by Penny Alley
“You crazy son of a bitch!” Seth bellowed, jumping out of his car to meet Gabe in the glow of his headlights. “What the hell are you trying to—”
Gabe punched him, knocking him sprawling across his own hood. “Where is he? What did you do?” Grabbing Seth’s shirt, he yanked the youngest McQueen up, his fist drawn and ready to deliver another blow. “Did you make a deal with Deacon? Trust a fucking McQueen!”
“What are you doing?” Maya screamed. He’d never seen her look as frightened as she did when he threw Seth from the car to the road. She flattened herself to the passenger side door when Gabe yanked the driver’s door open. Without bothering to reassure her, he ducked in far enough to pop the trunk.
Shaking his head to clear it, Seth staggered to his feet. He grabbed, but Gabe swallowed the temptation to hit him again and walked past him. The trunk hinges squealed when he yanked it open. Apart from a spare tire, jack and a few empty soda cans, the trunk was empty. He got right down into the carpet fibers, but there was no hint of Scotty’s scent. Not anywhere.
“Find what you were looking for?” Seth growled, holding his jaw as he came around the back of the car. He stopped well out of Gabe’s easy reach. The whole car rocked when Maya scrambled out of it. Gabe shoved past them both to check the backseat again, but his nose confirmed what his eyes and his head already knew. She wasn’t in Seth’s car, and she never had been. So while his brain kept arguing all the ways in which he could have waited for Gabe to go into the shop before swiping Scotty, gut instinct knew there was simply no way in which he could have taken Neoma.
That left Deacon, but how could he have done it? That she’d been taken out through the bathroom window was obvious. Gabe would have seen them coming out the front, and going through the back would have set off the alarm. More than that, however, Gabe had been all the way around the building. He’d been everywhere, and never once caught whiff of an unfamiliar scent.
For the second time that night, Gabe felt the brittle cut of glass filling up his gut. It must have shown on his face.
“What’s wrong?” Maya asked. “What’s happened?” She put herself in between Gabe and Seth, one hand thrown up to ward away another punch, were Gabe inclined to throw one. He didn’t, he only stared at her.
This is definitely the place to come on a Thursday night, she’d told him back at the ice cream shop. We just ran into Marcus in the parking lot.
Marcus.
Marcus had taken Neoma and Scotty.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
There were three vehicles—Colton’s official Fish and Game truck, the mustang (still jacked up off the ground) and a black four-wheel drive Subaru that struck Gabe as familiar and yet he was so rattled he didn’t immediately recognize as whose—in the office parking lot when Gabe careened into it. Sheer reflex helped him avoid the first major pothole, but he hit the second dead on, his jeep bouncing so high and hard that the undercarriage scraped the gravel. He skidded wildly when he hit the brakes and managed to stop without running into the building, but only because of the parking curb.
“He took the old squad car,” Colton said, exiting the office as Gabe jumped out of the jeep.
Shuffling through an armful of maps, Colton dropped all but the one he spread out over Gabe’s hood. The outside lights along the building weren’t quite bright enough to see by, but both Gabe’s and Colton’s flashlights fixed that. Gabe’s light shook. That was how he realized so was the rest of him.
“He’s got a thirty mile lead on us,” Colton said, one finger tracing the black line of an old mountain highway. “He didn’t bother disabling the tracking system, so we know exactly where he’s heading.”
“Scullamy,” Gabe grimly guessed, staring at the only obvious destination before Colton’s traveling finger landed on it.
“The truck’s fueled and ready to go. Gabe…” Colton waited until Gabe glanced up from the old road map and their dark eyes met. “Hollow Hills cannot survive an open war with Scullamy. They outnumbered us thirty-to-one more than ten years ago. He’s got easily twice that many soldiers now.” His jaw clenched, a precursor Gabe recognized to issuing an order they both knew he wasn’t going to like. “I won’t take us to war. Not for Neoma. Not for Karly. Not for anyone. If we do this, we do it the old way: Dirty—we send one man; he’s in and out and gone before they know he was ever there.”
“Me,” Gabe said, but Colton was already shaking his head.
“I’ll go.”
“Like hell,” Gabe countered. The whole drive down the mountain from the ice cream parlor back to here, that impossibly long twelve mile stretch filled with nothing but black forest shadows and hairpin curves, his own unending what-ifs, all the things he could have—should have—done differently to prevent Neoma and Scotty from being taken and that savage guilty animal clawing its way through his guts, the need to act…it all exploded out of him. He only thought he was shaking before. It was nothing compared to what ravaged him now, turning his legs to rubber and his hands to fists. “If you think for one second I’m going to stay here, guarding the fucking phones until you get back—if you get back—you can think again. My Bride, my boy—”
“My call,” Colton returned, meeting Gabe’s challenge without backing down. His sympathetic tone lowered, but the lupine amber of his eyes flashed warning. “If we do this, we have to do it quiet, and right now, I don’t think you’re capable of that. In fact, I know you’re not.”
“Like any one-man crew could get in and out of Scullamy alive.” Rifle slung over one shoulder, Sebastian McQueen stepped out of the office into the parking lot, flanked by both his younger brothers, Ian and Angus. They were a formidable threesome, a walking, talking hillybilly cliché from the stains of engine grease that made up their livelihoods, to the firearms that had built their reputations, holstered at their hips and held in their hands.
Gabe snapped up off the hood of his jeep. “Who the hell called you?”
“Seth,” Ian said, a toothy grin splitting his bush of a beard.
“Why the hell they’re here is a somewhat cloudier issue,” Colton muttered, no happier about their presence than Gabe was.
“Deacon almost killed your father,” Gabe accused.
“He tried,” Sebastian acknowledged, coming down off the curb to better see the map. “Cancer got him first.”
“Why should I believe you care what happens to Neoma?”
“I don’t care half a piss about your Neoma,” Sebastian bluntly said. “That they came into my home to steal the Bride and pup of a pack brother—even such a pack brother as you—now that I do care about.”
The off-yellow glow of headlights bathed them all as Seth arrived, making the turn into the parking lot at a much safer speed than Gabe had. Parking next to the jeep, he left his headlights on for added illumination before jumping out.
“What’s the plan?” he asked, joining his brother and craning his head to look at the map.
“Five of us are going to Scullamy,” Sebastian told him, holding Gabe’s steady glare.
Pulling a quick head count, Seth looked from his brothers to Colton and Gabe. “Who stays behind?”
“You are,” the eldest McQueen said evenly.
Seth paused in the midst of passing Maya his car keys. “Like hell I am.”
“If we don’t come back, Hollow Hills will need a new alpha, and you’re it.”
Grabbing the map off the jeep, Colton turned on them both. A rabid pulse of muscle leapt the length of his hard jaw. “Excuse me?” he said, deceptively calm.
“You know someone better qualified?” Sebastian returned without backing down. “Forget that he’s a McQueen and you’re an idiot. He’s stable, intelligent, a son of the previous alpha, and he’s already got a Bride. If she doesn’t already have a pup growing inside her, I’ll be seriously surprised. They’ve been going at it non-stop ever since he brought her home. People will follow him.”
Frowning, Seth glanced first at Gabe and then Maya, who blushed bright r
ed in the glow of the headlamps.
“You’re not exactly quiet,” Sebastian drawled.
“Definitely not.” Ian chuckled, and even notoriously silent Angus smirked in agreement.
“I can’t wait for you to build your own place so I can get some damn sleep.”
“Amen,” Ian rumbled, balancing his rifle across his burly shoulders. He grinned at Seth, that toothy amusement barely glimpsed through the bush of his dark beard.
Back stiff, Gabe looked to Colton, who scowled at each brother in turn, glaring at Sebastian the longest before, reluctantly, he said, “If we’re not back by tomorrow night, you’ll have less than twenty-four hours to get everyone out of Hollow Hills before Deacon sweeps in to finish the job. And I do mean everyone. If you can’t handle that, you’d better say so now.”
Cursing under his breath, Seth turned away. Hands on his hips, he glared across the parking lot toward the dim and sleepy lights of town, barely glimpsed through the curtain of trees that surrounded them. He shook his head, twice, then looked at Maya again. She was shaking her head too, hugging his car keys against her heart. “Fine,” he said, resigned.
“I want your word,” Colton said, shoving past Sebastian to close the distance between them. “You take everyone with you, chevolak and volka. No one is left behind to be slaughtered.”
Seth glared at his older brothers. “Right.”
“That includes Karly.”
Seth rolled his eyes, “Right,” he said again.
Colton came all the way around the jeep then, and likely would have grabbed his arm had Sebastian not caught hold of Colton first. “That includes Karly,” he said again, tight-lipped. “You take care of her until the day you die. I want your word.”
“I said I will,” Seth snapped.
“And my pup.”
Drawing a deep breath, though clenched teeth Seth said, “I will do all I can to safeguard your silly chevolak and any pup that births from her, if you even have one, I give my word.” Almost as an afterthought, he threw up a hand and gestured. “Scout’s honor.”
“Boyscouts use three fingers,” Gabe noted stiffly.
“You only deserve one.”
Unclipping his keys from his belt, Colton handed them to Seth. “We’ll take two cars and leave your guns behind. We won’t be using them.”
“Oh, that’s cute,” Sebastian grinned. “Of course we’re going to be using guns.” His brothers fell in with him, all of them heading for their vehicle. “But don’t worry. We promise not to shoot your Bride without cause.”
“Deals with the devil,” Colton muttered, glaring after them. He looked at Gabe and the harshness of his expression flickered, then softened. Laying his hand on Gabe’s shoulder, he offered a reassuring squeeze. “We’ll bring them back, I promise.”
Gabe didn’t answer. He already knew what that promise was worth.
* * * * *
Neoma lay on her side in the dark confines of a trunk that smelled like old oil cloths, gasoline and tires. Unable to move, but awake and terrifyingly aware of every swaying turn the car made as it stole them away, her face rocked in and out of the folds of Scotty’s kicked off clothes. Every bump in the road reverberated through her, amplifying her fear. Every tilt rolled her limp body into the shivering puppy her son had become just as fast as he’d come out of the same immobilized condition she remained trapped in. That he was in this mess with her was both a comfort and a horror. At least he hadn’t been given as large a dose as whatever Marcus had injected into the side of her neck when he’d grabbed her the moment she’d entered the bathroom.
Where were they? The car had ceased its climbing, but she knew they must still be in the mountains. They were in a winding grade of descent now, the consistency of it broken up by brief periods where the car leveled out before tilting downward again. The darkness in the trunk was absolute. She had no way to see out, but she didn’t need to to know where he was taking them.
Huddled in the hollow of her neck and shoulder, Scotty shivered. He made no sound, but each time the car rolled her paralyzed body away from him into the back of the trunk, he followed her, inching to get close again and nudging at her face with the cool of his tiny nose. When he licked at her chin for comfort, she ached to put her arms around him. No matter how hard she tried though, she couldn’t move. Not so much as a finger, or to blink her dry and burning eyes. Her heart felt sluggish, laboring for each too-slow beat. Her heavy chest periodically forgot she should be breathing, remembering again only when her ears rang and her vision dimmed, producing flashes of suffocating light that illuminated nothing but the possibility that she might die like this, with her son helpless to do anything but witness her passing.
She fought to drag air into her uncooperative lungs. She didn’t want to die in the trunk of a car. She didn’t want to die in Scullamy, either. And she refused to allow her son to die there. Not after all she’d done to get them both out.
Her ears kept popping, confirming the change in altitude even after the car levelled out and stayed level for what felt like miles. How far was it from Scullamy to the mountain? She wasn’t sure, but she knew it wasn’t far enough. Eventually the car slowed. She felt the bump and jostle as it pulled onto the unpaved shoulder and parked. Knowing what was coming, she wished then that they could have continued on for miles longer. Then the engine died, and the loss of vibration and sound made the sudden stillness even more suffocating.
The car rocked to the jolt of a door slamming. Footsteps crunched through the gravel, coming back to the trunk. Curled against her, Scotty’s small body stiffened. He trembled, his fur bristling as he shifted, alternately licking at her and trying to orient himself with the voices just outside.
“Your business, Scruffer?” a man asked.
“My business is with your Alpha,” Marcus replied. “Call him.”
Someone laughed. “At this time of night? Why should he want to see you?”
“He doesn’t. But he does want to see this.” A key slipped into the trunk’s lock, popping it, and with a bounce and a squeal, the lid raised up. Bright LED flashlight beams fell on her, hurting her unblinking eyes, and eliciting a puppy rumble of warning from Scotty. Marcus stepped back, allowing the two sentries to get a better look at her. “Tell him, I’ve brought his wayward daughter home again.”
The light hurt her eyes, but she couldn’t close them any more than she could turn her head. She had no idea which of Deacon’s loyal soldiers stood over her. Her lungs froze again and her head pulsed, reducing her vision to a darkening tunnel despite the franticness with which she fought it back. Trembling, Scotty backed against her shoulder, becoming a smaller bundle even as his growl increased in both volume and ominous intent.
“Is she dead?” Shifting the flashlight to his other hand, the nearest soldier reached in to touch her, only to snatch quickly back again, avoiding the protective snap of Scotty’s needle-sharp teeth. Marcus caught his arm when the sentry slapped back, knocking her pup sprawling.
“Did I say I was bringing them to you?” Marcus growled, shoving the man back a step. “No, they belong to Deacon. He decides when and who to hit.”
The sentry tried to pull his hand out of Marcus’s, but Marcus held on until the message sank in. When he finally did release, both guards backed from the trunk. They looked from Neoma and Scotty, to Marcus, and then the nearest pulled a cellphone from his coat pocket before he and his companion retreated to confer.
Bracing his hands on the open mouth of the trunk, Marcus bowed his head. His jaw clenched again and again while a brief call was made. “You’re not helping matters,” he told Scotty. Fishing a bottle of Visine from his pocket, he then dripped several cooling drops into her eyes, easing the burn until Scotty worked up his nerve to snap at his hand too.
“I said enough.” Tapping him on the star of paler fur that crowned his forehead, Marcus sent Scotty scrambling back to huddle against her breasts, trembling but still growling. “Save that for your grandfather. He’s
the one you have to beware of.”
If she could have moved, Neoma would have given him more to fear than her son’s tiny milk teeth. Marcus seemed to know it too. Putting the Visine away again, he paused to brush her hair back from her face.
“I’m sorry about this.” His voice dropped, becoming the softest whisper. “I know you’ve no reason to believe me, and maybe it doesn’t matter anyway. But this is the only thing I could think of.” His eyes lit, the amber of volka aggression refusing to stay hidden as he caressed her forehead. “Just get me close enough to kill the son of a bitch, Neoma. I promise I’ll do everything I can to get you and your son safely back out of here again.”
Footsteps crunched through the gravel toward them.
“Deacon’s on his way,” one soldier informed him as he slipped his cellphone into his coat.
Taking his hand from her hair, Marcus stepped away from the trunk. Careful to keep himself between her and the sentries, he sat on the bumper, arms folded across his chest to wait.
The sentries peered at her again. The farthest one pant-laughed, his eyes narrowing as he studied her. “She’s not tied or anything. What’d you give her?”
“Muscle relaxant,” Marcus said. “Hospital grade. It’ll wear off eventually.”
Both men crept closer.
“How long before she comes out of it?”
“No idea.” Shifting irritably, Marcus watched the road. “The boy wasn’t out for more than an hour, but I gave her a larger dose.”
They looked at one another again. “Got any more of that stuff?”
“If what you’re really asking is am I going to give you any, the answer to that is: Over my rotting corpse.”
The two men sized him over, probably weighing the likelihood of their ability to take him and seeming to reach the same conclusion when both eased back a step, vanishing from Neoma’s limited range of sight. Silence broken only by the chirp of summer crickets and hunting owls took over, and the waiting began. The stiff set of Marcus’s back illuminated by flashlight was all Neoma could see. All she could feel was Scotty’s trembling, the gradual steadying of her sluggish heart struggling its way back to normal, and her growing anger at her own insurmountable uselessness.