by Zoe Chant
Could the device de Jager had been using – Toni’s mind reeled – some sort of tracker that picked up on mindspeak? And – he must have deliberately dropped it in front of her. The way it had stung her … it had looked like a burn, but it had felt as though it had scraped skin off her fingertips where she touched it.
Skin. Blood. DNA.
Toni gulped.
Of course. He wouldn’t have been able to go up to the kids, but an adult, a related adult, was fair game. Toni’s shifter genes weren’t active, but they were still there. All those doctors’ visits when she was young had proved that.
After picking up on Felix’s mindspeak, and her defective DNA, de Jager would have had enough evidence to figure out who the shifters were in their little trio.
And if he had the technology to do all that … Jack had said de Jager was a hunter. He wouldn’t want to leave shifters any advantage. If he could detect mindspeak, it made sense that he would also have the ability to silence it.
It made sense. But it didn’t. It made no sense. The most important rule of shifter society, no matter whether you were a cat or a four-toed sloth, was secrecy. How could a human know enough about them to be able to build that sort of technology?
Assuming de Jager was human.
The possibilities raised by that thought were too horrifying. Either de Jager was a shifter who hunted his own kind – knowing they couldn’t appeal to human authorities for help – or he’d somehow had access to shifter abilities, enough to test and prove his hunting tech. Toni didn’t want to think about what that might have involved.
She pushed it to the back of her mind. Focus on what’s happening now, she told herself. Find Lexi. Find Felix.
She looked up at Jack, at the concern in his eyes. She trusted him, more deeply that she would ever have felt was possible given they had only known each other less than twenty-four hours. She had to tell him.
She couldn’t.
Even if some humans already knew about shifters, telling more would only increase the danger. Even if she trusted the human in question. Even if she…
Jack was still talking to her, words that didn’t make it to her ears. She made up her mind and held up one hand to his lips.
“De Jager has Lexi and Felix,” she said quickly.
Karen gasped. “How can you know—”
“I can’t explain that to you now. But he’s got them, and they’re still somewhere near the camp site. We have to move quickly.” Toni had been speaking directly to Jack, but now she turned to look at Karen. “Have there been … has anyone seen two small cats around the camp? Short-haired, with chocolate-brown fur. They’re…” She thought quickly “…the twins’ pets. He might have used them to, to blackmail them into going with him.”
Karen frowned. “I haven’t heard anything. Though I did see an animal control van near the reception hut when we came back from today’s ride.”
Toni was running before she finished speaking. The reception building was at the entrance to the camping ground – down the road, past the cabins. She heard Karen shout in confusion behind her, but ignored it.
Jack ran up beside her, keeping pace with Toni’s panicked sprint.
“This way. It’s a shortcut,” he said, pointing to another path through the trees.
Toni swerved to follow him, trying to keep her mental map of the park oriented. This route would bypass the cabins. If it went directly to the park entrance, it could save them minutes of running. And she had the feeling that every minute was going to count.
It was getting dark. They had been gone all day – and that was the plan, Toni wailed to herself, leave the kids to their own devices– with an adult who had no idea they were shifters. How did I ever, ever think that would be a good idea?
Toni had a stitch in her side by the time they burst out of the trees and on to sealed road. Ahead, the reception hut glowed like a beacon. The porch light illuminated a dark van parked in front.
Three hundred feet. Less. Toni opened her mouth to yell as the hut door opened and a man stepped out, two carry-cages clutched one in each hand. As she drew breath to shout, a panicked howl shot through her mind.
The cry cut into Toni like a knife. She stumbled and crashed to the ground. Beside her, Jack swore and clutched his head.
Toni tried to push herself back upright and hissed in pain as her wrist collapsed under her. She had hit the tarmac at running speed and tumbled head-over-heels; she didn’t need the fading evening light to know the concrete had torn up the skin on her hands and knees. The side of her face stung.
“Are you all right?” Jack’s voice was urgent, panting after their run. He knelt and pulled Toni upright.
Toni leant against him for support, testing her legs. It hurt, but she could stand the pain – and she could stand. Only her right wrist was really injured. She flexed her fingers gingerly, wincing as pain shot up her arm. Then she heard something that made her skin go cold.
Ahead of them – still too far ahead – the engine of the black van rumbled into life. Two headlights cut through the darkness, blinding Toni with their glare. She held one hand up to shield her eyes and shouted.
“Hey! Stop! You, stop right now!”
It was impossible to see the man behind the wheel. As Toni shouted and waved, Jack doing the same beside her, the headlights slipped sideways, leaving them in darkness. The engine roared, and the van swung away into the night.
Toni couldn’t believe what she was seeing. She stood stunned for a moment, her head thumping.
He’s driving away.
He saw two people yelling at him to stop, one of them bleeding on the road. And he drove away.
She realized with a chill of horror what that meant. It couldn’t be an accident that the driver had sped off without checking to see whether she was okay.
It must have been de Jager. He hadn’t stopped, because he recognised her – and he had Lexi and Felix.
And he knew who they were, too. What they were.
“No!” she cried, and ran forward again. It was no use. The van was far ahead of them already, and accelerating. But she couldn’t stop. She couldn’t just leave them.
“Toni, wait!” called Jack from behind her. He caught up to her in a few long strides and flung his arms around her, holding her still. Sobs heaved out of Toni and she pushed him away.
“I can’t stop! I’ve got to – I’ve got to do something. He’s got them—”
She stopped. How was she meant to explain this? He and Karen and everyone else would help her look for Lexi and Felix, but they were looking for human children. If she told Jack they had to go after the animal control van instead, he was going to think she had gone nuts. If she told him the twins were in the van – that they had just seen someone carrying them into the trunk in cages…
They’d lock her up. They would give her something to calm her down and keep her out of the way and keep looking around the camp for freaking human children and she would never be able to find Lexi and Felix. She would lose them.
No. She had to do this herself. But first…
Toni pressed the palms of her hands against her eyes, groaning. She had to call her sister, Ellie, and her husband. She only hoped they would answer this time. If she couldn’t get hold of Ellie or Werther, then she would try her parents. Maybe they knew some local shifters through their own networks. Maybe they knew someone who could help.
She turned toward the reception hut, remembering the old rotary-style phone on the front desk.
“I’m sorry. I’ve got to – I’ve got to make a phone call…”
“Toni,” Jack said again, grabbing her arm to stop her. Fury bubbled up inside her – how dare he stop her? Didn’t he understand? But then she looked up into his eyes.
There was no pity or look of oh-god-she’s-lost-it-now in his expression. Just care, concern, and … something else.
“Toni,” he repeated. “Lexi and Felix … are in the truck, aren’t they? Wh
en the guy with the cages came out, I heard…”
He looked at her as though a light had gone on behind his eyes.
“Toni, you trust me, don’t you?”
“Yes,” she blurted. “I do, but—”
He cut her off. “Then trust me now. I’ll get the twins back. The road here has speed bumps all the way back to the highway. That van won’t get far fast.” He cupped Toni’s face in his hands. “I will get them back.”
Toni’s eyes went wide. If he was going to go after the van, after the cats – was he suggesting – did that mean—? She didn’t dare complete the thought. Before she could speak, he turned and ran into the darkness by the side of the road.
“Jack!” Toni strained to look into the shadows. She heard twigs breaking and footfalls muffled by leaf mold, and then nothing.
Toni shivered, adrenaline fading into fear and exhaustion. Whatever thought had half-formed as Jack reassured her was dissolving now.
What was he thinking? No human could keep pace with a speeding van, regardless of speed bumps. And he was joking if he thought he was going to catch up with the vehicle. It must be a mile away by now.
She was on her own.
First things first. Toni forced herself to jog over to the reception hut. It was empty. There were no other cars around, either. She dredged Ellie’s cell number out of her memory and picked up the phone.
There was no dial tone. She realized, dully, that this did not surprise her. Reception empty, a fake animal control van – of course they would cut the phone lines as well. Literally cut in this case, she saw as she followed the phone line back toward the wall.
Her cell was still in her pack in the cabin. She had left it there this morning because reception out here was so patchy the phone was useless, but she could drive back toward civilisation until she found a signal.
Maybe she would even catch up with the van on the way.
CHAPTER EIGHT
JACK
Jack ran through the undergrowth, a silent shadow in the night. The road out of the park wound through the outskirts of the forest, but in this form he could take a direct route through the trees. He could hear the roar of the van’s engine ahead, crawling around the winding road.
It had been too long since he last shifted. This trip back to America was meant to be a holiday for his tiger, too, but what with one thing and another he hadn’t had the chance to let it out.
Muscles bunched and stretched under striped fur as Jack leapt past shrubs and low-hanging branches. His strong night-vision meant he avoided the obstacles that would have tripped his human form, and he closed in on his prey.
While his tiger focused on the hunt, Jack’s human mind was spilling over with questions. He knew that Toni was human – or he had assumed she was. Surely his tiger would have recognised a fellow shifter?
But her niece and nephew? Toni had panicked when Karen told her two cats had been picked up by animal control. She had said they were the kids’ pets, but … why had she never mentioned them before? And who brought pet cats on a camping holiday?
As soon as she had heard about the two cats, she had run. The fear Jack smelled rolling off her was the same protective terror she’d had when Karen first told her the kids were missing.
The pieces started to fall into place. Why Toni had been so worried Karen wouldn’t be able to keep the kids under control. The piercing screams from the van that had made her trip over. She hadn’t fallen from surprise, she’d been reacting to the mental punch of the kids’ terror flooding into her mind. He had felt it, too, but had thought the shooting pain was a result of the mate bond, and that he had been feeling Toni hurting as she hit the ground.
Toni knew about shifters. Hell, she might even be a shifter! He hadn’t sensed it in her – but then he hadn’t sensed that the twins were shifters, either.
The realisation fuelled him with elation and he ran faster. He could tell her about himself, talk to her about the mate bond. She would already know about it, if she came from a family of shifters. She would understand. She could probably tell him things about being a shifter that he didn’t know.
He could tell her, and it wouldn’t scare her off.
Yellow light glinted on distant trees, and Jack bared his fangs.
She would understand, but only if he could fix this, and save her niece and nephew. Otherwise he would just be the coward who had spent so long worrying about his own secret that he didn’t see what was right under his nose. The great big tough tiger who was so self-involved he didn’t even notice two tiny, helpless housecats.
Who let hunters take cubs from his land. From his mate.
His family.
He growled low in his throat. That isn’t going to happen, he promised.
Jack knew the Silver Forest like the back of his paw. Just in front of him was the only section of road that cut through the rolling foothills rather than curling around them. Low cliffs lined the road on either side for a quarter-mile where dynamite had blown a flat track through the rock. Rather than following the flat ground, Jack loped up the side of the hill, watching the twin beams of the van’s headlights dogleg along the winding road and begin to approach the cut. Crouching on the cliff above the road, he waited, every muscle tensed for action.
He had to time this right. He would only have one chance. One chance to save the children, and win Toni’s trust.
The sound of the car engines grew louder. The driver was fighting a losing battle with the many speed-bumps that pockmarked the road. Jack had had them installed when he purchased the park, to reduce the danger of traffic accidents from drivers racing along the quiet road at high speeds. That decision was now proving a good one.
Jack watched as the van bumped over another obstacle and landed with a suspension-mauling screech.
Thirty feet. Twenty. Ten—
Jack leapt, landing with a squeal of claws on metal on the van’s hood. A pale face stared at him in shock from the driver’s seat. He just had time to note the driver wasn’t de Jager before the man hit the brakes and sent the van spinning toward the side of the road.
Jack jumped aside as the vehicle ploughed through the barrier and into the cliff. Without waiting to see what happened to the driver he ran up to the doors at the back of the van. There was no need to shift to open them – human fingers might be able to work the locking mechanism but a tiger’s claws could simply tear it off. The doors rattled open and Jack lifted his front legs on to the van floor to look inside.
Two heavy-duty wire carry-cages, the sort rangers used to trap feral animals in, were strapped to the back wall. Inside each was a small, chocolate-brown cat. They both froze in place, staring at him with wide blue eyes. The one on the left hissed at him, then backed to the far corner of its cage.
He paused, listening. The two cats smelled like shifters, but he couldn’t hear a peep of mindspeak from either of them. He had heard them scream earlier, so he knew they could talk.
No, he remembered. I heard them scream once, when they were being carried into the van. After that, nothing, even though I’ve been tracking them close enough to hear any calls.
He could hear something, though – a strange, low buzzing. It filled the interior of the van like a mist. His whiskers twitched. Was there something in the van that shrouded shifter mindspeak?
If so, the situation was worse than he had thought. This wasn’t just an opportunistic kidnapping. These people had come here planning to take on shifters.
Jack jumped up into the van. The itching, buzzing sensation that had made his whiskers twitch rose to cover his whole body. Well, if he couldn’t talk to the kids, he would have to let his actions speak for him.
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He reached out and grasped the closer of the two cages, inserting his claws between the door and latch and twisting. The steel gave under his grasp and the door popped open. A chocolate-brown bolt of lightning shot under his paw and out of the van. He turned to the second cage. This one held the cat that had hissed at him. It was still skulking in the back of the cage, eyeing him warily.
He eased his claws under the latch of the second cage, the same as he had the first, trying to make his movements as slow and un-threatening as possible. Since he was essentially flexing six-inch-long talons through the bars of the cage, he wasn’t sure how effective that was. The hinges were just beginning to give when he heard a sharp pop and a stinging sensation down his side.
He wrenched the door the rest of the way off and spun around, growling. The driver was standing ten feet away, aiming a handgun directly at him. Jack’s first instinct was to jump on his attacker, but then he remembered the scrap of brown fur still trapped behind him. He knew his tiger could probably take a few bullets, but he couldn’t risk the driver’s shot going wide and hitting either of the children.
Jack backed farther into the van’s crawlspace, making sure his body filled the space between the shooter and the second small cat. He snarled, baring his teeth, and the man’s hands shook, the barrel of the gun waving erratically from side to side.
Now that he could get a clear look at the driver, Jack confirmed it wasn’t de Jager. Which meant the man wasn’t working alone.
The driver’s mouth moved, as though he was trying to speak but couldn’t force the words out. He gulped audibly, then managed to shout: “Stay in the van! Stay there, and nobody needs to get hurt!”
He took one hand off the gun and fumbled in his back pocket.
Jack was about to take advantage of his momentary distraction when a dark shadow dashed out from under the van and launched itself at the man’s face. Tiny claws lashed out and drew four lines of blood across his forehead.
Jack tensed. The driver was off-kilter now, but it wouldn’t take him long to grab the small cat and hurt it. He had to move now.