The Wolf Code Reloaded

by Angela Foxxe

  He smiled, laughing softly.

  “It’s not what I was looking for, but I’ll take it,” he said.

  “I need to shower and soak my leg first,” she said.

  “I can help you with that,” he offered.

  She shook her head.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “Why?” he teased. “Is it because you can’t control yourself if you’re around me naked?”

  “That’s exactly why,” she said, turning away but not before she saw him clamp his mouth shut in shock. “I’d prefer to keep a little bit of fabric between us.”

  “I understand,” he said. “I’ll run the bath for you and mix the salts, then I’ll leave you to it. If you want help with the bandage, I’ll be happy to help.”

  “That would be amazing,” she said.

  They stared at each other for a moment, then Ty hopped up as if he’d been hit with a cattle prod and grabbed the bag he’d brought with him before disappearing into the bathroom. The water started almost immediately, and Senora looked longingly at the bed. She was exhausted, and if she was honest, she was looking forward to sleeping in the safety of Ty’s arms tonight. He didn’t have to know that, but it was the truth. She’d had enough of nightmares, running from memories and angry dragons.

  Just this one night, she was going to sleep peacefully and soundly. Tomorrow, she would worry about reality.

  THE FINAL CHAPTER

  Ty was waiting for her when she got out of the bath almost an hour later, and she could tell he was more exhausted than he’d let on.

  “You didn’t have to wait up for me,” she said.

  “I wasn’t sure which side of the bed you preferred.”

  His smile was rugged and handsome, his eyes soft in the light of the single lamp that lit the room.

  “At this point, I’m too tired for anything that complicated,” she laughed.

  She went to the side of the bed and sat down, sliding back and laying on her side. The bed dipped behind her, the weight of his large frame filling a void she didn’t know she’d been feeling as she snuggled against him and pulled his arms around her.

  “How is your leg?”

  “It hurts,” she said. “But it hurts a lot less, and it’s not terrifying to look at. I guess that’s something.”

  “It will heal faster than you think.”

  “Why?”

  He paused, clearly shocked by her question. His pause made her realize that there was more to it than she had originally thought.

  “I thought that I wouldn’t turn into a dragon because he cut me,” she said, her body stiffening even though she was trying to remain calm.

  “You’re not,” he promised. “But there are some magical qualities that many of us have, and healing is one of them. Every shifter who has touched you today, even just your shoulder, has helped you heal.”

  Senora rolled her eyes then shook her head when she realized that he couldn’t see her.

  “So now you’re all healers, too,” she scoffed. “What other amazing powers will you have when it’s convenient?”

  Ty chuckled in her ear, but he ignored her.

  “Look at your leg now,” he said.

  She did, despite meaning to ignore him.

  “It’s still awful,” she said. “But I didn’t bandage it because you said it needed to air out.”

  “It does. Look at it now and memorize what it looks like. In the morning, you will see the difference, and maybe then, you’ll believe me.”

  “Or I’ll assume that the salts you made me soak in helped and that the wound wasn’t as bad as it originally appeared to be. The ranger said I didn’t need stitches.”

  “I guarantee you needed them before he got his hands on you.”

  She shook her head, but he held her tight and ignored her protests.

  “You’ll see,” he insisted. “Now, quit talking so much so I can sleep.”

  “But you’re-”

  “Shh,” he said, gathering her closer and loudly inhaling, his face buried in her hair. “You smell so wonderful. Sweet dreams.”

  She almost said something, but she decided against it. They could banter all night, and then they would be left tired in the morning, completely unable to focus. She would let him have the last word. It wouldn’t hurt anything to let him win one argument.

  His breathing was already heavy on the back of her neck when she closed her eyes and started drifting off slowly. Faces and names floated through her mind as she struggled to shut off her thoughts. Every face, every lost soul from the list Carla had given her and her own list of cold cases danced around in her head. She tried in vain to push them aside, but they would not be ignored.

  She laid there for an hour, trying to avoid the thoughts that would not be silenced. It was part of her nightly ritual, but she’d been hoping for a reprieve for just one night.

  She turned over, snuggling into Ty’s chest and begging her tortured mind to let it go; at least for the night. She was exhausted, and she needed sleep. There would be time tomorrow to hunt down the teen stuck in a group home, and to track down Peter Ageke. All those things would take time, and she needed to be fresh and have her mind clear-

  She sat up suddenly, pulling herself out of Ty’s arms and waking him up in the process.

  “What’s going on?” he said, his voice husky with sleep.

  She was on her feet and heading for the desk, her wound all but forgotten. She looked down at it when she realized that she wasn’t limping and gasped. It looked as if it had been healing for a week, and just an hour ago, it had still been an angry red on the edges, the flesh tattered like an old shirt around the outside of the wound. Now, the wound looked one-dimensional and only days from healing fully.

  “How did you do that?” she asked.

  “I told you.”

  “There has to be another explanation,” she said.

  He shrugged.

  “Believe what you want. Is that why you jumped up?”

  His question reminded her of where she’d been going. She shook her head and went for the notepad in the desk drawer. Grabbing a pen, she wrote the name Peter Ageke down, then crossed out each letter of the name, starting with G.

  She was three letters in when she realized that she was right.

  She finished writing and turned the paper around to show Ty.

  “Peter Ageke is an anagram. The man that was with the dragon that took Ava was the Gate Keeper.”

  “Are you sure?” he asked. “Did he know he was called that at the time?”

  “He gave himself the moniker. So he’s either named Peter Ageke and likes anagrams, or he is the Gate Keeper and is using an anagram to taunt us.”

  “He taunted us in Glen Rose at the farm.”

  “Exactly. Getting away with things is like a game to him. I’m sure he’s taunting us.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  Senora sighed and bit her lip.

  “There’s nothing we can do. He kidnapped an eleven-year-old WereDragon seven years ago. That doesn’t really mean anything right now.”

  “Kaden saw him.”

  “He did. And Kaden’s dead, so we have no help there.”

  “Maybe one of the other parents saw him.”

  “Maybe they did. But I’m not going to get my hopes up. Eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable, and getting a good sketch of him could prove to be impossible.” She made her way back to the bed, feet dragging and feeling more defeated than she had before she went to bed the first time.

  She curled up a little closer, focusing on how his embrace made her feel and letting go of the images fighting for space in her head. She needed sleep. She was no good to them tired.

  Ty held her and didn’t say a word. It was as if he sensed that silence was what she needed right now, and she was thankful for his intuition. It was nice to have someone who could read her so well and was willing to put aside his own needs when she needed him to the most. She would have to ma
ke it a point to thank him in the morning, but for now, she was reveling in the silence and enjoying the strong warmth of his embrace.

  She started to fall asleep within a few minutes of crawling into bed with him, and even though she knew she was as safe as she could be, she still left the little bedside lamp on. He didn’t comment on it, and she wasn’t going to explain. She just wanted that one small reassurance, and she could finally let go and sleep. Her last thought before she fell to sleep was to wonder if her leg would really be healed in the morning, then to laugh at herself right before the darkness came.

  ***

  Ty heard Senora laugh, but he resisted the urge to ask her what was so funny. An instant later, she was completely relaxed in his arms, and her breathing became heavy and even. He watched her for a while, brushing her chocolate waves out of her face and letting the silky strands slip across his fingers before they dropped back onto her shoulders. She was something else, he conceded, though he wasn’t sure if he could handle her. She was amazing, strong, hard-headed, and hell-bent on never sleeping with him again. Normally, he would see that as a challenge, but Senora wasn’t a woman that you challenged. She knew who she was and what she wanted, and any attempt to convince her otherwise was not going to end well. If he ever wanted to have a chance with her, he had to play his cards right and wait for her to come to him. He didn’t know if he could wait, and laying with her like he was, was harder than he’d expected. But he needed to know she was safe more than anything else, and her leg needed to heal.

  He’d downplayed the severity of the wound, and like the others, he’d worried about infection. Dragon claws were known to be rattled with bacteria that was beneficial to them but harmful to humans. If she’d been wounded like that any other time, she would have died of raging fever within a few hours. But the ranger had been there and prepared with a first-aid kit and his quick thinking, followed by the healing powers of everyone who had touched her. He knew Senora struggled to believe some of the more magical things about his kind, but he couldn’t blame her. She’d been thrown into this, and landing on the back of a werewolf as you ran for your life through the forest wasn’t the best way to find out that shifters existed. She’d been a trooper through it all, and he wasn’t going to push her.

  So he hadn’t told her that the salts he’d poured into her bath were really a magic potion made to look like nothing more than scented Epsom salts by the healer who lived at the base of the mountain and who was older than all the trees in the forest. And he didn’t tell her that she would now be immune to dragon related infections for the rest of her life. He wouldn’t tell her how her blood would run thicker through her veins, and her muscles would heal faster from exertion than they ever had. And he would take to his grave the fact that there would never be a dragon on this earth who could enchant her because a small piece of dragon coursed through her veins and would always be there.

  Because she would hear these things, and no matter what he said, she would believe that she’d been infected by the dragon. She wouldn’t enjoy the improvements her fragile human body had been given. She would think infection, and she would be desperate to fix herself. He wouldn’t be able to find the words to convince her to embrace her new strengths, and she would believe in her heart that he’d lied to her.

  He couldn’t bear to live knowing that she thought that of him. So he would keep everything to himself, and he would sleep better knowing that she would be safer tomorrow than she had been the day before, and he wouldn’t have to keep her in his sight to know that she was no longer vulnerable. That took a huge weight off his shoulders, and it was worth the anger she would surely feel if she ever found out.

  There was a chance she would figure it out on her own, but her skepticism would keep her from making that leap. For once, it was nice that she refused to believe the simplest things, even when the evidence was there in front of her. Her hardheadedness would save her in the end, and Ty didn’t want to change a thing about her. She was perfect the way she was.

  Just the way she was.

  She rolled over and sighed, burying her face against his chest and smiling. She wasn’t making this easy on him, but he had made her a promise and he was sticking to it.

  He lowered his head and rested it on top of hers, bringing her as close as he could without waking her and wrapping the blanket around them both. Daylight would be there before he knew it, and this moment would be gone. He was going to cherish this time with her for as long as he could. He was afraid he’d never have another moment like this again.

  They slept like that through the night, and even though Ty knew exactly where she was at all times, he still woke up, heart racing, the image of Kaden holding her by one leg as he flew through the sky etched forever in his memory. He would run his hands over her quickly, listen to her steady breathing, then force himself back to sleep only to wake up an hour or so later and go through it all over again.

  When he woke up again just after dawn, he decided to give up on sleeping and settled in to watch her sleep. She rested peacefully in his arms until well after breakfast, and he made no move to wake her. Her soft features tugged at his heart and made him long for something that might never be his. But in this moment, everything was exactly as he’d hoped it would be, and he wasn’t going to break the spell. He was stiff and tired, and his arm was asleep, but he wouldn’t trade this moment for anything. She trusted him implicitly, and that was more magical than anything that had ever happened to him in his life. Senora bursting into his life had changed everything, and he would never be the same man he was before.

  *

  Senora’s eyes fluttered open, and she came face to face with Ty, who was smiling in the bright light that streamed through their bedroom.

  “What time is it?” she asked, her voice husky.

  “Just a little after nine. You slept through breakfast.”

  “Why didn’t you wake me up?”

  “Because you’re beautiful when you sleep?” he said, arching an eyebrow and smiling down at her. “You needed the rest. Your body needed to heal.”

  Remembering her leg and surprised that it wasn’t throbbing beneath the sheets, she pulled the fabric away and was stunned to find that the wound was almost completely healed.

  “That’s not possible,” she breathed in a whisper.

  “There are a lot of things that aren’t possible, but they happen.”

  “There has to be another explanation. Maybe the wound wasn’t that bad. The salts dried it out, and now it looks really good.”

  She was trying to convince herself more than she was trying to convince him. It wasn’t working.

  “We need to get up and get going,” Senora said, jumping out of bed and getting a change of clothes out of her suitcase. “Are we checking out before we head to Oklahoma?”

  “We don’t have to, but I think we should take everything just in case we decide not to come back. I paid Kaden’s room for a few days, and I thought we might have a look it before we leave.”

  “That sounds like a good idea. I’m pretty much always packed, so give me about five minutes and I’ll be ready.”

  She ducked into the bathroom and changed quickly, stuffing her dirty clothes into the small plastic bag that laid over the edge of the ice bucket and emerging from the bathroom less than five minutes later, hair and teeth brushed and feeling more refreshed than she had in a while.

  “Thank you for letting me sleep. I guess I needed that. I’m ready to go if you are.”

  She grabbed Kaden’s laptop bag and her own, throwing both over her shoulder despite Ty’s protest.

  “I’ve got it,” she said, ignoring his offer of help.

  He picked up her overnight bag before she could stop him, tucking it under his arm and carrying his own bag with his free hand.

  “I’m going to hold onto our hotel key, but it looks like we got everything, right?”

  “I have everything I came with, and the list is in my laptop bag.”

 
“Alright, let’s go to the front desk and see if you and your handy FBI badge can get us a key to Kaden’s room.”

  She smiled.

  “I would hope so, since they let you pay the bill.”

  “I thought they would, too. But it turns out that people paying other people’s bills is pretty common here and they didn’t even find it strange that I wanted to do that. I thought it was weird, but it helped us out, so I’m not going to complain.”

  They walked through the halls and to the front desk. The lady behind the counter looked up at them and smiled.

  “Can I help you?” she asked nicely.

  Senora slipped her badge out of her pocket and across the counter.

  “I need to get into room one eighteen.”

  The clerk furrowed her brow.

  “Weren’t your people already in there this morning?” she asked, making a keycard for them as she talked.

  “This morning?” Senora repeated.

  “Yes. Two men came by and were in there for a few minutes, then left.” She handed the key to Senora. “They had a badge like yours, and I let them in. Was that wrong?”

  Senora didn’t answer. She and Ty were already running out of the lobby and down the hall. Her hands were shaking as she put the keycard in the slot. The light turned green, and she shoved the door open, but she already knew what she was going to find.

  The room had been tossed, and she could tell that whoever had done it was an expert. They used the same technique she’d learned at Quantico, and she was willing to bet that the laptop on her shoulder was what they’d been looking for.

  “This isn’t good,” she said, trying not to panic. “Whoever did this was one of us, or they used FBI techniques.”

  “How can you tell?” he asked, his voice more appreciative than questioning whether or not she was right.

  “We do it a certain way every time. It keeps you from making mistakes. This is a textbook FBI room tossing. Ty, I need to find out who came here this morning.”

  She left the room, half-running to the front desk. The clerk looked up, her face pinched with worry. It was clear that the woman knew that one pair of agents wasn’t supposed to be there, but Senora guessed that she wasn’t sure which agents were the wrong ones. Senora had to play this gently or the woman was likely to go silent.