Wolf Queen

by Alexis Pierce

“You should get some sleep,” Anderson says, stilling my hands that are still moving over the fully-packed duffel. I sigh, but my mind is running so fast that I don’t know how I could possibly get a wink of sleep.

  “You should get some sleep,” I reply, my voice a little too harsh for the joke I was trying to make it. Why does everything I say come out so mean?

  He presses his lips to my throat, holding me even tighter and pressing my hands up against my chest.

  “If you don’t sleep, I’ll lock you up so you can’t go. You’re no good to us exhausted, you know.” The rumble of his voice sends a pang through me, straight to my core. I soften against him, and my breath picks up as I imagine him trying to tie me down. He shakes his head, his lips soft against my skin. “Sleep, Eve.”

  He pulls away from me, and I want to cry out at the separation, but I keep control over myself. For some reason, I don’t want my mates to know how much I really depend on them.

  He lies down on our bed, holding his arms out. I crawl in beside him, burying myself in his bear hug. I sigh as my body loosens. I hadn’t realized how sore I was until just now, but sleep deprivation will do that.

  “I can still hear the gears moving in your brain,” Anderson says, pressing a kiss on top of my curly black hair. He pulls the ponytail out before running his fingers through.

  “It’s gonna get frizzy if you do that,” I complain, my voice already groggy. I haven’t slept properly for a couple of nights with all the fourth celebrations and meetings.

  He stops brushing my hair, instead using his fingertips to massage my scalp. If I were some sort of big cat shifter, I might purr at how good it feels.

  Instead, I drift into a dreamless sleep.

  It feels like I’ve just drifted off when my alarm goes off at three. I blearily reach for the phone, but someone else turns it off before I do. When I sit up, Thompson is standing over the bed, the bags under his eyes dark with exhaustion.

  “Did you sleep?” I croak, my body screaming in protest as I sit up.

  He simply shakes his head and tosses the duffel bag over his shoulder. Coffee is ready in the kitchen, and we leave our phones on the kitchen counter. Best to avoid anything that could track us on the road.

  It isn’t long before we’ve got fake plates on the Cadillac, and Thompson quickly passes out in the back seat. Anderson lists off the hand-written directions he came up with from following different roads on his phone’s map app. At around six, we stop for breakfast, just paying cash for fast food at a drive-through. Anderson fills up the tank, and I move to the passenger side in an attempt to sleep for a bit longer.

  Anderson shakes my shoulder to wake me, and the sun is high in the sky when we arrive at the GPS coordinates. It’s just an unassuming barn in Tennessee, nothing too special. A barbed-wire fence flanks the sides of the old red gate, and I get out to open it, my eyes darting in search of any possible traps and finding nothing.

  Anderson drives past the gate, and I hurry and shut it before getting back in the vehicle.

  “Park around the back,” I say. “I don’t want anyone to see us from the road.”

  It’s a ridiculous thought, though. The road is basically deserted, and it doesn’t seem like anyone has been out this way in days.

  When we get parked, my shoulders tense. The barn is old and made of sheet metal, some of the red paint peeling. What could possibly be out here that we could want?

  “Maybe we should come back at night,” Anderson says, and I roll my eyes.

  “Everyone expects crime to happen at night. If we’re in and out during the day, nobody will be the wiser by the time evening comes around.”

  I cover my face in one of the ski masks I brought, although I probably should have done it before we approached the building. I am probably the worst criminal ever.

  “What exactly are we looking for?” Thompson asks, leaning forward and already wearing his ski mask.

  I frown. “Anything we can sell.”

  I open the door, jumping out as he mutters a sarcastic, “Great.” There’s a chain with a lock over the door, and I clip it immediately with the pair of bolt cutters I’d been smart enough to bring.

  Anderson drags the sliding barn door open, and it screeches as he pulls. Nobody has been here in a while, then.

  We rush in, listening for any sign of movement, but there’s just…nothing. I expected a little resistance, maybe a fight, but the barn is empty.

  We walk around, but the only things on the metal shelves are old gas cans and random toolboxes. Frustration builds in my chest so heavily that I want to scream. Did we come all the way out here for nothing?

  Metal screeches against concrete, and I spin around, ready to fight, but instead find Anderson dragging a shelf out of the way.

  “What the fuck?” I hiss, but he points down at the ground with his cheap flashlight. There, once hidden by the shelf, is a hidden trap door.

  Well. This just got a lot more interesting.

  Chapter Eight

  Thompson

  The stench is the first thing we all notice, and we have to brace ourselves against it before climbing down the concrete steps into the cooler underground space. One of us should probably be keeping watch, but I can’t stand the idea of not knowing where the other two are going or what they’re doing.

  The steps land in a smallish room, the darkness oppressive as it bears in from all sides. Anderson swipes his flashlight through the room, but a scuffle in the corner stops us all in our tracks.

  When he turns the flashlight that direction, nausea tugs at my stomach, and I have to tell myself that I’m not allowed to throw up. There, curled up in the corner with wide eyes and rancid clothes, is a young child who smells of wolf. The child snarls at us, their hair shaved off and form too ambiguous to even guess at a gender.

  Serenity immediately falls into a non-threatening crouch. “It’s okay,” she whispers, and the child cringes, pulling themselves further into the corner of the room. “We’re here to help you.”

  Our eyes are all trained on the kid, and I realize that the clothing is far too large. With another glance around the room, my eyes shifting into my wolf eyes so I can see better, I spot a crumpled form on the ground. That’s where the rotting smell is coming from. Even from here, it’s clearly a dead human, old blood spattered against a door that’s nearly flush against the wall.

  Anderson walks up to the child slowly, his eyes kind and evaluating as the child watches him.

  “Do you understand English?” he asks. After a while, the child gives a curt nod. “What’s your name?”

  The child opens their mouth, but their voice is the barest husk, “Anna.” She shivers as Anderson moves closer.

  “We’re gonna get you out of here,” Anderson says. “We’re gonna help you find your parents.”

  Anna shakes her head, her arms tightening around her as tears dribble down her face, creating tracks in the dust. “You can’t.”

  He holds his palms out to look as non-threatening as possible. “We can. You’re gonna be safe.”

  She looks back up to him, setting her jaw. “They’re dead.”

  Well, shit.

  Anderson pauses, then kneels on the ground. “We’ll get you somewhere safe anyway. I promise you’re gonna be okay.”

  I approach the door beside the dead body, but the girl doesn’t look at me. When I try the handle, it’s locked, but the rotting body that’s filled with puss and flies has a keychain at the waist. I remove it carefully, unwilling to touch the meat that was once human. The first four keys do nothing, but then, with a click, the fifth one unlocks the door.

  What I find inside is somehow more shocking than anything we saw in here.

  “Eve,” I say, and she moves toward me, her eyes still focused on the little girl.

  When she drags her focus away, though, her jaw drops.

  “Fuck,” she says.

  Eve

  To keep the building, we need to come up with fifty thousand dollar
s. This room, though, in the basement of this unassuming barn in fuck-all nowhere, could set us up far better than that.

  Honestly, it’s like a crappy movie. I flick a switch by the door, and lines and lines of wooden shelves are covered in random items, each one with a label on the shelf below it. Glittering jewels, ancient vases, paintings, carvings, you name it. If it’s art, it’s here. How would we even deal with all this? With the labels, it’s clearly been tracked in some way. Suddenly, this all seems like too much. I must still be asleep back at the compound. There’s no way this is real.

  When Thompson steps forward, though, he pulls a necklace off the shelf. “English, thirteenth century,” he says, reading the label. “I don’t even know what something like this could be worth.”

  I open my mouth, but when words don’t come out, I have to clear my throat. “Grab anything that seems valuable. Fold down the back seats in the SUV if you have to.” My voice is dry yet commanding. “We’ll have to find a way to sell it.”

  We fill crates off to the side with boxes upon boxes of artifacts. There’s no way this whole room will fit into the car, but I’ll take anything we can get. When I get to a shelf that’s all Native American artifacts, though, I hesitate. Every piece here could be sacred to someone. Wouldn’t it be wrong to sell it?

  I put it all in boxes, ensuring that every label stays with its item. When Thompson walks in from his third trip to the SUV, I hand him one of the two boxes. “These have to go with,” I say. “No exceptions.”

  He glances inside. “This stuff won’t sell as high as the rest,” he says hesitantly.

  I shake my head. “We’re not selling it, but it would be wrong to leave it.”

  Anderson somehow managed to coax Anna into the SUV, wrapping her in a blanket that Thompson brought with us. She sits in the middle row of seats, clutching a water bottle and looking more than a little shell-shocked.

  “Are you guys criminals?” she asks when I finally clamber into the driver’s seat. I glance at Thompson, who’s also up front while Anderson takes care of her in the back.

  “Sort of,” I say. “Not like the ones who took you, though.”

  I guess I’m sort of a murderer, but she doesn’t have to know that. I put the SUV in gear, and Thompson hops out to let us out of the gate. “We just need money, but we aren’t gonna hurt anyone to do it.”

  Not yet, anyway. I’m not quite that desperate, after all.

  Chapter Nine

  Eve

  The nearest gas station is a truck stop with showers, so I go ahead and spend fifteen bucks to take Anna in. I sit on the closed toilet around the corner so she can shower without fear, and the soap I bought her was eight whole dollars.

  “How old are you?” I ask loud enough to be heard, afraid to get the answer.

  After a long pause, she says, “My birthday is June fifteenth. Has that passed?”

  I swallow my disgust and rage. “Yeah,” I say, my voice more distant than I’d like it to be.

  “Twelve, then,” she replies, her tone just as distant.

  On the sink right next to the shower, there’s a graphic t-shirt with TENNESSEE written across the front in big, bold letters in front of a mountain range, as well as a pair of my leggings that will be far too large for this tiny creature. The fact that she’s even speaking is a shock. Many of the kids Kenneth kept in cages still aren’t speaking, and she seems to have been far worse off. How long was she trapped in that hole in the ground?

  I don’t ask. Instead, I say, “Anderson, the super buff guy, is getting us McDonald’s. I hope that’s alright.” I try to keep my tone light and airy, but I wasn’t made for this sort of thing. Freya is much better with kids. I wish she’d joined us, although I understand why she couldn’t.

  “It’s fine,” she says.

  The shower continues to run for ages, but there doesn’t seem to be a time limit on these things. If it helps her in some way, I don’t mind waiting. When we went to the compound, I was expecting a fight, maybe some of Taranis’s men or other looters. I wasn’t expecting a child.

  My phone buzzes once against my thigh. “Thompson asked if you want some sunglasses.”

  It seems lame, not nearly enough to help Anna with the horrors she’s faced, but she seemed blinded when we took her out into the sun just an hour ago.

  She doesn’t respond, but I text him back a Yes, please, anyway.

  By the time we meet back out in the car, Anna looks like a whole new person. We’ve been giving her water in increments, and her color has sort of come back. Anderson has a bag of cheap burgers, and he gives her one to start so that she doesn’t make herself sick from eating too much. Even with baggy clothes on, her ribs protrude, and her stomach is swollen from dehydration and possibly intestinal parasites. Her cheekbones are hollow, and she doesn’t smile when she gets the food.

  If she had to watch her parents die, then I understand her perfectly. It was months before I spoke again after my father’s death, and three years before I smiled.

  “We’re going to St. Louis,” I say while I pull onto the highway. “Do you know where that is?”

  She shakes her head, her mouth still full of burger. Something about the set of her jaw tells me that she’s lying.

  “It’s in Missouri,” I explain, and she nods before looking out the window. Her shoulders are set in a tense way, like she’s ready to bolt. “There are lots of kids your age there. Some who’ve been through similar stuff as you.”

  That doesn’t seem to make her feel better, so I shut my mouth and drive. There’s little I could say to help her right now, though.

  It’s well into the evening by the time we reach the city. It’s nearly impossible to believe we’ve only been out for the day, that the pack hasn’t even had a full three meals since we left. Freya is waiting in the parking garage, a wiggly Poppy in her arms.

  As soon as I open the door, Poppy squeezes her way out, running toward me and wrapping her arms around one of my legs. My heart swells, but there’s more I have to do. There’s always more.

  Freya opens the door for Anna. One of the guys must have texted her, because she coaxes the girl out and speaks gently to her. Poppy watches with wide eyes.

  When Anna glances over, her eyes widen in shock.

  “Poppy?” she asks, her voice trembling and filled with emotion.

  The toddler at my leg takes a step toward her, then another.

  “Ann-Ann?” she questions, her voice high and uncertain.

  These two know each other? As far as any of us were aware, the pups in the basement were in wolf form the whole time and wouldn’t have had a way to communicate their names.

  Anna runs up and falls to her knees, crushing the younger girl to her chest with huge, ripping sobs that shake her whole body.

  Even when she stands, she holds her tight, fat tears dropping from her cheeks to the pavement of the parking garage. Then, she looks up at me. “My baby sister. You kept her safe.”

  This definitely complicates things.

  Freya

  I was vaguely aware that Poppy had a sibling, only based on her mother’s bitter words.

  “Are you taking both of them?” She’d been unable to focus on Freya’s face, her voice rough and filled with confusion. I had no idea that Kenneth had taken both siblings. I’d always assumed that one had run away and Kenneth had stolen Poppy from the playground or something.

  I give up my bed to Anna and Poppy, waiting on the couch in case Anna wakes up or has a nightmare. Eve sits with me, her features drawn.

  “She said her parents were dead,” Eve whispers, leaning her head on my shoulder. When I glance down, her eyes flutter shut. She’ll probably be asleep soon.

  “It was bad,” I say. “I think there may have been more going on than we know.”

  Eve wraps her arms around herself, and I pull the throw blanket off the back of the couch and wrap it around her shoulders.

  “She’s so small for a twelve-year-old,” Eve says after a long
silence. I thought she was asleep already.

  I nod. “She’s had a hard life.”

  “Are you going to adopt her, too?” Eve asks, her hand resting on my thigh as her body relaxes.

  I shrug. “If she wants me to, I will.”

  I’m not even certain a twenty-seven-year-old can adopt a twelve-year-old child, but it’ll be worth looking into. I’ll do everything I can to avoid separating the sisters.

  Eve hasn’t mentioned whether or not they found anything worth selling, and I don’t ask. If she did, she’ll tell me. If she didn’t, I don’t want to rub salt in the wound. At least they found Anna. If nothing else, a child is safe because of them. That’s worth more than anything else they could’ve brought back.

  Chapter Ten

  Eve

  When I wake up on Freya’s couch with the sun streaming through the window, I sit bolt upright. My hair is a disaster, and I think I may have drooled on Freya’s neck—thank god she’s not awake yet—but that’s not the worst part.

  I slept through the night. I should have been working, but instead, I passed out without so much as stirring.

  Fuck.

  I leap off the couch and sneak away as quietly as I can. Everyone else is still asleep, and I rush down to my office. At least I didn’t have any meetings overnight, but I still have so much to do. There’s a whole van-load of stolen items in a random storage room in the basement, and I have a very hazy idea of how to fence them.

  I take Dad’s planner down to the basement, sitting in the middle of a bunch of boxes while I search through his contacts.

  Half the numbers are disconnected, and most of the rest now belong to someone else. Only three seem even a little promising, and I had to leave a message because nobody in this business answers their phone at seven in the morning.

  When the final inbox beeps, I say, “Hi, this is Eve, Richard’s daughter. I have some antiques you might be interested in, if you could give me a call back.”

  How awful does that sound? Will they even know who I am with only our first names? Will they bother calling back? My voice was too high and cheery on the phone as I did my best customer service tone, but was that the wrong move?