“Mama. Come. Free.”
But he couldn’t get her out. He needed fingers to work the latch and he was a wolf.
She was lying on her belly, her head on her paws. Her eyes were sad and clouded over with grief at the loss of her mate. She was bleeding from several wounds. Her fur was matted with her blood. When he pressed his nose through the bars, she rallied enough to kiss it with her tongue.
“Go,” she whispered in his mind. “Go before they catch you.”
“No!”
“Go. The pups.”
He didn’t want to think about his siblings. They were in the cabin in the woods where he was born, huddled before a wood stove that had long since gone out. He couldn’t tell his mother that. He was new at this mind talk and had trouble forming the words. He did his best to relieve her worry.
“Pups. Good.”
For three days he came to her. One of the caged wolvers, another female, died the first night. He could smell no injury on her. She just laid her head down and died. Another, a male, died the second night. From far away, he could hear the male howling and snarling with rage as he battered himself against the bars. And then it stopped. When he came to his mother, the other wolver was dead.
The other three wolvers all sat, staring at nothing. Unlike him, they could shift back to man with the next moon, but they wouldn’t. They wouldn’t give the secret away.
On the third night, his mother couldn’t lift her head enough to kiss his nose. Her whimper was soft and constant. He pressed his head between the bars until it hurt. He stretched his tongue as far as it would go to give her one last kiss.
“Love you,” she said, her voice a barely discernable whisper in his mind. “Take care of my pups.” Her eyes remained open as the last breath left her.
His long howl of grief was interrupted by the shouts of men. He ran and never looked back.
Sharp pain did what his befuddled brain could not. He was fully awake, but with the residual memory of the wolf still with him, he snarled and snapped at the electric prod that poked his stomach.
“Perfect! I knew you were the one as soon as they brought you in.”
There were two men in the room. One held the prod. It was the other who spoke.
Of medium height and athletic build, Raymond Gantnor was the movie version of the perfect doctor. His tanned and marginally lined face was topped by thick, dark hair, greying at the temples. His smile was warm and reassuring, and showed off two even rows of pearly white teeth. His slacks were pressed with a sharp crease. His blue oxford shirt, open at the neck, looked starched. Looking at him, no one would suspect that under the pristine lab coat with his name embroidered on the pocket, lay a monster.
“It’s the full moon, isn’t it? I should have paid more attention to the werewolf mythology. Look at him, Jenkins. You can see it in his eyes. I saw that look in her eyes a few times. Animal eyes. I tried everything I could to make her change, but she wouldn’t. I wonder now if she could. I’d like to know the answer to that. Is it only the males that change or is she defective in some way?”
“Defective. All females are. They can’t change,” Bull answered. Until he figured a way out, Tommie at least, might be protected.
He saw the room through wolf’s eyes, but he could do nothing to change them. They burned with dryness. His wolf was close to the surface, snarling and growling with its panicked need to be released. It was confused. Images of their surroundings bounced in and out of its consciousness. Instinct called to it to be aware of the minute details of its surroundings, but the images faded as soon as the animal shifted its eyes. Confusion led to anger and anger to rage.
Bull fought to control it, to use it when the time was right and not before.
He shook his head as if his clearing mind was still confused. “What did you give me?”
“A simple combination of animal anesthetics. It took me a while to get the dosages right. I never had live test subjects before, non-human ones I mean. Tommie was my first subject in the drug department. I perfected it with the males. The dosage would kill a man, but you aren’t a man are you?
“You almost changed while you were under. Your friend was about to change, too, the younger one, not the cripple. I think the cripple might be defective, too. A three-legged werewolf can’t be of much use. I should have put him down, but he was useful for the drug trials. You, on the other hand, seem to be a perfect specimen and those other two taught me a great deal.”
The drug was wearing off quickly now and Bull’s mind retained what his eyes saw.
“Hit him again,” Gantnor ordered and Bull felt the sting of the electric prod.
This was what they’d done to Tommie, his mate. This was what they’d done to Samuel, a good wolver condemned to servitude because he’d had the courage to gnaw off his own paw to avoid the death that awaited him. This was what they’d done to Eli that forced him over the edge into feral madness and deprived his mate and offspring the fullness of life they deserved.
Fury boiled up and overflowed. Bull rolled to his back and struck out with his feet, slamming them over and over into the door of the cage. This one was different than the ones at the clinic. It was older. It had no mortise lock like the clinic’s, which were easier to snap. This one was secured with a heavy chain and padlock.
Gantnor was shouting. “Hit him again. Hit him again. He’s doing it. He’s going. Hit him again.” He had a camera in his hands. Click, click, click. The doctor snapped picture after picture, shouting with each click. “Hit him. Again. Again.”
Jolts of fire sizzled through Bull’s body. His wolf howled with rage. It wanted out. It wanted to be free of the pain and free to seek its revenge on the thing that caused it.
The links of the chain were separating. Bull could see it each time the door banged outward. He could feel it with each strike of his bare feet against the bars. He was almost there. With the next jolt of electricity, he fell back, chest heaving with his efforts. His body was coated with sweat. His heart was pounding and his head felt ready to explode.
“Give him a minute and we’ll start again,” Gantnor said, laying the camera aside. “The fight’s gone out of him, but look at his eyes. It’s there. It’s going to happen.”
“Cunning,” Bull muttered as he closed his eyes.
His wolf snarled. It understood.
Chapter 31
One wing of the gate hanging from the bumper, Cora brought the bus to a skidding stop. Several security men came sprinting toward them, all of them shouting words of alarm.
Cora opened the door and the first man to leap aboard was met by Helen’s fry pan. The crunch of skull was sickening and at first, Tommie sat stunned by the violence of it. But then a shot rang out and someone screamed as a bullet tore through the window of the bus, shattering the glass.
More shots were fired. The women poured out of the bus. The truck skid up beside them, narrowly missing Sarah who was last. Chaos ensued. More gunshots, shouts, screeches.
Tommie felt a hand at her back, shoving her away from the fight and toward the house.
“Go. Go find Bull. We’ll follow,” Cora shouted. “Go!” she shouted again when Tommie hesitated.
The blood spattered face of Bogie appeared in front of her. He grabbed her arm and started running. Tommie ran with him. The air between them whistled. A streak of blood appeared on Bogie’s cheek. Still moving toward the house, he grinned at her.
“Missed,” he said.
When they reached the wide veranda, he shoved her down behind one of the pillars while he went to the door. Finding it locked, he pulled a case from his pocket, chose what he needed and went to work on the lock. He flinched once when the wood above his head splintered.
Stretch came sprinting across the lawn. He reached them just as Bogie opened the door. Ducking low, he sprinted through. Another shot was fired. Tommie heard a grunt and then Bogie was pulling her through the door.
“One thing you learn quick as an omega. Keep your head low,
” Stretch told her.
Tommie averted her eyes away from the body on the floor. One of the men put a gun in her hand. Stretch took it back, pressed a red button on the side and handed it back.
“Point and shoot,” he said. “Easy.”
Easy for who? She’d never shot a gun in her life.
“High, low, right, left,” Bogie ordered and Stretch took off up the staircase to the right.
Tommie had no idea what Bogie meant until he shoved her toward the staircase that rose to the left. They were checking the house from top to bottom, right to left.
Tommie did as she was told and found what she expected. Nothing. She was backing from the next to the last room, when a familiar voice behind her spoke.
“Drop the gun and turn around.”
Tommie did as she was told. The nurse from the clinic, the one she’d rolled through the muck in the cage, was standing at the top of the stairs, pointing a gun at Tommie’s chest. Her voice was steady and her hand didn’t waver. She knew what she was doing with the weapon and with the few feet that separated them, the woman couldn’t miss.
Buster and Stu, she was sure, knew nothing of the real reason for her incarceration, nor did they care. She was a plaything for the sadistic doctor, something they understood, and a means to their freedom from the wards. The nurse was different. She’d never been sure how much the woman knew. She only knew the woman hated her.
“Won’t Raymond be happy to have his little bitch back. He doesn’t think much of you anymore, though. He has something better now. Maybe he can start a breeding program. He never wanted you, you know. It was your sire he wanted, but someone fucked up and he ended up with you. He’s wasted years on you.”
Over the balcony rail that ran along the upstairs hall, Tommie could see Helen coming through the front door.
Helen looked up and shouted, “Hey!”
The nurse turned and the gun swung around with her.
~*~
“Up the voltage and hit him again, Jenkins.”
Bull kept his eyes closed and allowed his wolf to tell him when to move. His eyes opened, his hand shot out. He grabbed the prod and yanked the startled Jenkins up against the bars. His other hand shot through the bars and into the man’s throat.
Gantnor shouted. Bull ignored him. He let Jenkins fall and fell back into position to kick the door. Once, twice, and the chain broke. Something bounced off his shoulder. He grabbed the dart from the floor, rolled forward, and emerged from the cage.
The doctor was fumbling with the pistol trying to load another dart. Bull grabbed the gun from him and tossed it aside.
Hands in the air, Raymond Gantnor pleaded with him. “You don’t understand. This could be one of the greatest scientific discoveries of all time. You could share in it. You’d be famous. Proof that werewolves exist. That’s all I wanted. Proof.”
“Is that all you wanted?” Bull leaned forward into Gantnor’s space and took the camera from the counter. He smiled, letting his wolf show when the man shrank back from his nearness. “I’m a wolver, Dr. Gantnor, not a werewolf. That’s something else you don’t want to meet. I’m part man, part wolf, a simple creature who’s not interested in scientific discoveries or fame.” He pulled the card from the camera.
“All I understand is that you tortured the woman who is to be my mate and two men I call packmates. Mates and packmates mean everything to us. Hurt one and you hurt us all, and when we’re hurt, we bite, though we don’t always use our teeth. Here’s your proof of that little scientific tidbit.”
Bull plunged the dart into Raymond Gantnor’s chest.
A gunshot sounded overhead and he heard Tommie’s scream. His wolf howled and Bull ran, leaving Gantnor to die alone.
~*~
Tommie didn’t think. She leapt. The boom of the gun going off echoed through the two story entrance hall as she and the nurse tumbled down the stairs. One of them screamed and Tommie wasn’t sure if it was her or the nurse. She was at the top of the stairs and then she was at the bottom. It was all over in seconds.
Helen plucked her up with one hand from where she landed atop the nurse. The beefy woman still held her frying pan in the other.
The nurse, whose name Tommie never knew, lay at the foot of the stairs, her neck bent at an odd angle.
“Are you crazy?” Helen hollered at Tommie, “You could have been killed.”
Tommie’s whole body was shaking, but she patted Helen’s cheek and tried to smile. “Yes, Helen, I’m pretty sure I am and you’re welcome.”
“Tommie!” A naked Bull, carrying a bundle of clothes, tore across the hall. He looked at the woman’s body at the foot of the stairs and then at Tommie.
“You didn’t,” he said.
“She did,” Helen said.
“We came to rescue you,” Tommie said.
Bull pulled her into his arms. “You’re crazy.”
“Already told her that.”
“I meant all of you,” Bull laughed.
“Yeah, listen to the naked guy.” Stretch walked over to the group and put his arm around Helen. “Don’t know if I like you eyeing another man’s jewels.”
Helen’s face turned pink and she leaned into Stretch. “You got the only jewels I need.”
Tommie started to laugh. She laughed until it turned to tears and she sobbed into Bull’s bare chest. “I don’t think I can do this anymore, Bull. I just don’t think I can do it.”
“You won’t have to, baby. I swear it. None of you will ever have to do something like this again.”
The Alpha was dead and so was Gantnor. They’d won, but no one was in the mood to celebrate. They were leaving this camp and the past behind and that was enough.
Tommie was one of the first to say goodnight. She was exhausted and numb. She told herself that the nurse was as much a monster as Gantnor and her death was not intentional. She’d only meant to stop the woman from shooting Helen. But a life was a life, and she had taken it.
She was exhausted, but she couldn’t sleep. She cried silently and prayed for forgiveness for what she had done, for drawing Bull into the Gantnor mess, and for laying her burden on the others when they had troubles of their own. She loved them and felt that it was her job to take care of them, not the other way around.
She heard someone scratch on the door of the tent, the camper’s way of knocking. It was Cora, dressed in flannel pajamas with little yellow ducks dancing across the yoke. She, too, had gone to bed early and evidently she, too, had been unable to sleep. Tommie moved over to give her room to sit on the edge of the makeshift bed.
Cora didn’t sit. She lay down beside Tommie and slipped her arm beneath Tommie’s head. With her other hand, she stroked Tommie’s hair like a mother would a child.
“You were so quiet on the ride home,” she began, “I knew you were feeling low. The other women feel it, too. I don’t know what it is, but there’s something special about you, Tommie. You make us dream and you make us remember to feel bad when bad things are done, even when they need to be done,” she chided gently. “If you do enough bad things in life, you tend to stop feeling bad about them and that’s not good. That’s us. What you end up with is like what our Macey was becoming, a selfish little bitch who thought of herself before she thought of others. You saved her from that when we couldn’t, because we were just saying the words. We weren’t living them. What we did tonight? It was for you and Bull, but it was for all of us, too. You two stood for us when we needed you and tonight, we stood for you. That’s what pack is and that’s a good feeling we haven’t had in a long, long time. I know I’m not saying it like it should be said, but I thought it might give you some comfort to know what’s in my heart.”
Cora kissed her brow and eased away. “I’ll say goodnight now. I’ll bet Bull is anxious to seek his bed and I’m interfering.”
“Thank you, Cora, for taking me in and for giving me the comfort of your heart.”
“You see? That’s what pack is and in the end, it’s eve
rything.”
Bull crawled through the door as she was drying her eyes yet again.
“Are you okay, Tommie?”
“I think I am, or at least I’m getting there.”
She watched him strip off his clothes and slide in beside her. She waited until he saw the chocolate bar on his pillow.
“That’s for you,” she said. “It should probably be a bottle of good whiskey or something like that, but it’s all I’ve got. It’s to say I’m sorry about earlier. When you said you were going to take care of Eli, you meant it. I had no right to say what I did.”
Bull leaned over to kiss her nose and then lay back staring at the ceiling of the tent. “Thank you, but I don’t deserve it. I could have taken the time to explain.”
“It has to do with the things you can’t talk about, doesn’t it?
“It does,” he said quietly. “I tell myself it happened a long time ago, that it’s the past and I should forget it. I thought I’d trained myself not to think about it, but the truth is that I built my whole life around thinking about what I lost. Lately, I’ve been thinking about what I had instead of what I lost. Doesn’t seem like a big difference, does it?”
“It is if what you had was good.”
“It was. I had a great life for a wolver cub. I had a good Alpha. I had a good pack. I had a great family. I ran the woods. You were right about being all arms and legs and big feet. I was tall and gawky and naive. I was happy.
“We were a small pack, only thirty-one of us. We lived in cabins, not primitive, but simple, off the grid. You know, generators for electric, wood stoves for heat, that kind of thing. I remember being so excited when I read an article about solar panels. I showed it to our Alpha. I remember feeling so grownup when he said he would look into it. Our Alpha was a good man, a kind man, too kind as it turned out.
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