“Mom? What are you doing?” I asked.
Wes came up behind me. She glanced from me to him and then went back to retrieving whatever she’d been digging for underneath her bed.
“This,” she said as she slid a long, shallow box free. She turned a dial using a combination I couldn’t see and the lock popped free.
“What is it?” I asked, edging closer. I’d never seen this box before. It was so unlike my mom, sleek and black and almost military. My mom used plastic containers and craft boxes for storage. This reminded me of something Grandma would have.
When I rounded the bed and saw the contents, I froze. “Mom, what the hell do you have a speargun for?”
“Language, Tara,” she said.
I watched as she removed a long black handle, complete with a trigger, and attached it to a metal wand, clicking and locking it into place. In the box, I counted six spearheads, all sharp and serrated and deadly looking. Before this moment, I would’ve bet my mom didn’t even know what a spearhead was, much less owned one. Maybe it did belong to Grandma and my mom was holding it for her.
I looked at Mom again. Her fingers moved deftly over the different parts of the gun, checking and inspecting its components. She looked surprisingly competent with that thing in her hands.
“Mom?” I said quietly. No answer.
I shared a look with Wes. He shrugged.
Carefully, my mom loaded a spearhead onto the end of the metal rod. It made a hard sound as it locked in. In a practiced move, she drew back a piece on the top of the handle like she was cocking it. She stared down the front end, aiming at a blank spot on the wall with one eye squinted half shut.
Her finger inched toward the trigger and I found my voice. “Mom, seriously, why do you have that thing?”
She sighed and lowered the weapon, setting it gently back inside the box. “I have it because it’s mine,” she said.
I blinked at her. The words didn’t compute. “But … it’s a speargun.” I couldn’t think of anything else.
“Uh-huh.”
“Do you know what a speargun is?” Mom rolled her eyes. “Okay, well, obviously, you do. What I mean is, why do you have it? You hate spears. And guns. And … black boxes.”
“It’s called a pelican case.”
“Where did you get a pelican case?”
“It was a wedding present from your grandmother.”
“Of course it was,” I said.
Wes muffled a laugh. My mom replaced the gun and shut the case. Instead of returning it to its original hiding place, she slid it against the wall near the bed. I noticed she didn’t lock it.
“What are you doing with it?” I asked.
“I’m keeping it ready,” she said as if it were the most natural thing in the world for my mother to keep a weapon at her bedside.
“Mom.”
“Okay, all right. You have a point. I am not usually one for responding to violence with violence, but sometimes you have to… Oh, what the hell. I have nothing deep to say about it. They’ve threatened me and my family for the last time. This time when they come, I’ll be ready.”
“Mom—”
“You’re leaving, and your grandmother is always in DC, and I’m not stupid. Steppe will come for me. I’m sick of being helpless. I hate that it has to be this way, but I’m not going to play human anymore. Not this time. Not with that ass, Steppe.”
“Mom—”
“And if he thinks he can get one over on me, Elizabeth Godfrey, he’s got another thing coming. I was a badass Hunter once and I can be a badass Hunter again.”
“Mom!”
“What?”
I grinned at her. “You already are. I love you.”
She smiled and pulled me into a hug. “Love you, too.”
She held me and smoothed my hair like she’d done when I was little. She was still stiff but it came from determination and ferocity instead of panicked stress. A mother defending her child. A warrior defending her home. Most importantly, it was accepting. Of me, of what we were, of this life we’d made.
The old us and the new us had finally merged somehow.
When I pulled back, we both had tears in our eyes. “Everything’s going to be okay,” she said.
“I know.”
“Wes is going to take good care of you. And you have your pack.”
She smoothed the hair away from my face as the first tear escaped. My pack. She’d called them my pack. It was the first time she’d ever referred to them that way.
“And who will you have?” I asked in a wavering voice.
“I’ll be all right. Your grandma is here. I have my mother, like you’ll always have yours.”
The moment pressed heavy against my heart. I didn’t want to leave like this. I couldn’t, not when I’d finally seen the acceptance in her eyes. I tried to think of something else to say that wouldn’t reduce the both of us to sobs.
The only thing I could think of was, “Does this mean you aren’t mad at me for getting expelled … again?”
She took my face in her hands and shook it gently. “You will always drive me to scrub some surface or another. I can live with that, as long as you can live.” She kissed the tip of my nose. “Promise me.”
“I promise, Mom.”
“Good. Now go pack your things.”
She let me go and I headed for my room. Wes turned to follow but my mother called him back. “Wes, may I have a word? Alone?”
“Sure. Be there in a second,” he said to me.
I hesitated, eyeing the two of them. Normally, at this point, I’d worry. But after the moment we’d shared, I decided to go with it.
I went into my room and pulled my duffel bag out of the depths of my closet. I threw in jeans, shirts of differing thickness—all I knew about this house was that it was in some mountain town of Colorado—and various shoes. After I’d packed the basics, I moved slower, wandering the room.
I tried not to wonder if this was the last time I’d ever see my room. It was hard to see an end in sight at a moment like this, when we were on the edge of the beginning.
Wes reappeared as I zipped up my bag.
“How’d it go?” I asked.
He reached around me, took my bag, and slung it over his shoulder. “Fine,” he said.
I followed on his heels as he went into Grandma’s room. “What did she say?”
“She, umm… She said be careful.”
“Wes.” I waited for him to face me so I could see his eyes. He was lying. Or not telling me all of it. Or both. I put my hands on my hips.
“Fine. She said if I let anything happen to you, she’ll use the speargun on me first then on whoever hurt you.”
I cocked my head sideways. “Wow. I’d expect that from Grandma but not my mom.”
“She looked a lot like Edie when she said it,” he said.
“Did she scare you?”
He rubbed the back of his neck. “I definitely won’t be testing her conviction.”
I grinned. I was a fan of this new side of my mother. My smile dimmed almost as soon as it’d come. Too bad I wouldn’t be around to see it.
“It’s going to be all right,” Wes said, reading my expression.
“I know. Let’s get whatever Grandma left for us and get going.”
Wes selected the dresser drawer Grandma had instructed us to look behind and pulled it free. He set it aside and we peered into the hollow section. Farther in, along the wooden backing, I could make out the uneven edges of a panel.
“There,” I said.
“I see it.” He reached in and felt along with his fingers. I waited. A second later, I heard a small scrape. When Wes brought his arm out again, he held a small panel of wood with loosened shards at the edges where it’d been wedged out of place.
“What do you see?” I asked.
“Looks like a bag of some kind. Hang on.” He reached in again and this time, his hand came out holding a brown zip-up pouch. It was roughly the size and shape of
a book, but soft and pliant.
I waited while Wes zipped open the leather. Inside were a slightly worn journal, a crinkled map, and two identical phones, both too large to be anything from this century.
“Grandma supplied us with … the first cell phone ever invented?” I said.
“They’re sat phones,” Wes explained. He picked it up, inspecting its various dials and buttons.
“What?”
“Satellite phones.” He looked up at me. “We’ll have to leave our cell phones here so they can’t trace us. This will give us a way to contact the others.”
“And they can’t track the signal?”
“I don’t think Edie would’ve left it for us unless it was secure.”
“Good point. What does the map go to?”
He unfolded it and laid it flat between us on the dresser. “It’s a map of Colorado. And here,” he said, pointing to the left corner, “Someone left handwritten instructions.”
“For what?”
He squinted, leaning closer. “Looks like this is how we’ll find the cabin, but it’s hard to read.”
“And this journal,” I said, opening the front flap and reading the name inscribed. “It’s Vera’s.”
“Why is Edie giving us Vera’s private journal?”
“I don’t know.” I paged through, scanning the words. The journal was handwritten in flowy cursive and hard to understand in a hurry.
“Tara!” my mother’s voice came from downstairs. “You need to get moving!”
“She’s right, we should go,” I said. “We can look at this later.”
I closed the journal and stuffed it into my bag. Wes did the same with the phones and replaced the panel and drawer.
My mother was waiting for us downstairs. She looked impatient more than anything else. Again, it surprised me how well she was holding up under the stress. “Fee called. They’re loading up and said to meet in the lot behind the house. Do you know what she means?”
Wes nodded. “There’s a side road I can take. It’s pretty overgrown but I can make it work.”
“Take my car. Fee will meet you there with a bag of clothes for Wes. You guys need to get over there and get out. Be fast.”
“We’re going,” I said.
“Do you have everything you need?”
I nodded.
“Cell phones.” She held her hand out to both of us and we handed them over. She gave me a tight hug and a hard kiss. “I would say call me when you get there, but you can’t. No news is good news, I guess.”
“Grandma gave us a satellite phone, Mom. I’ll call when we get there.”
She ran a hand across her forehead. “Of course she did. My mother thinks of everything. All right, go. Quickly.”
She ushered us out the door and shut it behind us. Before we made it to the car, the lights in the living room went out. Then the kitchen. It was eerie, seeing the darkened house and knowing my mother was in there. It felt wrong to leave.
“Tara, we have to go,” Wes said. I looked up and met his eyes over the hood of the car. We both stood with our doors open and our feet still in the driveway.
“Yeah.” With effort, I made myself get in.
In the silence, I found Wes’s hand and promised myself I would see my mother shoot her speargun. Hopefully, at someone other than my boyfriend.
Chapter Seven
True to my mother’s word, Jack’s pickup was packed and loaded with bags when we pulled off the road into the grass. A large, white tarp had been spread over the bed, making the pile underneath look like a misshapen cotton ball. Jack and Derek were busy tying it all down with rope. They looked up as Wes and I walked over, their expressions matching in concentration and concern.
“Did Angela get home okay?” Jack asked.
“Yes. She’s going to look in on Vera for us,” I said.
The lines around his mouth softened a little. “She’s a good girl.”
Fee came around the side of the truck, followed by Cord. Fee had a bag strapped to her back using a peculiar-looking belt to hold it in place. In each of her hands, she carried another bag identical to her own. She held one out to Jack and the other to Derek as they each dismounted the truck bed.
“Tara, you made it,” Fee said, clearly relieved.
“No problems?” Cord asked.
“None,” said Wes.
I didn’t miss the wistfulness in Cord’s eyes as she asked—or the disappointment at Wes’s negative answer. “They’re out there,” she said.
“We need to get going,” Fee agreed. She stepped forward to help Jack tighten the belt on his bag.
My brow furrowed as Derek began strapping his on the same way the others had. “I thought all the bags were in the truck,” I said.
“Cambria and Cord are taking the truck,” Fee explained. “Jack, Derek, and I will meet them there.”
“The three of you are running from here to Lexington Manor?” I asked.
“It’s Maryland,” Cord said.
“It’s really not a problem,” Fee added.
“Is it because of the luggage?” I asked, gesturing toward the truck. “You’re welcome to take my car if you need more space.”
Derek grinned. “That’s not exactly luggage. We cleaned out the weapons room.”
I eyed the boxes and bags underneath the tarp. Now that he pointed it out, I recognized the storage containers that’d lined the shelves in Jack’s back room. Those boxes held stakes of all material and size. Some fit into crossbows and some were handheld. What boxes didn’t contain stakes held an array of knives, swords, and axes. I knew from the many times I’d attempted to organize it all, Jack loved his weapons. He had enough to supply a small army.
“You’re taking everything?” I asked, gaping at the load.
“We don’t want Steppe getting his hands on it, that’s for damn sure,” Derek said.
And then I realized as I looked at their faces—none of them expected to come back here. The thought brought a lump to my throat.
“When Steppe comes looking, you can bet he’ll have trackers,” Wes explained in a gentle voice that filled the silence I left. “We want to make it as hard as possible on them. So we’re going to leave multiple trails out of here.”
“When was that decided?” I asked. I didn’t remember this as part of the plan discussed at Grandma’s.
“Long before today,” Fee said.
“We’ve always had an exit plan,” Cord added.
“You have?”
Cord snorted. “Uh. Yeah. We’ve been doing this a lot longer than you. We’re prepared.”
Jack cut a look in Cord’s direction. “We’ve had an exit plan but we’ve never had to use it. Mostly, it consists of confusing whatever trail we leave so that we’re harder to track. We know what we’re up against.”
Trackers. He meant Kane. Strike teams. Hunters.
I frowned at Wes. “So then we shouldn’t take your car. Or my mom’s.”
“We’re not,” he said.
“We’re running too?” The thought of shifting, of stretching my legs and running with the pack—at the head of them—made my muscles strain in anticipation.
“You’ll have to be careful about your route,” Jack said. “A pack that large will be easy to track.”
“I thought about that,” Wes said, “and I may have found a way around it.”
“How’s that?” Jack asked.
He hesitated. “I … procured a tour bus.”
My eyes narrowed. “And by ‘procured’ you mean …?”
“Benny stole it.”
“Benny,” I muttered. “Why am I not surprised?”
“Don’t worry. He won’t remember a thing,” Wes said.
Derek chuckled and shook his head.
“When did you have time to make that happen?” I asked.
Wes and Cord shared a look.
“We may have been planning ahead for contingencies,” she said cryptically. She shot a pointed look at Jack. “Lik
e I said, we’ve always had an exit plan.”
“You knew we’d have to run?” I asked, looking back and forth between them.
“Not necessarily from this,” Wes said.
“But we knew being able to leave quickly and without a trail would be beneficial,” Cord finished. “Especially once you started doing your wolfy thing … and inherited a pack that had an appetite for human guts.”
I stared at her, feeling somehow as if I was seeing her for the first time. “You helped Wes plan an escape for the hybrids?”
She shrugged like it was no big deal, but I knew better. Cord helping the same group that had killed Bailey was a huge deal. Cord helping me was a huge deal. “I didn’t do it for them,” she said.
Our eyes met and held. I felt a rush of something I’d never experienced when I thought of Cord. Gratitude. Something had changed between us during our time in the woods, but this was almost like friendship. And judging from the way she was staring back at me, she felt it too. I knew better than to push it, though, so I merely nodded at her and said, “Thanks, Cord.”
“Whatever. I owed you one,” she said quickly.
Awkward silence followed. Apparently, no one else knew what to do with Cord and I making nice, either.
Wes cleared his throat. “Where’s Cambria?” he asked.
I looked around and realized my best friend with hair the color of a summer sky was indeed missing.
“She went to say goodbye to George,” Derek said. At Wes’s glare he added, “Stop looking at me like that, dude. Chris went with her.”
“That’ll do it,” Jack said, giving the rope one final yank before stepping away from the truck. He wrapped an arm around Fee and kissed her cheek. “Ready?”
“As I’ll ever be,” she said.
As one, they turned to face the house, the roof visible through the trees that lined the yard, regarding it solemnly.
“We’ll be back,” he said into her ear, so low I barely caught it. My chest tightened. I felt like an intruder, watching this moment between them.
A warm hand slipped into mine. I looked up at Wes, attempting a smile. It wasn’t full but I knew he needed to see I wasn’t going to fall apart.
“We’ll be back,” he whispered, echoing Jack’s words.
“I know. I’m not worried.”
Blood Rule (Book 4, Dirty Blood series) Page 10