At ten, Gunner stripped off his shirt and went out back. He took a few deep breaths and jogged out into the woods and shifted, the wolf humming in satisfaction as he trotted and flexed.
He still felt like somebody was watching him but he couldn’t smell anyone, or at least not a shifter. He smelled a couple humans out and about but he didn’t expect a human threat.
He ran faster, as if he could outrun his own fears and anxieties. He tried to outrun his heartbreak and failed but it still felt good to push himself. He hadn’t pushed the wolf in too long unless he counted the fight. He couldn’t remember ever in his life feeling the kind of rage he’d felt when he’d seen Meg about to be attacked.
Gunner ran through a creek and his wet paws were cold now as he raced through the mud and grass. The weather had been so strange lately; rainy one day and too warm the next. He missed the reliable chilly days of too much fog rolling in.
He found himself sniffing for Megan as he ran and hunted for rabbit. He had no reason to think she’d be out here, only that he’d seen her there twice now. He wished for some magical moment to happen. She would be out here alone; a fox out at night. They’d sniff each other out and come running and he’d lick her face. They’d play together and share the hunt. They’d sit out in the dark together for a while and she’d curl up beside him. Then they’d go running back home to his place and make love, still smelling like the earth. He felt a tear welling up and felt ridiculous.
He was gnawing on a fresh rabbit an hour later when he heard the footsteps.
He had smelled something not human and not quite shifter. It was faintly metallic, and that was unnatural. His fur stood up on end.
The human came out from between the trees and Gunner saw a pair of muddy combat boots and a figure in a black raincoat.
It was John Byeler, the creepy admin guy. He was leering at Gunner like he knew.
Byeler had always smelled off to him but amongst humans, it had never seemed like so strange a lack of scent.
“Hey, wolfie,” John said in that eerie voice of his.
Gunner wasn’t particularly worried because he was, well, a wolf and also he could run fast if he needed to bolt. He didn’t see anyone else around.
“You don’t get it, do you?” He said, laughing. He grinned broadly and whispered, “I’m here to start the war up again. And you’re going to help me...Gunner.”
Gunner was moving to bolt when the tranquilizer dart caught him in his sore shoulder. He howled and swayed on his paws and another caught him in his flank.
That was smart of John, he thought dimly. A wolf would need two darts.
Everything was fading quickly and he thought of Megan and having no idea what this was, he wondered if she was safe.
Please be safe, he prayed to the fates. His brain was scrambling quickly. He felt himself being dragged and he couldn’t move. He thought of Meg’s smile and how he’d seen it much more often before things had gone to shit. He thought of the way she moved when he touched her and how she laughed and then everything went dark.
Gunner woke up with his shoulder on fire and the rest of his body aching.
People were carrying him under his shoulders, his feet dragging along a terracotta tile floor. He smelled foxes, but not Megan or anyone else from her pack. He stirred and tried to stand up and run but found he was shackled. Somebody punched him in the kidneys and he gagged. His head felt like somebody had kicked it a few times.
“Megan,” he muttered.
“This is your wolf,” John Byeler said.
“You say, he’s seduced an alpha? From the Flannery pack?” Some fox shifter was talking. The alpha, he assumed. Gunner was lying on a tile floor in some huge sitting room. He had never been anywhere like it before. It was the kind of place you’d call a “manor”, although on the outside it looked more like one of those old Spanish missions around California. There was a stone chair on a platform in the back of the room where a man leaned on his hand, glaring at John Byeler. The room was huge and lit by candles. A large table was laden with fruit and some small, dead animals. A couple of foxes stood on the table, picking over the banquet, while others lay on the floor or on chaises around the edge of the room.
John must have taken him down the coast a ways where the old-money shifters lived. Everywhere there were fox shifters, some in human form and some glaring at him with fox’s eyes. Nobody looked very friendly. This was one of those packs from way outside of the city and some of them were quite ready to execute a wolf for the slightest infraction. They were much more traditional in their outlook. They would have no sympathy for him at all if they even suspected he’d tainted one of their own.
“He smells disgusting, Henry,” another fox woman said to the alpha. He cracked his eye open and saw her upside down. She was covering her nose as she leaned against the wall.
“Why would a wolf seduce a fox?” Henry asked coldly. “A fetish?”
“He wants to destroy your clan from the inside.” John Byeler was talking, that’s who it was. He was all wrong, Gunner thought stupidly. Slowly he remembered that John was the one who had shot him with the tranq dart.
“Mmm no,” Gunner mumbled. “Mmnot…”
“Shut up, wolf,” one of the foxes spat, and walked over to kick him in the stomach with his boot where he was already sensitive. He groaned and rolled over.
“What better way to destroy this clan from the inside,” John said, “then to contaminate it from without? What could be more offensive to you than a wolf mixing with a fox? Or perhaps he’s looking to make this cold war between the two clans a bit hotter. God knows who’s working with him.”
“How do we know you’re telling the truth?” The alpha said. “Who are you?”
“I’m a wolf,” John said, smiling slyly.
Immediately about a dozen of the man standing by the wall shifted into their fox forms and readied themselves to pounce on Byeler, their teeth bared.
“You better explain yourself,” Henry the alpha said slowly. “And you better explain why we can’t smell you.”
“The smell is easily explained,” John said, shrugging. “Simple matter of a potion from the right witch. Covers up my scent. But I have no pack and no clan-”
“You’re a lone wolf,” the alpha said. “What did you do to become a lone wolf?”
“I’m sure you’ve heard about the cruel ways of wolves,” John said darkly. He kicked Gunner for emphasis. Gunner bit on his lip hard enough to draw blood. “I was ostracized by my pack as a boy. I was weak and they abandoned me. Though I blame myself for my lack of strength. I vowed I would become the kind of shifter who would stop evil wherever I saw it, even if it came from my own kind. I only used the potion because I knew you’d never let a wolf in your inner sanctum otherwise.”
“L-liar,” Gunner rasped. “Liar!”
John stepped on his hand and it hurt so badly he made no sound at all.
“As for whether or not I’m telling the truth,” John said. “Why don’t you ask him a few questions? See if he spills?”
The alpha said, “If this is treachery-”
“Go to his house out by Muir Woods,” John said. “You’ll smell her everywhere. In his bed. Megan Flannery. That’s the fox you’re looking for. She’s betrayed her people.”
Gunner cried out, “No!”
“Take him downstairs,” the alpha said. And to John, he said, “If we find out this is treachery, we will hunt you down.”
They were dragging Gunner away and his shoulder was on fire again and he felt as if his guts were about to spill out of his flank. He caught a glimpse of John as they took him down a dark corridor.
The man did not look very worried.
Chapter Sixteen: Delilah
Delilah hadn’t known who to pay attention to and Oracle wasn’t being any help.
The wolf attack had seemed to come from nowhere and she couldn’t get anything useful from her Oracle device on who had attacked the foxes or where they’d come from. She’
d figured on guarding the lovebirds and focused on getting them back together.
The attack had surprised her but she figured if she kept a close eye on them and if Oracle was doing okay with her data, she’d get by and complete this mission just fine and go home.
Megan had thrown her for a loop. She was so depressed and scattered from the way things had happened with Gunner, Delilah had been more worried about her than the wolf. That mystery wolf pack in the woods had gone after Megan’s pack after all, not Gunner. So Delilah stuck close to Megan, watching her every move. And when she got a chance, she’d go look after Gunner.
Then Gunner went running more and more often in the woods and she started to worry.
She was standing on the road outside Muir Woods one night, frowning down at Oracle. According to her info, Megan was getting drinks with her pack tonight and her mood was “down.” Oracle turned a dour gray color to describe it.
Gunner was shifted, running around in the woods by himself. Oracle showed him under no threat. But it had shown no threat last time either. How was she supposed to accomplish these missions if she couldn’t even trust her information? And shouldn’t a “benevolent afterlife” have reliable IT at least?
She walked into the woods tentatively, intending to look for Gunner on foot. On her last mission, Oracle had told her exactly where to go but now all Oracle knew was that Gunner was a wolf and he was “somewhere” in the woods which could mean anything.
She passed Gunner’s house and had an eerie feeling and walked back. The place was quiet and empty. She stealthily snuck her way in (locked doors had never meant much to her) and crept about. The place felt different and she couldn’t say why, only that she knew with certainty that somebody besides Gunner had just been here and that wasn’t good.
If Oracle wasn’t working, at least her instincts were. She ran back out into the woods. She was not supposed to directly intervene in her target’s lives, not with their knowledge anyway. But she found herself worried as she ran to look for Gunner.
“Gunner!” She shouted into the dark. “Gunner Dylan!”
She called for a few minutes, darting from one end of the woods to the other. She thought she would have come across him by now. But she’d heard nothing except her own echoes in the forest.
She wondered if he’d gone out farther than usual.
Oracle began to chime and buzz and flash in her hand she got a sick feeling in her stomach. It was doing just what it had done when the fox pack had been attacked.
GUNNER DYLAN IN DANGER
The terrible words swam in bold, black letters in a swirl of red on the screen.
“What kind of danger, you useless piece of tin!”
It took ten minutes for Oracle to inform her that Gunner Dylan had apparently been kidnapped by an unknown person or persons and taken to an undisclosed location.
His mood was: IN DURESS.
The screen swirled red again. “Duress”, from what Delilah knew, could potentially mean “in terrible pain. And she had no idea where he was or who had taken him. She slapped the side of the Oracle and muttered obscenities but it gave her no more information. It just swirled red and said:
GUNNER DYLAN IS IN DURESS.
Delilah shut her eyes and whispered, “Fuuuuuuuuck.”
“Okay, okay, okay…”
Delilah had been pacing in the woods for the better part of an hour. The only idea she had come up with so far was to keep an eye on WellDrop. Her instincts she tended to trust better than Oracle at the moment and her instincts said that somebody involved in Meg or Gunner’s life or somehow involved in WellDrop was responsible for Gunner’s kidnapping. WellDrop seemed to be Location 0. It was where Gunner and Megan had met and the kidnapping most likely had to do with their relationship so she figured she would at least start there.
Gunner had been coming on weekends again like everyone else since the expansion had been moved up. That was good, Delilah thought. That meant they’d expect him in the office on Saturday and when he didn’t show up, they would know he was missing.
It was time to investigate the good people of WellDrop.
The WellDrop offices were as easy to break into at night as Gunner’s house had been, though there was an alarm to circumvent and a window to awkwardly climb through. She figured she’d poke around for clues and see what she could see. The question was knowing which corners to poke around first.
If the wolves hadn’t attacked the fox pack, Megan’s friends would’ve been her first suspects. But that fight had been too brutal to be a set-up and how would they have known for sure that Gunner would show up? Delilah put the fox pack on the back burner. She had little more to work on than hunches and so went on a scattershot search for anything suspicious. She searched drawers and desks and hacked into laptops via Oracle. It was at least useful for that. She broke into file cabinets. She ended up falling into a rabbit hole of researching vendors and investors and anyone who had ever come near WellDrop. Maybe there was somebody with an axe to grind. She looked for shifters first. She theorized about secret vampires.
Nada.
At two o’clock in the mourning, Delilah was exhausted both from tearing up the place and then from putting everything back exactly as she had found it. She was half asleep in the least comfortable desk chair in the building.
John Byeler, the mailroom and admin guy, had a tiny little desk near the coffee bar. Delilah hadn’t searched it yet. She hadn’t even thought of him. He seemed too unimportant. Which was a stupid assumption, she realized. He had acted a little bit creepy toward Gunner, though he’d acted a little bit creepy toward everyone. She rifled around in his drawers. There wasn’t much there. As in, there was nearly nothing there.
But in the bottom drawer, which was locked so that she had to pick it with an unbent paper clip, she found a little bottle. It was a glass vial with a cork stopper. The vials were commonly used by witches for brewing potions.
Well, that was something.
Delilah, having spent the bulk of her human life ensconced in the underbelly of the magical world, knew her potions. She’d sold them for a time. People used potions for all kinds of nefarious things. There were love potions, potions of persuasion, a myriad of poisons, potions that made people lose their memory and potions that helped people disguise themselves. There was no telling what John Byeler was using this one for but Delilah was confident she could figure it out. She knew a large number of potions just by smell.
Delilah unstoppered the vial and inhaled deeply. She didn’t even have to think about it. She’d sold versions of the potion to plenty of shifters who were trying to stay on the down low for whatever reason (usually terrible reasons). She smirked to herself and shook her head. He was covering his scent. But he was definitely a wolf.
“John Byeler,” she muttered. “You little sneak.”
Her Oracle was sitting on the desk and she glared at it. “And you. You’re no help at all!”
The Oracle chirped and she thought for a moment that it sounded a little bit regretful.
Things happened to line up well for her purposes.
John Byeler, as the person responsible for sorting the incoming mail early in the morning, reported to work at seven o’clock, before anyone else. Delilah napped and woke herself up in time to throw him against the wall as soon as he walked in the door.
This was most definitely against the rules.
Her Oracle flashed red, attempting to inform that she was interacting too directly.
But the Oracle was on the fritz after all. Delilah figured she could potentially claim ignorance.
“Did you lead that pack to attack Megan and her girls?” Delilah growled in his face.
She saw the flash of recognition. He knew about it. That was good enough. “Where’s Gunner?” Delilah said.
“Screw you, girly!” John said. “Who the hell are you?”
“Oh, this’ll be fun,” Delilah said slyly.
Byeler put up a fight but Delilah was blessedly
gifted with the strength of an angelic agent, which gave her a bit of an edge that a normal petite person such as herself might not have had. She ignored his outrage and didn’t bother to ask any more questions or explain. When he inevitably shifted, intending to attack, she was ready with a canvas painting tarp she’d found in a supply closet. She threw the tarp over the wolf to confuse him, bundled him up, and dragged him into the supply closet before shutting the door.
She knew the potion’s efficacy well enough to know that if he didn’t take a dose in the next couple hours, he would be smelling like a wolf again if he did try to pretend to be a mere, innocent human. By then, Megan would be at work and wondering where Gunner was.
Delilah went to Tom’s Cafe across the street because she’d heard Megan once tell Gunner they had very good giant chocolate chip cookies, and congratulated herself for still intervening less directly than she had on her first mission.
Chapter Seventeen: Megan
Megan woke up long before her alarm went off, knowing something was wrong. Her dreams had been fitful, yet she couldn’t remember them. She was pretty sure she’d dreamed of Gunner and of angry foxes. She sat up in bed staring, feeling frozen and a little confused. There wasn’t a logical reason for this dread, yet she found herself suddenly overcome with a terrible feeling that Gunner was in danger. She’d heard a million stories about mates having a sixth sense about each other. She remembered her mother once knowing that her father had been hurt in a car accident across town just seconds after it had happened.
There was something triumphant, if Gunner was in danger, about having that kind of proof of their bond. How could anyone dispute it? On the other hand: Gunner was in danger. She sat up in bed and grabbed her phone and padded to the bathroom, leaning against the sink and furiously texting him. He’d said he wasn’t angry. They were on good if awkward terms. There was no reason for him not to answer if he was okay.
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