by A. J. Downey
I blinked, completely unsure how to take that information. “I’m confused,” I admitted finally. “What does you guys being Templars way back when have to do with anything?”
She glanced over at me again, a small smirk tugging at the corner of her lips. It was really kind of sexy, and distracting. I gave myself a firm mental shake to snap out of it.
“What’s the universally recognized symbol for the Red Cross?” she asked and I frowned, feeling like my brain was trying to work through a layer of cotton batting.
“A red cross?” I ventured.
“A Red Cross on a white background. That was the emblem of the Knights Templar, genius. The American Red Cross was founded entirely as a front for our branch of the crusade. With it, we were able to create an organization capable of going all over the world without too much scrutiny and we could actually do some good and help humans in need while we’re at it. It’s a win-win situation.”
That made some crazy kind of sense, so I nodded. Nothing more was said for a time until the sun slipped completely beneath the horizon. Ava left the freeway and a short time later left the main roads and rolled into a parking lot near an access point to the edge of the lake.
“Come on,” she said after she parked the car and turned it off. “We need to find a boat. There’s a dock about a half a mile up the beach, we should be able to steal something from there.”
“Why not just drive the rest of the way there?” I complained and bit back a moan of pain as I shifted to get out. My leg told me in no uncertain terms how little it enjoyed the treatment.
“They’ll waste some time searching around here for us and we’ll stick to the asphalt as long as possible to avoid leaving tracks leading them right to the dock.”
“They’re not going to be lookin’ fer tracks,” I mumbled as a wave of dizziness swept over me and I swayed for a moment on my feet. One hand shot out and I grabbed ahold of the Jeep to keep from falling over. “They’re gonna smell us and we’ll just be losing time walkin’ there.”
“We’ll see,” she muttered tersely and came over to tuck herself under my arm, bearing some of my weight on my right side. “Don’t get any fucking ideas, Werewolf,” she growled but there was no heat in it. “It’s not that I like you or anything I’m just trying to save both our asses.”
I nodded but didn’t say anything as we made our way to the dock she was talking about. It didn’t take us too long, but definitely longer than it should have. Something was really wrong and I wasn’t positive what.
The next bit is still a jumbled mess of images and impressions in my mind. The smell of water and fish, motion, the clunking of heavy footsteps on wood and then I was falling, unconscious before my body struck the ground.
***
“You know,” I muttered hoarsely. “For a guy that has never had any health issues I seem to be in a lot of pain and dealing with more illness since I met you than I ever have in my life. It’s been a fucking long one, too.”
Ava chuckled somewhere off to my right and I finally opened my eyes to see the blackened night sky above me, clouds rolling in and out in waves to obscure the half moon and the stars blazing away more brightly than it’s possible to see them in any city. The ground shifted beneath me and I could hear a sloshing sound. That’s what clued me in that we were on a boat.
“Where are we? And what exactly happened?”
“We’re on a boat. Not a particularly large one, a 40 foot yacht I was able to steal. Still, it’ll get us where we’re going if we’re lucky.” To my right and above me Ava sat in a chair. The chair was anchored to the deck and she had turned slightly so she could look down at me lying on my back on the hard wood with one of her slim hands still holding onto the wheel. In her other she held up a small glass jar with a metal cap screwed on tight and tossed it down to me.
The jar, which probably held baby food in its previous incarnation, landed on my chest and bounced and I was barely able to catch it before it fell to the deck. I held it up and shook it to see a few tiny pieces of metal rattle around inside it. Minuscule specks, no larger than a sliver or a splinter.
“What the hell are these?” I asked and looked over at her.
“Shards of the silver slug I pulled out of your leg. I thought it’d come out in one piece, but obviously it didn’t; I missed some of it. That’s why you were feeling sick, they were poisoning you. Your leg was infected and seriously inflamed and you passed out just as we got onto the boat, here, so I piloted us out onto the lake and let us drift for a bit while I checked you out.” She turned back to the front as if dismissing me but continued to talk a moment later.
“I didn’t see anything obvious so I checked your wound and that’s when I figured out what had to be wrong. I’ll tell you what, it took some serious effort to get those out of you considering I didn’t exactly have proper medical equipment on hand or decent lighting, or a sterile environment. Of course, the sterile environment part doesn’t exactly mean much to you–” she side eyed me, “…guys, does it?”
“Do I want to ask what you were just going to call my people?”
“Probably not,” she admitted and shrugged. I threw the little glass jar with its offending contents high and out into the lake where it landed with a little splash. I pushed myself up to a sitting position and groaned quietly. Removing the silver had definitely helped with the fever and chills, and I was certainly feeling better, but I was weak, starved, and my leg hurt more than ever.
“You didn’t happen to bring the food from the car aboard with us, did you?” I asked and a moment later a takeout bag landed on the deck right next to me with a low thump. I pushed myself back so that I was leaning against the metal railing that encircled the deck. I put my legs out in front of me and dug a cold burger out of the bag. I didn’t care that it was cold. I was so fucking hungry I would have eaten a raw cow if that was all that was available.
“Tit for tat,” she said and I looked up at her, my mouth full of food, with a questioning expression on my face. Despite myself, and despite the knowledge that I really shouldn’t be finding myself attracted to this woman, I couldn’t help but stare at her tits, in response to the words that came out of her mouth.
“Eyes up,” she snapped and I blinked, snapping my gaze up to meet her eyes with as innocent an expression as I could muster. “I told you something about the crusaders, now you owe me some information,” she continued as if nothing had happened.
I frowned, trying to remember what she had told me. Gradually the foggy memories surfaced and I nodded, swallowing the lump of food, I wiped my mouth with the back of one hand. “What’d you want to know?” I asked before I took another bite and she turned her chair again so she could see me more easily, her head swinging back and forth to me and to watching our course across the lake.
“Mathias said that he had an agreement with Declan,” she said and I could hear a hesitation when she spoke my father’s name. Obviously she had been tempted to say something else but changed her mind at the last moment. “What was that, exactly?”
“No idea.”
“That wasn’t our deal,” she snapped, glaring angrily at me and I held up a hand in a placating gesture, waving her down.
“Look, I don’t really know. Not for sure. But I can make a reasonably educated guess.”
“Then guess,” she growled and, again, I chose not to comment how just like a wolf-kind female she sounded.
“From what I’ve learned recently, it sounded like father had an arrangement with Mathias that he would have hunters patrol the border of our territory for any other wolf-kind attempting to encroach on our land. It sounded like Declan would allow him to take any trespassers that attempted to get into Washington and in return Mathias would leave the Northwest Pack alone. In essence, the hunters were protecting my packs’ territory for us.”
“But that doesn’t make any sense,” she argued. “Why would he make a deal with an Alpha? Mathias is well known for hating wolf-kind more than almos
t any hunter I’ve ever heard of.”
“Considering the experiments he was doing, it isn’t too hard to understand.” She glanced down at me again, silently urging me to continue. “Mathias is obviously trying to figure out what makes us tick. Maybe how we live so long or how we complete our change. He wants to learn something, and it’s difficult enough to hunt us when we’re spread out all over hell and gone. With that arrangement he had a nearly sure trap. Wolf-kind were sure to occasionally try to breach our territory. It’s a fact of life. Territory is important and Washington State has some of the best.”
“So... what? He could just pick off other wolf-kind as they try to enter the state?” she asked and I nodded.
“Sounds about what the situation was.”
“Why? What could he possibly hope to learn?”
“Like I said, why we live for so long, maybe? Why we heal so fast or how we’re so strong? Maybe how it is that we change?”
“But we already know that. Wolf-kind come from ancient Druids in Ireland, before St. Patrick subjugated the Pagan people and converted them to Christianity.”
That got my attention and I started so hard that I dropped the remains of my burger, the food slipping from suddenly nerveless fingers to drop to the deck with a wet plop.
“What did you just say?” I demanded sharply and her deep green eyes locked onto mine, staring at me as if she were just seeing me for the first time.
“Wolf-kind come from the ancient Druids. The first shifters were able to do so because of a connection to a wolf guardian spirit. The story goes that after St. Patrick converted the druids the ones that had already connected to the wolf went mad, started changing with the moon, and ever since, they’ve spread their madness and the hunters have been attempting to wipe them out because of it.” She eyed me curiously. “Didn’t you know that?”
I shook my head, eyes wide and feeling as if I’d just been hit over the head with a two by four. “No one I’ve ever known has any idea as to our origins. Wolf-kind have spent so long just trying to survive that a lot of our history’s been lost.” I spoke as if in a trance. Numb with the enormity of the information that had just been dropped on me.
The hunters knew, they knew where we’d started, how we’d started. How the first wolf-kind were born, or created. They knew far more about us than anyone had ever imagined, and the very notion of it at once thrilled me and filled me with dread. If they knew so much that had been lost to us, what else did they know?
Chapter 12
Ava
I’d blindsided him. Good to know I still had the ability, but it hadn’t been my intention this time. He sat silent, staring off into space for a long, long while. His dark eyes narrowed and calculating. I had a hard time believing that the mutts didn’t know where they’d originated, but no matter how good an actor he might be, no one was that good. You couldn’t fake a reaction like that.
“Hey, Dingo.” I nudged his hip with my foot, his eyes narrowed further and snapped to me.
“Fuck you,” he growled and I smiled and knew it wasn’t exactly nice.
“That’s what you get for calling me ‘Babycakes’ all the time. ‘Dingo…’ I rather like that little nickname for you. With that appetite of yours I wouldn’t put it past you, you know… the whole eating babie–” he snarled, his arm snapping out, one of his massive hands going around one of my ankles. He gave it a surprisingly gentle squeeze and we locked eyes.
“I have been trying pretty fucking hard to keep it civil, Babycakes,” he looked at me, soul deep and I swallowed hard. We were perched on that razor’s edge of violence and it could honestly go either way. If it went sideways I was pretty sure I was going to lose the leg. If I managed to get my gun out and on him, and actually survive the encounter, I probably would die from blood loss before I could get back to shore.
Me and my fucking mouth. I had always been the cool, calm and collected one. I was behaving more like my twin and less like myself every day. I closed my mouth and nodded slowly.
“Fair enough,” I conceded and honestly, with the way he was looking at me, I indeed felt duly chastised. I held his gaze and refused to back down, to be the one to look away first and with a slight, almost knowing smirk, he conceded. His hand slipped from my leg, but it did so in a lingering caress, and I fought to suppress a shudder.
“I was thinking,” I said, as much to change the subject from the intense interaction as anything.
“Yeah? About what?” He settled back against the side of the boat and shifted uncomfortably.
“We can’t cross this lake, not in this thing. It’s something like two hundred miles give or take to go north and cross to make landfall anywhere near where we’d need to be. There isn’t enough fuel to go even straight across at over a hundred miles. This thing was still in winter storage.”
“You got a point coming up anytime soon?” he grated and I guess I couldn’t blame him for being in a mood. I tried my best to squash down the image of him strapped to that table of Helen…
Good Christ, what had I been a part of?
“Yeah, we’re a mile, maybe two off shore. Is that enough to throw the scent?”
“Should be,” he said eyeing me suspiciously.
“Good. I’m going to take us as far as I can, we’ll make landfall where we can, steal another car or buy one or whatever and then we’ll have to catch a legit way around or across.”
He grunted noncommittally and we lapsed into silence. He finished the cold food while I piloted us carefully through the darkened waters, glad he’d been unconscious while I’d struggled to get the hang of this and get us out here.
When he’d finished making his way through the rest of the cold, fast food, he leaned his head back against the railing. I took the time to study his face while he had his eyes closed. He was handsome, strong featured, though his growth of beard really didn’t do much for him. He looked scruffy and unkempt and disconcertingly feral. Deep, dark circles resided under his eyes and they almost appeared sunken despite the fact the rest of him appeared fit.
He had washboard abs and honestly looked like Michelangelo had carved him from flesh and bone. His definition was phenomenal and I had to bet he worked very hard at keeping it that way. He had gym rat written all over him, however, as pretty as he was for me to look at, it was proving to be somewhat of a distraction so…
Thwack!
“What’s this?” he asked, glaring at the thick plastic of the bag between his knees.
“Clothes. I managed to stop and get you some while you were napping.”
He grunted a scoffing laugh and pulled the items from the bag. Nothing fancy, a pair of loose jeans and a zip up hoodie. I finished ‘em off with a pair of white jogging shoes. He’d look like a regular Joe walking down the street if we needed him to. Well, as long as he zipped up.
“Nice,” he said almost appreciatively and I felt the need to nip that right in the bud. Wouldn’t want my hard assed reputation to suffer.
“I read your dossier, remember?” I mused idly.
He grunted noncommittally and put his arms through the sleeves of the hooded sweatshirt, zipping it halfway up. His arms were so damned huge that the sleeves stretched ridiculously to accommodate them, but nothing tore at least. He breathed out a sigh of almost relief, his breath pluming the air and worked on unfolding and opening up the jeans, tearing tags and peeling stickers in a big damn hurry.
“You cold?” I asked, and he froze in place looking up at me sharply, a glint of something undefinable in those dark eyes of his.
“Yeah…” he drawled and unstuck, resuming his efforts to change into the denim from the ruined, too-small scrub pants. I averted my gaze and studiously steered us up the coastline, trying to keep the winking lights of the shoreline off to my left without losing them.
“I don’t get cold,” he stated after he’d gotten into the pants. He pulled on one shoe, then grimaced and looked like he was going to hurl when he tried to bend his bad leg to get the other
.
“Hold up, tough guy. Let me help you.”
“I don’t want your help,” he growled.
“Yeah, well you need it, so suck it up, Buttercup.” I got up from my seat and knelt down next to him. He could glare at me all he fucking liked.
I knelt down and unlaced the shoe and eased it on for him before lacing it up and tying it securely for him.
“Good?” I queried.
“Good,” he affirmed.
I resumed steering the stolen yacht, watching the fuel gauge and sighing after about another hour when it was at a point I figured we’d better head to shore. I glanced down at Remus who was huddled against the side pretty miserably. He looked miserable, and I was betting he was still feeling sick. I felt a slight tickle of remorse. It wouldn’t do to feel bad for him but…
“How long until we get wherever you got us going, Ba–” he cut himself off, “Ava?”
I nodded, acknowledging his attempt to maintain a truce. He was trying harder than I was and that kind of sucked. I hated to be outdone.
“Depends on what kind of vehicle we can score. We’re going to need a four by four of some kind, if we get lucky and score one at the get go, it’ll save us some time, not having to switch vehicles and all.”
He nodded, but the expression on his face was sour, “You good Wolfie?” I asked, momentarily forgetting myself as something very like concern thrilled through my veins. Alarm bells were going off in the back of my mind at his appearance.
“No,” he stated simply, “Feel like I’m going to puke.” I laughed without being able to help myself.
“Sea sick? The werewolf is sea sick?” I asked incredulously.
“No, I don’t think my body is over…” he stopped, scrambled to his knees and retched over the side. Fuck. From everything we’d learned about their unique physiology, this was bad fuckin’ news.
“You better get us to wherever we’re going, Babycakes. If I’m going to die, I think I’d rather like it to be peaceful at this point. I’m tired.”