Then he wasn’t suggesting another night of passion, or even hinting there could be one. Oh, well. It was better that way.
But Maya remained curious. What were they really up to that evening?
Could she figure out a way to find out?
She was definitely going to try.
Chapter 22
Any regret Ryan had about shrugging Maya off that night had disappeared—well, mostly—as he and Piers drove to the lot at the far side from the park, at the base of the hillside. They’d brought Rocky along, too, in case Ryan needed extra cover, though they considered that unlikely.
Ryan intended to shift. But he particularly wanted Pete Sharan to shift first, using his own formula so Piers and Ryan could observe what occurred. They were also meeting his parents there because the senior Sharans wanted to be kept in the loop as much as possible, and they already knew about the existence of Alpha Force.
Their rental car, which Piers had driven, was the only vehicle there, a good thing even though it was expected. They had arrived earlier than they’d told the Sharans to meet them, and their meeting place was the clearing partway up the hillside. That family could approach it other ways.
“So, you ready?” Piers asked as he removed the key from the ignition switch.
“I’m always ready.” Ryan tried to sound as if he meant it. But Piers knew him well enough to recognize when he was acting fine but had a few qualms inside.
They opened their car doors simultaneously, and while Ryan got Rocky out of the backseat Piers used the key to pop the trunk. He extracted the large backpack he used to carry his Alpha Force supplies, including light and elixir.
Ryan wondered what kind of concoction Pete had put together to aide him in shifting, if it contained any ingredients also within the Alpha Force elixir. He might never learn that with certainty, but if he was able to recruit Pete the guys with the scientific backgrounds in their military unit who kept improving the elixir would undoubtedly figure it out.
The few lights on poles in the parking lot emitted only a dim glow, as if it was nearly a given that no one would really park here after dark. Well, in his short time in Fritts Corner, Ryan had learned otherwise. They’d parked in a darker area where the car would not be beneath the glow of any light. If anyone else happened to come by, they might even think the car had been abandoned here, at least overnight. After all, who in his right mind would be hiking up the thickly forested hillside after dark?
Never mind that it had been done before.
“You ready?” he asked Piers once the trunk was shut and he’d helped his aide fasten the bag over his shoulders.
“Yeah. Let’s move.”
Piers made it look easy to carry all that heavy stuff. They’d both donned black athletic clothes to allow them agility while keeping their visibility at a minimum. In seconds, all three of them were on the worn path up the hillside, and only then did Piers remove a light from his pocket to illuminate their way.
Though Ryan would have preferred moving more briskly, they kept their pace slow, mostly to minimize how much they could be heard by regular human ears if anyone, as unlikely as it was, happened also to be hiking in the dark.
If they were heard by shifters, in either form, that was most likely okay.
They maneuvered around trees and bushes, and Ryan listened for sounds of any life around them. He heard rustles of creatures of the night and confirmed by their scents that they included raccoons, possums and skunks, and other nocturnal beings that were longtime natives to this area. Then there were the owls and other birds he anticipated, as well. Rocky put his nose into the air often but didn’t slow them down.
No wolves. Not yet.
“Almost there,” Piers whispered. In addition to holding the flashlight, he’d been peering at his phone’s GPS. The area was somewhat familiar to Ryan since they’d been there before, but even someone with his enhanced senses needed some assistance in finding places in the dark that were hidden by canopies of trees.
In another minute, the trees gave way to an opening, and Piers shone his light around. The clearing was vast, and they stayed along its periphery—but only for a moment.
Three people stepped out of the darkness off to their right and approached. It was the Sharans.
“What kept you?” The broad smile on Pete’s face told Ryan he was just joking. “Hey, we just got here, too. So—what magic are we going to create tonight?”
He looked directly at Ryan, and his parents were right behind him. All of them, too, were dressed in dark clothes, right down to their athletic shoes. Kathie Sharan appeared concerned, or at least Ryan saw a big frown on her face in the glow now emanating not only from Piers’s flashlight but hers and Burt’s, too.
Pete held a large brown duffel bag in his right hand. Was that where he stowed his equivalent of an elixir? Ryan figured they’d find out soon.
“Magic?” Ryan repeated. “I don’t think any of this is magic, but it’s certainly stuff that regular people might consider, well, supernatural, or at least different.”
“I’ll say.” Pete put his bag on the dirt ground around them. “So where do we start?”
“Okay, as I first said before we decided on this meeting, you’ve already made a promise of secrecy. Do you confirm that promise?”
“Of course,” Pete said, and his parents agreed. But then Pete added, “Can you tell us more now about Alpha Force?”
Good request. If he really was a potential candidate for recruitment, he would want to hear a lot more about the highly specialized military unit.
“Sure,” Ryan said. “Hey, let’s sit down here first for just a few minutes and get as comfortable as we can.” The others followed his suggestion, and when they were all seated on the hard ground in a circle, he stopped to listen to make sure they remained alone. He again heard the sounds of some nocturnal animals but nothing stood out as presenting any danger, so he continued. “Okay, here it is—the short version. We do whatever is required of us by the military, going undercover a lot in various circumstances and, yes, getting involved in some combat, too. I’ll tell you about some of our successes. And no, there haven’t been any failures at all that I’m aware of.”
For the next twenty minutes or so Ryan revealed some of the missions Alpha Force had been involved in, even going up against anarchists and training a similar unit of shifters in Canada.
“There’s more,” he said when he was done. “And as I indicated before, we’re always eager to recruit other shifters who can jump in and help our unit—possibly including you, Pete.”
“Heck, yes!” The young man jumped up. “I’d love to join Alpha Force. What do I have to do?”
“First thing, that formula that helps you shift—tell us more about it.”
“Our son was always great at science in school,” Burt said proudly.
“I was interested in science because I started shifting when I was a young kid and wanted to learn more about it, even though I couldn’t talk about it to many of my school friends—only those who were also shifters. But I wanted to do more than be forced to shift, like it or not, under full moons. It took me a long time and a whole lot of experimentation, but I finally came up with something that lets me shift whenever I want to even outside a full moon.”
“How does it work, and how long do you stay shifted?”
“It’s far from perfect,” Pete grumped. “But I shift about five minutes after I take a spoonful and stay shifted for about half an hour for every dose I take. Do you want to hear the ingredients?”
“If all goes well, I’ll need for you to tell some of the unit members who get all the technical stuff better than me. But I want to observe you now, and then, when you’re done, I’ll give you a brief look at how Alpha Force’s very special elixir works.”
“That’s how you changed the other night—an elixir?” Again, Pete sounded utterly excited. Ryan explained that the elixir was the basis of the unit, that it allowed shifting outside a full moon as
Pete’s medicine did—which he already knew after seeing Ryan shifted since he apparently recognized and recalled it from when he had been shifted, too—and that it permitted shifters while in shifted form to maintain their human cognition.
“Really?” Now even Burt sounded excited. “And can shifters outside the unit use that stuff?”
“Unfortunately, no—though we might be able to make occasional exceptions for family members.”
“Okay, son, we’re with you,” Burt said to Pete. “Go for it.” He glanced toward Kathie, who nodded.
Pete reached into his duffel and pulled out a plastic bag. His parents helped him place a dose of his liquid onto a spoon from a small bottle. He removed his clothes, then Kathie held him as, in a few minutes, Pete’s shift began. He groaned and was clearly in pain as it went on, but it didn’t take long despite there not being a full moon.
Soon, she was hugging a wolf. It was a larger wolf than Rocky. It backed off some, knocking at her with his muzzle and acting somewhat like a tame dog like Rocky, now sitting calmly beside Piers, who held his leash.
Rocky was definitely used to seeing people shift, though not exactly this way.
“May I?” Piers asked and at Burt’s nod drew closer. “Okay, Pete, sit.”
The wolf just looked at him without obeying.
“Do you understand what I’m saying?” Piers continued, but again, though he didn’t run, the wolf stayed standing where he was.
Piers and Ryan took turns talking to him for the next ten minutes, but Ryan was certain that the wolf had no more human cognition than Rocky and most likely remained around only because he recognized his tie to his parents on some level.
Pete had said before, though, that he recalled what he saw while shifted, even if he couldn’t use his human thinking abilities then.
Soon after that, his shift back began and then Pete lay naked on the ground, panting as he withdrew from his discomfort.
“Very impressive,” Ryan said when he figured Pete could understand him. “Do you let other shifters use it?”
“Burt and I do, a little,” Kathie said, “and some of our friends do, too, just for the fun of it—if you can call it fun.”
“I can,” Ryan said, “when I use the Alpha Force elixir. Do you want to see?”
“Sure,” Pete gasped.
It was Ryan’s turn to strip. He took a vial of the elixir Piers handed him and drank it, then waited in the light his aide shone on him that resembled that of the full moon.
Soon his own discomfort began, and in minutes he was wolfen in form.
He looked at the others, nodding his head. Then Piers, who had told an obedient Rocky to stay where he was, began talking to Ryan.
*
Sit. Piers had said that, and so Ryan sat.
Shake hands. He held out his paw.
When Piers told him to touch the ground as many days as they had been in Fritts Corner, he scraped it six times. The others looked somewhat impressed—although that could have been some of his training.
But then Piers told him to use his paw to scrape the loose dirt in the form of the moon that night, only a few nights after the full moon, he did that, too.
He heard all of those around him, shifters, too, gasp their amazement.
“I want that!” Pete exclaimed.
And Ryan believed he would soon introduce a new recruit to Alpha Force.
*
Maya hurried onto the tree-shrouded upward path before turning on her flashlight.
She had parked her car on the opposite side of the lot from Ryan’s, in a corner as dark as possible at the foot of the hillside. She had left her purse in the trunk, although she’d stuck her cell phone into her pocket. She could use it to take pictures, but she hadn’t brought her camera.
Before, certain Ryan and Piers were up to something that night—something important, she figured, since Ryan had let her know they had plans without revealing what—she had sat in her car in the shadows at the hotel parking lot for almost an hour, waiting.
Was Ryan shifting again? Maya felt certain of it. But why couldn’t she watch this time?
She might just watch without their consent, if all went as she hoped.
Maybe they were walking to wherever their plans took them, but she somehow hadn’t believed so. And her conjecture was proved correct when they arrived at their car around 9:00 p.m. and headed out.
She’d followed at a distance, not surprised at all when she saw they were heading toward the far side of the park and its forested slopes.
Where she knew full well that Ryan had shifted before.
She drove by the entry then, turning around and returning a while later when she figured they’d had time to leave their car and head up the hillside. Sure, they could be heading toward a different clearing for this night’s shift, and in any event she’d have to be as careful as possible not to be heard by Ryan in either form or allow him to see a glow from her flashlight.
If she was lucky, she could pretend to be a creature of the night and make only the sounds an animal might create while hunting prey this late—the lightest footsteps possible. Her work at WHaM, and her prior visits to this hillside, gave her at least a little hope of achieving that.
She finally returned, and had again parked her car in those shadows, this time as far from the other car as she could in the extended but empty lot, got out of her car and secured her purse in the back. She did it all quickly and carefully to minimize the possibility that the lights, or sound of the car door or trunk closing, would capture Ryan’s attention. In moments, she’d reached the threshold of the path up the hillside to the clearing.
Sure, she’d had to turn on her flashlight then, but hoped that the cover of the trees and other flora here would keep her from being spotted by Ryan or Piers. Ryan’s extra senses were more focused on scents and sounds anyway.
She took a few steps, listening. Yes, she did hear some distant noises like animals stepping on the forest’s dried leaves, and she attempted to imitate them with her own steps.
She hoped she remembered all the turns on the upsloping path. There were branches away from it, after all, but the main path was the one she wanted.
She hoped it was the one Ryan and Piers wanted, too.
She hated going so slowly, but would hate it worse if she was discovered.
But she would hate it worst of all if she didn’t arrive at the clearing in time to see Ryan shifted. She figured that, if he was already there, he would have changed into wolf form by now, but even if he ran into the woods he would return there, where he was likely to have left Piers, before shifting back—right?
Well, she’d just have to see.
For now, she attempted to curb her impatience and continued upward—also hoping she recalled enough to avoid getting lost up here in the dark. At least she wasn’t cold, since she wore a hoodie—charcoal in color, and her pants and athletic shoes were dark, as well. She’d learned from Ryan that keeping a low profile at night included wearing drab and unexciting clothes that wouldn’t grab the attention of any person who happened to be around, let alone any animals.
She figured she was about halfway there by now. Just a little farther and—
A moan sounded off to her left. A human moan.
And then a gasp, and a “Sshh.”
What was going on? Was this Ryan’s important task of the night, something to hurt a person? Had he attacked someone while shifted?
Which made her wonder again if it had been a shifter who’d attacked the Frittses—and whether that shifter was, indeed, Ryan.
Okay. She didn’t want to get lost, but she had to check. Still attempting to sound like a stalking wild creature, she moved off the path and in the direction of the sounds.
Which were followed by more sounds, like hisses and a “damn,” which was also shushed.
What was going on?
Still trying to go slowly enough not to attract the attention of a person or creature, she continued forward. Th
e aromas of blossoming trees and other plants seemed mushed together, and she didn’t actually sense by smell or hearing any creatures like those she tried to emulate.
But were there wolves around? Shifters?
Suddenly, she saw a light ahead of her—and stopped walking. She moved behind a tree, though, to gaze forward into the small clearing that was ahead.
There, in the middle, beneath a light on what appeared to be a portable pole, sat Carlo Silling. His friend Morton Fritts knelt in front of him with some kind of gadget in his hand that appeared to resemble a claw of some kind. No, not a claw. It was like scissors with curved teeth—and Morton leaned forward and raked the thing against Carlo’s face, which was already torn and bloody.
And resembled how Morton’s, and Vinnie’s, had looked after their apparent wolf attacks.
Apparent was now the operative word. They must have done this themselves, setting it up to look as if wolves had hurt them to garner sympathy—and more.
They undoubtedly wanted someone to go find the wolves, perhaps themselves, and kill them, using the attacks as an excuse.
And now they were performing a third one to help make their point.
Maya wished she could confront them. Better yet, call the authorities to confront them.
But for now she could do neither.
Except…she reached very slowly into her pocket, where she’d stuck her silenced phone. She needed to take a picture of this—and then get away. Far away.
She pulled it out and checked to make sure the flash wasn’t on—a shame, since the picture wasn’t likely to turn out well. But she didn’t dare do anything to call attention to herself.
She aimed it toward her view of the supposed attack and pushed the button, moving the camera as she took several shots, glad the sound was off so there’d be no clicks to indicate photos were being taken.
She stuck her phone back into her pocket, took a few breaths, then turned to leave.
And felt her arm and neck being grabbed as she was thrown to the ground.
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