Mark of the Wolf; Hell's Breed (16 page)

“
Yeah! It’s a fucking
shame they’re in Atlanta and it looks like we might be headed to
Savannah,” Kane muttered.

“
Or not,” Basil pointed
out. “At this point we don’t know where they’re headed. Could be
the river. Might be some place this side of it or across the line
in South Carolina.”

They thought they were completely
fucked when the SUV carrying Laurie turned off the main road they’d
been following and onto a dirt road that looked like it might be a
private road. They’d had to drop further and further back as the
traffic lightened, hoping against hope that they hadn’t been
spotted. They wouldn’t have known the vehicle had turned off if not
for their keen hearing. They’d lost sight of the vehicle. The SUV
had disappeared around a curve and could as easily have disappeared
around another since the highway they were following was an old,
winding two lane.

They backtracked to the dirt road and
got out. There were fresh car tracks alright and they could hear
the unique sound of the engine they’d learned to identify since
they’d been following it for hours.

Leaving the tank, they started jogging
along the dirt road, trying to pace themselves so that they didn’t
get close enough to be spotted but were still closing the distance
that separated them from the SUV. They’d been following it about
fifteen or twenty minutes when the engine died. Lucien and Damien
glanced at one another fearfully, the same thought leaping into
their minds.

Knowing this might be Laurie’s moment
of truth if she wasn’t dead already, they surged forward at a run.
They’d just gotten close enough to smell the river when they heard
another engine turn over, this one an outboard for a boat. They
struggled to pour on more speed, racing to catch the boat before
the kidnappers could pull far enough away to be beyond reach, but
the boat had already hit its top speed by the time they got to the
bank.

“
Shit!”

“
Fuck!”

“
Gods damn it!”

Lucien felt his tension
and anxiety mount, for it dawned on him as he watched the boat
speed away that he was going to have to make a decision that might
cost Laurie her life—might cost
them
more dearly than any of them
had imagined when they’d agreed to the assignment.

He didn’t know why he hadn’t realized
instantly that Laurie was his life mate. His destiny.

He’d crossed time—an entire universe
to find her, and now it looked like he could lose her
forever.

“
What are we doing here?”
Damien asked, breaking into his morose thoughts.

Lucien met his gaze for a
long moment. He could see Damien was as worried as he was. Well, he
hadn’t really thought this was going to be a one on one sort of
thing. He’d merely intended to exert his dominance as alpha and the
privileges that came with the added responsibilities.
He
was alpha. It was his
right to produce first off-spring. It was his right to decide
if
any
of the
others got off-spring off of Laurie!

But they’d lived and breathed team as
far back as any of them could remember. They were closer than
brothers. They were like a single, four headed beast—all pulling in
different directions much of the time but still connected in a way
no one outside the hybrids would understand.

He wasn’t sure of whether the changes
since they’d passed through the vortex had emphasized their pack
mentality or not, but Laurie was their woman not just his and he
knew that was the way they thought about it—all of them. Not just
him and Damien.

Nodding slightly, he looked at Basil
and Kane. “This is going to be tricky. I think we might hedge our
bets by going downriver, though, to head them off. That’s what I
want you two to do. Take the tank and head for Savannah. When you
get there get us a boat and head back this way. You know what the
boat looks like. Me and Damien are going to try to keep up with
them/track them from this direction. We’ve got the walkies from the
tank. If we discover they’d left the river or stopped along the
way, we’ll let you know.”

Kane merely nodded and immediately
turned to jog back to where they’d left the Hummer they referred to
as the tank. Basil looked at Lucien worriedly. “You think you can
keep up enough to keep an eye on them?” he asked
doubtfully.

“
Not in this form,” Lucien
said grimly. After shoving his walkie into the pocket of his jeans,
he peeled out of his clothes and tied them into a ball. He focused
then on shifting to the form of a wolf. Catching the end of the
belt he’d used to bind the clothes in a ball with his teeth, he set
out at a ground eating trot.

It took Damien a moment to grasp the
plan, but as Basil took off to catch up with Kane, Damien shed his
clothing as Lucien had, bundled them, and then shifted.

He hated to admit it, but he was
pretty sure it wouldn’t have occurred to him that he might need
some damned clothes at some point and it would be easier to have
them with him if the need arose.

It was still unhandy as hell carrying
them in his teeth. His jaws began to cramp after a few miles and it
was harder to breathe when he couldn’t open his mouth to pant.
They’d managed to close the distance between them and the boat
sufficiently by that time, though, that he could just see them up
ahead and he decided to ignore the discomfort. If he stopped to try
to make any kind of adjustment, he was going to have to work harder
to catch up again.

* * * *

Laurie supposed she should have
appreciated the pain and discomfort she endured at the hands of her
captors. She thought if it wasn’t for that she might have died of
fright. As it happened, though, although it was fear that had sent
her fleeing into the hands of her kidnappers, and fear had
certainly reared its ugly head when the stranger had accosted her,
after he punched her, threw her in the back of a vehicle, and
trussed her like livestock, she was in too much pain and misery to
worry too much about what would come next.

Unfortunately, the pain from the blow
had receded a good bit by the time the SUV braked to a halt and the
engine died. Her wrists and ankles were killing her. They would
have hurt worse, she was sure, if her hands and feet and legs and
arms hadn’t gone numb, but the longed for condition of
unconsciousness was denied her. She was fully aware of her
surroundings as she was dragged out of the car and lugged to the
river, aware enough that she knew far more terror than she’d ever
felt in her life when she realized their destination.

Oh god! They were going to throw her
in with her hands and feet tied!

She tried to fight them—for all the
good it did.

Well, she supposed it did
her
some
good.
The bastard carrying her set her on her feet and punched her again,
that time hard enough she fell backwards since she was bound hand
and foot and unable to catch herself. When she landed she hit
something hard enough with the back of her skull that she blacked
out.

Merciful oblivion!

The boat didn’t seem to be moving when
she next became aware of her surroundings.

“
If you’ve killed her, you
stupid fuck, the boss is going to have your balls!”

“
She screamed. I had to
shut her up! I didn’t hit her that hard. She’s just playing dead.
Aren’t you sweetheart?”

Laurie’s stomach pitched as awareness
returned and dizziness came with it. She puked—right on the guy
that was shaking her head and making her dizzy.

“
You fucking
bitch!”

She managed to get one eye open in
time to see the bastard draw his fist back to hit her again, but he
never completed the threat. The man with him cold-cocked him with
the butt of a pistol. His eyes rolled back in his head and he
crumpled to the swaying deck. “Stupid fuck,” he muttered, kicking
him a couple of times, she supposed, to see if he would come
around.

The ‘rescuer’ grasped her face between
his thumb and forefinger and lifted her head. “How many fingers am
I holding up?”

Laurie focused on his hand with an
effort. “Two?”

“
Do you know what day it
is?”

Laurie considered that for a couple of
moments. “I think it was Friday when you caught me.”

He grunted. “Well, I guess I won’t
have to kill the bastard. That’s a shame because I don’t like the
son-of-a-bitch worth a fuck.” He reached down and grasped her
around the waist, hauling her up. “Up we go now.”

He helped her straighten but the
minute he let go she wilted to the deck again. Shaking his head, he
hauled her up a second time, tipped her over his shoulder, and then
straightened with a grunt.

Surprisingly, since her skull was
pounding fit to bust, her mind seemed to clear as the man started
walking with her and she saw that the boat she’d spent most of the
day in was tied to a sizeable dock—the sort of dock that wasn’t for
private use but rather commercial, although it certainly wasn’t big
enough for anything like the huge commercial vessels—maybe
something like the shrimpers used? When she twisted her head, she
could see that there were several rundown looking buildings close
by that looked like they might have been factories at one time or
possibly had never been used for anything but warehouses.
Regardless, the buildings seemed to bear up her conclusion that she
was in some old warehouse or factory district. Unfortunately, it
was so rundown it was easy to see it was abandoned for the most
part if not completely.

She thought the man must be carrying
her to a building similar to those she could see and wondered for
the first time why she was still alive. For the first time since
they’d taken her she was both calm enough to think and alert enough
and she realized that nothing that had happened made any sense
considering the scenario she’d been given when she was taken into
protective custody.

Why take her anywhere if they just
meant to kill her? They could have choked her, cut her throat, or
shot her when she’d run to them. They didn’t need to take her
anywhere at all!

They could’ve killed her and disposed
of her body anywhere along the way if they’d felt the need to
remove her to a new location. They’d been traveling most of the
day.

So if it wasn’t a murder …. What?
Kidnapping?

She didn’t see that that made any
sense either. Why would anyone kidnap her?

And did that mean she had a chance of
living?

The men hadn’t covered their faces,
she realized with a deep sense of foreboding. They also hadn’t
blindfolded her to keep her from identifying them.

That seemed to be very bad news for
her brief hope of surviving.

The man carrying her was huffing and
puffing like a winded horse by the time he dropped her on a cracked
leather couch inside a dilapidated building. Dust rose in a cloud
when she hit it, the springs letting out a loud protest. Laurie
sneezed and kept on sneezing while the man sawed through the
plastic zip tie that had been used to bind her wrists.
Unfortunately, her arms were so numb she still couldn’t pick them
up to cover her face. She finally twisted her head and burrowed her
face against her shoulder to protect herself from the
dust.

The man moved to her ankles and sawed
that tie off. “There’s a working bathroom of a sort just through
that door. You can use it when you’ve got enough circulation back
to walk.”

Laurie was so grateful she felt like
weeping. Part of the misery of the day had been the most horrible
thirst and an equal desperation to empty her bladder. She struggled
upright and swung her legs off of the couch. Pain shot up from the
soles of her feet through her knees the moment her feet touched the
floor. She gasped. Gritting her teeth against the pain, she shook
her hands to try to force the blood flow through them at the same
time and endured until she thought the pins and needles were
subsiding.

Her feet still felt like blocks of
wood when she pushed herself up and stood on wobbly legs, but she
was more desperate than before to get to the bathroom now that
there was a possibility of relief.

There was only a partial door to the
bathroom. She was dismayed that she didn’t even have the comfort of
privacy, but she was in no shape to refuse because there wasn’t a
door. She used the toilet, feeling somewhat protected by the
voluminous t-shirt she was wearing and then got up to use the
lavatory. It was dim in the room, but even so she could see that
the water that shot out was rusty. It was malodorous, as
well.

Her throat closed, but she couldn’t
bring herself to drink the water she knew had to be contaminated.
It cleared a little after it had run for a few moments and she
decided she could at least rinse her face off.

It was as she was splashing the water
on her face that she heard her captor on the phone.

“
We got her. You can make
that call now
and
make the other half of the deposit in my account. I’ll get a
picture you can send her old man as proof as soon as she gets out
of the bathroom.”