“I told you not to touch her,” Malcom gritted out. “Are you stupid? Control your god damned temper.”
Despairing, Amelia slumped back against the couch, and Karlie went to put her arm around her – but one of the guards grabbed Karlie and hauled her to her feet.
No! They couldn’t take Karlie from her!
“We’re keeping you two separate,” Malcom said to Amelia. “That way we know you’ll cooperate.”
Panic clutched at her throat, and she struggled to breathe.
“Leave me here with her!” Karlie cried out desperately. “I’ll do whatever you want.”
“Yes, you will, or we’ll cut up her face.” Malcom’s voice turned hard as he dragged her away from Amelia.
Amelia bit her lip as they hustled Karlie out of the room. She could hear Karlie’s stream of curses growing fainter and fainter as they forced her outside, and she’d never felt so helpless.
Malcolm glared down at Amelia as she struggled to stay upright. Panic choked her, and she fought for control.
“You can’t hurt either one of us, because you need us.” Amelia’s voice was a weak groan. “So what are you going to threaten us with?”
“We know where your parents live,” he said to Amelia. “You will be leading a group of men across the Breach tomorrow, or we’ll kill them.”
“My parents have guns. There are dozens of families currently living on their property.”
“And this entire area has no cell phones, no phone service, no way to call for help. Your family and their friends will be no match against a team of armed mercenaries. We’ve already got men stationedin the woods watching them.”
Amelia slumped back against the sofa. Her head was whirling so much that she couldn’t think straight. There had to be a way out of this. There had to. She couldn’t let these men kill her family, she couldn’t let them wipe out Clayton and Holt and overthrow law and order in their world.
“What the hell did you dose her with?” she heard one of the guard’s voices coming from a million miles away.
“Just chloroform. She shouldn’t be this sick. Carry her to her room.”
She let two men drag her down the hall to a bedroom, and dump her into a bed, where she curled up in a ball of misery.
As the day wore on, she felt sicker and sicker.
Her head was pounding. Her heart was racing. She gulped down water that they brought her, and took aspirin, and then heaved it up again.
“What the hell’s the matter with you?” the guard demanded as he set down a plate of food in front of her.
She was barely able to mutter “Fuck you and the horse you rode in on, asshole.”
The guard yelled out, “Hey, she’s really sick!”
“She’s faking it!” another voice called back.
“Nah, she’s white as a sheet and soaked in sweat. Something’s wrong with her.”
She heard footsteps approaching, and through blurred vision she looked up and saw Malcom and Ricardo standing there.
“You’re right. We’ll have to get a doctor for her, I guess.” He glowered at her, like it was her fault that she was ill.
She was shaking, she realized. She couldn’t stop shaking.
“But we need her to head out first thing in the morning,” the guard protested.
“Nah. We can just use her sister.”
Not Karlie. “I can go,” she croaked.
“Doubt it,” the guard said callously.
The night was a blur of sickness and the room swam around her. Her head pounded. At one point, she felt someone jabbing her arm. They were starting an i.v.
“She doesn’t have a fever, but she won’t stop shaking,” a voice said. Malcolm. She felt her stomach gurgling again, turned towards him, and let out a gushing stream of vomit that was mostly water by now, and then fell back down, bitterly satisfied by the stream of curses he let out.
Chapter Fourteen
“Why can’t we find her?” Clayton’s voice was choked with anger and worry. He was pacing back and forth in front of their cabin. Neither he nor Holt had slept at all the night before.
He could sense that something was wrong, but neither he nor Holt could figure out where she was, which was impossible. She’d bonded with them. They should be able to locate her and go straight to her.
Had she actually run out on them? Why would she have left after she let herself form a psychic bond with them?
He’d spent years and years happily dodging any notion of settling down – and now that he’d found her, he didn’t know how he’d ever lived without her. He barely knew her, but he already knew that she was the woman he wanted to be with forever. She was funny, and sexy, and sassy, and – gone.
“She wouldn’t have left deliberately – would she have?” Clayton groaned.
“I don’t know. Maybe.” Worry creased Holt’s forehead.
“What do you mean?” Clayton demanded.
“After our psychic bond started forming, I did sense some doubt, some hesitation. Didn’t you?”
“Yeah, but I thought that was just because I was pushing too hard. Maybe it was. Maybe I drove her away.” Misery rushed through Clayton, like nothing he’d ever felt before.
“It has nothing to do with you. Something was on her mind,” Holt said. “Our psychic link just hadn’t formed enough for me to tell exactly what.”
“She’d have to know that leaving us after the bond formed would literally kill her. Am I that terrible? That unbearable to be around?” Somehow, this must be his fault. What had he done wrong?
“Stop doing that to yourself.” Holt put a hand on Claytons’ shoulder. “You didn’t do anything wrong. Let’s stay calm and try to figure this out.”
Clayton nodded unhappily. “If only we could pick up on where she is. I just don’t understand this. It’s like she’s on another continent or something.”
“There’s one of the Sentinels,” Holt said, pointing at a tall man striding in their direction. Sentinel Carmichael.
Clayton desperately tried to read the man’s expression. Did he look like a man about to deliver terrible news? She couldn’t be dead. She couldn’t be. He’d sense it.
He was picking up the faintest sense of distress from her– barely a whisp, but it was there. That meant she wasn’t dead. It also meant that every instinct in his body was screaming to find her, to protect his mate, to kill whatever was causing her distress – and he couldn’t. It was driving him mad.
“Did you find her?” Clayton demanded as Sentinel Carmichael walked up to them.
“Clayton. Settle down. Let the man talk.” Holt was chewing on his lower lip, eyes burning with worry.
Sentinel Carmichael shook his head. “No, but we did find out something interesting. No Amelia Baxter registered at the Festival.”
“What? That’s impossible.”
“We checked several times, and then we started doing database searches. There’s no Amelia Baxter in our entire region.”
Clayton and Holt exchanged bewildered glances. Clayton felt panic and rage choking him. What was happening?
“Perhaps she wasn’t 21, and she lied about her identity to sneak in?” Sentinel Carmichael suggested. “But then, we have a list of everyone who is supposed to attend the festival, and we match all the entrants against it. I don’t understand how she got in at all.”
“William!” Holt said suddenly.
“What?” Sentinel Carmichael asked him, looking puzzled.
“He’s a member of our pack. One of the betas. He recognized her, when we brought her back to our farm. He’d seen her before,” Holt said.
“Our farm is three hours from here,” Clayton said. “We don’t have three hours.”
“We’ll send a Sentinel from that area to talk to him,” Carmichael said. “Bay Hills Pack, right? There will be someone close by.”
A half hour later, Carmichael returned, this time driving in a pickup truck, with half a dozen other Sentinels riding in the bed. There was a grim se
t to his face.
Clayton and Holt rushed over to the truck.
“Climb in,” Carmichael said. “I’ll talk while we’re driving.”
They scrambled to comply.
“You’re not going to believe this,” he said. “She came from the other world. She came through the Breach.”
Clayton and Holt let out startled exclamations.
“But how did William know her?” Holt asked.
“When William was a cub, he went out for a run one day, and apparently found an area where he accidentally crossed through. In our world, it’s in a wooded area with no homes, close to here, but in their world, it’s on their family farm. Apparently Amelia and her sister crossed back and forth all the time, with no problems.”
“If William went there, shouldn’t he have died when he tried to return?” Clayton protested.
“Well, here’s what he said happened. He was running around panicked, couldn’t find his way back home. Then he ran into these two little girls playing in the woods – Amelia, and her twin sister Karlie. After he talked to Amelia and Karlie, and explained where he was from, they told him they knew how to get him home. They led him back through what he described as a ripple in the air, and he was fine. Then they walked through the ripple and vanished.”
“How could that be?” Holt wondered, shaking his head in bewilderment. “Does that mean that they’re somehow magic, and can cross over and then return safely, or does it mean that the spot that they found is special, and anyone can go back and forth through it, unlike the Breach?”
“Very good questions,” Carmichael said. “William described the exact spot where he wandered through to the other side. The area where William crossed over is a site where multiple ley lines intersect. If these women grew up there, it might have affected them in some way. Basically, they’re creatures of both worlds. It is also possible that on a spot where so many ley lines cross, that anybody could go back and forth without harm.”
“We’ve got to get to her,” Clayton said, his tone frantic. “She’s sick. I can feel it.”
Carmichael nodded. “We’re headed that way right now. If there’s a possibility that anyone can go back and forth through that spot, we need to station guards there like we have along the rest of the Breach.”
“When we get there, we’re going to have to cross over,” Holt said. “It’s very likely she doesn’t know what it means to bond with us and then leave. She’ll die if we can’t get to her.”
“I figured you’d say that, which is why I’m bringing you there. But know this. If you cross over, there’s a very significant chance you could be trapped there,” Sentinel Carmichael pointed out.
Clayton and Holt exchanged glances. “We’ll risk it,” Clayton said decisively.
* * *
Karlie was boiling with rage as she marched through the woods. She had spent a sleepless night imprisoned in some remote house with armed guards in her room, and been prodded at gunpoint to leave the house in the morning. When one of the guys had given her coffee and hot oatmeal, she’d had the satisfaction of flinging it in the guy’s face, and hearing his screams of pain.
He’d lunged forward, fist raised, only to collapse under half a dozen men. “We can’t harm her!” they’d yelled at him.
“We can harm her fucking family if she keeps this shit up,” the guard spit, furious.
Then she’d been dragged to the woods on her family’s property and forced show them where the portal to Clair De Lune was. Then, she had to take the dirtbags by the hand and lead them through one by one – two dozen men with guns, hauling bars of silver. She’d even had to lead Ricardo through.
They were on their way to a rendezvous with Ricardo’s pack. Their pack was bringing gold and diamonds in exchange for the silver. Apparently, in their world, there was no such thing as silver – and it was deadly to werewolves.
Over the centuries, from what she’d gathered, there had been occasional occurrences of people finding thin spots in the fabric of whatever separated their universes, and silver had occasionally made it through. That was how they even knew it existed, in the werewolf world. It was strictly forbidden to bring silver over, on pain of death.
As she stomped through the woods with them, she cursed under breath. She was hungry, tired, frantic with worry for her sister, and just generally pissed off.
Karlie was generally known as the nice twin, but if there was one thing that turned her from a people pleaser to a raving psycho, it was any threat against her family.
That was why, when a group of werewolves burst through the woods and lunged at her captors, she broke into a huge grin and then swung around and punched Malcom in the face so hard his nose seemed to explode.
Malcom forgot about his orders not to harm her, and jumped on her, screaming and swearing. He knocked her to the ground and raised his fist above his head to punch her, but before he could do anything, a massive gray wolf leaped through the air and ripped his head clean off.
Dear God. He was headless. His body sat up for a minute, blood gushing from the stump at the neck, and then fell to the earth with a sickening thud.
Karlie clapped her hands over her mouth and stifled a scream of horror. She crawled away and huddled up against a tree, as the woods filled with howling, enraged wolves.
Ricardo shifted to wolf form and tried to run for it, but he was pinned to the ground by several wolves who held him down, snarling and snapping at him.
The men who had held her prisoner fired at the werewolves, bringing several of them down. She shuddered as the werewolves thrashed and howled in agony. She remembered what one of the men had said yesterday about how their bullets were coated with silver. Her captors had shot these wolves with those silver coated bullets, clearly, and it had caused the wolves to die an agonizing death.
Several of the wolves raced to the sides of their writhing brethren, turned human again, and produced knives, with which they quickly cut out the bullets. They were two late for two of the wolves, who lay still and glassy eyed on the forest floor.
Their wolfish brethren crouched over their bodies and howled, a mournful, heartbreaking sound that twisted up into the air and brought tears to her eyes.
Then the howls died down, and the woods fell silent. Looking around, she realized that it was over. The surviving humans, and Ricardo, had been captured.
Two of the wolves morphed into incredibly handsome naked men. They ran over to her and helped her to her feet.
“You must be Karlie,” one of them said. “Where is your sister? We’ve got to find her now, before it’s too late.”
Chapter Fifteen
Amelia sat up in bed, clutching at the thin, scratchy blanket that had been tossed over her. Her headache had cleared. Her nausea was gone.
She threw back the blanket and scrambled out of bed, and then clutched at the wall. She felt better, but she was still felt dizzy and her legs were wobbly.
Gunfire. She heard gunfire, and shouts, and screams of pain. Panic swept over her. Who was shooting? Was she about to be rescued, or killed? Where the hell was her sister?
Frantically, her gaze swept the room. There was no furniture, nothing that she could hide behind. There was one window that was boarded up. No way out. She didn’t dare try to open the door. It was probably locked, but even if it wasn’t, she didn’t want to risk running in to a hail of gunfire.
Footsteps pounded down the hallway towards her room, and she tensed. Then the thick oak door flew inward with a mighty crash. To her shock and relief, Clayton and Holt rushed through, followed by at least a dozen other werewolves.
How had they found her? She didn’t even care right now. They were here, and the terrible ache she’d felt upon leaving them was gone.
“Amelia!” Clayton shouted, rushing to her. She fell into his arms, and he held her up easily. She’d never been more grateful for his size and his strength. Holt threw his arms around her two, and she felt as if their strength were pouring in to her and rushing t
hrough her body.
“Are you all right? What did they do to you?” Clayton demanded.
“I’m fine. They didn’t do anything. I just got really, really sick as soon as I left your universe. I feel so much better now that you’re here, it’s unbelievable.”
Then she felt something warm and sticky on her clothing, and smelled the coppery tang of blood. She jerked back, alarmed. “Are you bleeding? Which one of you is bleeding? Oh, dear God. We need a medic!”
“We’re fine,” Holt reassured her quickly. “It’s not our blood.” He flashed a feral smile; this was a side of Holt that she’d never seen before. “Those men just found out what happens to someone who hurts our woman.”
Their woman. Well, now that they knew the truth about her, she doubted she’d be their woman for long.
“I am so, so sorry,” she moaned. “I know you’ll never forgive me.”
“Forgive you for what?” Clayton asked, puzzled.
“Lying to you.”
“You did it for your family. We would have done the same thing. Your sister explained everything to us when she brought us through the Breach,” Holt said.
“Karlie!” Amelia cried out, looking around. “Where is she? Is she all right?”
“She’s at your family’s farm, safe. We didn’t want her anywhere near the gunfire.”
“No!” Alarm shot through her. “Not the farm! These men have people watching my family’s farm!”
Clayton shook his head. “Not any more. When we came through to your world, we rendezvoused with your human soldiers, and informed them of the situation. The men who were staking out your property have been arrested.”
“Oh, my God. Everybody’s safe? My family? The people staying at the farm?”
“Everybody’s safe.”
She slumped against him, weak with relief. He folded her into his muscular embrace, and she never wanted to leave it again.
He kissed the top of her head.
“Our Chief Sentinel is meeting with one of your generals, as we speak,” Holt said. “They’re going to want you and your sister to meet up with them, as soon as you feel up to it, of course.”
Twin Alphas: Claimed (A BBW Werewolf Romance) Page 9