by Christa Wick
The windows were down on Hank's old Ford, but Iris couldn't bring herself to approach it. She smashed one of the sedan's back passenger windows and rummaged for the key. She found it in the jacket shoved down on the floor.
Keeping one eye on the woods, she started the car and rolled the rear passenger windows down to hide the broken glass. Hearing the infuriated snarl of a shifter, his feet pounding the forest floor as his arms broke low hanging branches to clear his path, Iris pealed out of the turnout. The back end of the car fishtailed from the sudden acceleration and loose gravel. The vehicle bounced over the low concrete divide that separated the parking area from the road. Her head slammed against the driver-side window, the pain clamoring against the other agonies that tortured her healing flesh.
Pure instinct pushed her in the direction opposite the clan's lands. Only Cade and her grandmother would believe Iris. She had a long history of being an outcast among the wolves, her magic hidden so that she had less utility to the clan than the witches and healers who served them. And Hank would make good on his threat, at least with her grandmother. Even though he bore the same good looks as his son, the man was pure ugly on the inside.
Better to let him think he had scared her away, or that she'd died from her injuries. Surely, she had left enough of her blood on the ground to make him doubt her survival. A few months and she could sneak back, find Cade and get her grandmother out.
A car passed on the road, the driver's shocked expression and the surprised jerk of his vehicle reminding Iris that her clothes were tattered and stained red. Her attention divided between the rode ahead of her and the rearview mirror, she reached into the back of the cabin and retrieved the jacket. Clumsily, she put it on, her mind turning over her future plans.
Could she really ask her grandmother and Cade to give up their entire lives for her? Her grandmother, maybe. She had been old when she birthed Iris's mother and Iris had been the only successful pregnancy in a long line of her mother's miscarriages, aside from the woman dying in the birthing room.
Andra North had maybe a decade of life left and defending her strange granddaughter had made her almost as much of an outcast among the wolves as Iris was. But Cade would be risking his life and giving up his family and friends. She couldn't begin to understand his den instinct and what hardship it would be for him to live away from the clan.
She wasn't a wolf, how could she?
Still dreaming the past, Iris felt Cade's arms tighten around her in Esme's little shed. His voice rumbled in his throat, no words necessary to remind Iris that she was a wolf, had shifted in front of him the day before and during her escape from Hank. His fear reached into her memory, begging her not to forget her true form.
You are a wolf, love. My mate, baby. Come back to me.
Iris squirmed in Cade's arms as she fought the urge to follow his energy back to the present. She had scratched just the surface of the lost time and need to remember so much more, something that would help her, the cubs and the sweet witch guiding her over the rough terrain of a nightmarish past.
"I will," she promised in a whisper against his chest.
Her old self forgot about the shift, forgot about most of the attack, the other men, the silver blade that had pierced her chest. She remembered only the threat of death if she returned -- hers, Cade's, her grandmother's. For two weeks, Iris moved further from the clan, pawning everything of value that had been in the vehicle, stripping out the radio, and salvaging the tires and rims to sell them before she set the sedan on fire.
Hitching a ride with a trucker and going as far as a small town some fifty miles from the outskirts of Columbus, Iris kept only a small bag of the larger man's clothes and a lockbox. It took another week before she opened the lockbox. She could have smashed it open before that, but the box carried the same smell of decay and rot as the two men who had helped Hank kidnap, and almost kill, her. Only desperation for more items to pawn had forced Iris to look inside.
She found more silver that she quickly sold, crystals and dowels that turned her stomach queasy but were worth a few bucks regardless, and a thick sheath of paper covered with pictures and a language she couldn't read. Some of the images were the wards she would later carve into her flesh, her mind subconsciously recognizing their purpose but the knowledge remaining buried until she had absently scratched one into her arm and the would took a week to heal.
"What happened to the papers?" Esme asked, the question almost lost as it bounced and echoed from present to past.
"I had to leave them behind," Iris answered, her mind slowly resurfacing in Esme's shed. "But I hid them."
Leah, the only one in the room who had experienced none of Iris's memories during the regression, shook her head in confusion. "But why leave them?"
"Simple." Iris pressed closer to Cade as she answered. Relief eased the burn in her tense muscles when he tightened his hold and kissed the corner of her jaw.
"Hunters found me."
Chapter Seventeen
Sitting next to Cade in Dana's office, Iris listened quietly to her memories being dissected by those gathered. The only relatively new face was Oram, the West Virginia clan leader and Cade's direct boss. Sixteen years older than Iris, but from the same grouping of wolves, only time had made Oram a stranger to her.
"You're saying Hunters have charms to pass as wolves," Oram started and pointed at Iris. "And only she can sense them?"
Esme shook her head. "I'm suggesting that's the case. The two men assisting Hank were definitely charmed and I don't know of anyone other than Iris, wolf or witch, who can smell magic on someone."
The witch smiled, her magic pushing moral support in the she-wolf's direction. Turning back to Oram, Esme's expression turned professorial.
"There are two things we can draw from the shape of the silver pendants they wore, and the conclusions are exclusive of one another." She paused, waiting for Oram to indicate he followed her line of reasoning. "One is that a claw or wolf charm is used to control wolves. Making wolves that were strangers to Iris and not part of the clan assist Hank in trying to kill her."
Oram's brows knitted, much as Dana's and Cade's had done when Esme presented her argument to them before the arrival of the West Virginia clan leader. Unfortunately, Dana and Cade had far greater respect for Esme's intelligence than Oram appeared to have. Iris felt that it would be a long meeting before the man was convinced.
"The other, opposing, hypothesis is that the charm is used so that Hunters can pass as wolves. This hypothesis is bolstered, if not proven, by the artifacts found in the car. The two men, whether wolves or Hunters, acted as couriers for high-level material. While I believe that some of the glyphs Iris described seeing in that material could be crucial to neutralizing or extracting the crystals from the cubs, I'm certain the glyphs are those used by Hunters. Why would wolves have them in their possession?"
Dana watched the exchange between his mate and the other clan leader. His overly relaxed posture suggested to Iris that he was bored, but she'd spent two weeks watching the man in action and knew better. The gingery wolf was a deep thinker but also a consummate predator. When it came to disagreeing with Dana's mate and removing the threat of the crystals, both those in Oscar and in Esme, Oram was an adversary...prey, even. Far from bored, the wolf in Dana merely waited for the right moment to snap its jaws around the other man's neck.
It didn't take long -- just another dismissive pass of Oram's hand at Esme's insistence that the papers Iris had found must be recovered if at all possible. Dana leaned forward, his hands resting lightly on the surface of his massive desk, and stared at Oram. The battle was silent and quick, wolf parrying with wolf, but Iris felt each blow exchanged. From the tension running through Cade and Esme, they felt it, too.
Oram began to redden, the challenge from such a newly installed clan leader a high breach of wolf protocol. But there was no protocol higher among the wolves than leadership by the strongest among them. Iris could only imagine a handful of s
hifters as strong as the witch's mate, and one of them had his hand curled around hers.
In the end, it was Cade who broke the silence, looking at Dana as he spoke. "I'll take my team and retrieve the papers."
The witch inhaled sharply, her surprise the only physical acknowledgement of what Cade had just done. He had broken from his clan leader as surely as if he had stood up, crossed the room and punched Oram in the face.
And he had dragged his team along with him.
Giving Cade's hand a little squeeze, Iris drew his attention to her. "Just remember that you get 'mate' when you rearrange 'team.'"
His lips parted and she knew an objection waited at the tip of his tongue. She silenced him with a smile and another squeeze. "I haven't told anyone exactly where I hid them. And having a half-witch, who just so happens to be a homicide detective, on your team will improve the chance of success."
The room's energy changed, the air pressure plummeting. Both Iris and Dana, their faces growing pale, looked at the cause -- Esme.
"A witch and a half," she whispered, her hands and lips trembling. "I'm going with you."
"The hell you are." Rising from his chair, Dana closed the short distance between him and his mate. He pulled her up with a fierce tenderness. The dark glittering of his topaz gaze threatened to physically restrain her if she made any attempt to go on the mission.
Esme, her eyes misting like a fog rolling in from the sea, placed her palms against her mate's chest. She didn't push for release, just gently reminded him of the crystals in her. "Other than the cubs, who has the most to gain from retrieving the papers?"
"Then I'm going, too."
This time she did push, her head shaking violently as she rejected the idea. "You're too important to the clan."
"You're too important to me." He cinched Esme to him, his hands interlocking behind her back. "The clan means nothing."
Across the desk, Oram squirmed uncomfortably in his chair. Iris looked at her hand as Cade gave it a discreet squeeze, the gesture and push of his wolf telling Iris that Cade felt the same as Dana. His mate's safety came before the clan, before his status within it, before his very life.
Iris buried her face against Cade's neck as Esme slowly chipped at Dana's resistance.
"Oscar and I can't travel together any more than two cubs can." Standing on tiptoe, the witch nuzzled her mate's cheek. "And he needs you with him. You're the only father Oscar will ever have."
"You're the only love I will ever have." Tears glittered in the big wolf's eyes, as if he had already lost his mate forever, her leaving only a formality. "You said we would always be together."
Esme slid her hand across his chest so that the palm centered over his heart as she answered. "I will always be with you."
Chapter Eighteen
"Why do we even think the papers will still be there?" Remus asked with an hour's drive remaining on the run to Zanesville.
Having already justified the belief that her hiding place remained safe to Dana and Oram, Iris ignored the big wolf riding shotgun next to Tanner. Just four years older than Iris, she had known Remus since childhood. Like so many of the wolflings trying to impress their pack leaders back then, he had taken every opportunity to tell Iris she didn't belong. While his civility had improved over the last twelve years, he hadn't grown any friendlier.
Not that she would have welcomed his friendship. Some bridges weren't worth mending.
"I'd like to know, too."
Iris glanced at the man sitting protectively close to Esme. The wolf, a late twenty-something male named Navarro, wasn't part of Cade's team. He served Dana, who had not yet chosen a beta to carry out his orders and lead the clan in his occasional absence. Now, sent to protect Esme, his place at Dana's side was all but assured. Unless he failed to bring the witch back, in which case Iris assumed the young wolf was as good as dead.
Cade nuzzled her ear. "We've got an hour to go, baby."
She relented, for her mate and for Esme. The familiarity of the story would ease the witch's tension. And, judging by the way the woman had her hands protectively wrapped around her stomach, Esme's anxiety bordered on unbearable.
"Before the Hunters found me," Iris began. "I pawned everything from their car -- even parts of their car -- then I burned it."
Navarro nodded, smiling at the idea that she had made good use of their enemies' property after killing two of them.
"The money didn't last long, even with me sleeping outside at night." She didn't explain the particulars of why the money had evaporated so quickly. With her memory a blank on those weeks for more than a decade, she hadn't known herself. She had shifted for the first time during the attack by Hank and the Hunters. She'd almost died from the injuries. Her body needed fuel. Lots and lots of fuel. She had consumed as much food per day as she would have eaten during an entire week before the change. And it didn't stop her from losing weight. Nothing did until she had finished healing and subconsciously suppressed her ability to shift.
"It was raining, coming down hard, the wind so strong I could barely walk against it," Iris recounted. "I took shelter in a museum. It had been a school when first constructed and a stop on the underground railway..."
Sensing Navarro, and especially Remus, didn't want a history lesson, Iris shrugged. "Anyway, I spent a couple of hours walking around it, waiting for the storm to die down. The place was loaded with silver--"
She stopped as a light shudder descended the junior wolf's body from his head to the tip of his steel-toed boots. He had taken a Hunter's silver blade in his stomach less than two months before and the memory still uncomfortably tickled his gut.
"Of course, it was all behind glass so no one could steal it," she continued after giving him a second to recover. "But then I came up to this desk. There were replica blotters and inkwells, a fancy letter opener that was fake, too, and copies of Abolitionist manifestoes and stuff -- none of it real. But I could feel silver, just the faintest pull."
"Witches draw power from silver and iron," Esme explained as Navarro looked at her. "We're basically metal detectors for those two metals."
Iris glanced at the front of the tactical van. Remus, who had prompted the discussion, appeared to be staring out the side window, but she could see his eyes in the reflection and they were fixed on her.
She turned her attention back to Navarro. "I figured there might be a hidden compartment, and I was right. Inside, I found a silver coin, very old. From before the Civil War."
The find had been both a blessing and her near destruction. Knowing its intrinsic value was far greater than any pawn shop would give her, she checked the phone book for a local antique dealer who traded in coins. Walking into his store, she had almost turned around and left. But she forced legs that wanted to run hard and fast in the opposite direction to approach the counter where the man waited.
She held her breath as the same stink that had clung to the Hunters who tried to kill her clogged her nose in that little shop. She convinced herself that the owner had merely, and quite innocently, acquired objects that carried some kind of magic with them. She held onto that belief long enough to sell the coin for three hundred dollars.
She had been wrong, of course, and the mistake almost cost Iris her life. She had returned to the diner she had eaten at the night before. She needed more fuel for her injured body and the manager had offered her a job. With the three hundred in her pocket and a kitchen full of food to borrow from, she would have enough money to last her until she received her first paycheck. That and the tips would carry her to the next paycheck and the one after that while she figured out what she needed to do to expose Hank Mercer and rejoin the only people who had ever loved or cared about her.
"So, all those years sitting around that museum and no one ever found the panel or whatever?" Navarro asked.
Smiling, she nodded.
"The guy I sold it to must have been a Hunter or at least known what I was." Which was odd, Iris thought, because, at the tim
e, she hadn't known what she was. So how could he? "Anyway, less than an hour later and two teams of Hunters steamrolled into town. I had the papers on me and I didn't want to get caught with them, so I made my way back to the museum and hid them."
Satisfied, Navarro grunted. Young and overly charming, he leaned forward and offered her his closed fist for a light bump in appreciation of the clever wolfling she had once been.
She returned the gesture then relaxed against Cade. She didn't mention that a bus from a Columbus high school had shown up at the museum while she was selling the coin and fleeing the Hunters. She hadn't told Cade or anyone else yet about how she had followed the students onto the bus at the end of their tour. Some of the kids had given her funny looks, but the terror in her eyes had silenced them. The terror and Jenna.
Jenna, the cool girl with her haunted gaze who lived with her grandparents because her stepfather had murdered her mother before committing suicide. Jenna, who had dared, with one glance, anyone to open their mouth and reveal that there was an extra body on the bus.
"What is it, baby?" Cade asked, his thumb secretly stroking the inside of her wrist.
"Just remembering the girl who helped me escaped...who convinced her grandparents to give me a place to stay until I could get my own."
Cade blinked and his mouth turned down at the corners, a barely noticeable quiver dancing at their edges. Leading a mission that could be a cakewalk or a death trap, he didn't have the luxury of expressing his sadness for the time his mate had been alone and hunted. But she saw it shining in his gaze and knew she would tell him later about Jenna and how, after everything Iris had learned the last few weeks, she was almost certain the girl had been a latent. But not at that moment because he had to focus on the team's safety and she would unravel if she thought about her lost friend.