Heir To The Pack (The Cursed Pack Book 1) (9 page)

After breakfast Dash’s
aunts began a flurry of activity. “What are you doing?” he asked, hoping he
wouldn’t regret the question.

“Packing,” Elaine said,
absently, carrying a vase of wilted flowers to the kitchen.

“You’re packing flowers?”

“No, dear.” She set the
vase on the counter and patted him on the cheek. “I’m throwing them out,
because otherwise they will smell bad by the time we get back. Next, I need to
clean out the fridge.”

He shrugged and grunted, wandering
through to the living area. He’d hoped to catch Annie to talk to, or Jack to
play with, but they had been “busy” since breakfast.

Gaelan had set out to
patrol the woods and wouldn’t let him help. “You stay here and protect your
family,” he said.

Dash had tried to protest,
but there was no arguing with Gaelan, Alpha or not. He’d have had to fight him
to make the point, and it didn’t seem worth it.

Now, on the other hand, he
was beginning to wish he’d pushed. Bill and Novie were stationed by the front
and back doors, respectively. Dash and his family were all safe and protected
inside the house.

He threw himself down in
an armchair, drumming his fingers on the arms, then stood up again and paced to
the window. A run would do the trick. Except he needed to stay here and guard
Annie and Jack. And Daisy, he supposed. He could go seek her out but he didn’t
have the faintest idea what he’d talk to her about.

The doorbell chimed. Music
to his ears. He strode toward the front entranceway and gestured Bill to one
side. Taking the door handle in his hand, he paused. He supposed he should
check the peephole. It would save a lecture from his aunts, if something did go
wrong.

Crouching over—why
was the damn thing so low down?—he peeked through the glass tube. Two
male wolves in human form stood on his doorstep, one tall, dark, and
pock-marked, and the other, small, blond and broad. The smaller one stood on
tiptoe to peer in the peephole back at Dash.

Dash opened the door,
causing the blond to stumble and fall into the hallway. Maybe the peephole
wasn’t such a bad idea after all.

“Good morning!” He tried
not to sound too smug, but he couldn’t help the touch of pride that crept into
his voice at having caught the guy peeping in at him. “Can I help you?”

The tall one said, “We
have something for your Alpha.” His accent made the words sound labored. Russian.

“That’s me.” Dash waved
his arm, deciding not to punch the man for not recognizing him. He could be
generous, especially while the blond wolf groveled at his feet.

“Get. Up,” snapped the
tall one.

Blondie obeyed directions
and reached inside his leather coat, whereupon Dash picked him up by the
lapels, growling.

“Did you bring a weapon to
my house?” The man was heavy, muscular as he was, and Dash braced himself to
lift him to eye level. “Did you?”

The man said nothing,
merely hung in his grasp, not even trying to kick free.

“Bill,” Dash said. “Reach
inside his coat.”

Bill leaned past him, gaze
lowered, and checked inside the coat. “No weapon,” he said. “Just a box.” He
pulled a small white box out and made to open it.

In one swift movement,
Dash dropped the blond and knocked the box out of Bill’s hand. The box fell on
to the slate floor, as did the man.

“I appreciate your
caution,” said the tall wolf. “But it is unnecessary. We will go now.”

The blond kept his gaze
downcast while scrambling to his feet. He rejoined his comrade.

Dash noted Blondie’s face
had reddened, with embarrassment or bruises he couldn’t tell. “Good bye,
gentlemen.”

“We will see you at the
ranch.”

“You will.” He gave a
cheery little wave and shut the door. “You all right, Bill? I didn’t mean to
startle you. I didn’t want to take a chance.”

“No problem.”

Dash bent over and sniffed
the box. He detected no trace of explosives or anything else suspicious. Was
that...perfume? For the first time, he noticed that the box had been tied with
a pink ribbon. This had “woman” written all over it, and he had a pretty good
idea which woman had sent it.

“Is it a bomb?”

“It’s much worse than
that,” he muttered.

“Do you want me to get rid
of it?”

Sighing, he picked up the
box and slipped it into the pocket of his cargo pants. “No, it’s fine. It’s
confidential pack business. Make sure you don’t mention it to anyone else. Are
we straight on that...this time?”

“All right.” Bill took up
his stance by the door again, continuing to avoid eye contact with Dash.

“You don’t need to stand
there all day,” Dash said. “That’s why we have a doorbell.”

“All right,” the
submissive wolf said again, and eased himself down on Elaine’s charming Shaker
bench. Dash rather thought it might break under his weight. Elaine would hold a
grudge.

“Sure you’re happy there?”

“Yep,” Bill said, folding
his arms over his chest.

“Okay.” Dash stalked off
to his den.

He looked up and down the
hallway before he pulled the study door shut behind him. The little white box
weighed a thousand pounds in his pocket. He took it out and put it on his desk.
It looked so harmless.

Taking a deep breath, he
fumbled with the pink ribbon, trying to undo the elaborate knot. After a minute
or so he set the box down in disgust and began rummaging through his drawers
for a knife. Nothing. If he lived alone, there’d be a hunting knife in every
room of the house, but Elaine wouldn’t think it proper. Distracted, wondering
how Annie would feel about it, he slammed his fingers in the drawer and swore.

Pushing back his chair, he
rose, intending to head for the kitchen to find something large and sharp. The
damn box sat on the desk, mocking him. He hated carrying it around, but he
couldn’t very well leave it there. He shoved it back into his pocket.

Half the family appeared
to have taken up residence in the kitchen. Both his aunts—Marjie looking
a bit paler than usual—Annie, Daisy, Jack, and Gaelan were all standing
about, chatting. He couldn’t very well make off with a knife without being
interrogated. Instead, he rested a hip on the counter and scowled at everyone.

Annie caught his eye and
turned away, smiling. About what, he wondered. He ran a hand over his skull,
feeling the beginnings of the old familiar tension headache.

“We’re all done packing,”
Elaine announced. “We can leave as soon as you’re ready, Dash. Are you ready?”

He’d shove a couple changes
of clothes into a duffle bag along with his wash kit. How long could that take?
He shrugged.

“Did you pack formal
clothes?”

He screwed up his face at
his aunt. “What for? This is Montana, not New York. And it’s a ranch. I’ll be
running around in fur half the time, anyway.”

“There are functions to attend,
meetings, dinners. You ought to take your formal pack clothes. You weren’t
planning on only packing jeans and lumberjack shirts, were you?”

He scowled again, the
tension between his eyes deepening when he heard a titter. Annie. She wouldn’t
be laughing if she had to wear the formal getup they wanted him to wear. He’d
hoped the change of leadership might mean a relaxation of the formalities, but
he’d been naïve. The aunts would never let him escape that stuff.

“I’ll grab my bag.” If
he’d been in wolf form he would have flattened his ears against his head and
growled. As it was, he maintained his scowl and turned to leave the room. And
stopped. He heard something, at the very edge of his senses, and his hackles rose.
Something was wrong. Very wrong.

“What was that?” Daisy
asked.

“What was what?” Annie’s
voice still held a hint of laughter.

He spun on one heel,
silent, holding up a hand, straining every muscle to hear the sound outside the
window again. Nothing. Annie met his eyes, questioning.

He smelled gasoline.

“Get out!” he roared. She
stared at him, her eyes wide. He scooped up Jack and shoved her into the
hallway behind him.

The window shattered,
showering them all in broken glass. The Molotov cocktail hit the floor and exploded
in flames.

CHAPTER
EIGHT

Annie ducked instinctively
to protect Jack with her body, even though Dash’s bulk blocked both her and
Jack from the glass and flames.

“Move, move, move,” he
shouted. She pulled Jack from Dash’s arms and fled down the hallway, back
toward her room. The boy wailed, no doubt unhappy at being passed around and
carried like a sack of potatoes. Dash took her shoulders and turned her down a
side hallway she hadn’t been down before. It ended in a door. Next to the door
was a keypad, with an LED glowing red.

He reached over her
shoulder and keyed in a code so fast her eyes could barely follow his fingers. The
red LED turned green, and the alarm sounded a friendly double beep.

 
She grabbed the handle and flung the door
open, revealing a set of stone stairs leading down into the dark.

“Go fast, but cautiously,”
Dash warned. “It can get damp down there. The steps can be slippery.”

She took his advice,
clutching the stair rail—incongruous with the flagstones beneath her feet—as
she descended. Jack clung to her shoulder.

As soon she reached the
bottom she held Jack up, and began checking him all over. Her task was
complicated by the dim light in the basement.

“No, I don’t wanna, leave
me alone,” he said, struggling against her frantic fingers.

“Jackie, baby, I need to
make sure you’re all right.”

“I’m okay,” he said, his little
eyes filling with tears.

Once she was sure, she
pulled him close, her own eyes damp. “Sorry, baby. I’m sorry. Mama wanted to
make sure you weren’t hurt.”

The basement looked older
than the rest of the house, with the damp stone underfoot, flickering lights,
and the sound of dripping in the distance. The doorway they’d come through
represented a threshold between the ordinary house, and the dark cave down
below.

Someone had thrown a bomb
at them. A
bomb
. Who would do such a
thing? And why? God, how were they going to get out of this?

 
Dash stood at the bottom of the stairs,
watching the three older women descend, escorted by Gaelan and Bill.

“Where’s Novie?” he
demanded.

“She’s watching our backs,
and putting out the fire.” Gaelan assisted her mom to the lowest level. She
clutched his arm.

“I don’t like this. No one
came in after the bomb?” Dash’s frown deepened.

“Nothing. Total silence.”

“They’re trying to drive
us out. Damn it! We should have left yesterday.”

Annie held Jack close to
her, trying not to tremble at his words. Drive them out. To do what to them,
exactly? She hoped to hell Dash had a plan.

“There’s no point crying
over spilt milk, young man,” Daisy said, leaning heavily on Gaelan. Unnecessarily
heavily. He put his arm around her. Her mom
would
find a way to wring some pleasure even in the face of disaster.

“The question is,” she
continued, “What are you going to do to protect my daughter and grandson now? And
where are we?”

Good questions.

“The basement is
fortified,” Dash said. “And we have an escape route down here. It’s less than
optimal, but it’s a way out. I’d love to stand and fight, but we don’t have
enough fighters to protect the noncombatants.”

As he spoke, the door at
the top of the stairs opened. The wolves all turned, bristling. Novie slipped
inside, locking the door behind her. “The fire’s out,” she reported. “No one
attempted to enter the house, but it’s being watched. I saw movement in the
trees, and scented strangers.”

“All right,” Dash said. “This
is what we’re going to do.” He had a dark glint in his eye that Annie wasn’t
sure she liked. “Gaelan, you’re the sneakiest son of a—” He paused, shot
a glance at Daisy. “—wolf, here. I’ll take Annie, Jack, and Daisy out
through the tunnel. When you get the chance, Gale, I want you to fetch my car.”

“We won’t all fit in it,”
Annie said, imagining a clown car with rather a lot more fur inside. “How is
that going to work?” His plan was flawed. They would never get out of here. Even
now, the bombers could be upstairs.

Nausea rolled her stomach
and her mouth was dry as a whole graveyard full of bones. Her legs threatened
to fold up beneath her, but adrenaline told her to run, run, run. She’d rarely
been more frightened in her life.

Dash put his hand on her
shoulder. “Don’t worry. We have an emergency vehicle down here. Me, you, Daisy,
and Jack will leave in that right now. The others will take my truck. We’ll rendezvous
outside of town at that old burned out bar, Gaelan.”

How exactly did one keep an
emergency vehicle in one’s basement?

 
“I know it’s stupid, but I wish we had
Jack’s car seat.” It was a ridiculous thing to say given they were under
attack.

Dash looked at her and
away, scratching at the back of his neck. He made an inarticulate sound, halfway
between a dog’s growl and the sound of a Wookiee losing at chess. “How about we
rendezvous at the mall instead? We can pick up a seat there, and anything else
you need.”

She nodded again. The
trembles in her legs turned into shakes. Jack’s body seemed to grow ever
heavier.

“You’ve gone pale,” Dash
said. “Let me carry him to the car.” He stepped in and lifted Jack as if he
weighed nothing. She stumbled as Dash took her son. He offered her his other
arm, but Annie shook her head. She’d shown enough weakness. Hot, damp shame
flooded through her for asking about the car seat, and almost worse, for nearly
crying in front of the group.

“Gaelan?” Dash turned to
look at his friend. “That plan suit you?”

“Sure.” The massive blond
grinned. “Nothing I like better than a recon mission.”

“What if you fail?” Annie
blurted. Dash’s aunties were as old as Daisy. What if they were stuck here and
killed by the enemy?

He roared with laughter. “Seems
unlikely, but if that happened, we’re all wolves here. We’d change, and run or
fight our way out. Gotta take care of you puny cleanskins first. A werewolf
could snap you like a bone. We’re made of steel and sinew under the fur.”

“Go on, child.” Elaine
patted her arm. “We’ll see you soon.”

On impulse, she wrapped
the round little woman in a brief hug. Elaine’s eyes grew large, but she said
nothing. “I’ll see you soon. Come on, Mom.”

“Come on, indeed,” her
mother grumbled. “We’d have left five minutes ago if not for you. Do you think
you ever rode in a car seat when you were little?”

Annie pointedly ignored
her, not wanting to open the door for fifteen minutes of
uphill-through-the-snow-to-school-both-ways stories. “Dash,” she said, “Let’s
go.”

He led the way to a corner
of the basement, through a dark archway gaping like an open mouth, down a dark
hall. A heavy steel door crouched at the end of the hallway, in shadows. Again,
he entered a code on a keypad and swung the door open, gesturing Annie through.

Fluorescent lights
flickered on overhead, revealing the crevices and shadows of a dry tunnel,
carved through the bedrock.

“Where does this lead?”

“To the Batcave,” he said
dryly. “You’ll see.”

The Batcave? She couldn't
process it, so she merely nodded.

They continued down the
tunnel, which soon opened into what resembled a superhero’s underground lair. Boxes
and crates huddled against the white painted walls, full of God-knows-what
supplies. In the middle of the space stood a vast black Hummer with windows
darkly tinted.

Incredible. She never
would have suspected all this lay beneath the house. But why? Did things like
this happen to Dash all the time? The acid taste of fear hit the back of her
mouth. What had she gotten them into?

Dash opened the vehicle’s
back door and set wide-eyed Jack down in the back seat. The little boy had been
remarkably quiet so far.

“Son,” Dash said to the
boy, “I need you to sit quiet with your mom and grandma, and hold tight. Can
you do that?”

“Okay,” the boy said. Annie
took that as her cue and joined him. Her mom clambered in on the other side.

Annie buckled Jack into
the lap belt in the center, tightened it, and gripped his arm firmly. She hoped
to God no one would chase them.

Dash strapped himself into
the driver’s seat. “Annie, there’s a metal box on the floor back there.”

“I see it.” It looked like
a toolbox.

“Could you please pass it
over?”

Releasing her death grip
on Jack, she handed him the box. Dash pulled out the biggest handgun she’d ever
seen, checked it, loaded it, and laid it in a recess on the dashboard.

Dash turned to look at
her. “Do you want my spare weapon?”

Daisy butted in. “You can
give it to me, young man.”

“Mother! You’ve never
fired a gun in your life!”

“But I’m not afraid to.” Daisy’s
eyes glittered. “Hand it over.”

The very idea of her
mother with a gun was the last bundle of straw that crushed the camel to a
pulp. Her mother could not be trusted with a gun. She was terrifying enough
behind the wheel of a car.

“Pow-pow,” Jack said,
pointing his finger at Dash. “Pow-pow!”

She put her head in her
hands. “God help me.”

Daisy let out a theatrical
sigh. “Fine. Can we make our escape from the bad guys now?”

Dash wisely stayed out of
the whole argument, and started the vehicle. The engine roared like a monster,
deafening in the cave. Hard to believe he had a Hummer hidden in a cave in his
basement. But it made peculiar sense in a world where men turned into wolves
and people threw bombs into your kitchen.

He hit a button near the
rear view mirror and a bar of dim green light appeared at ground level. A
roller door, barring the entrance to the bat-cave, slowly revealed their escape
route. It led to a short tunnel with light filtering in through a wall of
vegetation that blocked the outside world.

“Did you build this?”

“My father,” Dash said
shortly, and gunned the truck. They shot forward, through the curtain of
greenery, and emerged into the woods.

Annie blinked rapidly,
trying to adjust her vision to the sunlight outside. They bumped over rocky
ground to join a rough road that appeared to be a firebreak through the woods.

“It’s so well hidden,” she
said.

“The last thing we want is
for our enemies to attack us from inside our escape tunnel.” He gripped the
wheel firmly as they bounced through another rut in the road.

That it was even a
possibility he’d thought about scared her even more.

“Go faster,” Jack said. “Faster!”

“I think my teeth might
fall out if I do,” Dash responded. “But we’ll be on the real road soon.”

After a few minutes of bouncing,
they arrived at a paved road. Dash pulled out and they swept away. Annie
belatedly realized she had nothing but the clothes on her back. They’d need
more at the mall than a car seat for Jack. But at least they were out, out of
the house, on the road, back in safe territory. Her heart settled back to a
normal rhythm.

Things were changing, that
was for sure, but now she had a little time and space to think. She wanted to
talk to Dash, without Daisy’s interference. If people were after them, she
needed to know who and why, and how to protect herself and her family. Right
now, she didn’t even know if she’d be safer with Dash or somewhere else. But he
held the key to seeing the Oracle, which was the only lead she had to curing Jack’s
illness. The Oracle had better be able to help or Annie had put them in danger
for nothing.

The twenty-minute drive
took them to a strip mall where they picked up some new clothes and other basic
supplies. Annie’s motherly guilt settled into background noise as she installed
Jack’s new seat in a corner of the parking lot.

As she finished tightening
the straps, Dash’s phone rang. He pulled it from a pocket.

“Gaelan,” he said into it.
“You got out?” He stared at the sky while he listened, then started and swore. “Gods
damn it. We’ll get on the road. Call me when you lose them.” He pressed the
button to end the call.

Just when she thought
things were settling down. What could have gone wrong now? “What’s the matter?”

“He got to the truck. He,
Elaine and Marjie are out and on the road.” Dash’s voice was clipped, like a
military commander. “They’re being followed, so we’re going to start without
them, and hope they can lose the tail. Bill and Novie are still at the house to
gather some intel about our attackers, and seal the place up. There was no
follow up attack after the Molotov.”

“I don’t understand what’s
going on.” That had to be the understatement of the century. She'd been on an
emotional house of horrors ride since this morning. She was wrung out,
exhausted, and the day was far from over.