Hard As Steele (A BBW Paranormal Romance) (Timber Valley Pack) (18 page)

             
She saw Patrick lumbering down the hallway in bear form. Clara laid her hand on Patrick’s leg, closed her eyes, and began healing it.  She could feel the bullet pushing out of the wound and heard it clink to the floor, and then she felt the wound closing.

Patrick pointed at the cub. “That’s one great kid you’ve got there,” he said. “He saved my life.
He’s the reason I’m going home to my wife and cubs.”

             
Clara opened her eyes again. Patrick’s wound was healed, leaving behind a round white scar. “He really did,” Clara said, as the lynx shifter walked over and helped her to her feet. “A soldier was going to shoot him, and Flint shifted for the first time ever and bit his leg. It gave me time to rip the soldier’s throat out.”

             
“My boy did that?” Steele beamed from ear to ear, and then Flint reached up and touched his face with his chubby little hand, and broke into an answering smile. Steele blinked hard, and rubbed at his eyes with the palm of his hand. “Something in my eye,” he muttered gruffly.
 

              It was chaos outside, but happy chaos.  Shifters shouted and howled their triumph, roaring in happiness, high fiving each other. The fear that had gripped shifters across the nation was lifted; they knew the face of the enemy now, and they’d killed most of them. Even more importantly, they had the missing shifters back.

A dozen freed shifters stood blinking in the sunlight.
  It was late afternoon, and they’d emerged from the mines after being let out of their cells and led through a maze of tunnels. Clara and several of the other healers had healed all of the shifters who’d been wounded during the fight.

             
There was a gentle breeze stirring the grass and shrubs near the old mine entrance. The sky overhead was an endless blue, and off in the distance, the trees were a riot of color, with fall coloring the leaves golden, red and yellow.  Tears of joy burned Clara’s eyes.

             
“The air smells so good,” she cried out, spinning in a circle, her hands held up high.

Steele stood with Roxanne, who was holding their son. He had his arms wrapped around her. Every time he looked down at his baby, he broke out in a huge smile.

Clara walked over to them. “Anyone need healing?” she asked.

She looked closely at Flint. “He’s fine. What a tough little guy.”

“Clara, I can never thank you enough for keeping him safe in there,” Roxanne said. “I am eternally grateful to you.”

“
Hey, I’d be happy to babysit him anytime,” Clara said, stroking his blond curls gently. “He’s an awesome kid.”

“Takes after his dad,” Roxanne said, flashing a smile at Steele.  “I heard someone say that the Elders are making sure all of your families have been contacted, by the way.  They’re arranging transport for everybody.”

“That’s going to be one heck of a reunion,” Clara said.  She managed a weak smile. She couldn’t imagine how hard her disappearance had been on everyone in her pack. Her parents tend to be very controlling and smothering;  she was looking forward to seeing them again, but she was already mentally bracing herself for the hysterics and the drama. Her mother always tended to make everything all about her.

“And I thank you for coming in to rescue us,” she added to Steele.  “Speaking of people that I should thank…
where are Donavan and Brice?  I need to tell them thank you, and figure out who the heck sent them in there to save us.”

“Who
is that?” Steele asked. Flint grabbed ahold of his finger, and Steele grinned at him, then turned back to Clara.

She stared at him. “The humans. You know. The two human soldiers who shot the other soldiers and got us out of there.” She scanned the crowd.
There were hundreds of people milling around, but they were all shifters.  Brice and Donavan were nowhere to be found.

“Patrick,” she called, “Where are Brice and Donavan?”

Patrick lumbered over. “I don’t know,” he said, looking around. “Did we ever figure out who sent them?”

Clara shook her head.

“They couldn’t have been with STAB,” she said, puzzled.

“Wait. So they were human soldiers, and they helped you get out?” Steele stared at her. “Are you sure?”

“They loosened our straps so we could escape, shot the other soldiers in the head, brought soldiers uniforms for us so we could put them on and sneak out, led us out through the hallways….yeah, I’m pretty sure,” Clara said. 

She and Patrick exchanged baffled glances. “Who the heck sent them?” she asked.

Steele looked around. “Hey, Trevor!” he called out. A tall, blond wolf shifter trotted over to them. “Trevor Gund, this is Clara,” he said.  “Trevor, did anyone in your family happen to disguise themselves as soldiers and sneak in to help free the prisoners?”

“Of course not,” Trevor said, looking puzzled. “We were working with your Wardens, as you call them, to get into the facility. We would have told you if we’d have had anyone inside. Why do you ask?”

“He’s a shifter,” Clara said. “I told you, the soldiers were human.”

“Some of his family is human,” Steele explained. “They’re related to Roxanne. They’ve got some kind of genetic mutation that allows them to mate with humans and have children.”

“The two human soldiers started working there a couple of weeks ago,” Clara said. “They must have had credentials that convinced the STAB people to hire them. Who the heck were they? I asked them who they were, and they kind of changed the subject.”

Worry creased Steele’s forehead.
“I don’t know. We’ll need to tell the Wardens about this right away.  The fact that there’s more than one group of human soldiers who know about our existence is certainly a concern.”

Patrick had been listening with interest, but his
expression suddenly changed, and he let out a low, enraged growl.  Clara turned to see what he was looking at, and she saw Dr. Jonas, weeping and kicking, being dragged out. She had heard that they’d managed to capture half a dozen human soldiers, all of whom would be interrogated by the Wardens, along with Dr. Jonas.

“I want to kill him.” Patrick’s face went
dark with anger, and he began bristling, brown fur rippling over his body.

Clara let out a sympathetic growl as the Wardens quickly rushed past.  She could hear Dr. Jonas’ terrified screams drifting by. “I’m a member of the U.S. Military! You can’t do this to me! It’s treason!”

Steele laid a hand on her shoulder. “I want to kill him too, more than you can imagine, and he will die for what he’s done. We need to interrogate him first, though.”

Clara nodded, reluctantly. 

She felt a sudden wave of weariness wash over her, and she glanced back at the dark hole in the side of the mountain and shuddered.

A shifter walked up to Patrick, holding a satellite phone. “I’ve got someone who wants to talk to you,” he said, and she heard a delighted chorus of cubs screaming into the phone
. “Daddy! Daddy!” They shouted.

Standing there in the open air, she felt the warmth of the late afternoon sun beaming down on her, and the cool breeze blowing away her terrible memories.

* * *

             
The shifters had been moved to the Lonesome Pine town hall, by bus, to wait for rides back to their home towns. 

The sun had set hours ago.  The humans in town had cooked up a huge banquet to welcome home Axel Gund and Roxanne and her baby.  Shifters were mingling warily with
the humans as they waited for their rides.

Roxanne sat in a folding chair by the side of the room, with Steele and Flint.

“I will never let you go again,” Roxanne said to Flint. “I will hold you in my arms forever and  – okay, really?” he’d squirmed off her lap and turned into a cub, and pawed at her leg.  Then he turned back into a human being again, with a delighted look on his face.

             
She bent down and picked him up in her arms.

             
“Is that normal?” she asked Steele.

             
“Usually our cubs don’t start shifting until they’re about a year old. My boy’s an overachiever,” Steele said proudly. “It’s a big deal when a cub shifts the first time. It’s like when they get their first tooth or take their first step.”

             
“You look so goofy when you look at him,” Roxanne said, but she was grinning like a fool too. The entire time the shifters were carrying out their raid, she’d had the terrible fear that she’d never see her child again. With Steele and Flint by her side, she literally wanted for nothing. She didn’t care if they lived in a tent, as long as they were with her.

What the shifters had
learned so far, by questioning several captured humans, was mostly good news. They’d found out that STAB was a rogue unit, operating completely on its own.

The unit had been formed a
fter they’d stumbled upon that shifter during their training exercise.  Colonel Clinton Bradwell, who’d been leading the exercise, had decided to exploit what he’d found.   His Brigadier General was having an affair with his male aide, so Bradwell was able to blackmail the man into allowing him and his men to operate entirely on their own, while sending back phony reports about the training missions that they were supposedly carrying out.  They’d siphoned off funds to build the secret laboratory inside the mountain, thinking that its remoteness would protect them from discovery.

They’d sent their men around the country seeking to capture shifters.  It still wasn’t clear how they’d been able to figure out where shifters lived, and finding that out would be top priority for the Wardens.

              Dr. Jonas worked for the Colonel.  Their goal was to be able to turn human soldiers into shifters, and harness their superhuman strength. Their ultimate goal was to take the results of their studies and sell them to an arms dealer for billions of dollars.  All of the soldiers, the Colonel, and Dr. Jonas would have shared in the profits.

             
When their experiments failed to turn humans into shifters, they began specially targeting shifters with unique abilities, such as healers.  They hoped that because the shifters were genetic mutations, they could figure out the mechanism behind the mutation, and copy it.  So far, their experiments had resulted in failure.

             
Because they’d discovered the original shifter near the town of Lonesome Pine, they recruited the police chief and the doctor into their scheme. They figured that they might be able to use them to locate more shifters in the area.

             
Dr. Polaris, who’d kidnapped Roxanne, hadn’t been able to provide any useful information to the Gunds when they’d kidnapped him.  Chief Fennel had gotten wind of the attack on the STAB facility, and had fled the area.   The good news was that they’d managed to wipe out almost all of the men in the STAB squad.   The bad news was, the colonel was still free, along with a small squad of men who were now on the run for their lives.

             
Roxanne spotted Katherine and waved her over. “He can turn into a wolf! That is the coolest thing,” Katherine said happily.  She shot a look at Edvin Gund, then sat down next to Roxanne.

             
“He likes you,” Roxanne informed her.

             
“No, he doesn’t. He’s never asked me out.”

             
“He grew up with a tiny group of people, hardly ever coming to town, and he probably doesn’t even know how to ask a girl out. He came all the way to Colorado with you to get me, didn’t he? Go talk to him.”

             
“And say what? I can’t. That’s just not me,” Katherine shook her head vigorously. “I’m not that brave.”

             
“You think that’s not you, but you snuck into the woods to spy on Chief Fennell and then drove 15 hours to rescue me, and you shot Steele when you thought he was a threat to me,” Roxanne pointed out. “Don’t do that again, by the way, but thank you for coming to save me. My point is, you always think of yourself as such a chicken, but you’re the bravest person that I know. You went out into the woods by yourself to spy on the chief. That took some serious cojones.”

             
“I was desperate,” Katherine protested. “This is different.”

             
“You want to hear desperate?” Roxanne looked her in the eye. “You have already met every single eligible male in Lonesome Pine, and if you don’t ask Edvin out, you will either have to marry one of them, or die single. Also, I saw a girl checking Edvin out, and I think she’s about to go talk to him.”

             
“What? Where?” Katherine leaped to her feet and quickly walked over to Edvin.

             
“There was no girl checking him out. You just lied about that, didn’t you?” Steele asked Roxanne with a grin.

             
“Who, me? Heck yeah.”  She watched them talking. After a minute, she saw Katherine break out in a smile. Then her and Edvin walked over to the buffet table and he poured Katherine a drink.  Katherine turned around and gave her the thumbs up signal, and Roxanne returned it with an approving grin.