by A. J. Downey
“Ava, no!”
“Shut the hell up Helen! You lost your voting privileges! Remus, get up!”
He snarled and broke the chains, ripping the wires and contact pads from around his groin area. I stared cold and hard at Helen in a bid to give him some privacy for the rest. He staggered over in my direction.
“Thanks, bitch,” his voice was bitter and dry, hoarse from those unnatural screams.
“Where will you go, Ava?” Helen asked; her voice musical and a touch haunting. The half-smile on her face was totally insane and I couldn’t believe I’d never seen it before. Her crazy. She’d patched my brother, my team, and hell, even me, up countless times… how did I never see it?
“None of your fucking business, but I’m out. After that, I am so out.”
“He’ll hunt you to the ends of the earth, Mathias will. You know he will.”
“Just fucking shoot the crazy cunt.” Remy growled. He was working a pair of green hospital scrubs up his legs but they were having a hard time making it all the way. The material straining around his powerful, muscular thighs. Too short, they rode high at the hems, around his calves, a bad parody of a pair of Capri’s.
“Shut up, she’s the facility’s top doctor, and an excellent surgeon. I can’t kill her.” I was torn. So very torn…
“Better make up your mind, Babycakes, before it’s too–”
I made a critical mistake, a rookie mistake and took my eyes off Helen for a split second, a rustle of fabric and Remy cutting off mid-sentence alerted me and training, muscle memory, took over. Compensating for my inattention. My finger twitched on the trigger and my gun went off and when I looked, Helen was going over backwards, crashing into the edge of the exam table and sliding to the floor a small pistol gripped in her nerveless hand.
Blood blossomed high on the white sleeve of her lab coat. A lucky blind shot, I’d hit her in the arm of the hand that had her gun in it. That was my fucking cue to leave. I shot a silent prayer of thanks to my brother for watching my ass and refocused, honing in on the monumental task at hand.
“Let’s go,” I bolted out the door with Remus Reese on my six and stayed on target: getting us the fuck out of here alive.
I bolted down the hallway and hit the button for the elevator. The doors opened and I sent it up and hit the button for the doors to close. Remy stepped forward and I pushed him back, out of the death box.
“Come on! This way!” I shot down the hall, around the corner and crashed into the stairs with the large werewolf loping along behind me.
“Damnit,” he cursed and I holstered one gun and hauled him ineffectually along by one arm into the stairwell. Pushing him ahead of me.
“Faster, for fucks sake!” I barked.
“You wanted faster outta me you shouldn’t have fuckin’ shot me!”
“Hind sight is always twenty-twenty, quit your bitching and move your ass, level four!”
He crashed through a door and ditched right, plastering himself against the wall. I cursed inside my own head; you never follow your own breech! I guess he wouldn’t know that being a civilian. I went through the door aiming one gun while bringing out the other. Nothing. I didn’t let out the breath I was holding just yet, anyways.
“Jeep Patriot, third down the line.” I holstered my weapon and he loped in that direction. I pulled out the key and hit the locks. Lights flashed and the headlights lit up out into the parking lot where the Jeep was backed in.
I was three quarters of the way there when the snarls and snapping raised the hair on the back of my neck. Remus popped up over the roof of the Jeep, standing on the runner to look behind me.
“Ava, move!” he shouted and came up with the shotgun from the passenger side holster, a sawed off deal. I threw myself at the driver’s door and opened it as the boom of the shotgun blared through the garage, reverberating through my chest. A yelp and a whine, very dog-like behind me. I stayed focused and got behind the wheel, jamming the key in the ignition.
I turned it over, slammed the door and rammed in the clutch simultaneously. I slammed the stick shift into first. A wild romp on the gas, screaming tires, I popped the clutch and shot forward as the gun went off overhead one more time. Remus folded his impossibly large frame into the Jeep and slammed his door.
“Don’t stop!” he bellowed and I dropped it into the next gear and picked up speed, short shifting and hauling ass up through the garage.
“Don’t stop, Girl, go right on through them,” he grated and I gritted my teeth and prayed they fucking moved. I shot straight at several members of my team who stood, guns pointed, stunned before scattering to either side. Too shocked to fire…
“Thank you James,” I breathed and pulled out into the morning light. The fire of the sun a cleansing thing… burning the horror of what I saw away just enough to make the memory of it bearable.
I drove. I drove hard and fast and knew the only chance I had to get the answers I sought so badly was to get us off the grid. The good news? I had a place for that. The bad news? It was a ways away.
Here was to hoping we could make it and the beast beside me didn’t rip my fucking face off before I got the full meal deal on what the fuck was going on.
Chapter 11
Remus
“Look, Babycakes,” I snapped. “You hunt, I evade. It’s what we do, and since we’re evading, you might want to listen to me and get us to the fuckin’ water!”
We had been arguing for about an hour. An hour where the hunters had undoubtedly been gathering their forces and sending teams after us, and with what I saw when we made our escape... I couldn’t believe it. Wolf-kind. Fuckin’ wolf-kind, working for the damn hunters. Worse, working for Mathias fuckin’ Young! What in the ever loving hairy fuck!? How in the hell..? I couldn’t wrap my head around it.
“What the fuck,” Ava growled, a distinctly wolfish kind of sound that I’m pretty sure she wasn’t even aware of doing. She had this bad ass bitch persona going on, and she had no idea that it was very similar to alpha bitch material. It was kind of hot, honestly.
I shook my head, banishing that thought as fast as I could and turned again to look behind us. “Would you quit fuckin’ looking back?” she snapped and I looked at her. Her hands were tight on the wheel. Knuckles mottled white from the pressure of her grip. Her shoulders were tense and the skin around her eyes creased as she squinted through the glare of the late morning sun through the windshield. “If anyone sees the half-naked guy constantly looking back it’ll look suspicious. Just stare front and center and try to act casual?” she ground out between gritted teeth. “God, you really are a fucking civilian, no tactical sense whatsoever.”
I was a bit offended at that but chose not to respond in kind, simply turning back around in my seat.
“Look, wolf-kind can track by smell. If we want a chance at throwing them off, we need to get across water. They’ll be right on our tails.”
She snorted, and indelicate, mocking sound. “Pun intended, Wolf-boy? Seriously though, you think I don’t know that? What the fuck does your kind have to do with it anyways?”
“You heard it, Ava,” I said, purposely using her real name instead of one of my little derogatory pet nicknames for her. I needed her to focus on what I was saying instead of her irritation at my propensity for using condescension on her. “You heard them back in that garage. The last ones coming at us, those were wolf-kind. I don’t know why or how but Mathias has my people working for him, or with him, I don’t know.”
She said nothing, just continued to stare straight ahead at the road so I pressed my point. “With wolf-kind on our tails we need to cross water to lose the scent. They’ll have to spread out and cover more ground up and down the far side of the lake to try to pick up our trail again, and by the time they get there the trail could be cold and we’ll have a good chance that we’ve lost them.”
“Could?”
I shrugged. “It’s hard to say how fast they’ll move. They might get lucky and find
the spot where we go ashore before the trail has a chance to really get cold.
“It’s not really possible to track us when we’re in a car doing seventy-five on the highway is it? Through the walls and with all the other smells in the air, I mean, that’s impossible. Right?”
I shrugged. “Police dogs are capable of it. They can track a kidnap victim even if the victim is put in a car for a short time but the trail does go cold rather quickly. A wolf-kind’s nose is even better than a police dog’s, if we know what we’re looking for, which we do. Match a human intelligence with the senses of an animal, it’s what we are, Babycakes. The best of both worlds.” She looked sideways at me for a moment, I guessed trying to decide if I was exaggerating or not. I honestly couldn’t give two rancid monkey shits if she fully believed me, as long as she listened to me. It was the only way we were going to escape with our lives. And speaking of which...
“Why did you bust me out of there?” I asked. “Not that I’m complaining, but what happened to change your mind on the whole torturing and experimentation thing?”
She made a disgusted sound in her throat and for a second I thought she was gonna hack one up and spit to the side. Instead her hands tightened even further on the wheel and she glared at the road ahead, as if daring it to do something to piss her off.
“I never signed on for medical experiments like that,” she said, finally, after several minutes passed in an ever increasingly weighted silence. “I’ve been crusading for years, wolf-kind are dangerous and they hurt people, but they’re still living creatures. You’re supposed to put ‘em down quick… painless whenever possible. Torture for information sometimes has to happen but that?” she shifted in her seat uncomfortably, “The order has been changing things up recently and I don’t like what I’ve been seeing,” she finished, and if ever there was putting it mildly…
I nodded but didn’t say anything. We were in a fragile state of a truce at the moment and I didn’t want to get her trigger finger itching. No matter how much the shit coming out of her mouth pissed me off. Instead, I turned and looked out the window, considering our situation and our best chance of survival.
“Where the fuck are we anyways?” I muttered, looking at the landscape passing by outside.
“South Bend, Indiana,” she said, shortly.
“Indiana?” I was surprised. I hadn’t realized we’d left Illinois. “Why the fuck did we go to Indiana?”
She was silent for another minute, perhaps struggling with the natural inclination to deny information to one of the creatures she had spent who knows how long hunting. Since we were officially in this together at this point, I was reasonably certain she would start to talk eventually.
“The facility we were holding you at is an American Red Cross distribution center. The underground portion is a secret from the majority of the Red Cross employees.”
“Why a Red Cross Facility?”
“The Red Cross is a front for our organization.”
My mind latched onto that information faster than you could imagine. Finally, a chance to get into the details, get some information about the Hunters. I would never be able to rejoin my pack, but if I could take some of this to William, it might earn me some leeway. However, before I could do any of that, we needed to finish our escape.
“Head north,” I said, changing topics abruptly and in her defense Ava simply nodded and rolled with it, without a hiccup or a stutter. She shifted mental gears with equal precision to shifting physical gears in the Jeep.
“What’s the plan then, oh great evader?” Her tone was only slightly caustic and I ignored it in favor of keeping the peace. There was no reason to fight with her right then. I knew when to pick my battles, unlike my late brother Rom.
“We’ll get into Michigan and ditch the Jeep. We’ll steal another one or buy one if I can get access to my bank accounts. Then we’ll turn west until we hit Lake Michigan.”
“What happens when we hit the lake?” I grinned and suppressed a wince of pain as a flare of heat burst in my leg from the slowly healing gunshot wound.
“We’re going to cross it.”
To her credit she didn’t flinch or swerve us off the road in her surprise, she just kept driving but she did glance at me out of the corner of her eye as her mouth dropped open in shock for just a moment before it snapped closed again with an audible clack of her teeth.
“Are you completely out of your damn mind?” she demanded. “It’s mid-May, there’s still likely to be ice on the lake. We might not actually be able to cross the thing without us getting sunk in the process.”
“As long as there aren’t any storms we should be good.” I leaned over and looked through the window up at the clear sky. “I don’t see any storm clouds, do you?”
“That’s not the point, why the hell would we want to choose to go across the lake. It’s dangerous, not to mention huge.”
“Exactly why,” I said and shifted in my seat, grimacing again as I moved my leg. “Goddammit, my leg is driving me nuts,” I grumbled. She didn’t have anything to say about that and just waited for me to continue.
“Look, crossing the lake isn’t going to be a picnic. It is a big-ass lake, and yeah there probably will be ice on the water at this time of year. The hunters following us might agree with you that it’s too dangerous to cross after us. And if they drive all the way around, or even if they catch a plane, by the time they get to the other side they won’t have any idea where we came ashore. They’ll waste time trying to find us and we’ll have a better chance of getting away.”
She fell silent, considering my argument for a minute.
“Actually, that’s not a horrible idea,” she admitted, finally. “Do you have a plan in place for what we’re going to do once we get to the other side of the lake?” she asked.
I shrugged. “I hadn’t actually gotten that far,” I admitted. “My main goal right now is just to shake them off our tail,” I gave her a pointed look that communicated she’d best keep it shut when it came to the unintended pun as I continued. “We’ll figure out where we’re going after that.”
She considered that silently for a moment before she nodded once, sharply, and let out an explosive sigh. “There’s an apartment,” she said. “In Ashland, up in Northern Wisconsin. It belongs to me and it’s completely under the radar so we’ll go there after we hit the other side of the lake.”
I shrugged. “Sounds like a plan to me.” I was honestly getting too tired and felt too worn out to care much one way or the other.
She glanced at me and then hit the turn signal to pull us off the freeway.
“What’re you doing?” I asked.
“You need some clothes and we need some food. Can’t have you running around in some scrub pants that don’t even fit.
I grunted. “Not gonna be doing much running around at all.”
“Boo-hoo,” she mocked. “Suck it up, Butter Cup.”
I couldn’t help the annoyed growl that slipped out of me. The wolf and I did not like being mocked. Not in the slightest. And considering she was the one that’d shot me in the first place, neither one of us felt particularly charitable on that front. She pulled into a parking lot of some large department store or other, I couldn’t be bothered to see which one, and pulled smoothly into a space. “Look, stay here, I’ll run and grab you some clothes and then we’ll grab something to eat.”
Without another word she opened her door and jumped out. I grunted and leaned back in my seat, my eyes slipping closed almost of their own accord. She was right. Clothes would be good. But honestly? I didn’t feel particularly hungry. And that scared the shit out of me.
***
I jerked awake to find the sun was setting and we were driving again. Ava had a fast food cup in one hand and was just finishing off what smelled like a cherry coke. She set her cup in the Jeep’s cup holder next to a second, full cup, and glanced at me.
“Morning Sunshine,” she muttered and I grunted a barely coherent response.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” she snapped. You’ve been out for hours, I wasn’t sure what to do so I just kept driving.”
“Not feeling so hot,” I muttered. That wasn’t entirely true. I felt pretty damned hot, feverish in fact. My body was alternatively burning up and wracked with chills that set me to shivering uncontrollably.
“There’s food if you want. I ordered a metric-fuck-ton of the stuff. Hope you like cold burgers and fries.” The smell hit me then and I wretched, body convulsing as my stomach heaved attempting to expel the nothing in it. I had no idea when it was that I last actually ate or drank anything. I reached blindly and rolled the window down and stuck my head outside to rid myself of the smell of the food. Honestly I was tempted to just throw the bags out, but she was right, food was needed and it wouldn’t do to waste it.
“What the fuck?” she yelped. “Remus, what’s wrong?” Her voice was tight. Not with fear, not for herself at least. I could almost think that she was worried about me.
“Worried about me?” I said in a languid kind of drawl. I felt drunk, delirious almost. Something was severely wrong. Wolf-kind don’t get fevers. We don’t get sick, but this all seemed familiar. I couldn’t quite place it but I was sure I had seen my symptoms in someone else before. If I could just concentrate...
“Not really. I need you alive. You’ve got information I want.”
“Information on Mathias and his deal with my father, Declan Rees?”
“Among other things.”
“Tit for tat,” I muttered, letting my eyes close again as the cold air from the open window caressed my overheated skin. “Quid pro quo. I tell you something you tell me something.”
“Like what?”
“Why is the Red Cross a front for the Hunters?”
“Not all Hunters,” she said. “Just our... chapter... I guess you could say.”
“Alright, then why is the American Red Cross a front for your Chapter?”
“Because our chapter can trace its origins back to the Knights Templar.”