Ian's Choice (Wolves' Heat)

by Lynne, Odessa

  Then he heard gunshots in the distance, loud, frequent, and coming closer.

  Confused because Ian had no idea what was going on or what was about to happen, he quickly looked behind him, but saw nothing. At a sudden flurry of movement at his side startled him and he ducked, but when he looked around, it was just two male wolves who had grabbed Marcus and Mason and thrown them over their shoulders.

  The same female who had been watching the woods earlier took a deep breath, her claws fully extended at her fingertips and her expression fierce, ready for anything. She turned to the wolf who had been stalking toward Ian and said something Ian didn’t understand in the wolves’ language, two syllables that to Ian sounded vaguely like Peter, in a tone of voice that would have caught anyone’s attention.

  Whatever she said brought the wolf’s head up and turned his attention to her, and Ian wondered if maybe her earlier distraction had been the only reason she hadn’t called him to a halt sooner.

  Peter answered with a growl and a last look at Ian, and then went to her and immediately buried his face against the back of her neck, trailing down, his sniff sharp and long.

  She reached around and grabbed his neck, not taking her eyes off the woods, and sank her claws right into his skin.

  Ian sucked in his breath at the sight but Peter merely hissed and grunted and nuzzled his way around to her front to settle his nose into the tender area between her breast and underarm, as if the pain was part of the pleasure to be had from her touch, or possibly a just and acceptable punishment for the wrong he had committed against her.

  “Mine,” she said, and this time Ian understood her perfectly.

  “Yours,” Peter said in return, and wrapped one arm around her lower back, pulling her closer, finally diverting her attention from the woods around them.

  Her distraction gave Ian a chance he hadn’t actually thought he would have.

  Marcus and Mason were already in the wolves’ custody, unconscious for the moment. Craig wouldn’t kill them in cold blood. Ian hadn’t set off a mating frenzy by trying to escape and now the wolves who would be responsible for chasing him down weren’t paying attention to him, because gunfire and roaring wolves deeper in the woods held their attention.

  Ian hesitated, but his gut was telling him he would probably not have a better chance to get away from the wolves than the chance he had now. Without Craig as a buffer between him and the others, his sense of self preservation rode him hard, especially after seeing Peter’s behavior.

  He felt trapped and he didn’t like it.

  The gunshots rang closer, and he had heard the faint call of humans yelling alongside the wolves’ roaring.

  Ian saw a man carrying a gun step around a cluster of trees to his side, just as Peter and his mate caught the scent and jerked apart.

  Ian threw himself to the ground and covered his head. A bullet hit the female in the stomach. Peter grabbed her and roared, blood welling through her tight fitting t-shirt in a dark stain, her own gasping whimper making Ian’s blood ran cold.

  The man kept firing, another guy coming out of the trees to his right. Peter eased his female to the ground, even as she breathed raggedly, and he took a couple of shots in the shoulder. The other wolves had already starting racing toward the humans and their next volley of shots scattered.

  Peter turned on the humans, and he roared with a depth that Ian had heard only once before, from Craig, when he had come after Third when Third had attacked Ian. The power behind Peter’s lunge toward the men sent them running through the trees, the wolves closing fast.

  Ian gritted his teeth and crawled over to the female. “Are you dying?” he asked, because it wasn’t a given that she was, not as it would be if she were human.

  Blood burbled out of her mouth along with her breath. She took a few rapid breaths and then said, “Maybe. Run. Or you’ll die.”

  “Is there anything—”

  A scream cut him off, a very human sound from deeper in the forest. Ian cringed and refused to look away from her face.

  “Peter will kill you if I die.” She took another shallow breath and he saw her teeth, the sharp points smeared red, blood coating her tongue. “Please. Alpha will kill him if he does. Run.”

  Ian had no idea what had screwed up the plan but knew better than to let himself get caught in the middle of the fight. He gave her a last look, scrambled to his feet and bolted through the trees, choice made.

  Chapter 18

  Adrenaline held off the pain in Ian’s leg long enough for him to get clear of the fighting so he could stop and catch his breath. Drizzling rain misted his face and trickled down the back of his neck. He was still up in the mountains, and he’d left the sound of gunshots and fighting wolves and humans behind, but he wasn’t exactly sure where he was. He knew if he wanted to get as far from the wolves as he could and head back toward the shelters, he needed to go down. But…

  Leaving Craig this way didn’t feel right.

  He shouldn’t care about Craig at all but he couldn’t deny that he did.

  Humans and wolves were never going to understand each other. That was the problem.

  If the wolves showed affection in the way that female wolf had manhandled Peter, then Ian would be stupid to think for a minute that Craig would never slip up around him and his human scent, despite Craig’s belief that Ian’s submission gave him better control.

  Wolves couldn’t control their instincts around humans during heat season. They couldn’t, or the world would be a different place.

  During their heat cycles.

  He needed to remember that.

  The rest of the three years between the onset of the wolves’ reproductive cycles wasn’t so bad, even though the whole world had spent most of each gap preparing for the return of heat season and trying to find a way to mitigate the damage that would come.

  He still didn’t think it would be enough of a difference.

  Mating for the wolves wasn’t like it was for humans. Love and marriage, a joint decision, that was the life Ian had grown up expecting. Someday.

  Being ready to live with the consequences of his own choices was a far cry from being ready to just give up his right to choose altogether.

  The woods had thickened and the trees had changed from oak to evergreen, the pine scent heavy and wet. He was near a rocky outcrop, or at least that’s what it looked like from here, and he made his way toward the jut of mountain stone, bared to the weather, edges worn and rounded and covered with thick green moss.

  A dark hole opened into the side of the mountain and Ian walked closer, then stopped and looked behind him. The road was long gone, trees grown up in the center, but he could still see the difference in the ages of the trees to the outside of the old track, two faint depressions where wheels would have rolled over the ground.

  He turned and started back to the opening in the mountainside, already suspecting he would find an old mine entrance.

  Too many years had passed to leave more than a gap between the brush, rotted beams already fallen around an entrance that had at one time been filled in with rock, but which shifting earth had caused to fall away and open the entrance to the world again.

  He smelled dampness, stronger than the forest and rain behind him. He took a quick look inside, doing nothing more than carefully climbing a few rocks, holding onto the most solid looking beam at one side and leaning in. He did everything with a slow, steady ease. Old mines were death traps.

  His grandfather used to tell him stories about the “earthquake that broke a river” about thirty years before Ian’s birth. The river had once cut through the valley between the mountains just to the south but the quake had buckled the riverbed and diverted its path. These mines predated those days. Maybe the tremors hadn’t done any damage to the mines this far north, but Ian had no way to know.

  He could hear the faint drip of water in the background, and from deep inside, the echo, plop…plop…plop.

  He pushed away from the entr
ance and hopped off the pile of rocks he’d been standing on. His weight came down on his wounded leg and he let out a shocked grunt, louder than he would have liked. A few small pebbles skittered down the pile, but then it got quiet again, the steady drizzle a background of pattering on the needles and limbs of the trees and the thick brush. He found a depression in one of the rocks and he knelt down on the ground, leaned over, and sucked the water out of it, then left it to fill up again.

  He should sleep. The cloud cover and the thickness of the woods was already making it hard to see, and the sun was setting. He had no idea how far from civilization he’d come and his leg ached. He needed a rest. He just hoped he was far enough away from trouble to stay out of it.

  He thought about the belt buckle, not for the first time since he’d run, and brushed his fingers over the top edge. He really should have discarded it somewhere along the way, but he couldn’t bring himself to part with it.

  Brendan might find him using the beacon.

  So might Craig.

  He could probably remove the micro-beacon himself. He knew where it was now. Craig had shown him. He could scrape off the metallic paint hiding the beacon and take a rock to it.

  He didn’t.

  Instead, he made a lean-to out of pine branches he managed to chop, break, and twist off some nearby trees, then dug up as much dry pine needles as he could find—too few for a comfortable bed but enough to cover the sharpest briars and the pointiest rocks—and settled down for the night, wet, cold, and uncomfortable, all the while trying to ignore the fact that the anxiety in his gut coiled tightest when he thought of Brendan, not Craig, tracking him down first.

  Something woke him in the middle of the night. A scuffle, a cough, a flash of light over his eyes.

  Ian pushed off the ground and rolled to his feet, the scratch of pine against his palms, his heart racing.

  “Ian?”

  Ian exhaled in a rush at the sound of Brendan’s voice in the dark.

  Light stabbed at his eyes as a flashlight swept over him. He turned his head away, but blinking didn’t make the glow behind his eyelids fade or help his night vision recover.

  “Get the lights off my face. I can’t see a thing.”

  “Guys,” he heard Brendan say.

  The lights wavered and then stabbed downward, spilling across the ground so Ian could finally see the group that had arrived with Brendan. There were four of them, Brendan included, all with weapons strapped to them, but one guy had his arm pulled up to his chest and tied in place with a jacket, and one was a woman.

  Ian knocked the pine needles off his t-shirt and arms. The drizzle had stopped but everything was wet, including him. Sleep had been fitful at best.

  “What’s going on?” he said.

  “We’re rescuing you. What the hell you think?”

  Ian looked at Brendan, standing there as if he wasn’t the cause of all this. “I think you put a fucking tracker on my grandfather’s buckle and sent me to find Devon hoping I’d get caught. You were tracking me and figured even if I lost the phone, you’d have them eventually. That’s what I think.”

  “Ian.” Not Raider. Never Raider when he was trying to manipulate Ian. Ian had learned that a long time ago. It was a tell Brendan didn’t realize he had. Not so funny now. Brendan didn’t even realized he’d put Ian on guard.

  Brendan looked over his shoulder at the guys and girl with him. “We should save that argument for another day. Right now, we’ve got at least one wolf on our tail and we need to get you and get out of here.” Brendan turned back to Ian. The light from the flashlights barely glowed upward enough to touch the bottom of his chin. “We’re risking our lives for you.”

  “Why? After sending me out and knowing if they found out about the tracker I might be killed, I have a hard time believing you give a shit what happens to me.”

  “You know that’s not true,” Brendan said, finally sounding like he cared what Ian thought. Ian couldn’t see Brendan’s expression but he was used to that tone. Brendan used it every time he wanted Ian to know how sorry he was about something. It was as fake as their friendship had become over the last few years.

  “Really?”

  Brendan sighed with exaggerated effort. “We knew the trackers would be blocked, even the micro-beacon. We tracked you up to where your signal disappeared and then extrapolated. We really did hope you could send us a message giving us the exact location, but obviously you weren’t able to do that. So yeah, it took a little extra time to come after you. How could we know you wouldn’t be there when we took the place? We thought they would leave the humans behind.”

  Even in the dark Ian could see Brendan’s shrug.

  “Heat season changes them,” Brendan said. “They’re harder to predict. I am sorry I couldn’t tell you the real plan but I knew you wouldn’t like it. We’ve started asking a lot of our guys to let themselves get taken. Turns out it’s the easiest way to find them.”

  Ian scrubbed his stiffly cold fingers through his damp hair. “So Devon really was just a way to get to me. To get me out there so I’d get caught by one of them and end up in some pack’s den. You used him and you used me.”

  “Come on, Ian. We’ve been friends forever. I knew you’d be okay. You always are. You getting caught in the same area really was the best chance Devon had to be found, admit it.”

  “You set that whole thing up. You knew Devon couldn’t back down from a dare with a big payoff at the end.”

  “The guys were messing with him. He chose—”

  “He hasn’t changed at all since you and him were together, so don’t try to tell me you didn’t realize he’d take them seriously. You knew he would. You were counting on it. So why didn’t you just put the tracker on him? Why’d you have to get me involved at all if a location was what you wanted?”

  “Why? You know why,” Brendan said. “It was time for you to commit. You keep teaching this submission shit to everyone, trying to save everybody, but we both know you’re wasting your time. It doesn’t work like that. I wanted you to see that for yourself. We’ve always stuck together. I need you with me in this. I need your heart in it.”

  “I didn’t want to believe you’d do that to Devon, not after everything we’ve been through together. I suspected you would track the phone, but it didn’t click that you actually planned on me getting caught until I found ou—disc—ov—” Ian stumbled over the words realizing he couldn’t let his agitation make him say more than he wanted Brendan to know. “Shit. Before I discovered the damn tracker on the buckle. We agreed I’d find Devon and then you’d come for him. That was our deal.”

  Brendan scoffed. “You never had any intention of letting us know where you were when you found him. We both know you were trying to play me, Ian. I told you where he’d gone in exchange for you finally joining the group, but you weren’t being honest with me when you joined. I’ve known you too long not to know you were going to have to see how it really was with them for yourself before you ever changed your mind. I called your bluff and made a backup plan.”

  “What you did is try to get me killed.”

  “The plan worked. You got caught by the wolves.” Brendan raised his hand. “Don’t try to deny it. I know you did and it doesn’t matter how, but I know. I just don’t know how you got away. But we’ve been picking up your signal for days now, wandering around. I’m glad you’re okay. But you gave us information about the wolves’ den we never would have gotten without you and I hope you see now—”

  “No,” Ian said abruptly, interrupting Brendan before he could start asking questions about Ian’s nonexistent escape from the wolves. “I don’t see anything. Your guys Marcus and Mason got caught in the middle of whatever that was back there. Did you rescue them?”

  He didn’t really care if Brendan had rescued the guys, but he hoped getting Brendan to talk about them would give him some information on the wolves who had been back there with him, and the wolves he’d heard deeper in the woods. Craig. />
  He wanted to know if Craig was dead. A sick dread lingered in the pit of his stomach, just waiting for the chance to send him to his knees and empty himself of the little water he’d had since yesterday.

  “The wolves who got away took them. The guys knew the risks when they joined. We have a long road ahead of us if we want the wolves to leave us the hell alone. It’s going to take some sacrifices to make that happen, and it was about time you made that sacrifice for yourself, don’t you think? You run around telling everyone they have to submit to get through it alive. Better to see for yourself what you’re asking everyone else to learn to live with. Letting one of them use you, just because if you don’t, they’ll kill you.”

  “Fuck you,” Ian said.

  “No, you needed to see what the hell I was talking about. These wolves, it doesn’t matter if it’s intentional or not, they’re ruining us. We might as well be fucking sex slaves.”

  Hadn’t he thought exactly the same thing just a few days ago? But it was different hearing it from Brendan, as justification for mass murder.

  “If we keep killing them, who’s to say they won’t take their technology and turn it on us and make slaves out of us all the damn time? Your short-sighted attacks have repercussions for all of us. For the whole damn planet!” Anger fired his words, too loud.

  The shuffling of Brendan’s men got louder, the dark hiding all but the broad strokes of their movement, but Ian knew they were readying themselves in case they were called on to shoot him. “It’s less than one month every three years!”

  “You know that’s bullshit!” Brendan pointed at Ian’s chest but lowered his voice, taking control of his anger. “They get you, they don’t let you go. It’s not right.”

  “Maybe not,” Ian said, “but we can either adapt or see everything go to hell. They’re not going to put up with us murdering their children and their breeding females forever. If you think they couldn’t have totally destroyed human civilization with their technology when they came or anytime after that, you’re deluding yourself. I paid attention. They’re holding back out of guilt over what they’ve done to us. I know what was being said those first few years. I’ll never believe they knew what was going to happen that first heat season. We weren’t the only ones who lost a lot of lives.”