by Zoe Chant
The van driver, de Jager’s assistant, had grabbed the kids just because they were there. A little bonus for the boss. Jack was the real target.
Which was why he was leaving Toni and the kids safely hidden behind layers of high-tech security, and venturing out into the woods under cover of darkness.
He couldn’t risk leading the hunters straight to them again. So instead, he was taking the fight to the hunters. And although his stomach crawled with guilt at leaving Toni behind, he knew he couldn’t bear to put Toni and the children in danger again.
Jack huffed quietly and turned back toward the forest. In a second, he was loping silently between the trees, his location fixed in his mind like the North Star.
The phone didn’t just have messages on it. It had contacts, plans – and maps.
De Jager had made his base at the abandoned mines deep within the park. It was no wonder the rangers hadn’t found him. The mines were strictly no-access, due to how dangerous they were. Any normal campers would have steered well clear.
Which was good, because that meant there wouldn’t be any stray passers-by to see Jack’s planned rendezvous with de Jager.
That man – no, that creature had killed dozens of wild animals out of rage at the fact that big game hunting was about to be made illegal. If he was hunting shifters…
Jack might not have close connections to shifter society, but he knew enough to understand what really made shifters frightened. Shifters needed to keep their powers secret, so it was impossible for them to go to the authorities if anyone was harming them in a way that touched on their shifter natures. If someone was hunting shifters – hell, there were plenty of places in the world where big-game hunting was still legal. And regular hunting, and trapping, culling, vermin control…
When a shifter died, they stayed in whatever shape they held when they drew their last breath. And no human court on Earth would prosecute a murder if the victim looked for all the world like a dumb animal.
Keeping low to the ground, Jack zeroed in on his target. De Jager’s last message said he’d be at the meeting point at eight; Jack would be there by six. He could lie in wait for hours if need be.
And when de Jager arrived…
Golden eyes glinted in the moonlight. When de Jager arrived, Jack and he had some unfinished business to take care of.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
TONI
Sun was streaming in through the living-room window by the time Toni woke up. After fleeing from Jack the night before, she had returned to the blanket nest on the sofa, acutely aware of how anxious the twins had been the last time she’d gone out of their sight. But now, even with the twins huddled beside her, the house felt … empty.
“Jack?”
Toni nudged her way out of the blankets, and sleepy yawns followed her as she walked out into the corridor. She poked her head into the kitchen, then knocked on the bathroom door. No Jack.
A flight of stairs led down to the bedrooms. This had confused Toni last night, until she realized that the apparently single-level house was set into the side of the hill, with another story dropping down the side from the entry-level ground floor. She’d helped Jack gather blankets and pillows from a spare bedroom, and knew Jack’s own room must be down there, too.
She quickly checked the stripped spare room, then hesitated at the next, closed door.
“Jack?”
There was no response to her tentative knock. Biting her lip, she opened the door.
There was no mistaking that this was the master bedroom. Jack’s room. The floor was covered with a thick carpet the color of pine needles, and floor-to-ceiling windows let the morning sun in to wash over creamy white walls. The furniture was all made of the same heavy wood, polished to buttery smoothness. A king-sized bed was positioned to catch the view.
But there was no sign of Jack.
Toni let out her breath. She had to accept the obvious: he wasn’t here.
So, where had he gone?
Toni gnawed her bottom lip. She remembered the phone she had seen on the bench the night before, the phone Jack had hidden after she mentioned it. Why hadn’t she pressed him about it then?
The gun might not have been the only thing Jack picked up from the van crash site. If Jack had the driver’s phone, he might have been able to track down the hunters somehow. But if he’d left without leaving a note…
Toni’s whole body went cold. She hadn’t known Jack long, but she was positive he wouldn’t deliberately re-traumatize the children by disappearing on them. Wherever he’d gone, he must have thought he would be back before the rest of them woke up.
“Auntie Toni?”
Toni hurried back to the foot of the stairs and looked up at Felix. The dark-haired boy was rubbing his eyes sleepily.
“Hey, kiddo,” she said, trying to smile. “Where’s your sister?”
“What’s the matter, Auntie Toni?” Felix’s voice was insistent. Toni wiped the back of her hand across her face. Were her emotions that obvious?
“Jack went out on a, an errand earlier this morning,” she said at last. “He meant to be back by now, but…”
The two children looked at each other.
Felix completed her sentence. “The man in the van had a gun,” he said. “He shot Mr. Silver before he made him drop it and run away.”
Toni frowned. “Who said anything about him going after the hunters?” she said quickly, then sighed. So much for hiding her suspicions from the kids to stop them worrying.
<…obviously gone after the hunters, oh my god> muttered Lexi, just loud enough that Toni could pick up the words.
“Dammit,” Toni muttered under her own breath. She turned away from the stairs. The whole back of the house was covered in floor-to-ceiling windows, just like the master bedroom, giving a vertigo-inducing view over the forest. “Where are you, Jack?”
She put her palms to the cool glass, and let her forehead fall to rest between them. It was like looking down into an ocean of green, waving branches. Farther out, the solid mass of green was broken by rocky outcrops and the winding curve of the river, and beyond that, the rising hills as forest gave way to mountains.
And Jack was out there somewhere.
Where?
Toni closed her eyes, concentrating. She’d felt a – a sort of magnetic attraction to Jack ever since they’d met. At the time, she had put it down to his incredible hotness, but after last night’s revelation that he was a tiger shifter…
Toni let the tiny ray of hope direct her thoughts. If that pull toward Jack was something to do with his shifter nature, and her own shifter heritage, could she call on that now? After all, she thought, flexing her hands, she knew now that she shared her family’s healing powers. Why not this?
And … now that she thought about it, this wouldn’t be the first time she had used that gravitational pull as a sort of magical homing device. After Jack had run off into the night, Toni had sprinted to her car, wondering how she would ever manage to catch up with the van, let alone find Jack wherever he ended up. But as she had buckled in and taken the wheel, a calm certainty had descended upon her. She had known, somehow, that she would find Jack only a few miles away. It had been as though an invisible ribbon connected them, and all she had to do to find him was follow it.
It had worried her, how this new shifter power she had developed seemingly skipped over the most important missing persons to zero in on … well, a fantastic lay … but she had pushed that concern aside last night. With her new knowledge of Jack’s shifter status, and the “m” word hovering on her mental horizon, she pushed it aside even more firmly now. Her new power was going to point her right to the very man she wanted to find. That was the important thing.
Toni f
ocused. There it was. The same magnetic pull she had felt the first time she met Jack, and yesterday, on their ride along the river, and on that frantic car chase through the night. A gentle, insistent force, as natural as gravity, or a river’s current.
And at the other end of it: Jack.
With her eyes closed, Toni felt the connection to his presence as though it were a tangible thing, a rope that she could pull herself along and reach out to touch him. Toni could almost believe that if she breathed in, she would be able to smell him; that if she leaned forward, she would feel the heat of his skin on hers. Around her, she could sense the cool shadows of the thickly wooded forest, and hear the murmur of leaves brushed by the wind. There was a strange, chemical tang in the air and the soil. She was standing on two legs at the edge of a clearing. And she wasn’t alone.
Toni opened her eyes and swayed. A wave of light-headedness struck her, and her heart was racing as though she had just run up a flight of stairs.
What was that? she wondered silently, rubbing her forehead. For a moment, it had been as though she really had transported out into the forest. And even now, with her consciousness firmly back in her own body, she could still feel the cool touch of the forest at the edge of her senses.
And Jack…
Jack was in trouble.
Toni reeled. The thought was like a physical blow. Somehow, she was sure beyond a doubt that it wasn’t just speculation.
“Auntie Toni? Are you okay?”
Felix had crept down the stairs to join her while she’d been concentrating. He stood beside her and they both stared out across the seemingly endless expanse of trees.
Toni put her arm out to stroke Lexi and pat Felix’s shoulder.
“I – I need to go find Jack,” she said unsteadily. Then, with more certainty, “And there is no way you two are coming with me.”
Throw herself into danger? That was one thing. But after last night, she would die before letting de Jager come within sniffing distance of the kids ever again.
“Right,” she said, her brain whirring. “Here’s the plan…”
***
As Toni drove along the rutted forest road, she could feel the connection between her and Jack grow stronger. It was as though she were a compass, and he the magnetic north.
Of course, compasses were useful if you could travel as the crow flies, but what Toni really needed was a map. Her connection to Jack was tugging her deeper into forest, but Toni was driving in the opposite direction. She knew she didn’t have many outdoors skills, but she knew enough to understand how stupid it would be to strike out into the wilderness with no idea where she was going.
She wouldn’t be any help to Jack if she just blindly followed their bond and fell head-first into a hidden ravine or sinkhole. Finding her way along the winding tracks would take longer, but be much safer.
For that, she needed a map. And she knew just the person for that.
Toni caught sight of Karen by the reception hut and screeched the car to a halt. The connection between her and Jack was almost a physical hurt now, as though distancing herself from him had stretched it tight. She gritted her teeth and forced herself to get out of the car, even as all her senses were screaming for her to turn around and race back into the trees.
“Karen!”
The blonde woman turned, surprise on her face. She had been wheeling two mountain bikes to lean against the building. One of them fell over as she hurried toward Toni.
“Toni! What—”
Toni cut her off before she could ask any awkward questions. “Karen, I need a favor. Do you have a map of the forest? With all the paths marked out on it?”
“There should be some in the cabin here, but—” Karen’s voice trailed off as Toni rushed past her. “Toni, is everything okay? Jack got in touch last night to let us know you’d found the kids and to call off the search, but are you all right?”
“I’m fine. Jack…” Toni was about to explain that Jack had gone to confront the would-be kidnapper, but the words died on her tongue. How much did Karen know about her friend? Toni didn’t doubt that if the meeting with de Jager went south – and the sick feeling in her stomach told her the odds of that were good – Jack would transform. If Toni involved any other non-shifters, what were the chances one of them might attack Jack, by mistake?
No. She couldn’t risk it. She would do this herself.
The weight of the handgun in her pack was cold against her back: a last resort against a situation she didn’t want to imagine.
“The maps are here,” said Karen, opening a drawer in one of the registration desks. “We’re here, and north’s that way. You can generally orient it by the mountains, but here’s a compass, anyway.”
She looked hard into Toni’s face. “I can tell something’s wrong, Toni. Look … I know we don’t know each other very well, but you’re a friend of Jack’s, so I hope you believe you can trust me to help, whatever it is.”
Toni clenched her fists as a wariness that wasn’t quite her own prickled the back of her neck.
“There is one thing you can do,” she said. She searched the desk for a pen, and then scribbled two phone numbers on a scrap of paper. “This is my sister Ellie’s number, and her husband, Werther. Felix and Lexi’s parents. I haven’t been able to get through to them from here in the camping ground, but if you could try…”
Both women’s eyes fell on the cut phone line behind the desk.
“A couple of the rangers are heading into town this morning to pick up some supplies,” Karen said. “I’ll go with them and get in touch with your relatives.”
“Thanks.” The twins had Toni’s phone, and instructions to keep trying to call their parents until they got through, but Toni figured a backup wouldn’t hurt. “If you get through, tell them to get here as fast as they can, and give them directions to Jack’s house.”
“In the forest? Toni, I—”
“I really don’t have time to explain, I’m sorry.” Toni gasped. The connection that linked her to Jack had gone taut, as though it was trying to pull her heart out of her chest. “Please, just call them, and tell them to get down here. I’ve got to go.”
She pressed the paper into Karen’s hands and ran outside. The bikes against the wall caught her eye, and she realized they were the ones she and Jack had left at the end of the track the night before.
Toni grabbed the sky-blue bike she’d ridden yesterday and slung it in the back of her car. She had no way of knowing whether the roads she was following would be wide enough to fit a car, and much as she disliked cycling, it was a better option than walking or running.
***
Now that she was moving in the right direction, the tension in Toni’s chest eased. The connection between her and Jack gratefully drew her forward as she navigated the roads along the edge of the forest. Eventually, though, even the gravel roads petered out. Toni bunny-hopped to a stop in a pothole, and gritted her teeth.
This was it. She’d traced the best route she could on the map, and this was the biggest road heading anywhere near in the same direction she needed to go. Even so, there was no way she could fit the car down there.
There was nothing else for it. Toni pulled the bike awkwardly from the back of the car and glared at it.
No helmet, she realized belatedly. She couldn’t even remember where she had left it. No matter. She slung one leg over and straightened the bike under her. A deep breath, one foot on a pedal, push, scramble to get the other foot into its stirrup – and she was off.
Sort of.
The where-you-look, there-you-go steering method Toni had perfected the day before still worked, though it did mean that if she didn’t want to fall into a pothole, she had to pretend they didn’t exist.
Not looking at obstacles was something of a difficult ask. Try as she might, Toni found her eyes twitching back and forth between the flat road in front of her wheels and the rocky holes and pits beside her. When the road finally deteriorated into a mud track
, she heaved a sigh of relief. At least that would be relatively soft to fall on.
As she rode, the invisible rope anchored in her chest seemed to almost physically pull her forward, driving her on toward Jack. The shocks of fear and tension that had shivered down the connection had faded, now, something she took as a sign she was getting closer. In fact, if she concentrated, she could almost tell—
Toni opened her eyes and just managed to twist the handlebars to keep herself upright before the bike veered off the path. Stupid! She could concentrate on riding, or concentrate on her connection with Jack – not both at the same time.
Her hands were sweating on the handlebars. The last thing she needed was to crash before she even got to Jack.
Come on, body. Do this one thing right, please, and I’ll never make you get on a bike again.
She pushed on. Even if she didn’t concentrate on her connection to Jack, she could tell she was headed in the right direction. The narrow track wound back and forth up a hill; Toni could just see the top of it through the trees.
She wondered what she would see from the top. This area on the map had been blanked out with a big ‘DANGER: NO ENTRY’ stamp over the top. But the anchor-rope in her heart was leading her straight into it.
Toni gritted her teeth. A few minutes later, legs aching with effort, she crested the ridge. Her breath caught in her throat.
She had thought the raised ground would give her a better view of her surroundings – but not like this. Below her, a landslide had cleared a patch of the forest of trees, leaving a wide swath of bare dirt. And beyond that, the lush forest gave way to a tangle of rubble and rusting machinery. There must have been some sort of factory out there, she realized. But it must have been shut down decades ago, and now the forest was reclaiming the land, sending out vines and hardy shrubs to help time break down the ruins.
Something gleamed silver in the rust and rubble. A solid-looking 4WD truck was parked up against what remained of a brick wall, barring the way to what Toni realized must be a drivable road, the first she had seen since she abandoned her car. She backed up hurriedly, concealing herself back in the trees along the ridgeline. She couldn’t risk being seen.