Alpha's Captive 04 - Haven

by V M Black

  The Alpha’s Captive

  Haven

  (Part Four)

  by V. M. Black

  Aethereal Bonds

  AetherealBonds.com

  Swift River Media Group

  Washington, D.C.

  All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 V. M. Black

  All Rights Reserved

  No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher.

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  Book 1 – Life Blood - FREE

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  Book 3 – Part Three

  Book 4 – Part Four

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  Stand-Alone Short Stories

  Heaven’s Price

  Memory’s Kiss

  Chapter One

  “What do we do now?”

  Levi could hear the strain in Harper’s voice, her words precise and a little too high.

  “We follow my backup plan,” he said firmly, sealing the SD card inside its tiny plastic bag and putting it back into the coin purse. “We go to Beane’s lair.”

  “Who is this Beane, anyway, and why does he have a lair?” she asked. “And where the hell is it?”

  “West Virginia,” he said, answering her questions backward. “So turn around as soon as you get a chance. And Beane is…” Levi tried to find a phrase that could describe everything that Beane was. “My tech guy,” he finished lamely.

  “Your tech guy,” she repeated, the words sharp. “I don’t even know what that means. Why do you have a tech guy, and what kind of tech does he do? Fixes your computers?”

  “Think more like Q from James Bond and less like Geek Squad,” Levi said calmly, even though a part of him wanted to drive his fist through the stupid cloth roof of the stupid Mini Cooper they’d just stolen.

  It was supposed to be over. Done. They’d gotten the reader, they’d gotten a tablet. And it was all for nothing, because the damned thing couldn’t read the data on the SD card.

  “Okay,” she said after a deep breath. “So who is he, then? Is he a shifter, too?”

  “Yeah,” Levi said. “He came about it in a roundabout kind of way, though.”

  Her hands tightened briefly on the steering wheel. “Look, our best chance just went up in smoke, and you’re talking in riddles. Just tell me what the hell is going on in plain English right now, before I throw you out of the car.”

  Levi grabbed his underwear. Beane had a long and complicated life story, almost none of which had anything to do with their current circumstances. He decided on the thirty-second summary. “Chay Beane’s a shifter with a spook shop out in West Virginia. He’s a freelancer now with a small team, mostly remote, and I contract with him whenever I need to trace stuff electronically or break into somebody’s network or tap someone’s communications. If anyone can get the files off the card, he can.”

  “You told me you were into art,” Harper said. “Not hacking.”

  There was a gravel turnaround ahead across the divided median meant for emergency services. Harper slowed to take it, ignoring the sign that warned of no turns.

  “I trace the exchange of rare objects for large amounts of money,” Levi said, tugging his pants on over his hips. “These days, the proof is often electronic.”

  “Okay, fine. So you have a hacker friend. Who’s a werewolf,” she said as the Mini Cooper’s wheels churned through the gravel. She swung the car around, back the other way.

  “A shifter,” he corrected as he fastened his pants. “Panther, actually.”

  “Right. And he can fix this somehow. Get the files off the SD card. How do you even know they’re there? Maybe you stole a decoy. Maybe it’s broken. Maybe—”

  “It’s there.” Levi cut through her increasingly shrill speculation as he grabbed his shirt. “I promise you, Harper, it’s there. I can see it on the tablet. The SD card is practically full. But the data’s got some kind of lock on it to tell regular readers to ignore it. Beane warned me this could happen.”

  She snorted. “Great planning, there.”

  “I’m sorry.” Levi paused with his foot half-way into his stolen loafer. “Look, I thought I’d only be putting myself in danger.”

  “And what if you had?” she demanded. “There’s a very good chance that you’d be dead!”

  Levi shoved his foot the rest of the way in. The note in her voice caused a pain in his chest that he didn’t care to examine. It mattered to her that he might be dead, even though in the scenario she presented they never would have met.

  And it mattered to him that it mattered to her even though it shouldn’t.

  “Yeah,” he admitted for the first time. “You’re probably right. But I had to do something.”

  “Getting yourself killed is something, all right.” Her sarcasm was biting. Trust Harper not to pull any punches.

  “Look, I tried to do it the right way—make plans, get a team, all that stuff,” Levi said. “I went through all the proper channels, you know. Stood in front of the damned clan council. And they just shot me down. Too risky, they said. I didn’t have proof, they said. I’d just make it worse for them, they said.”

  Harper’s eyes found his in the rearview mirror. “Were they wrong?”

  “They’re going to be wrong, dammit,” he snapped, stomping his foot into the bottom of his other shoe. The stolen shoes were slightly tight around the toes and loose at the heels, but they’d do. “I understand their decision, okay? I didn’t know what form the data would take. I didn’t even have proof that there was data—I just thought there had to be, or else all the ridiculous crap that Mortensen was doing didn’t make any sense. So, yeah, it was a big risk without knowing that stuff and an even bigger risk without approval or backup or, or anything.”

  He glared at Harper in the rearview mirror. “But it was either go for it myself or stand by as we were all pushed farther and farther into the boondocks, hiding out in the mountains because we didn’t dare stick our noses out. Some of the culls haven’t left their families’ property for years because they’re too damned scared. That’s not life. That’s a prison.”

  “So you decided to jump on your motorcycle and steal it yourself without even knowing for sure what it was,” she said. “For the family that you don’t even see anymore. Yeah, that sounds like a great idea to me.”

  “Someone on the council leaked,” Levi said, every word dripping with bitterness. “That’s the only thing I can think of. They were ready for me when I got there, and they knew who I was.”

  The edged, angry light in Harper’s eyes faded. “You can’t really trust anyone, can you? And you did it anyway. For them.”

  He laughed. “That’s the whole of the thing, isn’t it? There’s always a vampire hanging around, looking for an angle, looking for leverage. Th
e SOB on the council probably didn’t think he had a choice. But if this works….”

  “If it works, you’ll all have choices,” she finished. “You’ll be free. I get it. You went off on some damned suicidal mission out of a messed up sense of loyalty—”

  “They’re my family, Harper.” He cut her off. “What would you have done?”

  Her eyes flickered back to his again, and there was the tiniest hint of a smile at the corner of her mouth. “Probably the same stupid thing. But I’m not exactly known for my good life choices.”

  Levi angled in the seat so that he could stretch his legs. “I’m sure you’ll be amazed to hear that neither am I. Give me your phone, and I’ll figure out a route from here, okay? It’s probably not smart to stay on this road.”

  Harper turned on her phone, unlocked it, and handed it back to him. It buzzed with new message notifications just as Levi took it.

  “There’s a charger in here, so we should plug it in as soon as we get a chance,” she said.

  Levi glanced at her screen. Her messenger and her text apps had angry red dots with several dozen notifications between them, and her call history showed another nine.

  He cleared his throat. “You usually get a lot of texts?”

  Harper peered at him through the rearview mirror. “A few every day. Why?”

  “I think you may have made the news.” He tapped over to her texts and scrolled through them quickly, getting the gist of the messages. “Yeah. You’ve definitely made the news.”

  She reached back. “I’ve got to tell them I’m okay—”

  “No,” Levi said, tapping over quickly to the map app. “If you do that, they’ll tell the cops, and then Mortensen’s goons might know that you turned on the phone sooner than they would otherwise and they’ll triangulate where we are and send half the state after us. Let me figure out a route, and we’ll turn it off and keep it off, okay?”

  Harper hesitated.

  “It’s important, Harper.”

  “Okay,” she said, reluctance in her voice.

  “And we need to pick up another burner as soon as we get a chance.”

  “Okay,” she repeated.

  Levi studied the map. He zoomed in and out along the route for a moment, committing it to memory. He turned off the phone before returning it to her. “Six miles to your first exit.”

  “Sure thing,” Harper said, plugging in the charger.

  “Keep a lookout for a place to hide until dark,” he added.

  “Because that worked so well the first time?” she asked, but the usual bite of her retorts was somewhat dampened.

  “We’re driving a stolen red and white Mini Cooper in the middle of rural Pennsylvania,” Levi said. “We don’t really have much of a choice.”

  “Whatever you say,” she said. “But the guys who are after you have seemed to have had an unnatural amount of luck on their side. It’s like they know exactly where to look.”

  No kidding. They’d found them in the barn, found them at the Walmart, found them on the river….

  Levi spat a curse and grabbed her purse, digging through it quickly.

  “What is it?” Her eyes flicked up to the rearview mirror.

  “The dagger,” he said. “It has to be the dagger.”

  He’d been so busy running that he hadn’t stopped to think. Stupid, stupid, stupid….

  He found the dagger, then with a little more digging in the depths of her purse, he found her tweezers and his lock pick set, too. He examined the sheath and hilt first, trying to find a loose jewel or a tiny hidden chamber. He pulled the blade out and looked closely it, then poked inside the sheath with the lock picks. Nothing.

  Finally, he unscrewed the pommel again and pulled the cotton wadding all the way out with the tweezers. But it was just ordinary white cotton, the same kind that was in a pill bottle, kept dry by a narrow rubber gasket. He peered into the hollow space behind it and didn’t see anything, but when he prodded with a lock pick, something moved. He dug harder, trying to dislodge it, and all at once it came, sliding into his hand.

  A black plastic cylinder with a seam along one side, it was barrel-shaped and only slightly larger than a round for his luger. It looked so innocuous. But Levi knew it was anything but. He pushed an edge of a lock pick into the seam and twisted. It came open, revealing a tangle of wires, a tiny battery, and a small chip inside.

  Stupid. Terminally stupid.

  “Damned paranoid bastard,” he said. “That’s what I’d do, right? You’ve got data you don’t want to lose, and you hide it away. Wouldn’t you track the thing you hid it in, just in case?”

  “What is it?” Harper repeated.

  “We’ve been carrying around a GPS locator,” he said, snapping the device closed again.

  “What? Throw it out!”

  Levi put it carefully into his pocket. “I don’t think so. Let’s find a gas station. Plant it on somebody else. That should buy us a little time.”

  Harper’s forehead creased. “What if we get them shot?”

  “Mortensen’s too careful for that,” he said. Then he remembered the barn doors. “Well, maybe.”

  Still, there had to be some way….

  Out of the window, the road was long and straight with nothing but trees alternating with fields on either side. Except, far ahead, his werewolf sight made out something on the shoulder.

  With sudden inspiration, he said, “We’ll stick it on a semi, okay? They won’t try to go after a semi with guns blazing. They’ll at least do a bit of investigating first, right?”

  “All right,” Harper said steadily. “Where are we going to find a semi?”

  Levi grinned. “Dead ahead. Time for some more fast talking, Harper.”

  Chapter Two

  As soon as Levi pointed it out, Harper made out the shape of the big rig, parked on the side of the road. The driver was probably napping or taking a required break or something.

  “So what’s the plan?” she asked.

  “We stop and offer to help, of course,” Levi said.

  Harper snorted. “Really, that’s your best idea?”

  “Well, if he doesn’t come out when we stop, we don’t have to say anything at all. I don’t know how we’re going to stick it onto the trailer, though. We’ll have to put it inside the cab somehow, I guess—”

  “What’s wrong with bubble gum?”

  “It got wet. I threw it all away,” he said.

  She blew a bubble and popped it noisily. At Levi’s surprised expression, she said, “I bought more. Well, technically, you bought me more.”

  “We’ll need more than one piece,” he said, ignoring her allusion to her use of his prepaid debit card.

  “Check my purse.”

  He did, and he pulled out the packet and shoved four strips into his mouth, his jaw working around the big ball of gum.

  Harper dropped her gaze back to the road. She was entirely focused on the problem at hand, she told herself. The SD card had been a huge setback, and it put them in even more danger, and now the police knew she was with Levi, which meant that the bad guys definitely knew who she was.

  There was no part of her that was glad that the SD card didn’t work because it meant more time in Levi’s company. That was crazy thinking there, and Harper was a lot of things, but she wasn’t crazy.

  Especially about a man who’d already made his position clear.

  The semi was close now, close enough that Harper could make out the “How’s my driving?” number on the left-hand swing door. She slowed down, pulling off onto the shoulder.

  Maybe they’d luck out. Maybe the driver wouldn’t notice the tiny, two-colored car, and they could plant the GPS tracker and get away with no one the wiser.

  But even as she put the car into park, a man emerged from a clutch of trees a short distance from the truck. Gray hair, barrel chest, slight paunch, flannel shirt. Everything about him said “trucker.”

  Great. The trucker hadn’t been napping at all—h
e’d just pulled over to take a leak. And now he’d want to know what exactly they were doing. Harper had to hope he hadn’t seen whatever news reports had gotten her family so worked up.

  “Better get out and start talking,” Levi said, already grasping the door handle.

  “No problem,” Harper muttered, tugging her shirt down to reveal a little more cleavage before unbuckling and circling the car quickly with a smile plastered on her face.

  The trucker stopped in his tracks as she approached, staring at her distrustfully.

  “You in some kind of trouble?” she asked.

  “No, miss,” the man said, his eyes staying respectfully glued to her face in a way that meant that every bit of his peripheral vision was focused on her cleavage.

  Harper relaxed. This would be an easy one. Polite, but he wouldn’t mind wasting even half an hour with her as long as she was a Nice Girl.

  Harper was good at Nice Girl.

  “Oh, good. I just got this funny feeling....” Her eyes wide and innocent, she cocked her head sideways and waved to Levi, who was strolling casually over toward the back end of the trailer. “That’s my brother Dan. He said I was being dumb, but you know, we have an uncle who’s a trucker—well, it’s my dad’s brother, so Dan’s stepdad’s brother, so really just my uncle. Anyway, I said to him, ‘What if it were Uncle Silas who was broken down on the side of the road? You ever thought of that?’”

  The man smiled in a paternal sort of way, just like Harper expected. “We’ve got cell phones to call dispatch if something like that happens. They’ll get a repair guy or a tow truck or both out here.”

  “Oh, I know, but you know, anything we could do to help,” she said, giving him her most engaging smile.

  “That’s really nice of you, miss, but you shouldn’t be stopping like this,” he said seriously. “You’ve got your brother with you now, but not everybody on the road is nice, and that includes truckers. It’s really not a good idea for you to stop just ’cause you see someone on the side of the road.”