by Erika Masten
Eyes wide, Caroline Heath stared up at the territorial alpha bear. “I know, Ty. I understand, but that….” The she-bear gestured wildly but dismissively toward Aubrey. “This has nothing to do with those werecats or whatever is going on at that reservoir.”
“So it was you,” Aubrey said. “You or one of your friends here, following me when I was up there at the reservoir checking out what was going on. I hope to God you covered your tracks and didn’t lead one of them back to Grayslake.” Then he added under his breath, “Fucking amateurs.”
That famous Heath temper rose to the surface with a scowl that Ellie wanted to claw off of Caroline’s face as the she-bear said, “That’s not my doing, none of it. I didn’t tell him to follow you. Nate just—.” The woman caught herself and bit her tongue.
“Nate Brennan?” Ellie asked, seething and straining against Aubrey’s hold. “What do you have to do with Nate Brennan, and what does any of this have to do with someone taking my Mason?”
When Caroline’s only response was a heated glare, Abrams cautioned her. “Caroline, out with it. There have been too many people keeping secrets for me in my territory, and that stops now.”
If Ellie hadn’t been battling the sheer panic of wanting to know what happened to Mason, she would have enjoyed the mixture of anger, fear, and pain playing out over Caroline’s smooth, haughty face. Tears beaded at the corners of the she-bear’s eyes as they faded from angry bear black back to their gray human form.
Caroline had to choke back no small amount of emotion before she confessed, “I’ve been paying Nate Brennan to watch what’s going on at Garden Gate and… and slow down the renovations.”
It took a second for Ellie to process the statement. Then she screeched and swiped out at Caroline. As strong as Aubrey was, the wildcat wriggled and fought until it took a bear shifter holding her back as well to keep her from clawing Caroline’s throat out.
Abrams sighed heavily, wearily. He shook his head while squeezing his eyes shut against what looked like one hell of a headache. “Caroline, what were you thinking? Why in the world…?”
“He’s my brother’s blood, and he’s being raised by… by….”
“By what, Caroline?” Ty pressed, but everyone in the room knew what she was thinking. The same thing that came out of Nate Brennan’s mouth every other word. Ellie was a skin. “You realize Mason isn’t going to be able to shift, either, don’t you?” And that the Itan’s own mate was a skin, too.
“That doesn’t matter,” Caroline breathed. She looked up at Ty as she blinked out tears. “He’s Sam’s son.”
“And mine,” Ellie said, mad enough to spit.
“You can’t take care of him the way we can. I have a home. I have a business. I have a clan. What can you give him? You and that sister of yours, you have nothing.”
It was Aubrey who spoke up and asked, “And you were going to see to it that it stayed that way, weren’t you?” If he hadn’t been so busy holding Ellie back, it was clear from the tone of this accusation that someone would’ve needed to restrain him.
Little by little, haunted by the bitter truth of Caroline’s tirade, the fight went out of Ellie. She stood still at last behind the restraining arms of the lion shifter and one of the bears. The wildcat’s shoulders slumped. She didn’t have anything; it was true. She didn’t have anything but Mason.
“Where is my son? Who took him?”
Caroline’s response was a moment of hangdog silence.
“I take it was Nate Brennan,” Ty said.
The she-bear finally nodded and blinked away more tears. “But I don’t know why. I paid him what I owed him. Plenty of it. And I promised him more if he kept….” She glanced at Ellie and then away again.
Abrams nodded like he was beginning to put the picture together. “Paid him but treated him like help that had to come and go by the back door, I suspect.” Caroline screwed up her face and glared at the bear clan leader like she didn’t quite understand. “You don’t know your hired help very well, Caroline. Nate Brennan got run out of Redby by the alpha wolf there, he and his brother with him even though Jared hadn’t done anything wrong. It was Jared who came to me to ask if he and his brother could stay in my territory, and if it hadn’t been for Jared being so honest about everything and such a straight arrow, I’d have never tolerated Nate Brennan. He’s a speciest, and that’s the nicest thing I can say about him. He barely tolerates other wolves, and he hates other species of shifters, especially werecats. And Mason is half werecat, isn’t he? Nate also hates authority and anybody who thinks they can order him around. Apparently, that stands even if they’re paying him to take orders.”
Ellie wrestled her way out of all those restraining arms to stand on her own and ask the leader, “You think he took Mason to get back in Caroline?”
“Maybe,” Ty agreed. “Maybe that’s just part of it. We won’t know till we find them.”
“Let’s go already,” Ellie urge and shook her head when everyone stared at her. “Don’t even think of telling me I can’t go or I have to stay at home in case someone calls or shows up there.”
Aubrey nodded his agreement. “She’s right. The more of us are out there, the more territory we can cover.”
Abrams turned to face the lion shifter. “This isn’t Panthera business.”
Caroline came up from her knees behind Ty. “That lion shouldn’t even be in Grayslake. They’ve been lying all along, about everything they wanted from us. He’s just here to get his hands on Garden Gate and try to get a cub off her.”
When everyone, including Ellie and Aubrey, turned at that statement to stare, Caroline stiffened her posture and pulled her shoulders back with her usual haughty air. “Nate heard it. Drummond was arguing with that lion king of theirs that he didn’t want to have to breed Ellie.”
The eruption of anger from Aubrey and the chaos of two more bears having to push him back against the cell wall to keep him from reaching for Caroline…. None of that mattered. The bile in the back of Ellie’s throat and the waves of nausea in the bottom of her stomach didn’t matter. The humiliation burning her cheeks didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but getting Mason back from Nate Brennan.
Ellie looked pleadingly at Ty Abram and at the bears around them, even at Aubrey Drummond, though that made her flush feverishly. She had no pride left in her. “Please help me find my son before that wolf does something to him.”
Chapter 12
Surrounded by bear shifters, including Caroline Heath, Aubrey couldn’t say any of the things he wanted to tell Ellie Lowe. The things he wanted to tell himself. How he’d never deserved her attention. How he’d failed his own sister in letting her believe herself crazy rather than tell her she was a latent lioness. How he’d made a reprehensible promise to Pietr Achieli to save Vanessa and make everything up to her.
But also how he’d never have callously seduced and used Ellie as Caroline was suggesting. And not because Ellie wasn’t the most enthralling she-cat he’d ever met, but because she was.
All those things were loud and clear in his own head, where a very dejected-looking Ellie couldn’t hear any of it.
Ultimately, the only thing the Panthera agent could say to help was, “Let me call in my people.”
Abrams, like the other bear shifters, regarded Aubrey with a suspicious squint to his brown eyes. “To help look for the boy? Or to show me how useful an arrangements with your group might be? The value of having Panthera agents in my territory?”
Several of the bear clan members snorted, obviously thinking the same thing.
The frustration was sitting in Aubrey’s chest as heavy and thick as concrete, and it was getting hard to breathe through it. “No, that’s not what I’m saying. Look, it just makes sense to have more people on the ground, people who know how to deal with a shifter who has gone rogue.”
Aubrey didn’t say he used to do that professionally for the government.
Abrams exchanged glances with his people, feet shuffled,
but the room remained gripped in a stalemate of suspicion.
“Lord, but will you all please stop playing politics with my life and the life of my son?” Ellie begged. Distress cracked in her voice as it rose higher and higher and tighter and tighter with panic.
The sense of urgency already burning in Aubrey’s gut flared, and he knew he had to do something, even something stupid, to make sure he was out there helping instead of spending the night in that 15x30 cell. “If you let me help,” he told Ty, “I’ll do it by back channels. Nothing official.”
The Itan’s brow perked. “Meaning what, exactly?”
“Meaning I won’t be asking the Panthera for help. I’ll be asking my friends inside the organization who can keep everything to themselves. Pietr Achieli never needs to know, and the Grayslake clan will owe him nothing.”
Dissent grumbled among the bear shifters, murmurs of offense at the idea that they’d need the help of werecats or that they’d ever feel some sense of obligation to the Panthera.
In growing exasperation, Aubrey made a choice he knew would come with a heavy price. It was a decision that he wasn’t going to be able to hide from the Panthera.
“After we’ve found Mason and taken care of Nate Brennan, I will leave, and I’ll take my people with me. All of them. The Panthera operation in Grayslake, at Garden Gate, it will be off the table and we will be out of your territory. For good.”
This offer got a thoughtful round of silence from the bear shifters, including their leader, who after a moment asked, “Right of visitation revoked?”
Aubrey still couldn’t look at Ellie. She probably didn’t care if she ever saw him again, but for him this was proposition that left a dead feeling at the very core of the man. This was for Ellie, though, and for Mason. “Right of Visitation revoked,” he agreed.
The lion shifter heard a hitch in Ellie’s breath, but he didn’t look to try to read her expression. Done was done, and Aubrey was playing the only card he had in the deck—how much the Grayslake clan wanted to be rid of the Panthera. It would just be easier if Aubrey assumed Ellie wanted to be rid of him as much. Part of him didn’t want to hope otherwise, and part of him didn’t want to look at her face and see he was right.
In the end, as much as Ty Abrams might have hated politics, no one could pass up the opportunity to be rid of Aubrey. “Pietr Achieli will stand by this offer?” the Itan asked.
The Panthera agent nodded. “It will take some convincing, but yes.”
It would take the proverbial pound of flesh and all the blood and tears Aubrey had left in him. It would take a significantly deeper commitment from Dreyer—to the Panthera and to Pietr’s vision of breeding genetic weaknesses out of the small werecat population.
Aubrey tried to tell himself that didn’t matter, when werecats didn’t have the same concept of mating for love that some other species did. A lifelong pairing between them was rare. He had been foolish to think that he and Ellie….
“I have calls to make if you’re going to let me do this,” Aubrey told Abrams. The bear clan leader nodded.
Organizing a manhunt wasn’t a quick task, even among shifters and professional intelligence agents. It took more than an hour to get the teams on the ground. Nightfall had set in even before they began to fan out through Grayslake. Four Panthera agents made it into the territory within that time, including one unexpected tagalong.
As Ty Abrams himself and his brother Van prepared to team up with Aubrey, the Itan leaned near and nodded toward the most striking and most ominous shifter among them. The hardest, leanest muscle. The sharpest eyes, gleaming black even in human form. Long, straight black hair to the middle of his back.
“What is he?” Ty asked Aubrey in a mutter he kept low enough that even a shifter might not have heard. Aubrey doubted his fellow Panthera agent missed it, though.
“Dhakal is a weretiger. They are rare, and his kind rarer still.”
“How’s that?”
“He isn’t a human who can change into a tiger.”
It took a moment for that to sink in between the Abrams brothers, the idea that the shifter they were looking at was an animal shifted into human form. And even then, even when the werelion saw them narrow their eyes and tighten their shoulders with caution, Aubrey knew they had no idea how dangerous Dhakal truly was.
Ellie interrupted everyone’s anxious thoughts when she proclaimed to Ty and Aubrey, “I’m coming with your group.”
Aubrey started to argue but stopped to think. Ellie had made it clear she was going to be out there one way or another. She could go with a group of bear shifters he didn’t know and couldn’t trust, with maybe only one of his werecat allies on the team, or she could come with the two strongest bear shifters and the two most experienced werecats. Aubrey looked to Ty and nodded his agreement and encouragement.
After a sigh, Ty told the woman, “You stay back if we have to shift. As much as we like to say different, you’re not another pair of claws, you’re an added pair of eyes to help us find Nate and your boy.”
Aubrey knew that Ellie, even as a latent, still possessed the heightened senses of a werecat. She could smell, see, and hear better than any human. Some latents, like his sister, had one or two other abilities as well. Vanessa could run as fast as any other shifter with the possible exception of a cheetah. He knew another who could smell what kind of shifter someone was even when they were in human form. He hadn’t had the chance to explore what other kinds of gifts Ellie might’ve had.
It was too late for that now.
Not that any particular special talents were necessary to track down Nate Brennan. He’d left a messy trail of obvious leads behind him, and the search teams went to work immediately. All roads, so to speak, led not to Rome but to the forested federal reserve land on the far side of the lake. Nate might’ve been a drunk and a redneck speciest, but he was smart enough to know the best places to hide.
On a map spread out on the hood of Ty Abrams car under the moonlight, the Itan pointed to the terminus of an old service road. “There’s a decommissioned switching station here. It’s a good spot to set up Search Command.”
In the dark, the old cinderblock building squatted low and lifeless with the trees cleared away as though stepping back from the facility’s derelict body. Boarded up windows. Ratty chain-link fence around the service yard out back. No obvious recent activity.
But as soon as they forced the door and had gotten about three rooms in for a standard check of the building just to be safe, Ty and Aubrey glared at each other. They both smelled it—human.
A flat, menacing male voice rumbled from the concealing darkness and the heavy musk of grime and dust that had covered the stranger’s scent until they were right there in the same room. “Stay still and stand where you are. Keep your hands away from your jackets. Shifters don’t typically carry guns, but we know at least a couple of you are law enforcement.”
Ty and Aubrey went still and tense. We know, Aubrey thought. That was what the voice had said—we—so there was more than one person here. From the tone of voice, the stiff paramilitary cadence, the Panthera agent had a very good idea who they were.
“You’re Agency,” Aubrey said, trying to look as though he was relaxing his shoulders and accepting the fact that they had gotten the drop on him. They’d have expected a werelion, if they knew him for one, to try to diffuse the situation and talk his way out of trouble.
Peering into the gloom, the shifters heard a click and watched a human male in tactical gear walk out from behind a row of tall, rusty file cabinets left behind among other disused metal office furniture. The stranger held a small battery-operated glow stick otherwise used for camping. It wasn’t standard Agency issue.
Curious, Aubrey thought. There was significance to that, to the fact that everything the man wore and carried was the quality civilian version of what an Agency strike team would have used. Why wasn’t he in tactical uniform with the full compliment of government-issued gear?
“Who are….?” Aubrey started to ask, but he was interrupted by the shuffle of steps as another black-clad figure dragged Ellie in by one arm. Aubrey growled under his breath, his lion rising at the sight of another male even touching her, let alone manhandling her.
They never should’ve left her in the car. Hell, they never should’ve brought her with them. She was willful, but this was still his fault. It was still his responsibility to protect her whether she wanted him to or not.
Then from a doorway on the other side of the room, Nate Brennan dragged in a terrified Mason Lowe. The boy stank of urine and fear, having wet himself in the terror the wolf shifter had no doubt enjoyed inflicting on the child. If for nothing else, Aubrey wanted to kill the wolf for that.
“What the hell are you doing, Brennan?” Aubrey snarled. “You’re running with the Agency?”
“Shut up,” Brennan snapped. Then to Ty he said, “Get them in here. Get all your men in here.” Nate had Mason by the throat and squeezed enough to make the child squeal and struggle to underscore his threat.
Ellie panicked and started to cuss and tussle with the Agency man, who shifted his grip on her to take her by the hair and press the mouth of a high-caliber pistol to the base of her skull. Despite his lion’s mounting hunger for blood and his outrage at Brennan’s torment of the boy, Aubrey froze with cold chills coursing his body at the sight of a gun pointed to Ellie’s head. A shifter was fast, especially a werecat, but no one could out run a bullet.
Ty held up his hand in a calming gesture toward Ellie and shook his head no. Then he called out for Van and the rest of the team to come in slow. They’d found the boy. But they were not alone. As their standoff took form, bear shifters and werecats standing back-to-back in the center of the room surrounded by eight Agency hunters armed with high-powered rifles, Aubrey calmed himself by concentrating on their one point of advantage. Dhakal wasn’t in the room. The weretiger was still an unknown in the situation.