“You don’t know that!” she screamed back.
“I do know that!” he yelled. He swallowed and said at a more reasonable level, “I’d feel it, Vanessa. I felt it before. I’d know. She’s alive.”
He heard a car approaching from his house and turned to see Dane’s Jeep heading toward him with his brother in the back and Christa’s father sitting in the front seat, looking bemused. Her father’s face went chalk white when he saw the car.
Dane tossed Jordan a pair of pants and his wife a shirt. “Get in, Jordan. Let’s track her down.” He gave Vanessa a long look. “Go back there. Stay with our son.”
Vanessa opened her mouth.
“No,” he said. “Our son needs you, and the pack needs you, and I need you there with our son. We’re dragging most of both packs behind us, but call me as more arrive, and I’ll tell you where to send them.”
“Vanessa, don’t argue…for once in your life, don’t argue, because we don’t have time for it,” Jordan said.
Vanessa just glared at him and crossed her arms.
“Please,” Dane said.
Vanessa looked mutinous for a second, but finally she nodded, and her shoulders dropped.
“Boys!” Sue yelled.
They all turned to her.
She pointed inside the car. “There’s no phone. Whichever phone she called with isn’t here.”
“It wasn’t hers,” Christa’s father said. “I think she said it was Jordan’s. I almost didn’t answer.”
“Phone!” Jordan shouted, looking around at all the others.
Vanessa raised her eyebrows.
“And this is why you drag a human along,” Dane said, lifting his phone into the air.
Jordan grabbed the phone from him and punched his number in.
It was answered almost immediately.
“Jordan’s mate’s phone,” Ross answered.
“Ross, if you’ve hurt her…” he snarled.
“How does it feel, Jordan? How does it feel to have the woman you care about snatched out of your reach? And don’t think I don’t know what happened with Sammy.”
“You don’t know what happened!” Jordan shouted.
“Maybe I’ll free your mate from the match—since you were willing to kill to get out of yours.”
“That’s not what happened. Whoever told you that was wrong.”
“Sammy told me that—just before you killed her. I went to see her earlier that day. I knew she was one of us. I knew it. She told me that she hated being a Lycan, but that she couldn’t stay away from you—she wanted to move away, but she couldn’t. I should have found you and killed you then.”
“This is madness, Ross. Listen to yourself. Sammy had killed already…and you’re adding more to her tally. Colby? Aggie? How many more have to die before her one death is paid for?”
“Two. You and Dane. You have to pay.”
“Ross!”
“No! Jordan, I’m done waiting. Come find us.” There was a sound of crunching as Ross destroyed the phone.
Jordan swallowed and handed the phone to Dane. The rumble of more cars coming from both his house and the freeway mobilized him. “You ready, Dane? Let’s go rain hell on these people for taking Christa.”
“I love raining hell.” He nodded at Vanessa. “I’ll see you soon.”
She nodded back and then shifted and bolted into the woods, heading toward the house.
Jordan hopped in the back of the Jeep, beside his brother, and inhaled. “North.”
Dane whipped the Jeep around and then picked up another twenty cars as they went by his long driveway. As they drove on the road heading away from his place, they passed more cars, which turned and followed the group. It looked like a redneck parade—all of them in trucks and SUVs with their windows rolled down and rifles on their laps.
“This is interesting,” Garret said, looking at the cars around. “When you told me to keep a low profile online about this, I didn’t realize you’d throw a party when they actually came to kill you. Things have changed in the packs, have they?”
Jordan tried to relax. Ross wouldn’t do anything until they arrived. “Yeah, this is how we take down seven poachers now. After we’re done, we’ll have a barbecue. Potluck.”
Garret snorted a laugh. “You know Terran is going to be pissed you didn’t invite him. He’s in between jobs and his girlfriend just dumped him. He’d have loved to come punch wolves.” Garret wasn’t wrong. He should have invited his other brother who lived nearby. He should have invited everyone.
“There’s only one wolf to punch, and you’ll have to stand in line.” He gestured behind them. “A long line.”
“My girl sure does know how to organize,” Christa’s father said, glancing behind them. “She said she’d called in reinforcements because you were both too stubborn.”
Jordan inhaled. “Take this next left.” He hoped that his stubbornness hadn’t cost Christa her life.
Chapter Sixteen
Her head felt like it was in a vise, and her mouth tasted like sawdust. Christa opened her eyes slowly…and even the dim, dusty interior of the cabin hurt them.
“They thought you were one of us,” a man nearby said. He sat in a chair, spinning a knife on the table. He was Jordan’s age, but not nearly Jordan’s size. His soft, reedy voice sent chills across her skin. He was too calm. Too intense.
She jerked upright, but didn’t get far. Someone had strapped her to a gurney like a mental patient. The straps cut into her skin so she settled back down with a moan. Ross. Vanessa had shown her a picture of him so she could tell if she saw him. Ross had caught her. That stung more than the edge of those straps against her skin.
“Like I said, they thought you were one of us. I told them you were better than that. You were the best bait they could have found in the time I’d bought them. They were supposed to grab whoever came through on patrol, because you knew we’d try something. We just needed one member of the pack alive—one Lycan. Instead, they caught you. A human, and you’re the best they could have gotten. You should bring most of the Glacier pack out of hiding. Their new alpha female. Jordan is all about finding a replacement when one dies. When I heard he’d scent-matched again on the phone…” He shook his head. “All we have to do is dangle you out in the open, and they’ll all come running.”
“No, they won’t,” she said, relaxing. “I’m the idiot who got herself caught, and I’m weak. They’ll probably be relieved when you kill me.” She wasn’t completely confident she was bluffing. She’d also disobeyed the pack’s Alpha. Jordan might think it was good to be rid of her.
Ross laughed. “Nice try, but I’ve already had a chat with your mate. I’ve never heard Jordan sound scared like that.” He smirked. “Plus, I’ve heard phone calls between you.”
She jerked against her straps. Seriously, she could murder him with her bare hands for that. Wriggling did nothing to loosen the straps. Damn. If only she could kill him with her eyes.
“To think, I almost killed you. I’m glad you mentioned that night at the window that it would bring Jordan back.”
“You wouldn’t have killed me.”
He laughed at her.
Yeah, she would have shot him. Even though she was a pacifist, no one got away with trying to kill her.
“Then you ran through all our alternatives. If we hadn’t grabbed you, we were going to cut the power and the phone lines like you suggested.”
“Oh hell, I am too stupid to live. If you’d made it into the house, I would have found some stairs to run up—even if it doesn’t have a second level.” She shook her head. “Seriously, what kind of idiot wanders around detailing good ways to murder them?”
“But this is better. And the only way they’ll all come after you—other than some of the women and kids, and killing kids might have gotten the good sheriff too motivated to hunt us all down. You’ll be the perfect bait.”
Hopefully some of the Rainier pack had arrived. She might be bait, but she
wasn’t convinced of who was being hunted here. If even half of the packs she’d called arrived, that would be another seventy Lycans. It might be around a hundred Lycans coming against these seven poachers and Ross. Hopefully the local police wouldn’t show up. There was no way she could spin this as a team-building exercise.
“Where are we?” she asked. The cabin didn’t look like much of anything.
“A place that’s special to your mate and your brother.” He laughed. “Imagine…I got someone they’re both close to. You are the perfect means to an end.”
“Your end,” she muttered.
“You know I can hear you, right?”
She inhaled and thought. If she pretended Ross was just another veteran with a bad case of gout and no sense of humor—maybe she could at least keep him too distracted to listen for the Lycans.
“Do you like to bowl?” she asked.
“What?”
“Do you like to go bowling?”
“No.”
“Yeah, I didn’t think so.” You can always tell a bowler. “When were you born?”
“What?”
“When were you born?”
“July first.”
“You’re a Cancer. Your astrological sign is a crab.”
Ross stopped spinning the knife and turned to stare at her. His light eyes creeped her out. “What does that matter?”
It only explained everything…and Jordan had laughed at astrology. “You’re ruled by the moon, and love means everything to you. No other sign is cut to the heart like this when love goes badly.”
“It didn’t go badly. Your brother killed her when she tried to break things off with your mate.”
“Well, it certainly didn’t go well. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here in a dusty cabin watching you play with your knife.”
Ross almost smiled.
“You know, you can’t help being this way—ruled by your heart, passionate—but you let your crabby nature determine how you handle it,” she said.
He rolled his eyes.
“Hey, I don’t make these things up. It’s predetermined. You’re moody and changing. The one time you’re constant—the one time—is when you’re in love, so when that fails you, you feel lost.”
He went still. “You don’t know anything about me.”
She inhaled. “Yeah, I do. You grew up without a mother. Your father was always too busy with the pack to give you the attention you deserved. Then, he was so relieved when you shifted the first time and you thought, maybe then, maybe you’d get a little attention, but instead he was just relieved you were someone else’s responsibility. You wanted a female in your life, but because you were trying to duplicate your experience with your mother, you only were interested in unattainable females. If you could actually gain her love in return, it would devalue your entire childhood. So this woman you’re trying to revenge—if you could have gotten her, you wouldn’t have wanted her. Now that she’s dead, you’ve elevated her like you did your mother.”
“You know all that from my horoscope?”
“Yes.” Actually, she’d asked Travis a bunch of questions because she’d figured no one else had thought to, and then she’d guessed a lot of things, but the part about love being important was from his sign.
“It’s not true,” he said. “She and I would have been good together.”
“How do you know that?”
He went back to spinning his knife. “I just know it. Just like I know your boyfriend won’t live through today.”
“Have you actually seen Jordan?” she asked.
He glared at her.
“I’m just saying…he’s twice your size. And didn’t he already give you that nice club to the head?”
Okay, maybe that had been too far. His jaw tightened.
“Why do you think that…about Jordan not living through today?” Why was she even asking this? It would just freak her out. On the other hand, she had to know. If knowing could somehow save Jordan, she’d hear the details on how Ross planned to kill him.
He dropped the knife and leaned toward her. “Because his pack will be threatened, and he’ll be forced to protect them, but he’ll want to come to you. While he’s busy trying to come to terms with that and trying to save his pack from the poachers, I’ll be able to slide in and slit his throat. Your brother will be more and less difficult. He should be more difficult because he’s not a Lycan—the hierarchy isn’t a part of him—but that means he’ll come to me. He’ll abandon the pack to rescue you, and depending on his strategy, he might get the drop on me, but he won’t be able to hear me come up behind him. Your brother I give a fifty-fifty chance of surviving. Jordan I’m sure of. He won’t be able to help himself from saving his pack.” He held up the knife. “I have a gun, but I’m saving that for your brother. The knife is for Jordan.”
She blinked, and her stomach clenched with an overproduction of acid. That knife looked twice as lethal as it had before. “You’re saying Lycans always follow the hierarchy?”
“We have to—especially in wolf form. Our primal brain can’t prevent us from following it. Pack comes first.”
“You killed someone in your pack.”
“Colby wasn’t in our pack.”
“Why not?”
“Because I could kill him. The pack didn’t really accept him, and he was new. He wasn’t pack. We sense such things. If he’d been pack, I wouldn’t have been able to kill him—or it would have been very difficult, anyway, beyond thinking clearly. He wasn’t pack.”
Christa shook her head. “That is the weirdest, most circular logic I’ve ever heard.”
He shrugged.
“So if someone from your pack was here, you couldn’t kill them?”
He froze and stared at her. “Will there be?”
“I have no idea.” It wasn’t technically a lie. She hadn’t seen his pack arrive. She didn’t know how long she’d been out cold, but it felt much later in the day. “I’m just trying to understand how you can talk about killing those in the pack you once belonged to if pack is so important.”
“I don’t belong to Glacier anymore. It’s one of the reasons I went to the new pack.”
“I belong to Glacier. Won’t Jordan come to save me because I’m in his pack?”
“And see the majority slaughtered? No. He might try to take me down as a threat to the pack, but I have a little surprise in that case.”
She’d never really cared for surprises, but she really didn’t like the sound of this one. “He’ll try to save everyone else instead of me?”
Ross nodded.
She wasn’t sure how it worked. He could be right. Jordan had told her she was first, third, and fourth, but maybe that didn’t apply when the entire pack was in danger. If she had the choice, though, she’d never want Jordan to pick her over the pack. “I’m okay with that,” she said finally. “If he picks the pack over me, I’m okay with that.”
He picked up the knife and pointed it at her. “And that is why I’m going to let you live.”
“What?” she shouted. “Oh, you suck!” Bad enough she’d gotten caught. Now he was going to let her live knowing she’d gotten Jordan killed? Yeah, even her orneriest client couldn’t have pissed her off this much. “Which do you like more? Show tunes or rock ballads?”
“Rock ballads,” he said with enough horror that she smiled…just before she started singing “Tomorrow” from Annie. And Dane wasn’t wrong—the whole song sounded different if you thought the redhead had a sugar daddy.
…
“We’re heading back to the cabin,” Jordan said.
“Oh hell no,” Dane said even as he stepped on the gas. He pulled out his phone and called.
Jordan was tempted to make the call or take over driving, but he didn’t want to distract Dane.
“We’re headed back to the cabin, honey. Tell anyone that arrives.” He sighed. “You’re okay, right? Okay, good…watch for a trap…they might have been trying to get us away from you. I love yo
u.” He hung up and took a stuttering breath. “It was hard to convince anyone to stay there, but I thought that was a possibility. I told Ethan to keep a few from each pack that stopped by.”
Jordan nodded. At least Dane was thinking clearly and seemed to be good at strategy. He couldn’t get past the emotions of Christa’s being taken. If anything happened to her…
“You don’t have to wait until the moon is out?” Christa’s father asked Jordan.
“No. It’s harder to remain in human form when the moon is out, but we can do it—just as we can change no matter what time of day it is.” His father-in-law was turning out to be a fairly reasonable man—something he wouldn’t have guessed from knowing either of his offspring. Christa. He needed Christa. He could see so much of her in her father.
Jordan had to restrain the wolf inside from jumping from the Jeep and running the whole way to her. The Jeep was faster than him on foot, with Dane driving this crazy pace. Plus, he didn’t want to be too tired to rip Ross’s throat out for taking Christa.
Christa.
Mate.
He forced down the wolf inside.
Two years ago, he’d thought Dane was driving too fast. This time, he wished the Jeep could go much faster.
“It’s inconvenient that you end up without clothes.” Her father unzipped his rifle case. The action should have made him nervous, but Jordan was fairly confident his new in-law wouldn’t hurt him until he’d saved Christa.
Garret laughed. “And funny. His prom wound up being on a full moon and…”
He glared at his brother.
Garret kept grinning and shook his head. “I’m just really enjoying being in the majority again. You realize in this vehicle, you’re the freak?”
Clearing his throat, Jordan said, “Nudity doesn’t seem to bother us as much as it does humans.” Talking seemed to soothe the wolf inside. Killing his brother might help, too.
“Says the man who probably would switch back to a wolf rather than stroll down a street naked.”
See, her father was reasonable. “That’s true.” He examined the sides of the road. “When I came here last time, I came down from the north. They’re expecting us from the south…expecting us to follow the road the whole time.”
This Weakness For You (Entangled Select Otherworld) (Taming the Pack) Page 25