by Lauren Esker
They stared at each other for a minute. "Okay," Jack said. "Guess we have to coordinate this. One, two ... three."
They got up together. Casey was astonishingly short; he hadn't realized on the ground just how short she was. She couldn't be over five-two or five-three. Jack, on the other hand, was six five in his bare feet. This was going to make it even more awkward to move in sync, which they had no choice but to do until they found a way to get the cuffs off.
"Okay, I'm up," Casey said. She wrapped her right arm defiantly over her breasts again. "Now will you tell me what happened to us?"
"While we walk," Jack said.
She hesitated. For an instant she opened her mouth as if she meant to say something, then closed it again.
"Look, I'm not trying to be difficult, I swear. There are going to be people coming after us, and we need to get moving."
He expected more questions, but instead, after a quick widening of her extraordinary eyes, she nodded and settled into step with him when he started walking.
It took them a few moments to get the rhythm of it. Casey had to hold her arm up and forward so she wasn't jerked off balance with every step he took. On top of that, they were both barefoot. The forest floor was a prickly minefield of brambles, sharp sticks, and pine cones.
But it was possible, although they had to plant their feet carefully. The ground sloped, so Jack pointed them uphill, trying to find deer paths and other openings in the undergrowth so they wouldn't get their feet and legs torn up so badly. He was hoping to come out on a ridgetop or something similar, a high point where he could get a feel for the lay of the land.
Security takes priority. An old memory: the U.S. Army's survival manual. Find a safe place and assess your situation.
If they just stayed here in the woods, they'd die. But it was possible, he hoped, to come up with a means of evading their pursuers until his team could find him. And they would be coming for him. Avery and the rest would never leave him behind.
So, in the meantime, it was his responsibility to keep himself, and the civilian he was now responsible for, out of danger until his team could get to him. They couldn't outrun a transformed lion shifter, let alone fight off the whole pride. So they had to throw them off the trail. There was little point in trying hard to hide their tracks unless they could conceal their scent trail as well, because the lions would almost certainly be hunting them by smell. Their best chance was a waterway of some kind, but he hadn't seen any sign yet of creeks or streams—
There was a sharp tug on the handcuffs. Casey had started to fall behind, only to be jerked ahead at his next step. Jack's momentum pulled her forward in a skipping stumble before he could stop. Casey gasped in pain and hopped on one foot for a minute.
"You okay?" Jack asked. He tried to rein in his longer stride so she didn't have to hustle to keep up. This was going to be very weird. He was used to having teammates, but not a teammate who couldn't get more than a few feet from him—especially a civilian, untrained in evasion and survival, who would probably do little more than slow him down.
"Ow. Stubbed my toe on something. I'm not used to walking barefoot in the woods at night."
"Are you hurt badly? Let me see your foot."
"It's not that bad—Agent Ross!" Her voice rose in a squeak when he went down to his knees, carefully keeping his handcuff arm raised, to inspect her foot.
Belatedly, he realized that this had put him right on face level with the mound of curls between her legs. With his senses as tuned in as possible, in case his weak human nose could detect anything on the night wind, he couldn't help smelling her rich female musk.
Jack flushed and dropped his gaze hastily to her feet. Being all right with other people's nudity was one thing; sticking his face in her crotch was something else entirely. Business, business. I'm only down here for important things. Pretend she's got pants on.
Really ugly pants.
"When you're on the move, taking care of your feet is your number one priority," he said, and was relieved his voice came out steady. "Even a little scratch can get infected. A thorn can leave you lame. Which foot?"
"Left," she said, and gave a little gasp when Jack grasped her foot.
"I'm going to pick it up and check it over; is that okay?"
"Fine," she said, still sounding a trifle breathless, and leaned on a tree.
Jack ran his thumb firmly over the ball of her foot and heel, and tested the toes by pressing on the ball of each one. It was still too dark to see well—his vision was all right at close range; it was at longer distances that his nearsightedness became an issue—but she didn't flinch or cry out. He noticed in passing that there was some kind of tattoo on her ankle, a little flower nestled into the hollow beneath her ankle bone.
"Seems to be okay. We can go slower. I probably should slow down myself. My feet aren't any more armored than yours." At least not in this form.
He managed to get up without embarrassing himself or touching anything he shouldn't. He watched her for their first couple of steps, keeping his gaze firmly fixed on her lower legs and trying not to notice the flexing of her buttocks. She didn't seem to be limping.
"How are you holding up?" he asked.
"Okay," she said. Her face was pensive, heavy brows drawn together in a frown. "Confused. Will you tell me who's after us now?"
He'd really hoped he'd have more time to earn her trust before he had to bring her world crashing down. Or at least a more graceful way to lead into it. But there was nothing to be gained by lying to her. She deserved to know what she was up against, and she seemed to be able to keep her head in a crisis.
"Roger Fallon," Jack said. "Lion shifter Roger Fallon and his pride. They brought us here to hunt us."
Casey gazed at him. She hardly even seemed to react. Shock, Jack thought. Or—something else? She didn't even seem surprised. Then he realized it had just taken her awhile to get far enough past her initial astonishment to react, when her mouth opened and her eyes went wide.
"What? No, that's impossible. Why?"
"That's what I was trying to find out," Jack said. "Shifters have been going missing in the Seattle area for a while now. It looks like Fallon and his pride have been abducting people and playing The Most Dangerous Game somewhere in the north woods up here."
Perhaps unconsciously, Casey moved closer to him—so close, in fact, that her arm brushed distractingly against his.
"So you're saying Roger brings people out in the woods and ... hunts them for sport?" she said. There was a small catch in her voice. "That's completely insane. I—I don't believe it."
"I wish it wasn't true, but ... do you have another explanation for how we got from Fallon's party, to waking up handcuffed together naked in the woods?"
"Do people ever survive?" Her voice was tight with fear.
Lying to her wasn't going to make their situation any less dire. "We haven't found any yet. Which doesn't mean it's impossible."
Casey swallowed. "How many?" she asked, her voice tiny. "How many people has he done this to?"
"I don't know," Jack said. "I'm sorry."
Casey took a couple of deep breaths and dragged her fist across her eyes. "I'm okay," she said, sounding as if she was trying to convince herself as well as him. "I'm okay."
Jack gave her cuffed hand a quick squeeze. "You're holding up really well."
She tried to pull away, but succeeded only in jerking the cuff against both their wrists. Then, unexpectedly, she laughed—a watery laugh with an edge of hysteria, but genuine amusement in it too. "This stupid thing," she said, shaking the cuffs. "As if it's not bad enough that we're naked in the woods and someone's trying to kill us. This is just embarrassing."
"It gets worse," Jack admitted. "I think they're my handcuffs."
Her eyes sparkled, and she clapped her free hand over her mouth. "Oh God," she said around her fingers. "I bet that's going to be hard to explain on your report."
She looked good when she smiled. Jack smiled
back at her. "I swear I'm not a screw-up all the time."
"Why the handcuffs, though? It doesn't make any sense."
"My guess would be to keep us from shifting," Jack said. Well, me, to be specific. "What kind of shifter are you?"
"Lynx," she said, and then quickly, "How did you know I'm a shifter?"
Oops. "I read your file."
"You have a file on me?" Casey asked with a sharp flare of anger in her voice.
"I'm a federal agent, and you're part of an investigation. We had files on all of Fallon's employees."
"Right, you work for the not-FBI." She relaxed somewhat. "Care to tell me who exactly you do work for, Special Agent Ross? Or is that classified?"
"You can call me Jack. And it's a small agency that deals with shifter-related crimes, called the SCB. That stands for Shif—for Special Crimes Bureau." He'd almost said "Shifter Crimes Bureau", which was the agency's unofficial in-house name ... but that wasn't what their paychecks said. "Most people haven't heard of us, even in the shifter community."
"There's an agency just for that?"
"Think about it. Most people don't know shifters exist, or don't believe it even if they've heard rumors. And a shifter gone rogue can tear right through a crowd of non-shifters who aren't expecting it." Like they're going to tear through us, if they catch us.
"That makes sense," Casey said. She gave him a little smile. "What kind of shifter are you? No, wait. Let me guess. Bear?"
"Pretty obvious, I guess." Jack glanced down at his shoulder tattoo.
"So you can't shift out of your cuffs?"
He shook his head. "My paws are too big. What about you? Do you think you can slip the cuffs over a paw?"
Now it was her turn to give her head a shake. "Lynx paws are large. Not as big as a bear's, but bigger than my hand."
"Damn."
If he had to be responsible for a civilian while being hunted by lion shifters in the woods, it seemed he could have done worse. She hadn't panicked and seemed to be doing okay at absorbing the information he was giving her.
"And we have another advantage," Jack added. "I'm not on my own here. I'm part of a team."
"Do they know you're here?" Casey asked, perking up.
"They know I was undercover, and I've definitely missed at least a couple of check-ins by now. They'll be looking for us." He hoped. It depended at least partly on whether this was the same night or a different one. If he'd been out of touch for a day or two, Avery would be moving heaven and earth to find him by now. If this was the same night ... he glanced up at the sky, trying to gauge the time. Nights were short in the summer this far north. The sky was already brighter than it had been, the trees outlined as dark blurs against the growing light.
Even if it was the same night, he'd definitely missed at least one check-in, probably more. Avery might not have tipped into full-fledged emergency mode yet, but he'd definitely know something was wrong.
"I hope you're right," Casey said.
"I trust my partner," Jack replied. "By now he'll know that I've dropped out of communication. If anyone can find us, Avery can."
Chapter Three
"You didn't wake me up?"
Soft-spoken, level-headed Avery Hollen had a firmly established reputation as the office nice guy. He was the calm center around which the hectic heartbeat of the SCB's Seattle-based Pacific Northwest division pulsed. When Avery blew up, he even did it in a relatively calm way—but that didn't make it any less startling to people who were used to thinking of him as a guy who never got mad.
Jen Cho jumped so hard she actually leaped away, looking for a moment very much like the gecko that was her shifter form. "Hey, I did wake you," she said defensively. "Just now. So don't shoot the messenger. We weren't sure anything was wrong. We still aren't sure if anything's wrong."
"Jack's missed two check-ins and you aren't—All right. All right." Avery rubbed his eyes and painfully swung his legs off the couch. He'd known it was a mistake to fall asleep in the office break room, but he hadn't wanted to take the time to drive all the way home and back, not with Jack out on the first night of a very dangerous assignment. Now he'd be paying for it in stiffness and pain. He had painkillers in his desk, but that didn't help with the problem of getting to the desk.
Sitting on the edge of the couch while he psyched himself up for it, he asked, "Have you called Stiers?"
"Not yet," Cho said. "I figured I'd get your input first, before pushing the panic button."
Avery rubbed his gritty eyes, willing his brain to kick-start itself. Back in the Army, he used to be able to go on two hours of sleep a night for weeks. On the other hand, he wasn't twenty anymore, either.
Cho rinsed a cup in the sink and filled it from the coffeepot. She opened one of the drawers, took out a jar of instant coffee crystals and added a couple of generous spoonfuls, then dumped four packets of sugar into it and shoved it into his hands. "Here, have a J. Cho morning special. Since they still won't spring for an espresso machine in here, this is the next best thing. Gets the cobwebs out of your brain."
Avery sipped and made a horrified face. "This should be classified as some sort of chemical weapon."
"Yes, that's what makes it work."
"I think my teeth are melting."
"Drink up, you giant wuss."
***
The SCB was chronically underfunded, mostly due to the difficulty of justifying to the federal penny-pushers what it was, exactly, that they did. Their Pacific Northwest headquarters, which handled the entire swath of states north of California and west of the Rockies, was run out of a modest suite of offices in a normal office building.
Tonight there was only a skeleton night shift consisting of Cho, Avery, and a young intern named Rivkah Rosen. Most of the lights were off.
His tired brain buzzing from the sugar and caffeine, Avery limped through the dim ops center to the pool of light around Rosen and Cho. The damaged muscles in his leg kept knotting up, making it stiff as a block of wood, the knee refusing to bend. Whenever he put weight on it, though, the leg wobbled and threatened to buckle.
Just a glorious memento of his one aborted tour in Afghanistan, nearly a decade ago now.
He stopped on the way by his desk to shake out two capsules from the mostly empty bottle in the bottom drawer, swallowing them with the dregs of Cho's dreadful coffee sludge. He'd been trying to dial back on the meds lately, but right now he needed to be clearheaded and not distracted by pain, for Jack's sake.
Damn it, Jack.
He reminded himself not to get too worked up about it. Yet. Jack had been undercover for about a week, having gotten himself hired by the catering company that worked most of the corporate events for Lion's Share Software. Discreet strings were pulled to make sure he'd be on Fallon's yacht on the night of the mixer.
Jack was supposed to check in every four hours throughout the night. He'd made the first check-in on schedule before the ship left port. Avery had been up for two days straight overseeing preparations for the op, and after Jack made his second check-in on schedule and the evening wore on with no sign of anything amiss, Cho had talked Avery into lying down to catch some sleep so he'd be alert if anything did happen.
Now Jack had missed two check-ins and no one knew what was going on.
"You should've woke me when he missed the first one."
"You'd only been asleep for an hour. And you and I both know there are plenty of reasons why he might not have been able to find a safe place to call us from."
Cho should know; she normally worked the undercover side of things. Her gecko form made her naturally inconspicuous, if a little out of place in the ecosystem of the Pacific Northwest, and she'd turned out to be a natural at infiltration. The only reason why she wasn't working this job alongside Jack was because she was getting over a lingering bout of pneumonia—the Seattle climate really wasn't good for geckos—and Stiers didn't want to send her on any assignments that might involve running and fighting until she was back
up to a hundred percent.
Avery had been glad to have her in the ops center because of her field experience, but he hadn't considered the flip side: she was used to working with a minimal safety net and inclined to give the field agent the benefit of the doubt. Avery was exactly the opposite; he figured that as Jack's handler on this particular assignment, worrying was his job.
"I wish we'd been able to get a second agent on the boat." They were stretched thin, as usual; most of their field agents were out in Idaho and Montana, working a big dragnet operation in search of a rogue cougar shifter who'd killed three people at a remote wilderness lodge. "What's the status of Eva's team?"
"Standing by," Intern Rosen reported after a glance at the computer screen. Jack's only backup was a small strike team with a speedboat, led by their resident orca shifter. "We haven't alerted them yet that anything's wrong. Should we?"
"Not quite yet. What about our CI?" Avery asked. "Heard from him?"
Their confidential informant in Fallon's organization was a security guard and lion shifter who was also the boyfriend of Fallon's sister Mara. After helping to clean up the aftermath of one of the hunts, he'd had a change of heart, but was too scared to leave the company. He'd promised them information in return for immunity regarding his role in the murders. It was through him that they'd gotten most of their information about what the Fallons were up to.
Rosen shook her head.
"Look, we know Fallon confiscates cell phones for the duration of the cruise," Cho pointed out. "Supposedly to help people relax and enjoy themselves without thinking about work. A guy making a phone call is going to stand out like a sore thumb. It could be that Jack just hasn't been able to find an unobtrusive place to call in yet."
"Yeah," Avery said, but he didn't believe it for a minute. Not Jack. It wasn't merely a communication failure; Jack would've had a contingency plan in place. They'd worked together too long for Avery not to know that.
Despite Cho's reassurances, gut instinct told him this op had gone FUBAR—fucked up beyond all recognition. He just hadn't figured out the exact nature of the FUBAR-ing yet. Had Fallon realized that Jack was a plant, or that one of their pride was passing information to the feds? Or had Jack figured out who Fallon's next target was, and gotten involved without waiting for backup?