by Viola Rivard
Her attacker snarled as he retracted his hand, and then she saw it in his eyes. Murder. Her heart was pounding so quickly, her breath coming so fast, that she was barely aware of the other presence that joined them.
“Gareth, that's enough. You will kill her.” A male voice.
“Or she'll kill him,” a female said in a not-so-quiet whisper.
Her attacker turned his snarl on an approaching male. “I will say when it is enough!”
Harper remained in a defensive stance, her knife poised in a hand that wanted badly to tremble. She could hear her friends beginning to rouse from inside the tent.
“I think I heard something,” she heard Jo say.
Ian responded, “Yeah, we're in a forest, surrounded by forest-y things that make forest-y noises. Go back to sleep.”
Harper could have laughed, if she wasn't still so hopped up on adrenaline, her life still hanging in the balance of the next few minutes.
“You can't kill her,” the other male said evenly. He approached them carefully, as though worried her attacker would turn his rage on him. “Gareth. Look at her and think. You enforce the Law. You know the consequences for killing a human female.”
His words did not exactly flip a switch in her attacker's mind, but Harper could see understanding slowly dawn on his face. When he looked at Harper again, he no longer regarded her with murderous rage, but scathing disdain. For her odds of survival, it was a marked improvement.
There was a tense silence that ended with the sound of the tent unzipping. The sound filled the clearing, and every muscle and joint in Harper's body locked as her survival instinct overrode her more altruistic desire to run and protect her friends.
Not taking her eyes off Gareth, she called out to Jo and Ian. “Guys, we have company. Come out of the tent with your hands up where they can see them.”
Her friends hesitated, exchanging confused whispers, and then emerged, wide-eyed and nervous as they looked around the clearing. Their first reaction was not one of fear, but excitement, as they spotted the two shifters that were still in wolf form and sitting not far from the tent.
“Oh my God,” Jo said. “They're really here.”
Ian gave them a jerky wave. “Hi. We come in peace.”
“They're not aliens,” Jo admonished.
Harper cleared her throat to get their attention. Their heads snapped in her direction. At the sight of the angry male looming only a few feet from Harper, Jo let out a squeak and instinctively moved to stand behind Ian. Ian, for his part, looked between the male and Harper with alarm, his eyes urging her to do something.
Coming into this, she'd had no expectations of Ian. She had known full well that if shit hit the fan, it would be her defending he and Jo. The extent of Ian's combat training was being captain of his high school debate team. On principle, she disliked when men tried to defend her, as she felt it was undermining her own extensive capabilities. For that reason, she was surprised when she felt resentment trickling from some atavistic part of her.
“Drop your knife,” said the male that wasn't Gareth.
Harper looked at him for the first time. He was naked, having abruptly shifted from his wolf form. Like Gareth, he was heavily tattooed. He looked to be in his forties and about her height, with pronounced crow's feet, a large nose, and brown hair that fell just past his ears. In isolation, each of his features held its own sort of unattractiveness, but somehow as a whole, he didn't look half-bad. Harper found herself far less wary of him, not just because he seemed to be the voice of reason, but also because he had kind eyes. One of the first lessons her uncle had taught her was how to know a person by their eyes, and it was one of the lessons she'd referred to the most throughout her life.
“If I drop the knife, will you promise not to harm me or my friends?”
Gareth gave her a snarling reply. “You are in no position to negotiate, bitch.”
“Humor me,” she said, dryly. “I get that you could kill us, but I'm not going down easy if you try. And you shouldn't try, because like I've already explained, we're not here to encroach on your territory. We didn't even realize this territory was taken.”
“What is your purpose here?” asked the older male. He stepped forward, until he was standing beside Gareth.
Gareth began a diatribe about how it didn't matter what a lying human had to say. Harper spoke over him.
“We're looking for a pack, one led by an alpha named Shan. Are you familiar with him?”
Behind her, she could hear the confused murmurings of Ian and Jo. Throughout their planning, Harper had failed to mention that she knew the name of the alpha. Already, when they asked where she got her information, and Harper would be forced to equivocate, citing some vague reference, or her interpretation of a piece of academic literature. She had hoped that when the time came, she could continue to tap dance around the subject, but at the moment, she was too harried to be bothered.
“How do you know about Shan?” the older male asked, his eyes narrowing in suspicion.
“I have sources in the shifter community,” Harper said smoothly. “I've heard he's trying to bring agriculture to packs in the region. We're hoping to find out more about his efforts and, in exchange, offer our own information and technology to aid his cause.”
It wasn't a lie. While their primary goal was to study the culture of the pack, they were also interested in the implications of an agricultural revolution among wolf shifters. Both topics were a research goldmine. Few people in the academic community put any weight in the rumors of the agriculture boom within the reservation, and those who wanted to research it were hung up in the maddening bureaucracy of getting funded for an illegal expedition and getting legal permission without being funded. Harper had circumvented the broken cycle by simply breaking the law and maxing her (and Ian's) credit cards.
“You expect us to take you to Shan?” Gareth asked with incredulity. “Bring you back to our pack, so that you can spy on us for the rest of your human scum?”
Man, he really does not like humans.
In his ranting, Gareth had inadvertently told her something. He knew Shan and was quite possibly one of his pack mates. She was careful to hide her excitement.
“I would at least like the opportunity to present our case to him,” she said evenly. “Unless, of course, you're authorized to speak on his behalf.”
He wasn't. She knew that, and so did they. In a wolf shifter pack, the alpha's authority was absolute. While certain things could be delegated, the alpha's judgement was not one of them.
“Drop the knife and we will take you to Shan,” said the older male.
Harper complied at once, not because she fully trusted him, but because she was out of alternatives. There was no way she could fight all of them. If they did attack, the knife would only serve for her to do a little more damage before her inevitable disembowelment.
She didn't resist when the older male bound her hands behind her back. She tried to look reassuringly at Jo and Ian as they were similarly tied up, but neither would be placated. Jo looked to be on the verge of tears, while Ian looked at Harper in stark accusation.
None of this had been part of the plan, or at least, part of the plan Harper had shared with them. Privately, she'd been fully prepared to be captured, perhaps even held captive for a time, until they proved they posed no threat to the pack. No pack could thrive as Shan's had without being cautious of outsiders.
While Jo's hands were being secured behind her back, the other wolves shifted and approached Gareth. They were both females, one of them tattooed nearly as much as the males, most notably with a snake wrapped around her upper arm, ending at her neck. She was tall, pale, and had a masculine face. Harper wouldn't have recognized her as a woman if not for her bare chest. By contrast, the other female was shorter, darkly complected, and pretty. She sported only a handful of tattoos, a small tribal one and a few floral patterns. She watched on anxiously as the larger female attempted to set Gareth's arm back int
o place.
“I ought to plant that knife into that bitch's back,” Gareth seethed.
He made similar pronouncements each time the female pressed down on his injury to ascertain where the damage was. Under normal circumstances, Harper would have written his words off as bluster. The battle was over and he was licking his wounds. But she couldn't fully let her guard down with this one. She got the impression that his mood could turn on a dime, that in a flash of impulsivity, he might forget whatever rules constrained him from killing her.
After tying them up, the older male and the younger female ransacked the campsite. They went through everything, most likely in search of weapons or supplies that might be useful. Harper was indifferent to it, too busy analyzing the wolves to be bothered with property destruction. That was, until the property in question was her own.
When the small female began rummaging through her bag, Harper was quick to lodge a complaint, unconsciously tugging at her bindings as she did so.
“Be careful with that!” she snapped as she watched the girl shake out the contents of her backpack. Her iPad clattered to the ground.
“I'm serious,” Harper said, starting a march towards the female. “Watch how you're handling my things.”
Suddenly, the tattooed woman was in front of Harper, blocking her path. “Where are you going, darling?”
“That is my bag,” Harper said, enunciating each syllable. She knew full well that she had zero leverage, but she just couldn't help herself.
She had serious issues with possessiveness. She was excellent at sharing things, but that's because sharing was on her terms. One of her earliest memories was of her adopted mother asking her to share a toy with one of her cousins. Harper had declined, and when her mother had insisted, Harper had informed her that being forced to bestow something against her will was not sharing, it was “coercion.”
“Oh,” the woman said with mock surprise. She had a strange accent that Harper thought might be Creole. “That's your bag? Well, we'll be sure to hang on to it for when you're not our prisoner.”
Harper stopped listening to her. She could easily see over the woman's shoulder, and felt her anxiety spike as the younger female extracted the bag of joints from their compartment.
“Put that back right now!” Harper snapped.
“What is this?” the girl asked. She held the bag up to the light, as if it might allow her to glean something.
The tattooed woman whistled. “It's our lucky day, is what it is.”
“No, no, no,” Harper heard herself say. “That's medicinal. I need that to sleep.”
“West, can I gag this one?”
“If you must,” replied the older male.
Harper didn't realize that they were referring to her until a moment later, when the leather strap was secured around her mouth. Jo tried pleading for them not to gag Harper, but only received a threat to gag her as well. Ian just watched, regarding Harper with a sour look.
“Sure, fine, tie my friends up and destroy all of their things,” Ian said, affecting his well-practiced impression of Harper. “But oh no, don't touch my pot.”
Harper wanted to strangle him, and she was grateful when Jo said, “At least Harper tried to protect us. You just stood there and let them tie her up.”
“What the hell was I supposed to do? Sorry I didn't take kung fu lessons before we came. I was too busy dropping out of college for a semester to come help you two. And I didn't see you doing anything either. Go figure, the first thing that the self-proclaimed feminist does is hide behind me.”
Two minutes later, West had gagged Ian as well.
As the morning progressed, Harper continued to seethe over her bag. The smaller female had shifted and carried it in her mouth, along with one of Jo's bags.
Ian did have a point. Harper definitely fixated on her bag at the exclusion of all else, but that was because she wasn't particularly worried about her fate, or that of her friends. She knew that so long as they were being taken to Shan, they would be all right.
Of course, she based this entirely on her gut. She knew very few specifics about the alpha, only second and third-hand accounts. There were a handful of details that could be corroborated by multiple sources and were therefore, in her opinion, credible. Like the fact that he was extremely large by any measure, around twice the size of the average alpha wolf. Or that he wasn't exactly a shifter, not in the conventional sense, but more like the proto-shifters, also known as skinwalkers, that had roamed the land in centuries past. And then, there was the one thing everyone agreed on, that he was highly intelligent.
There were other things, factoids bounced around that were too ridiculous to be true, but nonetheless made Harper both wary and curious. There were those who claimed that Shan was not merely twice the size of an alpha shifter, but vastly larger, as big as a tree and large enough to squash a wolf beneath a single paw. Others claimed that he wasn't simply a genetic throwback, but the second coming of some ancient wolf deity. And then, perhaps most unsettling, was the claim that Shan was not merely intelligent, but could read minds.
In any case, his reputation preceded him. He was not known for being merciful, but he was a just ruler. He would hear her out, and when he did, her aim would be to appeal to his intellect. If that failed, she had one, final card to invoke. It was a move that would spare the lives of her friends, if nothing else. For herself, life as she knew it would be over. It was a bell she would never be able to unring, and so it would be her last resort, to be used only if she was certain that people were going to die.
Throughout the morning, Gareth followed them, bringing up the rear of the procession. Though his arm had been set, he would not be able to shift again until it healed, leaving him both bound in human form and in a wrathful mood. He had stopped ranting, but every time Harper looked his way, she found him staring at her with eyes that promised murder.
Sometime around noon, they stopped to drink at a pond. West and Gareth went off elsewhere on their own, leaving Harper and her friends with the two females, who she had learned were named Viper and Rosa. Jo asked several times, and with increasing urgency, if they could untie her so that she could pee. She was at first dismissed, and then outright ignored.
Though agitated on Jo's behalf, Harper was in no position to advocate for her and instead kept her focus on scanning the area and trying to mark their progress on her mental map of the region. She thought she had a general idea of where they were, still in the foothills of the Virginia swath of the reservation, but she had trouble pinpointing a precise location, as she couldn't calculate their speed of travel. It irked her that her cellphone was still in her back pocket, but might as well have been in her Boston apartment for all she could get to it.
She passed the time working at her bindings and trying to ignore her dry mouth and the clear pool of water. West had done a good job of tying her up, but she thought she could get free of the bindings if she tried. At the moment, there was no incentive to do so, so she simply ran her fingers along the twine, familiarizing herself with the knots.
As soon as the males returned, they were moving again. Gareth had shifted into the form of a rather large gray wolf, perhaps to show the others that he was healed. It was a stupid move, as it was clear to anyone that he couldn't put weight on his right front leg. He'd probably injured it more in the process of shifting, a fact that provided Harper some amusement in her otherwise bleak circumstances.
Harper couldn't get a bead on which of the wolves was dominant, though she leaned towards Gareth. Both he and West were likely beta males, as evidenced by their size. Most standard members of a pack, sometimes called omega wolves, ranged in size from that of an average wolf to about twice the size of an average wolf. The rule of two held across the social hierarchy, with beta wolves being about twice the size of omegas, and alphas being twice the size of betas.
From the few interactions she'd witnessed, Harper had gotten a decent sense of their group dynamic. The females respected W
est, but they feared Gareth. This was particularly telling, because among shifters, fear was an integral part of leadership. It was not enough for an alpha to be beloved or venerated. His wolves had to also live with the awareness that, should they step out of line, there would be swift and painful consequences.
Not long after they left the pond, Jo peed herself. The event was marked by sobs, during which Gareth snapped his jaws at her, only making her cry harder. Harper's protective instincts flared, but it was West who came to her rescue, shifting and ordering Gareth to leave her alone. After that, Harper and Ian were allowed to pee. Harper was escorted by Viper, her bindings never removed.
Throughout the trek, Ian held up surprisingly well. Before they'd left Boston, if Harper would have had to guess which one of them would handle an abduction better, she probably would have said Jo. Ian had a bad temper and rebelled against anyone who tried to order him around. By contrast, Jo had more mental endurance than Ian, in spite of her anxiety problems.
By the time night fell, Harper and Ian were walking side by side, their shoulders brushing up against one another's. The simple physical contact did more to reassure them than any words or meaningful looks could convey.
Jo would occasionally catch up to them, but would quickly fall behind. Try as she might, Harper couldn't match Jo's shuffling gait, and would naturally pull ahead of her as soon as her mind began to wander. Oddly, the wolf named West had no trouble keeping pace with Jo, and a few times Harper had heard him issuing softly spoken words of comfort and encouragement to her.
As lights began to appear in the distance, Harper grew attentive, coming out of her head to analyze their new surroundings. At first, the lights looked like fireflies, glow bugs, as her brother had called them. They danced and pulsed, dotting the mountainside with their light. As they drew closer, the lights came into focus. They were campfires, dozens of them, their light splashing across the surrounding trees and the people clustered around them.
No less than ten shifters were gathered at each fire, all of them in human form. That in itself was unusual. Wolf shifters were generally in animal form by night, as it was prime time for hunting. It seemed, however, that they were socializing or at least they had been until their procession passed by. One by one, heads turned to regard them with curiosity and speculation. No one approached them, but they left a trail of whispers in their wake.