Wolf Shield Investigations: Boxset

by Dee Bridgnorth

  No, he thought, pushing the wolf further back. There was nothing a wolf could do about this. He wanted to pull her from the car which was likely the worst thing to do in this situation. She could be wounded in a dozen places, but she was alive for the time being. Any movement might make her condition worse.

  The wail of sirens was faint, far in the distance, but growing louder all the time.

  He brushed dark brown hair away from the girl’s face as gently as he could, willing himself not to examine her delicate features. If he spent too much time doing that, the wolf would thirst for vengeance and this was not the time to give in to those baser urges.

  “Stay with me,” he whispered. “Stay.”

  And then maybe he’d be able to track whoever had done this. They would pay.

  Chapter Two

  What was happening?

  She was drowning. No, floating. She was floating in darkness, flying without wings. Nothing made sense. There was nothing to hold onto, nothing to keep her grounded. She was simply in midair, struggling to keep from falling.

  If she fell, she knew, that would be it. She would die. No one had to tell her for her to know.

  It was a dream, wasn’t it? It had to be. She was dreaming about something terrible, and she knew she was dreaming. That was a relief, anyway. At least if she knew it, she could manage her reactions. There was nothing worse than having a nightmare and not knowing it was a nightmare.

  She didn’t have to give in to fear or panic if she knew she was dreaming.

  And when she stopped struggling, she could relax and simply float in the darkness. Yes, this was nicer with something supporting her the way it was. Whatever it was, she couldn’t see it or feel it. But it had to be there, or else she would have fallen.

  When had she fallen asleep? That was a good question. She shouldn’t have drunk so much at dinner. She always did have strange dreams after drinking—so strange they were usually enough to keep her sober. But after the last two weeks, a night out with Beth had seemed like the only answer.

  Beth was probably pulling up in front of her house right now. She would wake up safe, secure. Nothing was wrong.

  Everything was wrong.

  Even now, dreaming, there was no escaping that dread.

  There were voices coming from somewhere, and they sounded far away though they were only in her head. That had to be the case, didn’t it? Because she was dreaming. Anything she thought she heard was coming from her own subconscious. Just a mirror of herself.

  Beth would laugh at her when she told her about this. Always so logical, always data-driven. Even now, unconscious thanks to a couple of glasses of wine, she couldn’t help but focus on logic.

  Beth. There was something about Beth. Something tugging at the back of her mind. What was it? It was so much easier not to think, to just float…

  No, she had to figure it out. Whatever it was. Even if she didn’t want to think about it, she had to. What was it? Something about driving home. Something about driving.

  Her eyes snapped open, and it wasn’t dark anymore. It was very, very bright. There was a light directly overhead, shining down into her eyes. She squeezed them shut, but it was no use. That light was there, always there, burning through her eyelids. It was torture; someone was torturing her.

  That made sense, because she was in pain. They were hurting her. Everything hurt, every part of her body. Head to toe, legs and arms. Her back. She tried to shift her weight, but all it did was send firebolts of agony racing through her. She opened her mouth, wanting to scream, but nothing more than the most pathetic little whimper came out.

  “She’s awake!” Suddenly, she was surrounded. She heard them instead of seeing them, heard them breathing, heard the squeak of sneakers against tile.

  “Marnie! Marnie, can you hear me?” Somebody yanked one of her eyes open and shone an even brighter light into her eye. She flinched, groaning.

  “Who are…?” Her mouth was so dry. Her throat hurt. What was happening? She couldn’t even speak.

  “Marnie, you were in an accident. Just stay still as you can. You have a lot of bruising, but you’ll be all right. We want to send you down for some more tests, including a scan of your head to make sure there wasn’t any injury. You lost consciousness, so we have to take precautions like that. Do you understand?”

  It was all happening so fast, people screaming at her. It wasn’t easy to make sense of what was happening. “I think so,” she managed to croak. It didn’t even seem like anybody was really paying attention. They were so busy shouting orders at each other.

  An accident. She was in an accident. But she’d been with Beth, hadn’t she? Where was Beth? “Beth?” she whispered, but nobody heard her. She was probably someplace else, getting the same attention. She was probably scared too, probably wondering what happened to Marnie.

  An accident. Beth was such a good driver! Always safe, never so much as a speeding ticket. It had to have taken something pretty serious for them to get in an accident, maybe an animal in the road or something. Beth hadn’t touched more than a glass of wine all night, and that had been early in the meal. They’d been at the restaurant for almost two hours, doing what they could to get each other through what had been the most disastrous two weeks of their professional lives.

  Maybe the worst two weeks of their lives, period.

  Beth wouldn’t have been sped to the point of being careless. That just wasn’t the sort of person she was. Considering how often she made fun of Marnie for always falling back on data and logic before making a decision, she was probably even worse. Or better, depending upon how a person looked at it. Always cautious, wise well beyond her years. Even back in college, she’d always been the one people came to for advice. It was like she’d lived two or three lives already.

  “Please, tell Beth I’m okay,” she pleaded to no one in particular as her bed rolled down the hall. She sensed people all around as she passed and wondered if they were looking at her, if they were curious about what must’ve happened to put her in this position.

  She was curious too and wished they could tell her. She couldn’t remember anything beyond leaving the restaurant, and Beth had insisted on driving. Marnie hadn’t put up a fight—she wasn’t drunk enough to be completely out of her senses.

  If Marnie knew one thing, it was her limit.

  She didn’t have time for this! Just thinking of how this would set her back even further made her groan. They were already so far behind after losing half the team, then grieving that loss. The last thing either she or Beth needed was time in the hospital. Just the thought of it made her groan again louder than before.

  “Are you in pain?” somebody asked, leaning over her the instant she made a sound.

  “Yes,” she admitted, even though that was the reason she groaned.

  “We’ll take care of that,” they promised, before wheeling her into a darkened room. Thank God, finally, there were no bright lights shining in her face and making her head hurt worse than it already did.

  Everyone was very nice, easing her into the machine where they scanned her brain or something like that. She still wasn’t quite sure what was happening or how she ended up there. Maybe there was something wrong with her brain. Well, if that was true, she was in the right place. This was all she could hold on to as they ran their tests, then wheeled her back to what she guessed was the emergency room.

  “Where is Beth?” she asked, trying to look around even though her head didn’t seem to want to move much. Her muscles must’ve tightened up after whatever happened had happened. It seemed impossible, the thought of being in a crash. That was the sort of thing that happened to other people—careless people or people who bad things happened to. People with bad luck.

  Right?

  “You just get some rest now,” someone dressed in scrubs urged her. “Once your scan results come back and we know there isn’t any damage to your brain, we can give you something for the pain. It’ll be better for now if you just st
ay very still and try to sleep so you won’t feel anything.”

  Sleep? How was she supposed to sleep when nobody would answer her questions?

  “Just tell me, please!” It was all she could do to raise her voice, and even when she did, she felt exhausted afterward. Maybe she should rest. What in the world happened to her?

  “I’ll be back in a little while. Try to sleep. The body needs plenty of rest when it’s been through something like you have.”

  That was all fine and good, but what had she been through? Why didn’t any of these people understand? It was enough to make her wish she could jump off the bed and throw things around the room just to get her point across.

  But right now, she could barely lift her head from the pillow.

  She slid her hands around, getting a sense of the bed itself. A thin sheet had been spread over her, and it didn’t do much to ward off the chill in the air. Did they always have to make these places so cold? She raised the sheet a little bit, tucking it under her chin, and noticed for the first time that she was wearing a hospital gown. They’d changed her out of her clothes, and she hadn’t even noticed! What had they done with her things? How was she supposed to rest now with all these unanswered questions?

  She closed her eyes, a single tear rolling down her cheek. It wasn’t pain that made her cry but rather frustration. She had never been able to deal with frustration well, especially when that frustration stemmed from people not listening to her. That was the whole reason she’d started her own business—so she wouldn’t have to get bossed around, so her opinions and insight wouldn’t be spoken over by some upper management idiot.

  Here she was with people talking over her just the way she hated most, ignoring her questions, patronizing her, even. It was like her personal hell.

  Stop being such a baby. Her inner voice chided her, snickering over how childish she was behaving. Even after everything that happened recently, all the tragedy that had taken place, all she could do was think about herself and her own frustrations. What were Michael’s kids going through without their father? What about Carla’s husband? They were people with real problems, real concerns.

  Her eyes opened slowly, blinking against the light.

  Michael. Carla. Funny how now, thinking about them, all of this seemed a little less random. Could it be? No, no, it wasn’t possible.

  But it was beginning to look more and more like she’d been in an accident, just the way they had. Maybe not the exact same type of accident, but still, what were the odds? In two weeks, two of her executive team members had died in stupid, easily avoidable accidents.

  Now here she was. Everything that was happening pointed to a car crash, even if she couldn’t remember anything that had taken place. Maybe she’d been sleeping when Beth crashed the car. Or maybe the test results would come back and show she had a head injury. Maybe that was why she couldn’t remember.

  Regardless, what were the odds of three accidents happening in two weeks to a total of four members of her company’s executive team? There weren’t that many of them to begin with, only a half-dozen total in a rather small company.

  Were they cursed? Or was there something else at work?

  She didn’t have time to process any of this before the curtain opened and a pair of men entered. They both wore white lab coats and apologetic expressions.

  “Your CT scan came back clean,” one of the two explained, trying to smile. It was good news, wasn’t it? So why did he still look so unhappy?

  “Can I go home?” she asked, and they both snickered gently. Even now, in this position, it made her skin crawl.

  “I’m afraid not,” the other doctor murmured. “We still want to keep you for observation. You were in quite a crash.”

  So, it was a crash. Somehow, having it confirmed didn’t make her feel much better. Sure, at least now she knew, but still.

  “Are you in pain?” he asked, and she nodded.

  “I hurt all over,” she whimpered. Was this really her? She sounded so weak, fragile, so unlike herself. Sure, she’d always been delicate—petite and all that—but she’d never been weak.

  “That’s to be expected. Now that we know you don’t have brain damage, we can give you something for that. It might make you sleepy, but that could be for the best right now. The police will have questions soon, but we’ve held them off so far.” The two of them exchanged a concerned expression while one of them pulled a syringe from his pocket.

  On one hand, the thought of being without pain was a godsend.

  On the other hand, she wanted to be awake. She needed to be alert. “Where’s Beth?” she demanded. “I want to see Beth. I need to talk to her. Where is she? Is she okay? Why won’t anybody tell me?”

  Again, there was that concerned expression.

  The thing was, she’d seen that expression so many times. Nursing a sick parent through their final days gave her insight other people might not possess. She’d seen it so many times, more times than she could count, and soon she’d become immune to it.

  Until now. Until she was directly affected.

  “Is Beth awake?” she whispered as tears filled her eyes. “Is she in a coma?”

  One of them shook his head, sighing. “I’m afraid not,” he murmured. “We didn’t want to tell you until you were a bit stronger, but…”

  “Please tell me she’s not dead,” she pleaded in a broken whisper. The tears spilled over, running down the sides of her face, soaking into her hair and the pillow beneath.

  They couldn’t—it was clear—because Beth was dead.

  “Oh, no! No, no, no!” She turned her head from side to side, ignoring the pain in her body in favor of the pain inside, pain that exploded in her chest, tightening her heart, squeezing hot, stinging tears from her eyes. “No, Beth! Beth! No!”

  She barely noticed the faint taste of something passing over her the back of her tongue and throat when the doctor injected the syringe into her IV line. It took a second for her to realize it wasn’t just pain relief but also something to sedate her since everything got fuzzy within moments.

  That didn’t change what was happening inside. It only changed what she was able to express, the level of emotion she was able to show.

  It didn’t change the mantra running through her head on an endless loop. Beth. Not Beth.

  Chapter Three

  “The name on her license is Marnie Harris. Born November third, 1993.” Logan spoke softly into the phone while Val took down this information and Sledge kept an eye out for anyone who seemed overly interested in what they were discussing.

  Marnie. Her name was Marnie.

  “The car was registered to her,” Logan continued before rattling off the plate number. “She wasn’t the driver. Good thing for her—not so much for the girl who was driving, though.”

  Sledge remembered the girl, a branch sticking through her chest. The horror of her final moments must’ve been unimaginable. At least she couldn’t have suffered long after the impalement. If the just and merciful God his grandmother had always gone on and on about actually existed, the poor girl would’ve died instantly.

  He’d seen a lot of the world and doubted there was any such thing as this God, much less that they were just and merciful.

  “Gimme a rundown as soon as you get it,” Logan concluded. “There’s gotta be something more to this. They were deliberately run off the road.”

  He sighed on ending the call, sliding the phone into his jeans while looking Sledge up and down. “You made a mess of yourself,” he observed in a detached tone, like he felt he had to say something and chose to comment on this.

  “Yeah, I know,” Sledge admitted. He was covered in filth from the knees down after kneeling by the car, monitoring Marnie’s pulse while waiting for the paramedics.

  “You all right? I don’t like your energy right now.” There was a lot left unsaid, a lot which didn’t need to be said. The wolf always picked up on energy the way all animals did, especially when it came
to other wolves. They could generally feel what the others were going through in most cases.

  “I don’t like this whole situation,” Sledge countered. “I wish we’d been close enough to see the plates on that second car.”

  “You don’t need to tell me that,” Logan sighed, running a hand over the top of his head. Unlike Sledge’s shoulder-length hair, his was short and neat, one of the parts of their military training he hadn’t managed to shed.

  Sledge, meanwhile, had grown his out the minute he was able to and hadn’t gone shorter than his shoulders since then.

  “The girl isn’t even twenty-six years old yet. What sort of trouble could somebody that age get into?” he asked, then shook his head when Logan opened his mouth. “I know there’s no way to answer that question. It’s rhetorical. You know what I’m getting at. What could possibly be the reason why somebody would run them off the road?”

  “You know just as well as I do that there could be multiple reasons, none of which make sense to us but that might make perfect sense to a jealous ex-boyfriend or obsessed psycho. Or even a competitor, somebody in their line of business—whatever that happens to be.”

  Val would find out quickly enough. She always did, research genius was that she was. The poor girl couldn’t get much sleep with them always asking her to run a search on this or that name. Just like everyone else, she’d probably foreseen not having much to do for the rest of the evening after their mission in the woods was completed.

  That already seemed like the distant past. Everything had been turned upside down the second they saw those cars up ahead.

  Everyone else had gone home, taking Logan’s SUV. Logan and Sledge could get a cab home or rideshare, though it would probably be a challenge given the time of day. It was already past two in the morning.

  Though that didn’t seem to slow down the number of people coming into the emergency room. Car accidents, mostly—people who’d been out partying and decided it would be a good idea to get behind the wheel. There weren’t many things in the world for which Sledge had absolutely no patience, but drunk drivers were one of them. It was always a choice; there was always another way a person could go. Nobody had to get behind the wheel after drinking.