Silver Mine (24 page)

Shelley was sweaty and dirty. Again. She probably smelt as well, but this time she didn’t care.

She’d been woken up by a hand covering her mouth. A young man with the biggest green eyes stood beside her bed. As a shifter, his nakedness struck her as less peculiar than his face which, strangely enough, was missing both eyebrows. He placed a finger to his lips.

He stepped back, freeing her mouth and allowing her to call out for help if she wanted to.

Should she?

There was no reason she shouldn’t. No reason except the small, usually silent part inside that for some inexplicable reason chose now of all moments to make itself heard.

Her wolf told her to trust him.

The stranger didn’t give her a chance to ask any questions, which was probably a good thing or those in the other room would have heard. He shifted into a wolf, put his paws up on the windowsill and waited.

Shelley checked her watch. One thirty. She yawned as she pulled on her pants and silently shoved things into her pack. Her backpack this time, not Chase’s.

Maybe following the youth was crazy, but it was the first time in forever that her wolf had nudged her this hard. What good was it to long to have her wolf more responsive if she was going to ignore the beast the rare times it did show up?

Besides, Shelley was pretty sure she could take the kid in a fight.

She grabbed the samples, dragged on her hiking boots and slipped out after him.

Walking into a trap was the last thing on her mind. Maybe it was from years of hanging out around animals and learning when they could be trusted and when not. How it was never the big scary-looking ones she had to watch out for. It was usually the sweet, innocent granny’s poodle with that twinkle in its eye that would knock the needle to the floor a second before driving teeny razor-sharp teeth into her finger.

This wolf was one of the big, gentle ones. She bet she could crawl on his back, pull his ears, and he’d sit patiently and wait for her to finish tormenting him.

There was a chill in the air she’d felt earlier in the day that vanished as she followed him into the tress. Ahead of her his hindquarters bounced as he led her down a thin path back toward the main highway. The trail rose slightly as it moved toward the hills they’d crossed before hitting Chase’s cabin.

He trotted slowly for a wolf, as if adjusting for her speed, and she was grateful. She didn’t think she could keep up even the gentle pace for long though. When he walked straight into the middle of the creek she swore.

“Damn, you’re hiding our trail.”

He nodded, lupine head dipping regally.

“You’d better not be leading me wrong, or you and I are going to have words.”

Words with her big knife. Still, she couldn’t shake the instinctive urge to trust him.

Twenty minutes later they had broken free of the water and he led her up a heavily overgrown goat path toward the top of the ridge. She no longer had the energy to do anything but put one foot in front of another.

That pizza Chase had promised her was getting farther and farther away.

When she finally hit the top of the rise, she found the wolf had curled up in the lee of a tree on the side of the ridge that faced the cabin. They were high enough to have a good view of the surrounding area, but unless someone knew exactly where to look, she and the wolf would be nearly invisible.

She slipped off her backpack and joined him, wiggling until she’d found a comfortable spot against the dirt of the hillside. “Well, you’re obviously not trying to take me away somewhere to hurt me. Thank you.”

He circled a couple times before lying down nearly in her lap. He rested his chin on her knee and stared up at her with something close to puppy love in his eyes.

“Where were you when I was a little kid? I could have totally used a wolf to accept me back then.”

He opened his mouth and grinned before yawning and getting cozy.

Shelley tucked her shirt around her and relaxed. So. Hiding in plain sight. She supposed from here she’d be able to see if there was a huge panic over her departure. If needed, she could stand up and shout, even take off her top and flap it to get attention until everyone down at the cabin knew where she was.

It salved her guilty conscience. Maybe crawling out that window hadn’t been logical, but shifters were more about instinct than logic.

The heat of the sun washed over her and lulled her off into nearly sleeping.

Something crashed and Shelley jerked upright. There was a second staccato bang. Branches to her left smashed together in the gust of wind that played over the hillside. A quick glance at her watch showed she’d only slept a few minutes. The wolf was on his feet, growling as he stared down the hill toward the cabin. Shelley yawned and blinked the sleep from her eyes, attempting to focus.

But when she did, the view wasn’t at all what she expected. On the lawn outside Chase’s cabin, men and animals milled everywhere, all facing toward a line of rapidly approaching bears.

Chapter Twenty

From a distance there was barely any sound to accompany the fighting. It was as if she was witnessing everything on a teeny tiny screen, a newscast on her cell-phone. Only when a body was left behind on the lawn could she make out additional details. A bear went down, curled into a ball and was abandoned as his core group surged forward.

A wolf flew through the air, caught in the backswing of a massive paw.

Her young kidnapper wolf slipped under her hand and nudged her.

“I’m not leaving,” Shelley insisted. “I’m safe enough watching from here. I have to see what’s happening. Why are they doing this, I wonder?”

She double-checked her blade was in place. Just in case she needed it, although, please, no. She would fight if she had to, but a battlefield of shifters seemed a terrible place for a human woman. It had been bad enough killing the puma, even in self-defense.

Down to one side the bears were forcing their way forward. Chase’s huge cougar body was easy enough for her to spot, or maybe it was because she was sure that had to be him. The biggest body headed into the worst of the trouble, slamming himself against a group of shifters and knocking them over like bowling pins.

A small bear rolled to his feet, and this one, instead of returning to the fight, hightailed it back toward the northern bush.

Shelley frowned in confusion. Now that she’d noticed one, there were clearly more of these runaways. One or two at a time, bears broke away and disappeared until there was only a small contingent still fighting.

She’d had enough. From what she could see, the good guys outnumbered the baddies two to one.

“Come on, wolf boy, escort me down.”

He stepped in front of her, blocking her path.

Instinctively she growled at him, and he snapped back in obedience faster than she expected.

Hmm, that little sensation of power was a sweet thing for a lowest of the low to experience. “You are totally going to give me an ego if you keep doing that. I mean it. I think we need to head back. Sniff for me. Make sure there are no bears coming at us from the side, okay?”

The wolf waited for her to grab her pack then led her on a direct route down the hillside toward the cabin. They popped in and out of the trees, allowing her to check again and again how things were proceeding on the lawn.

If things turned ugly she wasn’t sure if she’d run forward faster. It was damn tempting. She was concerned about Chase. She’d taken off because her wolf had insisted on it, but the entire time she’d wondered and worried what his reaction had been to her disappearance.

She was caught in the middle, and it was time to throw caution away and make sure he was okay.

Wolf boy stopped at the base of the hill and led her off the main trail. Shelley sighed as the branches closed in around them, scratching and tugging at her long sleeves. “I hope you know what you’re doing,” she complained.

He obviously did. Not even five minutes later they broke out at the edge of the lake, not far from where she’d walked with Frank. Which was only…two nights ago? Shelley shook her head in wonder.

There were a lot of shifters between her and the cabin, and she hesitated. Being brave was one thing. Being stupid was another. She watched and analyzed until she was confident what she saw were mainly Chase’s men.

Now her role as a vet could be used. Unfortunately.

The wolf gave a low bark before slinking into the clearing. Shelley followed cautiously, but firm in her steps. Someone waved from the right, and she headed his direction.

Mark glared down, the hand slapped over his forehead partially covering a bloody gash. “Where the hell did you go?”

“Never mind that now. Where’s Chase?”

Mark stared at her.

Shit
. “Mark, you hear me? Where’s Chase? I saw the fight from the hill. Where is he? And who the heck are those guys?”

She pointed toward the dozen bears all sitting on the lawn, surrounded by shifters. That’s when she noticed one of the men stood over them with a rifle at the ready.

“We’ll figure out who they are. Chase is in the cabin. Frank carried him in.”

Carried?
“He’s hurt?”

“He was already hurt, lady.”

She pushed past him and headed at a dead run for the front door. Her wolf guide sped past her, darting into the house long before she could reach it. All along the route the shifters in her path separated and stood aside, clearing space for her.

Chase. Dammit, she’d left and he’d gotten himself hurt again. She was going to kick his ass.

She was nearly through the front doors when her wolf boy blocked her again. Words exploded from her. “Move it, or I’ll turn you into a eunuch.”

He tilted his head to the side, the most puzzled expression on his wolfish face.

Delton’s slow drawl carried over her shoulder. “Jones, the lady means she’ll cut off your balls. It’s okay, let her in.”

So that was the boy’s name. She gave Jones a dirty look as she pushed past him, frantically searching the cabin for a sign of Chase.

Frank hadn’t carried him to the bedroom, and she understood why as soon as she got close enough. “Oh, Chase. What have you gone and done this time?”

The cougar on the floor of the kitchen was bleeding profusely from deep cuts. Bite marks and torn skin made a mess of his beautiful body. He opened his mouth to snarl softly.

She understood enough cat body language to answer that one.

“No, I won’t go away. Now let me check you.”

The bear tried to get in her way again. “You don’t want to—”

It was certain stupidity, but she did it anyway. She slammed a hand against the man’s huge chest and shoved him. “Shut up, Frank. I know what I want and don’t want.”

Of course, for all her shoving, he didn’t move an inch, but at least he didn’t try to block her when she slipped around to Chase’s side.

She kept her touch light as she examined as much of his body as she could reach with him in an awkward position against the wall. He snorted and sniffed when she hit delicate sections, but there didn’t seem to be enough damage for him to be lying there as if he were more seriously injured.

He had to be exhausted, but even that didn’t explain his immobility.

She patted his flank gently. “Come on. It’ll be easier to stitch you up if you shift to your human form.”

Chase closed his eyes and ignored her.

Ignored her, or was going into shock? Damn. She scrambled to get in position to check his vitals, but Frank held her back with his big pawlike hand.

“Shelley?”

She looked up to find the bear shifter staring at her sadly.

He shook his head. “He’s not going to change.”

Frank pointed, and she moved in closer, following his lead. Chase had been hiding his back against the wall. He’d moved just enough she could finally see.

There was a hole where there shouldn’t be one. Not only was he injured, either a bite or a huge claw wound, but the area around it had changed back to human, twisting his cat body to the side with the mismatch in size between his forms.

The puma in the bush, with its twisted mutated corpse, instantly flashed to mind, and she shuddered.

Panic hovered, but she fought off the fear. That horrifying conclusion wasn’t inevitable. There had to be a way to stop it from happening, stop the disease from continuing. The shifter in front of her was impressively strong.

The fact he had captured her heart in their short time together only made it that much more important.

“Chase? Can you shift? Come on. Shift and give me a chance to fix you up. There’s not that much damage, and I’ve got the samples. There’s a chopper coming, and you can fly out with me and we’ll find a way.”

Chase opened his eyes and stared unblinking for a moment then rolled, blocking the wound completely from her sight. Ignoring her request, all but ignoring her. His eyes were glassy, and he had to be in pain, but right then she wanted him to keep on fighting. To not give in.