This Weakness For You (Entangled Select Otherworld) (Taming the Pack) (22 page)

Christa frowned even as the woman beside her switched focus to the desk, where everyone had gathered around the printouts. When the Lycan went to rise, Christa touched her arm. “Wait, you mean this isn’t the den everyone keeps talking about?”

The woman’s nose wrinkled and then she smiled. “No, I forgot that some humans call their study a den. No, it’s like a wolf’s den. We have a downstairs underground lair. It’s where we enter our homes and shed the wolf—though, really, we’re never not a Lycan.”

Oh, so there definitely wasn’t a cellar wife then. Unless she went down to the cellar…then she’d be the cellar wife. She blinked several times. Okay, the stress was getting to her. Obviously.

“Seven!” Ethan said, shaking his head. “That’s one against each of them if you don’t count Ross being there.”

“Seven?” Christa asked, standing up.

Vanessa was at her side a moment later, taking Nathanial out of her arms.

“Oh, thanks.” The flare-up might be over, but if she had a weak moment with her nephew in her arms… She’d have killed herself to prevent him from being injured. Most of her worst MS falls had been from trying to save whatever she’d been carrying, and none of her loads had been as valuable as Nathanial. She bent over the desk with the others and pulled one of the printouts under the desk light that only she and Dane needed.

Jordan had covered the gorgeous windows in this room with plywood shortly after dinner, so that she and Dane could be in here with the lights on at night. Dane had wanted to look over the map while they were out, and she’d wanted someplace to wait for Jordan to return. It had been painful to watch him screwing the plywood into the walls on either side of the windows.

The printout had a picture of a man—a normal-looking man—as well as all his vital statistics.

“This is one of the poachers?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Dane said, hanging up the phone. “These are the seven in North America from what Travis’s hacker discovered.” Dane was speaking directly to her, as all the rest had heard the phone conversation. “Used to be eight, but we got one of their crew two years ago. I guess they’ve been looking for payback, splashing Jordan’s description around—trying to get someone to turn on him. They call themselves mythical acquisitioners.”

“Bloody murderers,” Ethan grumbled.

“He looks so normal.” Christa’s eyes skimmed the information on Eric Baier. An army doctor. That would explain his knowledge of weapons and scalpels. He was younger than the veterans she called, but this sheet on him didn’t look much different from the bios she worked from—other than that he’d been dishonorably discharged.

She glanced at the other sheets the pack members were scanning with dark scowls. One of the men had tattoos on his face, another several piercings, but none of them looked like serial killers. No wonder they’d been so successful. Their neighbors probably said, “He didn’t seem like the type.” Well, maybe that one with the tattoos and the slimy grin…he looked like he’d killed squirrels as a kid. Anyone with skulls on his eyelids had an abnormal fascination with pain.

Dane moved all the papers into two rows. “They probably go in pairs. We have three with surgical experience and then four with special ops training, or militia, in skull-tattoo guy’s case. We know the guy Jordan killed two years ago was good with a scalpel, so he probably decided to freelance.” Dane dragged a hand through his hair. “I know he couldn’t aim worth a damn.”

“Which was a good thing if you were the one being fired at,” Vanessa said.

Nathanial pouted in her arms. He’d open his mouth to complain, and she’d rock him long enough for him to stop. He sure seemed to like being testy—and if that was the case, they had no one to blame but themselves. He’d had that built into his DNA.

“You’d think someone would recognize this guy.” Ethan pointed at tattoo-face.

You’d think. And Jordan was out there up against a bunch of freaks good with scalpels and at killing people. “There are seven out there?” Christa asked.

“We don’t know that.” Dane had always been a stickler about facts. It was annoying. If she were closer, she’d have punched him. That might have undermined her authority as alpha female to be squabbling with her brother, but it’d feel good to punch something. She needed to punch something. “Travis just said they managed to trace everything back to this group. It might be none of them…it might be one of them again.”

“Not if it’s personal like this. Jordan actually killed one of their guys. They’ll all be here,” she said.

“Remember, Jordan’s bigger than them,” Vanessa said.

Dane gave his wife a look.

She shrugged. “What? No matter how you look at it, that’s gotta be true. These guys all look like they’re on steroids, and you know that doesn’t help with size all over.”

The rest of the room gave her a look.

Then Ethan’s wife turned to Christa and said, “And he has already ripped one of their throats out—he’ll hold his own.”

…

They’d gathered back together on the way to the next Lycans listed as most vulnerable—Tim and Jenny and their three kids.

Out of breath from sprinting, they all leaned against trees. For the first time, Jordan felt conscious of being naked on a hunt as they were reporting in. He angled himself away from the females in the group. He’d also paired off with Reilly when previously he’d safeguarded any females on hunts himself, but Sue and Brock were mated and asked to stay together, and he’d trusted Kennedy with Jeff and Blaine. It still stank of being whipped, even if it did make sense. Luckily, no one would ever question the pairings—one of the perks of being Alpha.

“At least two heavy diesel vehicles on that road,” Jordan said, nodding at Jeff.

There’d been no sign of heavy trucks on the road he and Reilly had searched.

“And definitely not logging, fuel, or food trucks,” Blaine added. “They’re somewhere in town or on the forest land. If you’d let us follow the path to the end…”

“They’d have been waiting there with a cage,” Kennedy said.

Blaine shrugged.

They didn’t have the numbers with them to chance that tracking the semis would lead to a trap. This might end up being to get a lay of the land, not necessarily attack.

Jordan listened for a moment and inhaled, tasting the air for eavesdroppers before lowering his voice. “They’re here—which means we’re dealing with new factors. Guns. Possibly tree stands—that might be how they’ve taken down other Lycans. We’re there below them—our only weapons being a part of our wolf form, which wouldn’t manage to get up the tree without getting shot in the head. If I give the signal to fall back, you fall back. There’s no reason to stay and fight to the death tonight when we can win without casualties another time.”

They all nodded.

“Also, stay in form. I don’t want them knowing your identities as more than names on paper.”

Names on paper—Tim and Jenny. Theirs were the next names on the paper labeled as most vulnerable. Their teen was named Hayden, ten-year-old Kevin—the pack’s newest Lycan, and their young daughter, Annabeth. Complications during Annabeth’s birth had left Jenny with a limp, and she was weak for a female Lycan her age. The younger kids were listed as non-Lycan, but they could be used to trap the others. Seeing it all there on the printout had filled Jordan with white-hot rage that had subsided only when Christa pressed closer to him.

He wished he hadn’t brought Tim in to represent his family during the discussion—even if the horror on Tim’s face had cemented the fervor of the others. He’d had to turn away several wanting to come. But he’d understood Tim’s dread now that he had a loved one, too. Seven was a good number of Lycans to take on a hunt. Enough to present a strong front without giving too many opportunities for a weaker member to fall behind. Tim would have been a good addition in this pack, but Ross might have been expecting his scent, and leading the prey to a trap was a poor strategy unless you were purposefully using them as bait.

Which he’d done before.

And now he’d never have the stomach for it.

Christa was making him soft inside.

“Let’s go.”

He was the first to shift, a right given to Alphas.

If Jordan kept more of his conscious mind in wolf form, he wouldn’t have been able to stop snarling as they approached Tim and Jenny’s. As a wolf, he kept thinking “offspring,” “trap,” and “hunters.”

A half mile from the house, he shifted and motioned them all to crouch out of sight behind cover as he surveyed the area. The moon was nearly full, which made the change to wolf quicker and the pull of the primal form whisper in their brains all night. It felt unnatural not to be a wolf at night during this week.

Even though he had the blessed genetics of darker skin and dark hair, he still felt more vulnerable in his human form. But his mind was clouded with instinct as a wolf, and he needed to be able to remember what he’d seen to relay back to the others.

He scanned the forest slowly. His skin felt all prickly with awareness. With the moon so close to full, the forest should have been teeming with creatures and their noise. A forest on a full moon was deafening from the amount of life crawling, slithering, and flying. This time, it wasn’t. He turned to check on the pack members, but an innate awareness dragged his gaze back. The flash of glass lenses was all he had time to note before a bullet snicked by his head, embedding in a tree.

He whipped his head up and around. In the trees—they were using tree stands, and if their hunting party hadn’t stopped this far back and been using trees as cover, they’d all be dead in an ambush.

“Back,” he hissed quietly as more bullets started splitting the air. The Lycans bolted fast, and he shifted and ran behind them with bullets chasing at their heels. He heard the snarl of an approaching Lycan. And out of his periphery, he saw Ross coming straight for him. The phosphorous tattoo glowed on his right shoulder. Jordan huffed a command to his group meaning “go” and then he split away, running straight at Ross.

Bullets flew their way. His Lycan mind was pressing to “run” and “kill” at the same time with Ross in the area. Fight and flight. An Alpha thought of the pack before anything else—even revenge—and the bullets were too close. He shouldn’t face Ross. The pack needed him. The pack was more important. Christa was more important.

Pack.

Leave.

Pack.

Mate.

Go.

And then the whisper of revenge and fight, just a whisper.

A memory flashed in his head of another fight on another day, and right before Ross reached him, he shifted to human. That surprised Ross already, but he definitely wasn’t expecting Jordan to rear back and punch a wolf in the head. Jordan’s fist connected to the Lycan’s head with a satisfying crack.

Ross hit the ground, dazed. The dark brown Lycan lay there, probably thinking, “What the hell just happened?” Jordan knew that’s what he’d been thinking when Dane had punched him in the head. It’s not what you expect from a human facing a wolf.

“That’s for Aggie, you bastard. Pick on someone your own damn size.” Bullets sprayed the ground all around them, hoping for a lucky hit, and Jordan knew the poachers didn’t consider a Lycan working with them a problem for “friendly fire.” Ross was expendable. Jordan shifted and chased his hunting party. Sometimes a retreat made sense, even to predators.

But it felt awfully good to have punched Ross in the face.

…

It was like sitting in a herd of antelope when a lion approached. As one, all of the Lycans looked toward the door and started moving toward it.

“What’s going on?” Christa asked Vanessa.

“They’re back.”

She followed the others out into the dark house. They were all heading toward where the cellar was. The Lycans must have incredible night vision, because she tripped over something, but someone grabbed her and set her back on her feet, and she heard Dane swear as he knocked into something.

The quiet shuffle of feet stopped, so she stopped…and waited…and swallowed the lump in her throat.
Please let Jordan be okay. Please let Jordan be okay.
After seeing the faces of what he might be up against, she was twice as terrified as she had been when she’d been pacing the floor and ranting—which a houseful of Lycans had heard.

Please let him be okay.

She swallowed again.

A door swished open, and a rush of cooler air with an earthy smell brushed her face. After a moment, warm arms grabbed her and pulled her up against a naked chest as Jordan turned her away from the cellar. She hugged him tight, pressing her face against his skin.

“You’re not wearing a shirt,” she whispered against his chest.

“I’m wearing more than most of them—that’s why I turned you around,” he whispered back, amused. “Looking only counts with me.”

“I can’t see a thing.”

“Travis sent bios on the poachers. His guy was able to track them through communication with Ross,” Dane said. She suspected he was guessing at where Jordan was from their conversation.

It was pitch black in this room. They’d covered all the windows with drapes, so the only light was moonlight through a sunroof in the adjoining room, and it didn’t penetrate the dark where this downstairs den emptied.

Jordan wrapped both his arms snugly around her, and she listened to the reverberations in his chest as he spoke. “I’ll look at those in a moment. We found the road they traveled in on, but more importantly, we found them, and Ross is with them. They’d set up a trap using tree stands about fifteen feet off the ground, and they were sitting there. I counted four separate stands, but they were firing on us at the time, so I didn’t have the luxury of long-term analysis.”