The Surrogates: The 5 Book Paranormal Pregnancy Romance Box Set

by Angela Foxxe

  The goal was to get them out of here and away from this place as quickly as possible. If they could get to where she was planning on going, then they would have made a strategic withdrawal that they might be able to survive at. Tasha thought back to her military history class in college and thought about the concept of a Phyrric victory. If they could hold out and kill or injure enough of their enemies, then they will eventually come to the conclusion that it’s not worth their time to keep sending people after them.

  The best place for them to make a stand like that was at her grandfather’s house, which was nestled up in the mountains on top of a hill surrounded by grass that you couldn’t possibly hide in. He’d been a rich man who made his money and knew how he wanted to spend it, on building a fortress of isolation up in the mountains.

  He was gone now, vacationing in Arizona for the winter, and his house was free for them to camp out in for a while. It was a shame that he wasn’t there. If she’d shown up, he would have taken them in gladly and helped defend them without ever needing an explanation.

  She had always been exceptionally close with her grandfather and he was always a good guy to her. He didn’t get along with Tasha’s father very well, but he loved Tasha’s mother like his own daughter. It had been her grandfather who had taught her how to hunt with a rifle and how to skeet shoot. Once she got up there, she knew that they would have enough supplies to survive the winter and to patch up Dane the best they could without having an actual doctor there with them.

  At this point, Tasha was even beginning to wish that Mr. Grayson had survived, just so they had another pair of hands to help hold down the fort. She was going to have to call her parents soon. Maybe she could get all of them up there, if it wasn’t too late.

  “Here you go, sugar,” the waitress said as she returned with their meals.

  “Thanks,” Tasha grinned.

  Paying for the ticket, she eventually made her way back through to the other half of the building which served as the souvenir shop, gas station, and miniature grocery store.

  She found Dane standing in one of the aisles, grabbing things off the shelves with his quivering hands, stained with blood that had dried over the course of their journey or had been wiped off on one of the paper towels he’d used to clean himself up.

  “I got our food,” Tasha said with a small amount of pride in her voice.

  “I’m not hungry,” he said shortly.

  “I don’t care,” Tasha shrugged. “You have to eat.”

  “I will later,” his eyes moving across products. He grabbed a bottle of something and put it in the tiny basket that he was carrying. “I think I have everything I need. Do you have the money?”

  “I do,” Tasha nodded, “but you’re not going up there and paying. You look like death. Take the burgers out to the car and I’ll pay for all of this.”

  “I’m fine, Tasha,” Dane shook his head, annoyed by the implications.

  “No you’re not,” Tasha said, feeling like she was officially the only capable one among the three of them and Addy was the only one with a serious exemption. “Take the food and get out to the car. I’m not arguing about this.”

  He took the food and trudged out of the store, the bell ringing after him as she watched him go. The clothes were too baggy and he didn’t look like he was going to make it much longer as he struggled against the passenger door of the car.

  Deep down, regardless of whether she trusted him or not, she didn’t like seeing him this way. By the time she got back to the car and was buckling Addy into the car seat, Dane had reclined the chair and was sleeping, shivering. She needed to get to her grandfather’s cabin and she needed to get there immediately.

  Chapter 8

  To call the cabin a cabin was a complete mistake and it was obvious from the moment they made their way through the winding, muddy path through the trees and came to the sprawling, open road that wound up the hill to where the cabin sat like a bastion atop the hill. It was three stories high and it was the kind of place you’d expect to see in some forest over in Germany or in the movies of places that never existed.

  The foundation was thick stone, built like a bunker that could withstand the nuclear holocaust and it wasn’t by accident. There was a fallout shelter under there where her grandfather and grandmother had expected to ride out the last of their years when the Reds finally had enough with the grandeur of America. Now, she was thankful more than ever for their insane paranoia.

  When they got up to the carport, she saw that his truck and her grandmother’s old car were sitting in the garage, but he’d taken the RV and headed south for the colder months of the year.

  After her grandmother had passed, he had become a bit of a nomad during the winter months. He had friends all across the country and he made it his mission to reunite with them before death inevitably came for him.

  Stepping out of the car, she grabbed Addy and carried her up to the porch and found the key hidden behind one of the wooden supports that held up the awning for the wrap-around porch and opened the door. The cabin smelled like her grandmother, a scent that her grandfather was never going to be able to get rid of, even though he never would.

  The cabin was beautiful, sturdily built with an enormous glass front that overlooked the southern slope of the hill. Right now, all that glass worried her until she approached it and looked at it. It looked like it was thick enough to stop a rocket, probably not an accident.

  The large central room was warm and inviting. She set Addy down on the sofa, making sure that a pillow blocked her from rolling if she magically figured out how to move in the next few seconds until she got Dane.

  Heading back out to the SUV, she found that Dane was heading toward the cabin already, his whole body shivering as she wrapped her arm around him and helped him to the kitchen where she sat him down. Grabbing her grandfather’s first aid kit, she set it down on the table and opened the refrigerator and found bottles of Gatorade. Handing them to Dane, she gave him a stern look.

  “Drink,” she ordered and immediately he did exactly that. There was no discussion at this point and when she grabbed scissors and cut off his sweater that displayed how great the potatoes in Idaho were, she looked at his wound and immediately cleaned it the best that she could. He was too weak to protest much beyond a wince or a hiss of agony. She ignored him and made sure that he was drinking the Gatorade.

  Eventually she made progress on the wound and started to stitch it together the best that she could. It had been a long time since she’d been told at camp how to stitch up a kid if they were injured under her care over the summer.

  When she was done, she inspected her work and knew that it probably wasn’t the best thing that she’d seen and that a doctor would probably scold her over it, but she did the best that she could. It would hold and as she bandaged it, wrapping him and making sure that he was cared for, she looked up at him.

  “It looks like someone took a knife to you,” she said.

  “More like a fore claw,” Dane winced, opening another bottle of Gatorade and slowly nursing the contents. “Chuck was a bad one. I’m glad that he’s gone, but there are worse than him out there.”

  “What was he?” Tasha asked, not believing that she was actually asking him this.

  That surprised him as well. He slowly set the bottle down and looked at her, as if he was asking her silently if she was really interested in any of this. Normally, Tasha wouldn’t be. In fact, the entire time she had been pregnant with Addy, she hadn’t wasted her time with this Shifter nonsense. After all, it wasn’t really relevant. It wasn’t like every full moon they were bursting out of their skin and taking to the streets to burn down churches and eat virgins. So what was the point to any of it? But now, with these things actively hunting her, it seemed pretty relevant.

  “He was part of the Bear Clan,” he said after a moment. “Most Shifters of German descent are part of the Bear Clan. They came out of the Black Forest and never really looked back. He�
��s been around for a long time, taking jobs as a freelance killer if he could find the work. Bears aren’t people you want to mess with.”

  “And dragons are?” Tasha raised an eyebrow.

  “We’ve been in the background for a while,” Dane shrugged. “It hasn’t been since recently, really, that we started showing up and making actual plays. People are content to believe what they want and Dragons weren’t very popular until we started making ourselves important. It rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. The Bears and the Wolves were the angriest. When they caught wind that we were finding surrogates, they decided to end it before the war came for them. They knew that we wouldn’t keep the peace if we had another generation to hold up the legacy.”

  “What? Like you all had a treaty or something?” Tasha shook her head. “So there was peace and then they thought you were getting too big and that you were going to kill them or drive them out? Is that why they attacked you?”

  “Yep,” Dane nodded.

  “That’s ridiculous,” Tasha shook her head again. “Why would they think that?” “Because we were going to attack them and drive them out,” Dane said with a shrug.

  “What?” Tasha asked.

  “We were going to wipe them out,” Dane said. “One by one, we were hoping to pick off a few of them before we launched a full scale attack. Our hope was to wipe out a few smaller Clans and then turn the bigger ones on each other before they got wise and turned on us. Looks like someone caught wind a little sooner.”

  “So you’re the assholes in this scenario?” Tasha couldn’t believe this.

  “I didn’t want to go along with it,” Dane said defensively. “This is the same inane stupidity that we’ve been doing for centuries. One Clan rises up, attacks the others and then there’s all hell loose among us and eventually things peter out because we’re at the brink of extinction and so we come to a truce. The truce holds and eventually the ranks swell again.

  Whoever was the aggressor last time is usually the most adamant to keep the peace, but eventually, someone rises up and strikes again, make a move, or tries to annihilate everyone. Same shit, different day.”

  “So why do they do it?” Tasha asked, not understanding the logic of any of it.

  “Why does anyone ever do anything?” Dane asked her. “Because they think that this time they know exactly what went wrong last time and how they’re going to do it differently and better. It all ends up the same. People die and we move on. It’s just a matter of riding out the storm at this point.”

  “What does riding out the storm mean to you?” Tasha asked him.

  “Not getting killed,” Dane smiled charmingly.

  “That’s why we’re here,” Tasha said nobly.

  “Oh they’ll find us,” Dane assured her. “It’s only a matter of time before they come here and they’re going to come with as many people as they can rally to their cause and their cause is very attractive right now. Once the Matterhorn Group is extinguished, they’re all going to start turning on each other, but first, they’ve got to kill me and Addy, and whoever else survived the initial attack.”

  “They’re not touching Addy,” Tasha vowed.

  “But I’m expendable?” Dane asked her.

  “Both of us are expendable right now,” Tasha informed him.

  When she showed Dane everything that her grandfather had built underneath the basement of his beloved cabin, there was something inside of Dane that made him smile with excitement. The bunker was large enough for a family to survive for a very long time. It had everything that you would need to stay alive and sane.

  There were three rooms. There was the sleeping accommodation with a library and entertainment area that was crammed together and built to keep people from going stir crazy. It was the kind of room that you’d expect to see in a bunker. The second room was a small bathroom where there was a shower, toilet, and a sink. The final room was a cramped little kitchen that was complete with a huge pantry, a stove, sink, oven, and a microwave that could be used. It was all rather luxurious for anyone who might be expecting the world to decay into nuclear hell. Why her grandfather would want to survive that was beyond her.

  “We could ride this out down here,” Tasha said to him.

  “No,” he shook his head, “but you and Addy could.”

  “You can’t fight them alone,” Tasha said to him.

  “Like you said, I’m expendable,” he threw the words back in her face. It stung, but he wasn’t understanding what she meant by that.

  “If they find you up there,” Tasha said to him. “Then they’re going to know that I’m alive and that I’m here with Addy. They’ll find the bunker and they’ll wait until my grandfather comes back, torture him until he opens it, or seal us down here forever. Either way, it’s not a happy ending if you’re up there.”

  “And if we’re all down here,” Dane pointed out the obvious flaw in her plan, “then they’ll just do the same thing. Besides, what are you going to do to help this beyond watching Addy?”

  “I say we keep Addy down here during the fight,” Tasha said with a nervous feeling in her stomach. She didn’t like the idea of her being in there alone, but she knew that it was going to be the only choice. “We seal the door behind us. I call my grandfather and tell him that Addy is in there and he’ll be back here in less than a day. Addy will be hungry and very unhappy, but she’ll be safe and she’ll be alive, even if we’re dead.”

  “You think they’ll just leave without her?” Dane asked her skeptically.

  “They won’t have any other choice,” Tasha said. “If Addy starts to cry, they won’t be able to hear it. I’ll pour ammonia around the door to kill the scent, and they’ll have no reason in the world to think that she’s in the sealed bunker.”

  She could see the wheels and gears turning behind his eyes. He didn’t want to admit that she was right, but this was the best plan. If they thought that they were desperate enough to abandon their child and make a final stand together, then her grandfather would be able to take care of Addy.

  “So, what’s the plan for you?” Dane asked her.

  “I’m glad you asked,” she said with a smile on her face.

  *

  “They’re coming,” Dane said.

  He was looking better. There was more color in his skin and two days of preparation was enough for him to actually get some life back into him. While he had recovered, Tasha had sealed up everything that she could. She’d boarded up doors and she’d made sure that all the windows that they had could be boarded up, but the main windows were open and that was just fine for her.

  The stairwells were clogged with furniture and everything was set up to brace for the assault. Essentially, they were going to have one way to enter the home and that was through the glass front of the cabin facing the south side. She’d opened up her grandfather’s safe and found all the guns that she could possibly want waiting for her. She walked out onto the balcony overlooking the hill where there were three hunting rifles available to them.

  Dane was looking through the binoculars to the south, and no doubt there were more coming up from the north where the slope was steep but manageable. There was no way they were coming up from the east or the west. It was far too rocky and it was far too sheer for anyone to climb it easily, but she would never say never.

  Essentially, it was going to be a hard fight for them to get to the cabin.

  She had shotguns loaded and ready all throughout the house and she had her escape route, her retreat from the balcony all planned out. Reaching down, she took one of the rifles and hoisted it up.

  Yesterday, she had tried to call her parents. She tried to call her sister and her brother, but there was nothing. She had no doubt that they had them or they were dead.

  She watched the single person approaching the slope. It was a man who had a gray goatee and looked like he was not suited for this kind of a pursuit. That was something that made Tasha feel a little more confident. She liked to think tha
t these people who were coming after her were as civilized and as used to a normal life as Dane had been. She didn’t want to go up against a whole bunch of animal warriors who knew what they were doing.

  The man stopped when he was in shouting range of the balcony.

  “End of the line, Dane,” the man shouted up to him. “Surrender and we’ll make sure that you all get clean, quick deaths. There’s no need to soil the earth with bad blood. We’re willing to do it civilized.”

  “Where is my family?” Tasha shouted at them, steeled for whatever answer she had to hear.

  “They’re safe,” the man shouted up at her.

  “How do I know that?” Tasha shouted back.

  “You don’t,” he said.

  “I want you to release them,” Dane said.

  “We all want things, Dane,” the man called back darkly.

  “But that’s not how this is going to work?” Tasha asked.

  “Nope,” the man agreed. “You surrender yourselves and the child, they get to walk free.”

  Tasha raised her rifle and took the man in the sight of the scope. He was grinning at her, more than willing to call her bluff. She could hear him laughing and it was sickening to her. “You kill me and you only make things worse,” the man said.

  Tasha squeezed the trigger.

  “What the hell did you just do?” Dane shouted as the man’s head whipped back and he toppled down the hill.

  “If they have my family,” Tasha growled, “then there is no guarantee that they’ll save them when I’m dead. They know too much and they’re just collateral by now. If I kill the messenger, then maybe they’ll be more willing to negotiate.”

  “Or maybe they’ll just attack,” Dane cried.

  “Well, that is what we’re waiting for, isn’t it?” Tasha wasn’t afraid anymore.

  This was how it ends.

  This was how she was going to make her stand.

  It was a half an hour before someone else appeared, coming up the hill. It was a woman who was approaching this time, possibly the one that had been in her parents’ house. It was hard to tell. The woman had her hands up and she was making sure that it was very obvious that she wasn’t interested in getting killed at this particular juncture of the negotiation process.