Hard As Steele (A BBW Paranormal Romance) (Timber Valley Pack)

by Georgette St. Clair

  A half dozen cars pulled into the parking lot. Steele saw them quickly park near where they all were sitting.

  Steele tensed and moved in front of Roxanne.

  The Gunds had all leaped to their feet, wary and watchful.

  “Who are they? Do you know them?” Sven asked Steele.

  “The Wardens are here,” he said.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Steele, Roxanne, Isadora, Katherine, Mayor Bertelsen, and half a dozen of the Gunds were crowded into a small motel room just north of the border in Montana, along with Chief Elder Jordan Fleetfoot, several other Elders, a dozen wardens, and Cody. The Gunds, Isadora, and the Bertelsens were all on one side of the room, and the Wardens and Elders were on the other side.

  Wardens and shifters from all over the region were standing by, waiting for Cody to find out what he could from Katherine. Once they knew where the shifters were, they would stage an all-out attack. They were determined to get their kidnapped shifters back, and shut down the military operation once and for all.

  Loren stood back, watching the proceedings with deep frown lines set in his forehead. He and the Wardens consulted with each other in low tones, frequently glancing at Steele, Roxanne, and the Gunds.

  The Wardens had been shocked to learn about the Gund family’s strange mutation, and the fact that apparently half the town of Lonesome Pine knew of their existence. It presented them with a dilemma of a type they’d never faced before.

  Cody had been picked up at the airport as soon as he returned from Europe, and flown in a small private plane to meet up with them, so he could get to work on retrieving Roxanne’s memories as quickly as possible.

  Steele sat on the edge of one of the room’s two beds, closer to the Wardens, although he really didn’t know where he should be sitting right now. He’d turned his back on his whole world, and now he was a man without a job, or a home, or a way to care for the woman he loved. Already, he was keenly feeling the loss of his pack, but he would have made the same decision all over again if he’d had to. Roxanne was his. He was meant to be with her, and meant to take care of her.

  He struggled to swallow his anxiety as Cody gently smoothed out the tangles in Roxanne’s mind. Anxiety and fear were foreign emotions to Steele, but watching Roxanne’s face turn pale as she relieved her trauma made his gut tighten. He could only pray that Cody could undo the damage that had been done to her.

  Now Cody was walking Roxanne through what had happened during her kidnapping, starting at the very beginning.

  “When I was talking to the doctor, I told him that as far as I knew I was a virgin, and I didn’t understand how I could be pregnant,” Roxanne said to Cody. “That was why I ignored those missed periods for so long. I’d gained some weight, but not a lot. When I told him that the only man I’d been with had been imaginary, and that I knew I’d dreamed the man up because I’d seen him turn into a wolf, he suddenly got very interested. He started asking me all kinds of questions.”

  A look of pain crossed her face. Cody closed his eyes and his lips moved silently. He was using the power of his mind to enter Roxanne’s head and help her.

  Steele started forward, wanting to comfort Roxanne, but Loren grabbed his arm.

  “Don’t interfere,” Loren growled.

  Steele forced himself to settle down. He knew Loren was right. Loren didn’t care about Roxanne’s welfare, of course, but he did care about Cody’s successfully helping Roxanne regain her memory.

  What Cody was doing was a delicate process, and Steele didn’t dare interfere. All that he could do was stand there and watch as Cody carefully guided Roxanne through the process of recovery.

  “I don’t remember much else, but he jabbed me with a needle, and I passed out. I woke up in this laboratory, strapped down to a table. There was a girl there too, Clara Winter. She started explaining things to me and then a guard screamed at her to shut up and hit her with his rifle butt.” Tears filled her eyes and ran down her cheeks. “I gave birth a few weeks later. They kept doing all these blood tests on both of us, but they let him stay with me and breastfeed. They kept waiting to see if he would change into a cub, but he never did. A few days ago, they took him away from me and said they weren’t bringing him back…” she gulped back a sob. “I was screaming and begging them to let me keep him, but they took him. My God. What are they doing to him right now?”

  At that, Steele let out a howl of rage, and started to shift. Loren and several other Wardens jumped on him and pinned him down.

  “Control yourself!” Dash shouted at him. Steele swallowed hard, and drew on every last bit of his strength, and then forced himself to turn human again.

  “I’m fine,” he muttered. He was far from fine; it was taking every bit of strength to stay human. He could feel his bones shifting underneath his skin, and his fangs itched under his gums.

  He’d make those bastards pay.

  “I think that they would want to keep him alive and study him,” Cody said. Roxanne’s face went even paler, but she nodded.

  “I hope you’re right. You have to be right,” she said, anguish lacing her words.

  “How did you get out?” Cody asked.

  “After they took Flint away, I was in the lab, and there was another shifter there, an older man named Bertrand. He shifted into wolf form and killed a few of the guards. They didn’t have me strapped down, because they weren’t afraid of me. When Bertrand shifted, I grabbed a surgical knife and stabbed one of the guards in the throat, and Bertrand took the keys from one of the guards and opened the laboratory door. We ran down a bunch of tunnels. Apparently, one of the shifters they had there was from an old mining family, and he actually knew the way out and had told Bertrand. Bertrand told me all the shifters were communicating with each other by howling and roaring to each other.”

  One of the women grabbed Sven’s arm. “That must have been Axel! That means he’s still alive!” she said eagerly.

  “Yes, he must be.” Sven put his hand on her arm and squeezed her hand.

  “Go on,” Cody said to Roxanne.

  “Bertrand had a stash of dynamite; the shifter had told him where to find it. Guards were following us, and Bertrand said that he would blow up the tunnel so that they would think we’d both been killed, and that way the guards wouldn’t search for me when I got out.” She wiped tears from her face with the back of her arm.

  Steele shuddered with rage and frustration. He wanted to kill something more than he’d ever wanted anything in his life.

  “I was supposed to bring back help right away,” she choked, her voice husky. “The next thing I remember, I’d hitched a ride to Lonesome Pines, and I got to my apartment and I literally couldn’t remember why I was there, or why everything was so dusty. All I knew was that I need to find him-” she glanced at Steele – “and get help.”

  Sven moved swiftly, standing next to Roxanne. “This is very important,” he said. “I need you to describe the directions my grandson gave to get you out, and what it looked like when you walked out of that mine. Any landmarks that you saw, any old signs or equipment, anything.”

  He listened carefully as Roxanne described the tunnels and where they’d been held, and the entrance, as carefully as she could. Then he looked up at the Wardens and nodded with satisfaction.

  “I know where that is,” he said. “I know what part of the mountain they’re in, and I know about a back way in. My ancestors dug those tunnels. I can get us in there.”

  He described the exact location to the Wardens.

  “We’ve got hundreds of shifters standing by,” Loren said. “We’re ready to make our move.”

  “As soon as we’ve shut this facility down, we’re going to have to call a meeting of all the Elders to decide what to do about the fact that a large group of humans are aware of our existence,” Jordan said to Mason Criswell, one of the other Elders.

  Sven turned to glare at him. “Try and come near my family,” he snarled, and suddenly his face went hair
y.

  “You don’t have a say in this,” Jordan growled back at him. He was used to being treated with extreme deference; any sign of disrespect set him bristling. “We have to serve the greater good. If the Elders decide-”

  “We don’t serve your Elders!” one of the other men from the Gund family barked.

  Suddenly most of the men and women in the room were growling, snarling, fur rippling over their bodies.

  Roxanne slammed her hands down on the nightstand and let out a yell of pure rage, making everyone jump.

  “Listen the hell up!” she shouted. They all turned to stare at her in amazement.

  Her face was flushed and streaked with tears, but there was steely determination in her gaze.

  “I know you all know me as nice, easygoing, eager to please Roxanne, but at the moment, my baby is being held by a bunch of sadistic mad scientists who have no more respect for him than they would a stray dog. Your people are being held prisoner there and abused every day. Quit bickering like a bunch of little bitches, and tell me how the hell we’re going to get my son back.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Something bad was going to go down today at the lab. Clara could sense it.

  Clara lay strapped down to the examination table, and three other tables in the laboratory were filled as well. There was a bear shifter, another wolf shifter, and a mountain lion shifter. The soldiers had never brought in that many shifters to the lab at the same time; they were afraid to have so many of them in one place. Normally they were brought out of their cells one at a time, or two at a time if possible.

  Dr. Jonas was rushing to take blood samples from the shifters. He dropped a vial and cursed but didn’t bother to clean it up, just rushed on to the next shifter.

  Roxanne’s baby was there, in a cage with a blanket. In a cage. That made Clara so angry that it was all she could do not to shift. She could hear Flint crying. Be strong, she told herself. Somehow, these men will be punished for this.

  There were a dozen soldiers in the room. Clara had never been closer to true despair. What could she do against these odds?

  In the hallway, she could hear soldiers rushing past, and it sounded as if they were pushing wheeled carts. They were moving out, taking their lab samples and reports with them, she was sure of it. Why so suddenly? It seemed like something had spooked them, and they were shutting this operation down.

  It was unlikely they’d want to leave behind any living survivors, and transporting her and the other prisoners would be too risky, she was sure.

  “Sir, I don’t think it’s a good idea to have so many of them in here at once,” Evan Petrowski whined.

  “You don’t get paid to think.” Dr. Jonas was putting trails full of vials into some kind of container. “They’re all well secured. We’ll be out of here soon enough. I need these final samples.”

  Final samples. She’d been right. Were the cold fluorescent lights overhead the last thing she’d ever see?

  What could she do? There were straps on her wrists, ankles, and neck. She couldn’t move.

  “Let me check those straps,” Brice Ramsey said, as if reading her thoughts. He walked over and fumbled with her neck strap, then her wrist straps, then her ankle straps.

  “The straps are fine. I strapped her down myself,” Evan said indignantly.

  Brice ignored him, and went to check on the other shifters. “You got a problem with me?” Evan’s tone had turned belligerent.

  “Donovan, check the other straps,” Evan said, ignoring him.

  “Hey! I’m talking to you!” Evan’s face flushed with anger, and he reached for his weapon.

  “Get your hands off your damned gun, or I’ll have you shot,” Dr. Jonas barked at him. Sweat beaded on his forehead; his white hair was sticking up, and Clara could smell his fear. “You need to keep watch over the subjects, not each other. We’ll take this up with the Colonel when we’ve moved on out.”

  He was about to say something else, but an alarm began blaring in the room, and all the soldiers started, pulling out their weapons and looking around wildly.

  “What the hell?” Dr. Jonas shouted “What’s going on?”

  Two soldiers rushed through the door. “There’s a large force in the west tunnel, making their way towards us! There seem to be hundreds of them!”

  “What the hell? How is that possible?” Dr. Jonas’ eyes went wide with fear. “How did they get that far? There are supposed to be perimeter alarms!”

  “They’re coming from an area that had been closed off! There shouldn’t even have been a tunnel there!” The soldier’s tone was aggrieved.

  Hope flared up in Clara. She might die here, on this table, but maybe this was a rescue attempt. Maybe some of the shifters would get out.

  Dr. Jonas glanced at Evan.

  “Eliminate them, then follow us out of the south tunnel,” he said, and rushed out of the room with the two soldiers.

  Her heart sank. This was it, then. She’d really wanted to go down fighting.

  Clara tensed and jerked against her straps…and realized they were loose.

  Brice had undone her straps. As Evan raised his rifle to point it at her head, she shifted and launched herself through the air at him.

  The other shifters quickly shifted and attacked the soldiers. To her shock, Brice and Donovan put their bullets through the heads of several soldiers, and the shifters tackled the rest of them. There were shouts of rage, and howls, and the smell of gunpowder in the air.

  Clara dashed over to Flint’s cage. She shifted just her hands, opened the cage door, and pulled him out.

  Before she could stop him, he shifted into cub form and dashed into the fray, yipping with rage. He could shift! Roxanne really had given birth to a shifter baby!

  Clara dashed after him; a soldier was pointing his gun at Patrick, the bear shifter, when Flint attached himself to the soldier’s calf, sinking his fangs in deep.

  The soldier screamed, raised his rifle butt, and was about to bring it down on Flint’s little head when Clara leaped up and ripped his throat open. At the same time, Patrick tore open the soldier’s stomach and his intestines spilled out.

  Clara, still in wolf form, grabbed Flint by the nape of his neck, carrying him out of the way in her jaws as he yelped and waved his paws indignantly.

  When it was over, Donavan and several of the shifters were bleeding from several gunshot wounds, and the soldiers lay dead on the floor. The shifters turned human again, all except for Flint, who stayed a cub and looked around the room with interest, his pointy little ears perked up as he sniffed the air.

  Brice, who was bandaging Donovan’s wounds, gestured at a duffel bag in the corner. “There are extra uniforms in there,” he told the shifters, who were standing there naked. “Put them on, and grab the weapons from their bodies,” he added, indicating the fallen soldiers with a jerk of his head.

  He looked at Clara. “There are some scrubs in that cabinet. Put them on quickly. We’re going to pretend that these men are with me, and that they’re taking you and Flint out of here at gunpoint.”

  “Why should we trust you?” Clara demanded, as she rushed to pull on the scrubs. Flint was still in wolf form. She set Flint down on the floor while she hurriedly dressed, then picked him up again.

  “Why? Because we set you all free and shot these men,” Brice said. “We’ve got to get going now. Do you know how to handle a weapon? Good,” he added, as the three shifters, now wearing camo, snatched the rifles from the dead soldiers’ bodies.

  “Who are you? Why are you helping us?” Clara asked.

  “We don’t have time to explain. Follow me, and keep your heads down,” he said to them. “Everyone’s in a hurry, the guards haven’t seen you in camo and they won’t expect it, and you’ve got your caps on to help conceal your identity. If we’re lucky, we can make it to the tunnels and get out of here. We’ve got to go now; the mines are rigged with explosives, and once the last soldiers are out of here, the whole tunnel syst
em’s going to collapse.”

  Clara glanced at the other shifters, and they nodded at her. “You’re bleeding, Patrick,” she said to the bear shifter. In human form, he was a middle aged man with brown hair shot through with gray. He had a wife and three children, she knew. He had a gunshot wound to the leg.

  He shrugged. “Flesh wound.”

  She didn’t have time to heal him. They rushed out into the hallway, with Brice and Donovan in front. The mountain lion shifter and the other wolf shifter, in their soldier disguises, pointed rifles at them. They ran down several empty hallways, and then came to an abrupt halt. A group of soldiers were coming their way.

  “Coming through, we’ve got a prisoner, coming through!” Brice shouted.

  “There’s incoming! We’re trapped!” one of the soldiers yelled. His voice was tinged with panic. “There’s fucking hundreds of them! They’ve already taken out the Delta and Bravo squads!”

  Clara allowed herself a fierce grin of joy. She’d been waiting for this moment for so long.

  Then, coming from a tunnel ahead of them and to their left, she heard shouts and growls and roars.

  Patrick quickly moved her to the side of the tunnel, and shifted to bear form, covering her and Flint with his body.

  Suddenly, Flint darted out from behind Patrick and Clara, right into the middle of the battle. He threw back his little head and let out a high pitched yowl of rage.

  “Flint! Get back here!” Clara screamed, crawling after him.

  Flint ignored her, and leaped through the air, attaching himself to the arm of a human soldier, who frantically tried to pull him off.

  Suddenly, Clara heard a howl. There was an enormous wolf crouched low, fur bristling. The wolf launched himself at the soldier, and as he proceeded to take the soldier apart, Clara grabbed Flint firmly and ran down a side tunnel. She crouched there, covering Flint with her body and keeping a tight grip on him as he squirmed and yelped. The cub was clearly desperate to get back into the middle of the fight.