
A pencil was fumbled out of a waistband...just not by the girl I’d assumed would possess the small weapon. Instead, Savannah was the one who shrieked out an attack cry, Savannah was the one who lunged forward, and Savannah was the one who fell into the unnamed captor’s outstretched arms.

“What the...” he began. The outpack male had reached for the girl, I realized, out of some nearly forgotten sense of chivalry rather than in an effort to recapture a prisoner who was already restrained hand and foot. But when those bound hands raised and stabbed a pointy graphite tip into the male’s open eye, his scream was gut-wrenching.

The SSS member fell to the ground, writhing as he cradled his injured face with both arms. And without free hands and legs to halt her descent, Savannah plummeted earthward right along with him. But the spunky halfie shuffled to one side as soon as she landed, bracing her back against the altar even as Lia completed her shift atop the other standing stone.

My youngest pack mate must have begun calling on her wolf the moment I stepped into the clearing in order to have so quickly gained fur. And, even so, her transformation was far from smooth. She was excited and scared, I knew, Quill’s knife only inches away from her jugular and who knows what fate on the horizon if she failed. But with her captor’s attention trained on me and then on his injured compatriot, the teenager was able to not only don fur but also to wriggle her way out of the now-loose ropes that had previously bound her wrists and ankles together.

And then the fight was on. It still wasn’t a fair fight—a tired halfie wolf, a tied teenager wielding a pencil, and me with the pointy stick I’d just now scooped back up off the ground against two armed and able-bodied men. But as Lia leapt from one stone to the other and ended up crouched against her new friend’s back, I knew we made up in grit what we lacked in firepower. For the first time all day, I truly believed all three of us would make it out of there alive.

But I didn’t have time to join my companions beside the standing stone because Quill had finally gotten his act together and was reaching for his handgun. Mick was a bit slower on the draw, but I could tell from the look in the lead SSS member’s eyes that my almost-pack-mate wasn’t going to bluff this time around. He’d aim for my shoulder or leg—not quite close enough to the head or chest to kill me outright but still causing a serious enough wound that I’d be forced to stay put while he ripped out my beating heart.

Not happening
, my wolf growled. We didn’t have time to think or to plan, just to lunge at the greatest threat in exactly the way Hunter had trained us to.

It wasn’t a killing blow, but it wasn’t meant to be a killing blow. Our goal was simply to get rid of the gun so our fight wouldn’t end before it really began.

And we succeeded. I heard the bullet burst through the barrel and explode out into the air at the same moment I felt the pain in my forearm. But it didn’t matter. My sword—my stick—whatever—had met its mark.

As I watched, the smoking hunk of metal skittered away across abruptly invisible leaves. A well-timed cloud had crossed in front of the moon, and Quill roared his rage as the weapon he depended upon to maintain his competitive edge disappeared into momentary darkness.