“This is insane,” I said, curling in on myself, my cheek to the cold glass of the window. “We should let her go.”
“I think it is time you stop suggesting that and go along with the established plan,” Dmitri advised.
“I wasn’t involved in establishing any frikkin’ plan. I wasn’t even consulted,” I protested.
“You haven’t been in the right state of mind,” Gabe stated.
“What is the right state of mind for a kidnapping? Dangerous? Risky? Crazy? That’s all I see when I look at you two.”
“No,” Gabe snapped. “You’ve been pining over Pietr Rusakova and you’re so blind to it all that you don’t even realize that’s what you’re doing.”
I puffed out a breath in exasperation. “I am not pining. I do not pine. And I certainly don’t pine over Pietr Rusakova of the chess club.”
“Debate team,” Gabriel corrected through gritted teeth. “He’s on the debate team, not the chess club, and you know it.”
“Wait. Is that why you’re going along with all this, Gabe? Because you think this’ll get Pietr out of the picture—Dmitri said he’ll take him—and then what? You think it’ll open the way to me?”
I laughed bitterly when he hunched over the steering wheel, glowering at the road ahead.
If you could still call it a road …
“God. Why don’t you get it, Gabriel? I don’t want you. I’m sorry, but I don’t. And I don’t need you. I…” I stopped myself from proclaiming my love of Gareth. Barely. “And I don’t want Pietr Rusakova, either. I mean, I’ll admit it—as an alpha, it’s fascinating to watch a rival alpha with his pack. They’re totally different from us. And he, well, the fact he’s cured, no more werewolf there—it just makes it even weirder. But I’ve wanted Gareth for a long time. Everyone knows that. Accept it.”
“I should be the alpha.”
“Gawwwd,” I groaned. “Then leave, start your own pack. Hell, I’ll even give you a little of the money Dmitri’s going to give us, if it makes it easier.” I picked at the back of Dmitri’s headrest. “If I go through with this—get Dmitri Pietr and he leaves and leaves us with money,” I said, “would you finally go then, Gabe? Go and never come back?”
“Is that what you really want?”
“It’s more than what I want,” I admitted slowly. “I think it’s what we both seriously need.”
His knuckles whitened on the steering wheel, but he said nothing.
CHAPTER FIVE
Alexi
Pietr paced the length of the room, fingers clenching into fists before relaxing again as he tried to keep calm. “So you have not seen Jess?” he asked, all eyes on him.
The pups shook their heads.
Max had disappeared back down the steps on the trail of some scent he wasn’t ready to talk about. Cat sat on one bed, pups nestling around her as she played with their hair and complimented their clothing, and I sat on the other bed, feeling we had gotten nowhere since we’d arrived.
Pietr looked at me, his distress plain. “Where could she be?”
The door opened with a billow of snowflakes, and Max paused on the threshold to stomp the snow from his boots. “No answer to that yet,” he confirmed what we all feared. “But I think I’ve found a valuable clue.”
Gareth stepped in behind him, snow coating his jacket and jeans and in his hair, a torn-up length of rope hanging in his hands. His gaze hopped from face to face, taking a quick accounting of his pack, and he sighed, his eyes finally falling on Pietr. “I may be able to help you,” he said. “But I’m afraid by helping you find Jessie I’ll also help them get what they want.”
Pietr’s voice was low. Dangerous. “What do they want?”
“You.”
“Then let’s give them what they want. Every bit and more,” Pietr said, his eyes bright with hate.
Gareth shook his head, his mouth twisting down. The pups rushed him, flinging their arms around him. “You’re only human now. You can no longer do what you used to,” Gareth said, sighing. “Perhaps you’d better leave this to the wolves.”
Cat stood up and cleared her throat. “About that…,” she began, placing a hand on Pietr’s arm. “There is something we have kept from you, little brother. Something you must know.”
“Tell him in the truck,” I urged, standing to slip my coat back on. “And the pups?”
“Stay here,” Gareth said, petting their heads and smacking their shoulders. “Be careful and be smart. I will be back as soon as I can.”
“And the others?” one pup asked.
“I will bring back whoever is left and worthy of being your family,” he said, tilting the pup’s head up with a finger beneath her chin just before he turned to the door. Only I was close enough to see the way his eyes flashed red and to hear him say beneath his heating breath, “And the rest can rot in Hell.”
Jessie
I woke in the trunk of a car, jostling along what I could only guess was a lumpy country road. I was freshly bound and gagged and if I’d thought my shoulders had ached before at the tension brought on by having my wrists pulled so tight behind me, it was nothing compared to the pain that burned in them now.
But … I wiggled my fingers and tugged at my wrists. It did not feel like they’d had duct tape handy this time. As raw as my wrists were, I could still work with less than perfectly knotted rope. And from what I’d seen of Gabriel, he was as much a Boy Scout as he was an angel.
Which was clearly not at all.
I listened to the muffled sounds of voices on the other side of the car’s backseat as closely as I could, trying to determine how many people rode in the seats ahead of me, and who they were. The voices were frustrated and disillusioned.
And sounded distinctly like Gabriel, Marlaena, and Dmitri mid-spat.
I closed my eyes again, allowing my mind to drift away from the jouncing trunk and dissolve into what remained of Derek’s thoughts as I worked the rope with numb fingers. I needed to find a way to utilize all my assets and combine every bit of knowledge I had to get out of my current predicament.
Derek’s memories had offered up odd but useful suggestions before.
He had answers. Weird, creepy answers, but they were still answers. And that was what I wanted.
Answers.
Help from any source.
The right answers might give me a way out of this.
I thought of Derek. I remembered how he’d seemed at Homecoming—before I’d known any of the truth about him, and he was there, filling out the spaces in my brain, spreading like floodwaters creeping beyond riverbanks to ooze across low-lying hayfields.
My brain shuddered and my heart raced as my world dissolved and his popped into focus.
We were with Wanda again—within Wanda again. Although the décor in the hallway had changed, become crisp and clean and nearly sterile with very few images hanging on the walls, I still recognized it as hers.
Derek skipped down the hallway, only a few years older than the last time I’d been here, and shoved open a door. Inside was a beautiful park, filled with trees and flowers surrounding a fountain and an assortment of statues. In the branches, birds chirped merrily.
We’d found Wanda’s happy place.
But the birdsong ceased and the sky darkened as we bounded across the threshold.
“She’s built better defenses,” we said.
“Never mind those—find the icon.”
We headed toward the burbling fountain, seeing the statues spread out not far from it. These were of ordinary people, built of granite, all of them posed and frozen in some action that seemed part of their nature.
We paused in front of a tall man with broad shoulders. He wore a button-down shirt, and an exposed gun holster like a detective might wear on the job. He looked like he was in his late forties, strong creases beginning to show around his mouth and across his brow. He had decidedly few laugh lines. On the base of the statue was written a single word: BOSS.
“I have
him,” we said.
“Excellent.” Mommy’s voice filled our ears. “Now make him shine in her eyes.”
Derek pulled out a can and shook it. He held it up to the statue and sprayed the paint liberally all over the man so that he was covered in a sparkling coat of gold and our arm ached. “Now she’ll notice him.…”
My mind balked. Wanda was being manipulated into noticing her boss? What sort of ramifications would that have? I speculated, beginning some mental math before Derek’s mother burst in on our shared thoughts again.
“Good work,” Mommy assured. “Now get out of there.”
We turned back toward the fountain, but our knees turned to jelly and we staggered the distance to the doorway, gasping. “Can’t … drained.”
“Don’t quit on me now.”
Air brushed our face like a warm breeze in a world where the temperature was dropping in jumps of tens of degrees. And the air—the sweet breeze that carried just the faintest scent of Mommy’s brandy-spiked coffee—whispered, “Rest. Regroup. Feed.”
Grasping the door frame we lowered our head and dug our fingers into the wood. We fed, pulling from the door frame and wall until wallpaper and plaster cracked and flaked and the ceiling began to sag.
“Not too much,” Mommy warned, her voice edging into a hysterical tone. “Derek, Derek—you need to let go—get out before she buckles or you’ll be trapped.…”
But we were high on the sensation, our head full of clouds, our feet so light if we let go of the wall we might drift away, lost.…
“Derek—now,” Mommy commanded.
But her voice held no power, no authority. It was a whisper among the dark rain that now fell in the forest of Wanda’s mind.
Then everything shuddered and the high was snatched away, replaced by a throbbing headache.
“Out. Now!” A voice boomed like a crack of thunder as lightning raked the sky.
“Father,” we said with a gulp, and let go of the door frame and raced out into the hall, the door slamming shut behind us. We ran down the hall, back toward the main doorway and out into her brain, vaulting backward out of the gray matter, skull and flesh, and slamming back into our body—Derek’s body.
Our eyes peeled open, the throbbing behind our skull so intense we bent over to catch our breath and try to clear the fireworks that burst across our field of vision.
“I told you that you had to be tough with him. If you’re weak, he’ll be weak. And the little bastard will ruin everything we’ve worked so hard for on this project.” Father leaned over us, grabbing us by the shoulder and forcing us to sit up so fast, we thought we’d die. “Quit screwing around. You have a job. Do it. We can’t afford a screwup like the last time. Get yourself under control.” Then he strode out of the room, slamming the door shut behind him.
We rubbed our head, our eyes screwed tight against the light in the room that seemed to want to pierce our eyelids and drive into our eyeballs like railroad spikes. “Where’s he going?” we asked, our voice thick with misery.
“Out to see some woman, no doubt,” Mommy hissed. She patted our hand in a conciliatory gesture. “But don’t you worry. How do you feel?”
“Rested. Ready to tackle anything.”
“Excellent.”
And I knew that resting and regrouping mentally was what I needed to do, too.
So I closed my eyes and thought back to my training as a competitive shooter, thought back to calming things, and let my pulse and my breathing slow.
Alexi
Rescue attempts are seldom as easy as they appear in the movies. And so it was true of our circumstances. Max’s superior nose tracked them easily to a particular mountain road. Thanks to the borrowed truck, we roared toward it.
Roared was an apt description not because of our amazing speed but because of the more amazing lack of any truly discernible muffler on the beast we rode.
Cat had explained the flaw in the cure to Pietr and so he pouted, even less useful than before as he wracked his brain to decide how he might break past the cure and be oborot once more.
“If the car crash didn’t trigger it…,” he grumbled.
Cat patted his hand. “The car crash happened too fast. I think the change must be triggered by a building desperation. Perhaps you must be close to death. Or perhaps someone you love…” She looked away.
“That is far from encouraging. But you don’t know if that is what it takes to trigger the wolf’s return,” he said, catching her gaze and holding it with his.
She shook her head, dark curls tumbling around her heart-shaped face. “Pravda. I do not know. There seems no certainty in this.”
“Then I guess today we will find out exactly what it takes,” he said, setting his jaw stubbornly and once more turning to face out the window.
Marlaena
We parked the car, and Gabe hefted Jessica over his shoulder, carrying her to a large lump in the snow. He dumped her on the ground, and she kicked him, growling as savagely as a simple human could.
I laughed in spite of everything. “What’s that?” I asked as Dmitri and Gabe brushed snow off the lump.
“Our transportation,” Gabe explained, tugging a blue tarp away from the lump to reveal a sharp-looking pair of snowmobiles.
I had always wanted to ride a snowmobile.…
And I had never been allowed.
“It’s far from a ladylike pursuit,” Margie had scolded me when I’d mentioned the possibility. A group of my friends were heading to a ski lodge way up in the mountains. It was going to be chaperoned. Safe. There was even mandatory church attendance on Sunday. In short, it seemed like the perfect diversion for winter break in an area where you had to head to the mountain peaks to find anything like winter.
But Phil and Margie had agreed: The trip would be laced with temptation, and I was ill-equipped to make good, moral choices.
That was before I let my grades slip.
Before I stopped caring about things, because why bother trying to make good choices when you never got any choices to make in the first place?
Before I started earning a reputation that made the girls hate me and the guys vie for fifteen minutes alone with me behind the school.
Even though what they wanted only took ten.
At most.
And it was before I made my first change—terrified and alone at the first sleepover I’d ever been allowed to attend.
At the church Phil preached at.
My throat tightened. Yeah. The third verse of “Kumbaya” had been waaay more memorable than anyone ever expected it to be.
I’d wanted only a few things and I’d been denied all of them until I disappeared and made my own way.
“You’re kidding me, right?” I stepped over to the sleek machines and ran an appreciative hand across one slick chassis. “How much farther is it? I mean, if we expect them to catch up to us sometime during this century…”
The faster this was over, the faster I could start to try and make amends—get my pack away from everything that was so wrong and so dangerous. That’s what we needed to do, I decided, looking at Dmitri and Gabe.
Gareth would agree. But maybe he’d think I was just as bad an influence.…
“We have the perfect staging area,” Dmitri confirmed. “Not far from here. But I prefer some small comforts in my old age. Let the others walk, run, or lope their way to us.”
He turned one snowmobile on, the engine firing up with a noise much like a contented purr.
“Not like Pietr can lope anymore,” I said, loud enough to be heard over the engines.
Dmitri smiled. “He will lope when the moment is right.”
“Wait. What?” My brows tugged in tightly.
He thrust a helmet into my chest, his smile becoming a wicked grin. “There is still wolf within him—you need not worry. We will force it forward.” He put his helmet on, and Gabriel wedged one on Jessica before sliding one on his own head.
“We tried triggering—”
Gabriel mounted up and turned, patting the spot behind him. Awesome. I was going to have to ride with my arms wrapped tight around him. Someone was totally thinking he’d hit pay dirt with this idea. Making sure my groan of protest was audible thanks to the smart helmet technology, I took a seat behind Gabe and locked my hands in front of his stomach.
“You may continue,” Dmitri said as we started off.
“Thanks so much.” I watched the scenery ghost past us. “We tried triggering the wolf with the truck crash, remember?”
Jessica’s growl filled my helmet until Dmitri gave her a swift smack across the back.
“No wolf—no over-whatever.”
“Oborot,” he corrected.
“Whatever. It didn’t happen then—why now?”
“It requires the appropriate stress and proper timing,” he said grimly. “Timing is the key to everything.”
“Yeah, well, so far our timing’s sucked. And Jessica, well, hers isn’t any better,” I muttered.
“Remember the deal. You get me Pietr Rusakova and I’ll be nothing but a memory. And evidently Gabriel will make himself scarce as well. You can only win by doing this.”
I thought about it. I could be rid of two devils with one dramatic choice. Maybe I could rebuild things with Gareth. Maybe once he realized what I had to do to save all of us—the sacrifice I had to make …
Gareth understood sacrifice better than anyone. Surely he’d understand this if it freed our struggling family from Gabe and Dmitri.
“Just what exactly do I have to do to hold up my end of the deal?” I asked, regretting my willingness to go through with it as soon as the words fell out of my mouth.
“You will trigger the wolf inside Pietr,” Dmitri said as if it were as simple as breathing.
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