by MJ Compton
“You’d better pray that there’s no wind,” Randy said, “and that God hears you or it may be your final prayer.”
Lucy hunkered down to wait in her habitual spot on the steps of the bus. At least Restin hadn’t saddled her with Joseph. She couldn’t deal with a child’s trauma right now. On the other hand, babysitting would have filled the time until Stoker returned.
Stoker.
She’d wrapped her arms around his neck and buried her face in his ruff a little longer than usual this morning. Although she hated everything about Operation Jericho, saying goodbye to Stoker every morning was the worst.
“What the . . .?” Dakota said, and Lucy raised her chin from her knees.
She smelled it, too.
Smoke.
A black pillar rose like an exclamation point against the pewter dawn.
She sprang to her feet, fear shoving her heart into her throat. “No,” she whispered, shaking her head as if she could erase the dark billow on the horizon.
“That’s right about where New Sinai sits,” Dakota said.
“No,” she said, louder now. “Stoker promised me . . .” She stepped toward the road.
“You’re supposed to stay on the bus,” one of the roadies reminded her as he followed her.
“My pregnant sister is in New Sinai,” she snapped. “My husband is up there.”
She thought she heard one of the werewolves invoke the Ancient Ones for salvation from human females, but she was too worried about her loved ones to care who insulted her.
The tunnel.
Hank claimed an old mineshaft ran from the New Sinai Tabernacle to the ravine. Lucy was positive Michelle didn’t know about it, positive Randy kept its existence a secret from everyone.
She started running toward the ravine.
What in the name of all he held sacred had gone wrong, Stoker wondered. One minute he’d been howling in response to Lucy’s song, the next the smoky smell of the morning brought back some of the most terrifying moments of his life, and he’d morphed to human form without thinking.
Hot air from the fire lifted the hair on his head. Sweat trickled through his sideburns and down his cheeks as he checked his position: he was near the gate, on the northeast corner of the New Sinai enclosure.
Scat, human hell, and damnation, he thought, as he watched tongues of orange lick closer to the stockade fence.
Lucy’s worst nightmare, right in front of him.
But he hadn’t set the fire, and he knew no one else from the pack had, either. After they’d nearly died in a barn fire in Montana, they all retained a loathing of flames and smoke.
The piles of bracken, almost fence-like in appearance, weren’t the haphazard undergrowth of a forest, but rather a deliberate placement, cutting off the stockade of New Sinai from the rest of the landscape.
No wonder the underbrush in the surrounding forest had seemed thinner the past couple of mornings, but what genius had decided to place the tinder so close to the dry wooden fence? They could have at least dug a ditch as a firebreak. Even his feeble delta brain knew that.
Scat.
Someone had to put out the fire before it spread to the stockade fence . . . and trapped everyone inside.
He ran deeper into the woods, morphed again, and raised his muzzle to summon help.
It’s tough being tough when one isn’t wearing clothes and the setting is straight out of Deliverance, Hank thought as Luke tossed one of Butler’s mercenaries against a tree at the edge of the ravine and told him not to move.
The soldier slumped to the ground before he ever heard the warning.
“Now what?” Luke asked.
“Where did you find him?” Hank asked.
“Setting fire to the brush by the edge of the gorge. Scared the piss right out of him.”
Hank didn’t need to be told the latter: he could smell the sharp tang of urine even though smoke and gasoline fumes filled the air. He thought he heard someone running from the direction of the bus, but getting a fix on the footfalls was difficult with the crackle of flames growing louder.
“What are we going to do with G.I. Joe?” Luke nodded toward the unconscious soldier.
“He’s not government issue,” Hank corrected. “If anything, he was probably rejected by his local draft board, which is how he ended up with the likes of Randy Butler.”
Luke stared at the pathetic figure. “A man’s gotta belong somewhere.”
Hank wondered to whom Luke referred. The sky slowly turned from gray to pink, like shrimp as it cooked. Something crashed through the saplings toward them. Not a deer, although Hank had glimpsed several does herding their fawns away from the flames.
He’d heard Stoker summon a roadie to bring their clothes, so when Lucy burst into view, he was surprised.
She took one look at them, and her face flushed bright red.
Oh, yeah. Their clothes were en route from the bus. Which is where she was supposed to be . . . on the bus, not en route.
She clutched her side and panted, as if she’d run the entire distance. “Where’s Stoker? Is he okay?”
“Haven’t seen him lately,” Hank replied.
He turned his back to her. His nudity didn’t embarrass him, but Lucy didn’t need any more stress right now. Matter of fact, he was starting to worry about her. She obviously wasn’t in any kind of physical shape to be dashing through the woods.
“Are you okay?” Luke asked, and stepped toward her.
Hank cuffed the side of his head, sending him sprawling into the rotting leaves carpeting the ground.
Stupid whelp. Because he spent entirely too much time surfing porn sites on the Internet, he probably didn’t realize his naked parts were adding to Lucy’s discomfort.
“Why didn’t you stay on the bus?” Hank asked her.
“The fire,” she said, still gasping for air. “Stoker. Michelle.”
“You leave them to us,” Hank said. “And you go back to the bus. That was the deal. You stay with the bus.”
“No.”
He thought he heard tears, so he glanced over his shoulder.
She was shaking her head. “The deal was no fire. You reneged. Any other deal is null and void.”
Hank tried another angle. “Stoker is not going to be happy if he sees you here.”
“We didn’t start the fire,” Luke added. He’d climbed to his feet and now brushed leaf skeletons from his flesh. “If I never get up close and personal with a fire again, it’ll be too soon.”
The look in Lucy’s eyes turned wild. Feral.
Uh-oh, Hank thought.
“Well, somebody started a fire,” she snapped. “Where’s Stoker?”
Hank shook his head. “I don’t know.” He heard someone else running toward them. The smoke was starting to deaden his sense of smell.
A roadie joined them, barely winded while Lucy was still trying to catch up with her oxygen. He threw down a wad of fabric. “Your clothes.”
“Take Lucy back to the bus,” Hank ordered.
“Give me a minute to catch my breath,” she said. “Then we need to find Stoker.”
“You’re not going to catch your breath with all this smoke,” the roadie said. “And you’re walking back to the bus, not running through the woods. Let’s go.”
Lucy started hiking in the opposite direction, heading toward the gorge, still wheezing and limping slightly. “Hank, you mentioned a tunnel, a way into New Sinai from the gorge. Not the hole you guys dug when you extracted me, but a real, honest-to-goodness tunnel.”
Hank pulled on his sweatsuit and hurried to catch up with her. He felt naked without his hat. “What if someone from New Sinai sees you?”
Lucy’s laugh lacked mirth. “I’m their ghost, rem
ember? They’re less likely to shoot at me than they are at you.”
“The spring will go dry before we can wet down the fence,” a soldier said.
Randy gritted his teeth.
One spark. That’s all it would take to turn the stockade from protection to a death trap.
There was no way the entire populace could exit through the abandoned mine shaft in the rock beneath the Tabernacle. Its narrowness prohibited anything but single file passage. Only children could walk abreast; and really, they, along with the women, were the most expendable of his followers. The youngest children were already coughing, but they were a sickly bunch anyway, a complete drain on his society.
He’d half-hoped he’d be able to toss a few more over the fence before the week was over, but Reuel’s fire had voided that plan, at least for the day. The wolves hadn’t stayed nearly as long as they had the previous mornings.
Fine for today, but what about tomorrow and the day after?
That was the problem with most people: they couldn’t see the big picture unless someone like him rubbed their noses in the wet paint. One morning of brush fire wasn’t going to scare off a determined pack of wolves. New Sinai needed a more permanent solution, such as a couple of wolf pelts nailed to the side of the fence, although if the idiots who’d reintroduced the wolves into the mountains found out, New Sinai would have more than wolves hounding them.
On the other hand, the way things were going this morning, there wouldn’t even be a fence by noon, so a couple of wolf pelts was a moot point.
Stoker joined Ethan in a cluster of trees. The fire crackled along the line of brush, creating a flaming necklace adorning the stockade fence.
“Are there a lot of kids in there?” Ethan asked.
“I only saw a couple,” Stoker said. “Lucy would know better than I do. Or Joseph.”
“Well, Lucy and Joseph aren’t here right now,” Ethan said, his gaze fixed on the flames.
“You say that as if it’s a bad thing,” Stoker said.
“Don’t you remember how scary being in that burning barn was?” Ethan asked. “We’re adults with survival skills. Those kids don’t even have life skills.”
Stoker would never forget the barn fire: the smoke stinging his eyes and filling his lungs; flames singeing his fur when he ventured too close. Smelling the current conflagration conjured up every memory of that Montana inferno.
“I don’t think there are a lot of kids.”
Ethan stared at the burning brush a few more moments. “The fire might be a good distraction if you want to get Lucy’s sister out of there.”
Stoker watched the tongues of flames licking at the bracken, and remembered his promise to Lucy. He had to keep his word, no matter how much he loathed fire. “That’s what I was thinking. Want to help me find Hank’s tunnel?”
“Where’s Stoker?” Emotion shredded the edges of Lucy’s voice as she got in Luke’s face.
“I don’t know,” Luke replied. “Maybe he went to rescue your sister.”
Lucy peered at the mouth of the tunnel, barely more than a fissure in the rocky side of the gorge, a narrow path cut through the rock. Her heart thudded in her ears, beating out a warning not to pursue Stoker, that despite his claims to the contrary, he was perfectly capable of making decisions. Good decisions. He wouldn’t do anything to endanger his life.
Except he might, if only to prove to her that he could be her hero. She never should have extracted his promise to rescue her sister. Now she was going to lose both of them, and she didn’t think she could stand it.
Not when she’d just found Stoker. The very things she loved most about him couldn’t be the instruments of his death. She wouldn’t, she couldn’t let that happen.
He was so much more than simply what he could do for her.
What a lousy time to realize how much he meant to her, how very precious and necessary to her he was. But then, her timing had always been bad.
The blackness of the fissure beckoned. There was nothing she could do to help, except distract the gunmen from the wolves by pretending to be a ghost, but if that’s what it took to save her mate, she was going to have to have to suck it up, put on her big girl panties, and deal with it. After all, Stoker was in danger because of her.
“What are you doing here?” Stoker asked the roadie who handed his sweatsuit to him.
“Delivering your clothes the way you asked?”
“No, I ordered you to watch my mate. Where’s Lucy?”
The roadie’s sun-deprived face turned even more moon-pale. “Uh, she took off, looking for you.”
“And you didn’t go with her if you couldn’t stop her?” Stoker snarled. Ancient Ones, he didn’t have time for this scat.
“Hank and Luke followed her,” the roadie explained.
Stoker punched the roadie, just to vent some of his rage.
The smoke played havoc with his olfactory nerves, numbing them to every other scent. He’d never be able to track Lucy by using his world-famous nose. His personal secret weapon failed him when he needed it the most.
Helplessness and rage roiled together into a new emotion, one he couldn’t even name. All he knew was that blood needed to flow, and at that moment, he didn’t much care whose blood fulfilled the sacrifice.
No, that wasn’t true.
Randy Butler had to die. Maybe Restin and his government mandate only wanted Butler stopped, but Stoker wanted him dead.
“You can’t go in there.” Hank grabbed Lucy’s arm as she tried to duck past him and into the mouth of the mine shaft. “It’s too dangerous.”
“My husband and sister are behind that fence.” Tears flowed in molten paths down her cheeks. “I can’t stay here while they die, not when I might be able to help.”
“Michelle’s not there,” Hank said.
“What?” Lucy whirled on him. “You went in after her?”
Hank shook his head. “Not me. Tokarz. He came back two nights ago and got her out while the rest of us distracted everyone with Jericho.”
“Where is she?” Lucy clutched his arm, her fingernails leaving quarter moon indentations in his flesh. “Is she okay?”
“She was airlifted to Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs. They’re keeping an eye on her and the baby.”
The bands of tension in her chest tightened. Stoker was on a wild goose chase. “You didn’t tell anyone? Stoker went through the tunnel for nothing?”
“Not nothing. There are innocent people in there,” Hank said, sounding defensive. “Women and kids.”
“Stoker didn’t go in for the kids. He went in for Michelle!” Lucy snapped. “He went in to keep a promise to me, one he can’t keep now because Michelle isn’t there, and you didn’t tell him. If he dies, I will never forgive you. Do you hear me? I’ll have you brought up on murder charges. I’ll tell Restin to rip out your throat. I’ll–”
“I get the picture,” Hank said. “But I wonder if you do.”
“What’s the problem?”
Restin had moved through the woods so silently, no one had heard him approach.
Lucy jumped and shrieked a little, but not one of the lycanthropes batted an eye. The crackle and roar of the fire and the fleeing wildlife had masked his footfalls, and the wily werewolf took full advantage of the cover.
“Lucy wants to go after Stoker,” Hank said.
Restin turned his intense blue gaze to her. “That mine shaft looks awfully . . . close.”
His concern for her claustrophobia touched her–a fleeting brush of gratitude–or maybe he was reminding her of her shortcomings.
“What are you trying to do? Force Stoker to rescue you instead of your sister?”
Lucy glanced at Hank, who didn’t react. Obviously Restin wasn’t in on Hank’s private li
ttle Operation Michelle either.
She shook her head. “I know my ideas are usually really bad, but they think I’m a ghost. I thought I could go in, spook a few of them, maybe distract them, Stoker could get out.”
“Not a bad plan,” Restin said, and Lucy’s stomach lurched. If Restin liked it, it had to be a dreadful solution.